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.
The collaboration charge was repeated by Bruno Kreisky, the Socialist chancellor of Austria, whom Wiesenthal often singled out for the ex-Nazis serving in his cabinet. They traded slurs over many decades and, in the end, Wiesenthal won a slander suit against Kreisky.
Neither Wiesenthal nor the World Jewish Congress (WJC) gained anything during the ugly public relations battle over the disputed war record of Austrian statesman Kurt Waldheim. Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary-general running for the presidency of Austria in the early 1980s, had served in the German army during World War II.
The WJC accused Waldheim of participating in Nazi atrocities. Wiesenthal's brief investigation turned up nothing, though he called Waldheim a "world-class liar." Wiesenthal said he lacked evidence to prove Waldheim was culpable for mass killings or deportations.
The WJC launched a massive campaign to discredit Wiesenthal. Eli M. Rosenbaum, a U.S. Justice Department Nazi-hunter and former WJC general counsel, wrote a book called "Betrayal" (1993) that criticized Wiesenthal for his alleged "cover up" of Waldheim's wartime activities as Waldheim went on to win the presidency.
While the accusations against him stung, Wiesenthal found his reputation greatly enhanced in his adopted country of Austria, which had long viewed him as a meddler, according to Pick.To many, his name had long been a symbol of human conscience. Wiesenthal's honors included the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal (1980), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) and an honorary British knighthood (2004).
In 1977, Rabbi Marvin Hier named his Los Angeles-based Jewish human rights center after Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal remained officially unaffiliated with the California center, but Hier agreed to send him a modest monthly stipend as Wiesenthal kept his Austrian office open, mostly hoping to outlive the surviving handful of Nazi war criminals.
Wiesenthal wrote prolifically to provide some income for his work. Besides his memoirs, his books included "The Sunflower" (1969), part-memoir, part-parable of forgiveness; and "Sails of Hope" (1973), in which he studied the possibility that Christopher Columbus was Jewish. He joked that American Jews might celebrate three holy events: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Columbus Day.
Wiesenthal was described as a man who accepted material sacrifice but craved name recognition. In many ways, he won his wish. Some felt this aspect of his personality diminished him, including Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel, who found Wiesenthal boorish and covetous of his Nobel Prize.
Ever image-conscious, Wiesenthal once said Paul Newman would be the ideal man to play him onscreen. When told the actor disliked portraying the living, Wiesenthal said: "Give him also my regards, but for his comfort I wish not to die."
Simon Wiesenthal Dies At 96