By keeping the file active, he helped launch an international manhunt that resulted in Eichmann's capture by Israeli intelligence. In 1960, Mossad agents kidnapped Eichmann from a street in Buenos Aires. He stood trial in Israel and was hanged in 1962.
An early book by Wiesenthal, "I Hunted Eichmann" (1961), had a more-boastful title than the content inside suggested but made its author an overnight sensation after years of toiling in obscurity, according to biographer Hella Pick.
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Simon Wiesenthal Dies At 96
Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, who helped track down Nazi war criminals following World War II, then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died in Vienna, Austria on Sept. 20, 2005. He was 96.
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Because of Mossad secrecy over the kidnapping, Wiesenthal's role appeared magnified, and he took advantage of the publicity to press his cause. This led to later denunciations of Wiesenthal by a former Mossad leader -- one of many enemies Wiesenthal made among leading Jewish figures who criticized his methods -- but the Nazi hunter was unapologetic.
"Through the publicity we got information, and through the publicity we got money," Wiesenthal once said, noting that the money was essential sometimes to persuading aging Nazis to talk.
He said a former Gestapo officer once demanded $25,000 for information leading to the capture of Stangl. Wiesenthal uneasily settled on $7,000, which he said amounted to perhaps a penny for every person killed at Treblinka, one of Stangl's camps.
"I had three possibilities," Wiesenthal once wrote. "To throw the man out, to strangle him or to deal with him. I chose the third option, because I felt that the arrest of a mass murderer justified such a payment."
Captured in Brazil, Stangl was taken to Germany in 1967. He died in jail in 1971 after being sentenced to life in prison.
Wiesenthal used such stories to convince the press that Cold War tensions did not erase the obligation to the past. He embraced more romantic, sometimes fictionalized depictions of his work, as was the case in Frederick Forsyth's novel "The Odessa File" (1972).
He never doubted his motivation for working so long against the seemingly impossible odds of righting a genocide. In a New York Times article from 1964, he once described attending Sabbath services with a fellow camp survivors who had become wealthy jeweler. The man asked why Wiesenthal had not resumed architecture, his pre-war trade, for it would have made him rich.
"You're a religious man," Wiesenthal told his friend. "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 smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.' "
Szymon Wiesenthal was born Dec. 31, 1908, in the Galician town of Buczacz, part of what is now the western Ukraine. His father, a sugar wholesaler, died while fighting in World War I, and the family struggled amid competing Ukrainian, Russian and Polish forces.
It was common to find drunken soldiers raping and killing Galicians, especially Jews. When his mother sent him one day across the street to a neighbor's house to borrow yeast, a saber-wielding Cossack slashed Wiesenthal's right thigh. The scar remained for the rest of his life.
