Accompanying a U.S. Army captain on his rounds to the nearby villages, Wiesenthal was allowed to make arrests -- exhilarating work, he said.
"I'll never forget our first case," he wrote in his memoir "The Murderers Among Us" (1967). "We drove to a small house where an SS man named Schmidt lived. He had been one of our guards, an insignificant little man who looked as anonymous as his name. I walked up to the second floor, found him and arrested him. He didn't even try to resist. He was trembling. So was I, but for a different reason. I was weak from getting up the stairs and from the excitement."
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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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He deliberately chose to remain in Austria because he held many of its citizens culpable for the deaths of millions of Jews. He worked with a Jewish relief agency to clear names of suspected Nazis and demanded that Jews who had collaborated with Nazis have no place in postwar Jewish organizations.
In 1947, he started his independent Jewish Documentation Center in Lidz (later it was based in Vienna). He had grown disenchanted with working for the Allies and bristled at following orders. "I considered that my self-appointed task was holy, and my determination became the more pronounced, the more I learned how Jews had been abused," he wrote in "I Hunted Eichmann."
When money ran out in 1954 -- his chief benefactor, a Swiss Jew, had died -- he closed his center and worked for a Jewish vocational training organization. Wiesenthal returned to chasing war criminals full-time only after publicity from the Eichmann case.
Wiesenthal often spoke of the necessity of his work by citing the Anne Frank case and his search for the man who arrested her family. He started the hunt after meeting a post-war generation of Austrians who labeled the horror stories of death camps "Jewish propaganda" and viewed "The Diary of Anne Frank" as a hoax.
Through contacts at investigation agencies and resources such as the telephone directory of the Gestapo in Holland, he found Frank's arrestor, Silberbauer, working as an inspector for the Vienna police. When the man was suspended in 1963, Wiesenthal made sure it received great attention by phoning the Dutch press.
The case went nowhere when prosecutors said Silberbauer's actions were not war crimes and that he was not responsible for Frank's deportation to a concentration camp.
This was not Wiesenthal's only unsuccessful pursuit -- an Austrian jury in 1963 acquitted Franz Murer, "the butcher of Vilna," who was reputed to have killed 80,000 Lithuanian Jews. Appalled by the verdict, Wiesenthal grew more convinced of the need for a rigorous press offensive in the future.
He did just that in the 1960s and 1970s during his successful campaign to prevent the expiration of German statutes of limitation against Nazi war criminals. He enlisted the help of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), one of his chief American admirers.
Over the years, Wiesenthal sought greater recognition for the sufferings of the gypsies, communists and others under the Nazi regime as well as the wartime efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who aided Jews and disappeared mysteriously in 1945 while in the custody of the Soviet Army.
In 1968, Wiesenthal called a press conference to highlight the large numbers of former Nazis serving as ranking officials in the communist East German government. The East Germans countered with accusations -- which biographer Pick wrote were false -- that Wiesenthal was on the Mossad and CIA payroll. They also claimed he was a Nazi collaborator in wartime.
