Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 1908 – 20 September 2005) was an Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture, and was living in Lviv at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp (February to May 1945).

After the war, Wiesenthal did not return to his original profession as an architect, instead dedicating his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals, so that they could be brought to trial. In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided Jewish refugees in their search for lost relatives. In 1961, he resumed this activity in Vienna, where he opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime and continued to try locating missing Nazi war criminals. He may have played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann who was captured by Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971. Wiesenthal conducted research full-time, funded by donations from private individuals as well as the Mossad, Israel's principal intelligence agency.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a "Jewish fascist", likened his organisation to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event.