Bringing Nazis to Justice: Simon Wiesenthal

The senior leadership of the Third Reich knew that they would be held responsible for their war crimes if Germany lost the war, so many Nazi leaders committed in anticipation of defeat. Others died fighting the Allies, were murdered by the Soviets, died in Soviet concentration camps, or were executed after the Nuremberg trials. A few were released after several years of imprisonment and some even managed to escape capture entirely. Even those Nazis who managed to escape capture for many years could not rest easy, however. Thanks to Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, former Nazis were being brought to justice for their crimes as late as the 1990s.

Simon Wiesenthal was born in Austria-Hungary (in the modern day Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1908. He was educated at the Technical University in Prague and was trained as a architectural engineer in the former Soviet Union. At the time World War II began in September of 1939, Wiesenthal was living in a part of modern day Ukraine which was then a part of Soviet occupied Poland. His stepfather and stepbrother were killed by the Soviet secret police, but he managed to avoid deportation until after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After the German invasion, Wisenthal was sent to a series of concentration camps and narrowly escaped death on a number of occasions. He was one of the survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp although he weighed less than 100 pounds when the camp was liberated. His family was not so lucky, however, and most of them died in various camps throughout occupied Europe.

After almost falling victim to the Nazi regime, Wiesenthal made it his life’s work to bring those responsible for the Holocaust to justice for their crimes. Just two years after the end of the war, he helped found the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz, Austria. The purpose of the center was to gather evidence for use in the war crimes trials of ex-Nazis. Unfortunately, the post-war tension between the Soviet Union and the West made such trials a low priority for the Allied governments and the center was eventually closed. Nevertheless, Wiesenthal may have been instrumental in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust.” Whether or not Wiesenthal was actually responsible for Eichmann’s capture, the trial and subsequent execution of Eichmann gave Wiesenthal new hope for bringing those responsible for the Holocaust to justice.

Wiesenthal opened another Jewish Document Centre in Vienna and continued to search out ex-Nazis until his death in 2005. During that time, he was reported to have been instrumental in the capture of over 1,100 ex-Nazis including high ranking officials and low-level Nazi killers. Some of the more famous Nazis he helped bring to justice were Fritz Strangl (commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor), Karl Silberbauer (the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank), and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan (a female Nazi who ordered the torture and murder of hundreds of children). Despite his success, Wiesenthal was frustrated by his failure to find Josef Mengele (the “doctor” of Auschwitz). Although most former Nazis who may have escaped have long since died of natural causes, Wiesenthal was still searching the world for ex-Nazis until his retirement in 2003.

For obvious reasons, Simon Wiesenthal has been a controversial figure. He was universally applauded by Western governments and received numerous awards for his work. He received many death threats from anti-semites, however, and could have easily been killed by a bomb detonated outside his home by neo-Nazis in 1982. Others, including elements within the Israeli government, have criticized his efforts as self-glorifying and/or as interfering with Mossad’s own operations. Nevertheless, the consensus seems to be that Simon Wiesenthal made great contributions to the reconciliation of post war Europe and that he should be honored for his tireless efforts to right the wrongs of the Holocaust.