Tireless crusader never let the murderers rest
Death camp survivor made hunting Nazis his life’s work
Simon Wiesenthal, the tenacious Nazi hunter who scoured the globe to bring more than 1,100 war criminals to trial, died yesterday. He was 96.
Mr. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at home in Vienna, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles announced. As tributes for the death camp survivor flowed from around the globe, Canada’s Jewish leaders stressed the federal government should be doing more to bring war criminals in this country to justice to honour Mr. Wiesenthal’s legacy.
After the Second World War, Mr. Wiesenthal helped find hundreds of Nazi criminals. They included Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of Hitler’s “Final Solution”; Franz Stangl, a former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland, who was extradited to West Germany in 1967; and the Gestapo aide who arrested Anne Frank and her family at their secret annex in Amsterdam.
Although Mr. Wiesenthal travelled the world for his cause, he had not visited Canada for decades. He was critical of Canada’s failure to prosecute war criminals and had vowed not to return until the federal government took a more active stance.
“He loved Canada and he respected and admired Canada’s democracy,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said in an interview yesterday.
“But I think he read the political tea leaves quite accurately. He simply said he wasn’t going to return to Canada because he felt there wasn’t the political will to deal with the issue of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators.”
Mr. Wiesenthal, an Austrian Jew, has been called “the conscience of the world” for his refusal to let the memory of Holocaust victims fade.
He was born in 1908 in Buczacz, Galicia, a small town in what is now the Lvov Oblast area of Ukraine. He studied architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague and earned his degree in 1932. He married a high school classmate, Cyla Mueller, four years later and began work designing houses.
When the Russian army occupied his town in 1939, Mr. Wiesenthal was forced to work as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. He saved Cyla, his mother and himself from deportation to Siberia by bribing a Soviet commissar. When the invading Germans replaced the Russians in 1941, 6,000 Jews in the area were murdered within weeks.
In August, 1942, Mr. Wiesenthal watched his mother board a train bound for the Belzec death camp, where she was killed. He and Cyla were sent to a forced labour camp. Within a month, most of their relatives were dead. (Mr. Wiesenthal would later count 89 lost family members between them.)
His drafting skills and his wife’s blond hair, which gave her an “ Aryan” look, saved them. The Polish underground gave her false papers as “Irene Kowalska” and smuggled her out of the labour camp to Poland, where she was able to work in factories. In return, Mr. Wiesenthal drew detailed charts of railroad junction points for saboteurs.
Over the next three years, he survived more than a dozen concentration camps. He once managed to escape for eight months but was recaptured, after which he repeatedly tried to kill himself to avoid torture. He spent five weeks in hospital.
By the time he was liberated on May 5, 1945, he weighed just 44 kilograms.
The ordeal set him on a lifelong mission: While imprisoned, he determined to ensure the truth was known if he survived.
“Instead of sketching homes, he began sketching the faces of the murderers whom he watched practise their inhumanity daily, and he began compiling lists of names of those who had come, not to beautify communities but destroy them,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote in a tribute.
Two days after liberation, Mr. Wiesenthal went to work at the U.S. Army’s War Crimes Section, collecting evidence of the atrocities. The job led to a full-time obsession: He spent the next six decades hunting Nazis.
In 1947, he and 30 volunteers founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. Within three months, they had compiled information on more than 1,000 places where war crimes had been committed; their files were used when the International Military Tribunal met in Nuremberg.
“It was very important work. Many of us could not do this work,” said Max Eisen, a death camp survivor who volunteers with the Holocaust Centre of Toronto. “We were shell-shocked after we came home, those of us who survived. We just couldn’t talk about it for a long time.”
As the Cold War intensified, the office closed in 1954, and volunteers drifted away. Both the United States and Russia lost interest in pursuing war criminals, but Mr. Wiesenthal did not. He often said he was not motivated by anger.
“I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge,” Mr. Wiesenthal said. “My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest.”
He continued to pursue Adolf Eichmann, who was tracked to Argentina and arrested by Israeli agents in 1960. His quest to bring Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to justice was unsuccessful: He died in Brazil in 1985.
Mr. Wiesenthal allowed his name to be used for the creation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1977. With offices worldwide, the centre investigates and reports on anti-Semitism and bigotry worldwide.
“He is truly the embodiment of self-sacrifice, to make sure that the victims are remembered,” said Leo Adler, director of national affairs at Toronto’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Mr. Wiesenthal received threatening letters and phone calls throughout his life. A bomb was placed outside his home in 1982. A policeman always stood guard there and outside his office.
Canadian leaders were quick to laud Mr. Wiesenthal yesterday. Irwin Cotler, the Justice Minister, called him “the conscience of humanity, the pursuer of justice.”
Prime Minister Paul Martin released a statement praising his work, saying he demonstrated “extraordinary perseverance.”
In spite of his Canadian following, Mr. Wiesenthal did not have such kind things to say about this country. He refused to visit from the 1970s until his death, even boycotting the 1989 Toronto debut of Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story, a $10-million film about his life made by a Canadianproducer.
“I make it a policy not to visit countries with inadequate policies on war criminals. Canada is among them,” Mr. Wiesenthal wrote in a letter read to the 500 people at the private screening. “I am disappointed in Canada.”
Canada has lagged behind other nations in prosecuting or extraditing war criminals who immigrated here. When Mr. Wiesenthal provided Canada with a list of more than 200 suspected war criminals living here in the 1980s, the Mulroney government formed the Deschenes Commission to pursue the allegations, but few charges came out of the two-year exercise. “It was the work of an army of giants, only to produce a dwarf,” Mr. Wiesenthal wrote of the effort.
The Canadian government abandoned criminal prosecutions of Nazi war criminals in the 1990s after it lost a Supreme Court case against Imre Finta, who was convicted in absentia in Hungary in 1948 for sending more than 8,600 Jews to concentration camps. The Canadian court accepted the defence that Finta was just following orders.
Since then, the federal government has focused on revoking citizenship and deporting suspects on the grounds they hid their war crimes when they immigrated to Canada. But few of the hundreds of suspected war criminals in Canada have ever been forced out of the country.
“ The greatest compliment to him would be to beef up their record on war criminals,” said Ruth Klein, national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights.
“That’s the way you pay tribute to a man like that, not by giving him a posthumous medal or a title, but by taking his message and carrying on his work — by action, not just by words.”
National Post,
with files from news services