Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, honorary KBE, (31 December, 1908 – 20 September, 2005), was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer who became a Nazi hunter after surviving the Holocaust.

Nazi hunter

Wiesenthal was liberated by American forces from Mauthausen on 5 May, 1945. When the Americans found Wiesenthal (who was then 1.80 m tall), he weighed less than 45 kg. As soon as his health improved, Wiesenthal went to work for the U.S. Army gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. In 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz, Austria in order to gather information for future trials. However, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost interest in further war crimes trials, the group drifted apart. Wiesenthal himself continued to gather information in his spare time while working full-time to help those affected by World War II.

Related Topics:
American forces - 5 May - 1945 - U.S. Army - Nazi war crimes trials - 1947 - Jewish Documentation Center - Linz, Austria - War crime

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During this time, Wiesenthal claimed to be instrumental in the capture and conviction of the main engineer of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann. This was disputed by Isser Harel, the former head of the Mossad, who said that Wiesenthal not only "had no role whatsoever" in the apprehension but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation.

Related Topics:
Final Solution - Adolf Eichmann - Isser Harel - Mossad

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After Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which went to work on other cases. Among his most high-profile successes was the capture of Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Silberbauer's confession helped discredit claims that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. During this period Wiesenthal also located nine of the 16 Nazis later put on trial in West Germany for the murder of the Jewish population of Lwów and also captured Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a former Aufseherin (literally, "Female Supervisor") living on Long Island who had ordered the torture and murder of hundreds of children at Majdanek.

Related Topics:
Israel - 1962 - Karl Silberbauer - Gestapo - Anne Frank - The Diary of Anne Frank - West Germany - Franz Stangl - Treblinka - Sobibor - Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan - Long Island - Majdanek

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