Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal: The Bookkeeper of Unfinished Justice

When American troops reached Mauthausen on 5 May 1945, Wiesenthal weighed 41 kilograms. Within three weeks, still barely able to stand, he handed the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps a list of roughly a hundred men he believed should be arrested. Eighty-nine members of his family and his wife's had been murdered. He spent the next fifty-six years turning that arithmetic into a profession that did not previously exist.

Buczacz

He was born on 31 December 1908 in Buczacz, in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, now Ukraine. His father Asher had fled the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape pogroms, served in the Austro-Hungarian army and was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915. His mother Rosa remarried; his younger brother Hillel died in 1924 of a spinal injury. He attended the Humanistic Gymnasium in Buczacz, where he met Cyla Muller, whom he married in 1936. Jewish quotas kept him out of Lwow Polytechnic, so he studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague from 1928 to 1932, apprenticed as a building engineer in Odessa, and later said he graduated from Lwow Polytechnic in 1939. Even here the record is uncertain: the researcher Guy Walters found no archival evidence of the Lwow studies or of Wiesenthal's appearance in professional architects' registers.

Five Camps

Under Soviet rule from 1939 he bribed officials to avoid deportation. After the German invasion in June 1941 he registered for forced labour, and by late 1941 he was in Janowska concentration camp painting insignia on captured Soviet locomotives while Cyla, on false papers, worked in Warsaw. He passed through Krakow-Plaszow in the autumn of 1944, Gross-Rosen, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen from February 1945. His mother had been transported to Belzec and murdered in August 1942. He lost the big toe of his right foot to a quarry injury, and attempted suicide after being recaptured in June 1944 to avoid interrogation.

The Documentation Centres

He worked as an interpreter for the Americans, riding along on arrest operations. In February 1947 he founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz with thirty volunteers, collecting 3,289 depositions from survivors, and closed it in 1954 as Allied appetite for trials evaporated. In 1961 he opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna, funded by donations and by a Mossad stipend of several hundred dollars a month. The output was smaller than the legend: he located roughly six Nazi war criminals who were subsequently arrested, and his published claims of more than eight hundred were unfounded.

The cases that were his were serious. Franz Stangl had commanded Sobibor and then Treblinka, where some 900,000 people died, and had escaped to Brazil via Red Cross papers. Informed in 1964, probably by Stangl's former son-in-law, Wiesenthal quietly built a dossier with the Austrian justice minister Hans Klecatsky; Stangl was arrested outside Sao Paulo on 28 February 1967, extradited in June, and sentenced to life. In 1963 Wiesenthal read that Karl Silberbauer, the officer who arrested Anne Frank, was serving on the Vienna police force, and his publicity forced a suspension though no prosecution. In 1964 a chance conversation in Tel Aviv put him onto Hermine Braunsteiner, the Majdanek guard called the Mare, who had settled in Queens; he traced her and notified the New York Times, and though extradition took until 1973 she received a life sentence in 1981.

Eichmann, and the Problem of Credit

Wiesenthal watched Adolf Eichmann's family in Linz until 1952, learned in 1953 from a letter that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires, told the Israeli consulate in 1954, and in 1960 arranged for private detectives to photograph the family at the funeral of Eichmann's father, passing the photographs to Mossad on 18 February. The agent Zvi Aharoni said they "were useful in confirming Eichmann's identity." Eichmann was seized on 11 May 1960 and hanged on 1 June 1962. Six weeks before the trial Wiesenthal published *Ich jagte Eichmann*, I Chased Eichmann: A True Story. Isser Harel, who ran Mossad, said flatly that Wiesenthal "had no role in the capture of Eichmann." Wiesenthal also falsely claimed to have blocked an attempt by Eichmann's wife to have him declared dead, and to have kept the Eichmann file back when he sent his research to Yad Vashem in 1952.

This pattern recurs. Biographers Tom Segev and Guy Walters catalogued fabrications: he claimed as many as eleven camps when there were five; a Mauthausen drawing he said he had witnessed was copied from *Life* magazine photographs; the same anecdote appears with different protagonists in different books. His Mengele claims placed the doctor in Kythnos, Cairo, Spain and, in 1978, Paraguay, which he had left in 1961; Wiesenthal was still insisting Mengele was alive in 1985, six years after he drowned. Most consequentially, he told the *Washington Post* in 1979 that "I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews." The historian Yehuda Bauer told him to his face, "Simon, you are telling a lie." Wiesenthal replied: "Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential." The invented five million non-Jewish figure spread widely, and Jimmy Carter used it in the order establishing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Vienna Politics

His fights were often domestic. When Bruno Kreisky became Austrian chancellor in 1970, Wiesenthal noted publicly that four of his cabinet appointees had been Nazi Party members. Kreisky, himself Jewish, called him a "Jewish fascist," compared his organisation to the Mafia and accused him of collaborating with the Gestapo and the Judenrat. Wiesenthal sued for libel and won in 1989; Kreisky's heirs refused to pay, and when the archives opened no evidence of collaboration was found. In 1975 Wiesenthal held documents proving that Kreisky's prospective coalition partner Friedrich Peter had served in an SS brigade that exterminated over 13,000 Jewish civilians in Ukraine; he withheld them from the press until after the election and sent them to the president instead. The Waldheim affair went the other way: asked in 1971, Wiesenthal reported no evidence of a Nazi past, and when Kurt Waldheim's concealed Balkan service surfaced in 1986 he was left embarrassed, initially helping Waldheim defend himself before demanding his resignation.

Why Simon Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that he was not a genius of intellect and should not be sold as one. His gift was archival persistence combined with an intuitive grasp of publicity, applied to a problem the world had decided to close. Nobody asked him to compile 3,289 depositions in Linz, and nobody would have found Stangl or Braunsteiner without a private individual willing to spend years cross-referencing letters, rumours and chance remarks in Tel Aviv cafes. He understood that a name in the *New York Times* was often a more effective instrument than a file with a prosecutor, and he kept the political cost of Nazi impunity high in a country that badly wanted it to be zero. That is a genuine and unusual capability. But the counter-case is unusually heavy here, because much of the mythology was self-generated. Segev concluded that he lied out of a storyteller's temperament and survivor's guilt; Ben Barkow's summary is the fairest available: "Accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made." He inflated his role in the Eichmann capture, inflated the number of camps he survived, inflated his arrest count roughly a hundredfold and, worst, deliberately falsified the Holocaust's demography for tactical reasons. What he had was not brilliance but a refusal to let go, in an age with a strong appetite for letting go.

Legacy

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, received the Erasmus Prize in 1992 and an honorary KBE from the British government in 2004. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in Los Angeles in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who paid him for the use of his name; Wiesenthal was never satisfied with it and once asked the board to remove Hier. The last man he helped bring to trial was Julius Viel, convicted in 2001 of shooting seven Jewish prisoners. He retired that October, aged ninety-two, saying: "I have survived them all. If there were any left, they'd be too old and weak to stand trial today. My work is done." He died in Vienna on 20 September 2005 and was buried in Herzliya. Terry Davis of the Council of Europe called him "a soldier of justice." The description survives the corrections.