Conscience of the Holocaust dies at 96

Simon Wiesenthal helped to track down Adolf Eichmann, the one-time SS leader who organised the extermination of the Jews. Picture / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down numerous Nazi war criminals following World War II, then spent decades fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died yesterday aged 96.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, Austria.

"I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice," Hier said.

Lord Janner, a former war crimes investigator and chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told the BBC: "He was a brave, fantastic, single-minded man who'd suffered hugely himself in concentration camps during the war and was determined to do whatever he could to bring at least some of the Nazis to justice."

Wiesenthal was perhaps best known for his role in tracking down Adolf Eichmann, the one-time SS leader who organised the extermination of the Jews.

Eichmann was found in Argentina, abducted by Israeli agents in 1960, tried and hanged for crimes committed against the Jews.

Wiesenthal often was accused of exaggerating his role in Eichmann's capture. He did not claim sole responsibility, but said he knew by 1954 where Eichmann was. The capture "was a teamwork of many who did not know each other".

Among others Wiesenthal tracked down was Austrian policeman Karl Silberbauer, who Wiesenthal believes arrested the Dutch teenager Anne Frank and sent her to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she died. Officials never reacted to the tip.

An architect before World War II, Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.

He spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity.

Through his work, he said, some 1100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.

Wiesenthal's quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria where he was a prisoner in May 1945.

It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 45kg when he was freed.

He said he decided to dedicate "a few years" to seeking justice. "It became decades," he added.

Even after reaching the age of 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust.

"We are living in a time of the trivialisation of the word 'Holocaust', " he said in 1999.

"What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date."

Wiesenthal's life spanned a violent century. He was born on December 31, 1908, to Jewish merchants at Buczacs, a small town near the present-day Ukrainian city of Lviv in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In 1932 he received a degree in civil engineering and was apprenticed as a building engineer in Russia before returning to Lviv to open an architectural office.

Then the Russians and the Germans occupied Lviv - and the terror began.

- AGENCIES

* An obituary will be published in the Weekend Herald.