died earlier in the day at the age of 96. In a message to BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Terry David, said that without Wiesenthal’s search for justice "Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds" of history.
"Simon Wiesenthal…tracked down more than a thousand war criminals responsible for the horror of the Holocaust. But his was not a quest for revenge, it was a quest for justice. What he accomplished has been, and continues to be, of immense importance both for the memory and the dignity of the victims, and for the safety and well-being of those who survived – of all of us," David explained.
"Without Simon Wiesenthal’s relentless effort to find Nazi criminals and bring them to justice, and to fight anti-Semitism and prejudice, Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds and reconcile itself. He was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable to our freedom, stability and peace. It was people like him who helped us to build Europe as we know it today," he added.
His funeral was to be held in Israel, Friday, September, 23, after a memorial service in Vienna’s central cemetery on Wednesday, Jewish officials said.
HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
The death of Simon Wiesenthal Tuesday, September 20, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to the often lonely mission of hunting Nazi war criminals, "leaves a rich legacy for the notion of justice and of the responsibility of civilization to not overlook or forget atrocities against humanity," said Deutsche Welle, the world service of Germany.
German President Horst Köhler said Wiesenthal’s life work had nothing to do with revenge, but with justice. Paul Spiegel, Chairman of the Jewish Central Council in Germany, called Wiesenthal’s death "a great loss" while Israeli President Mosche Katzav said Wiesenthal was the very embodiment human decency.
The prime minister of Hungary, which was a close ally of Nazi Germany, warned that ‘all of humanity is poorer’ for the loss of Wiesenthal. "The Holocaust took everything he held most dear, his family. But he gave the generation of survivors that thing without which they could not have lived in peace — a belief in justice," Ferenc Gyurcsany said.
In Poland, the country where many Jews were massacred in concentration camps, Holocaust survivors and top politicians expressed regret Tuesday, September 20, over the death of the man some described as "the conscience of the Holocaust."
GHETTO UPRISING
The last surviving leader of the bloody 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Marek Edelman urged the Wiesenthal Centre to continue its work hunting down Nazi war criminals.
"Thanks to his work, the crime of genocide was not forgotten even after half a century," Edelman told Polish media. "I hope Wiesenthal chose his replacements and that after his death, the Centre in his name will not be closed."
Speaking in Warsaw Tuesday, September 20, Poland’s outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski praised Wiesenthal "for his life-long commitment" seeking truth and "seeking those guilty of the greatest crime which humanity has experienced, the Holocaust."
The co-chairman of Poland’s Council of Christians and Jews Stanislaw Krajewski called Wiesenthal the "conscious of the Holocaust" and media quoted him as saying that "there was a larger data base in the head [of Wiesenthal] than in the archives of the institution."
JOB DONE
After dedicating six decades to hunting Nazi criminals responsible for killing 6 million Jews in World War II and bringing them to justice, Simon Wiesenthal retired in 2003 and reportedly said: "my job is done. I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived them all."
Born in Buczacz, Astro-Hungary in a region of the present day Ukraine, Wiesenthal spent most of the war in concentration camps separated from his wife, Cyla.
Wiesenthal was liberated from Mauthausen death camp by American troops in May 1945. After recovering, he plunged into the work that became his life by helping the US army gather documentation for the Nazi war-crime trials. “Survival is a privilege which entails obligations,” he wrote in his book “Justice, Not Vengeance: Recollections.”
He founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna two years after the end of the war and in 1977 helped set up the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, to fight bigotry and anti-Semitism worldwide. Among his most high profile cases was Wiesenthal’s role in the capture of Adolf Eichman, head of the Gestapo’s Jewish department.
He reportedly tipped Israeli intelligence on the Nazi criminal’s presence in Argentina by 1954. Mossad agents finally captured him in 1959 and put him on trial in Jerusalem. Eichman was executed for his crimes in 1961.
ANNE FRANK
The Nazi hunter also located and brought to trial Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentrations camps in Poland, who was hiding in Brazil, and Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi officer who arrested Anne Frank in Amsterdam.
He was also instrumental in the extradition to Germany in 1973 of Hermine Braunsteiner, a supervisor of the murder of hundreds of children in Majdanek who reportedly made a new life as a housewife living in Queens, New York.
Wiesenthal did not bring to justice one prime target, Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous ‘Angel of Death’ of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mengele died in South America after eluding capture for decades.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor of the Yad Vashem foundation in Jerusalem, the Dutch Medal of Freedom and the US Congressional Gold Medal, as well as an honorary knighthood form Queen Elizabeth II. A film “The Boys from Brazil” based on Wiesenthal’s life was made in 1978 with Laurence Olivier playing him in the starring role.
MANY THREATS
Yet his work was not without danger. Simon Wiesenthal received "numerous anonymous threats and insulting letters", the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. In June 1982, a bomb exploded at the front door of his house in Vienna where he lived with his wife Cyla (until her death November 10, 2003.) The explosion caused a great deal of damage, but nobody was injured.
Since then, his house and office were guarded by an armed policeman. One German and several Austrian neo-Nazis were arrested for the bombing. The German, who was found to be the main perpetrator, was sentenced to five years in prison.
Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter. Wiesenthal reportedly once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you’d be a millionaire. Why didn’t you?"
"You’re a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?’, there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler’, Another will say, I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes’, Another will say, ‘I built houses’, But I will say, ‘I didn’t forget you’." (With BosNewsLife Research and BosNewsLife News Center).
