95 Facts About Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer.

Simon Wiesenthal studied architecture and was living in Lwow at the outbreak of World War II.

Simon Wiesenthal opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals.

Simon Wiesenthal played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the 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.

Shortly after Bruno Kreisky, a Jew himself, was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Simon Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party.

Simon Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989.

In 1986, Simon 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.

Simon Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event.

Simon Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on 20 September 2005 and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.

Simon Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908, in Buczacz, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine.

Simon Wiesenthal's father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews.

Simon Wiesenthal instead enrolled at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he studied from 1928 until 1932.

Simon Wiesenthal was apprenticed as a building engineer through 1934 and 1935, spending most of that period in Odessa.

Simon Wiesenthal married Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Galicia.

Simon Wiesenthal's autobiographies contradict each other on many points; he over-dramatised and mythologised events.

Simon Wiesenthal designed a tuberculosis sanatorium and some residential buildings during the course of his studies and was active in a student Zionist organisation.

Simon Wiesenthal wrote for the Omnibus, a satirical student newspaper, and graduated in 1939.

Walters quotes a curriculum vitae Simon Wiesenthal prepared after World War II as stating he worked as a supervisor at a factory until 1939 and then worked as a mechanic in a different factory until the Nazis invaded in 1941.

Walters says that there is no record of Simon Wiesenthal attending the university at Lwow, and that he does not appear in the Katalog Architektow i Budowniczych for the appropriate period.

Simon Wiesenthal's mother moved to Lvov to live with Simon Wiesenthal and Cyla.

Simon Wiesenthal bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres of the city, which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.

Simon Wiesenthal painted swastikas and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and Cyla was put to work polishing the brass and nickel.

In exchange for providing details about the railways, Simon Wiesenthal obtained false identity papers for his wife from a member of the Armia Krajowa, a Polish underground organisation.

Simon Wiesenthal travelled to Warsaw, where she was put to work in a German radio factory.

Simon Wiesenthal spent time in two labour camps as well.

Simon Wiesenthal prepared architectural drawings for Adolf Kohlrautz, the senior inspector, who submitted them under his own name.

Simon Wiesenthal was able to pass along further information about the railroads to the underground and occasionally left the compound to obtain supplies, even clandestinely obtaining weapons for the Armia Krajowa and two pistols for himself, which he brought with him when he escaped in late 1943.

Simon Wiesenthal, waiting to be shot, heard someone call out his name.

Simon Wiesenthal was returned alive to the camp; Kohlrautz had convinced his superiors that Wiesenthal was the best man available to paint a giant poster in honour of Hitler's birthday.

On 2 October 1943, according to Simon Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were about to be liquidated.

Simon Wiesenthal variously reported that Kohlrautz was killed on the Soviet Front in 1944 or in the Battle of Berlin on 19 April 1945.

Simon Wiesenthal then moved to the apartment of Paulina Busch, for whom he had previously forged an identity card.

Simon Wiesenthal was arrested there, hiding under the floorboards, on 13 June 1944 and taken back to the remains of the camp at Janowska.

Simon Wiesenthal tried but failed to commit suicide to avoid being interrogated about his connections with the underground.

Simon Wiesenthal was placed in a death block for the mortally ill, where he survived on 200 calories a day until the camp was liberated by the Americans on 5 May 1945.

Simon Wiesenthal weighed 41 kilograms when he was liberated.

Simon Wiesenthal worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who were carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail.

Simon Wiesenthal went with them, and was housed in a displaced persons camp.

Simon Wiesenthal served as vice-chairman of the area's Jewish Central Committee, an organisation that attempted to arrange basic care for Jewish refugees and tried to help people gather information about their missing family members.

Simon Wiesenthal worked for the American Office of Strategic Services for a year, and continued to collect information on both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Simon Wiesenthal assisted the Berihah, an underground organisation that smuggled Jewish survivors into the British Mandate for Palestine.

Simon Wiesenthal helped arrange for forged papers, food supplies, transportation, and so on.

However, as the US and the Soviet Union lost interest in conducting further trials, a similar group headed by Tuviah Friedman in Vienna closed its office in 1952, and Simon Wiesenthal's closed in 1954.

Simon Wiesenthal, employed full-time by two Jewish welfare agencies, continued his work with refugees.

Simon Wiesenthal's work became a way to memorialise and remember all the people that had been lost.

Simon Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed along that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954.

When Eichmann's father died in 1960, Simon Wiesenthal made arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of the family, as Eichmann's brother Otto was said to bear a strong family resemblance and there were no current photos of the fugitive.

Simon Wiesenthal immediately became a minor celebrity, and began work on a book about his experiences.

Simon Wiesenthal helped the prosecution prepare their case and attended a portion of the trial.

Meanwhile, both of Simon Wiesenthal's employers terminated his services in 1960, as there were too few refugees left in the city to justify the expense.

Simon Wiesenthal opened a new documentation centre in Vienna in 1961.

Simon Wiesenthal became a Mossad operative, for which he received the equivalent of several hundred dollars per month.

Simon Wiesenthal maintained files on hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals and located many, about six of whom were arrested as a result of his activities.

In 1963 Simon Wiesenthal read in the newspaper that Karl Silberbauer, the man who had arrested famed diarist Anne Frank, had been located; he was serving on the police force in Vienna.

Simon Wiesenthal escaped while on a roadwork detail in Linz in May 1948.

Simon Wiesenthal's family joined him there a year later and they emigrated to Brazil in 1951.

Concerned that Stangl would be warned and escape, Simon Wiesenthal quietly prepared a dossier with the assistance of Austrian Minister of Justice Hans Klecatsky.

Simon Wiesenthal's publishers advertised that he had been responsible for locating over 800 Nazis, a claim that had no basis in fact but was nonetheless repeated by reputable newspapers such as the New York Times.

Simon Wiesenthal served a three-year sentence in Austria for her activities in Ravensbruck, but had not yet been charged for any of her crimes at Majdanek when she emigrated to the United States in 1959.

Simon Wiesenthal soon traced Braunsteiner's whereabouts to Queens, New York, so he notified the Israeli police and the New York Times.

Simon Wiesenthal's trial was part of a joint indictment with nine other defendants accused of killing 250,000 people at Majdanek.

Simon Wiesenthal was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981, was released on health grounds in 1996, and died in 1999.

Simon Wiesenthal left the camp in January 1945 as the Red Army approached and was briefly in American custody in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, but was released.

Simon Wiesenthal took work as a farmhand in rural Germany, remaining until 1949, when he decided to flee the country.

Simon Wiesenthal acquired a Red Cross passport and left for Argentina, setting up a business in Buenos Aires in 1951.

Simon Wiesenthal moved to Brazil in 1961 and lived there until he drowned while swimming in 1979.

Simon Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele in several locations: on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960, Cairo in 1961, in Spain in 1971, and in Paraguay in 1978, the latter 18 years after he had left.

Simon Wiesenthal was not always happy with the way the centre was run.

Simon Wiesenthal thought the centre's Holocaust museum was not dignified enough and that he should have a larger say in the overall operations.

Simon Wiesenthal even wrote to the board of directors requesting Hier's removal, but in the end had to be content with being a figurehead.

Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Simon Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party.

Simon Wiesenthal discovered that he would be unable to sue, because under Austrian law Kreisky was protected by parliamentary immunity.

Simon Wiesenthal decided not to reveal this information to the press until after the election, but forwarded his dossier to President Rudolf Kirchschlager.

Simon Wiesenthal believed that Columbus's concept of "sailing west" was based on Biblical prophecies rather than any prior geographical knowledge.

Simon Wiesenthal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, the 40th anniversary of the end of the war.

When Wiesel was awarded the 1986 prize, Simon Wiesenthal claimed the World Jewish Congress must have influenced the committee's decision, a claim the WJC denied.

In 1992, Simon Wiesenthal was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.

Simon Wiesenthal spent time at his office at the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna even as he approached his 90th birthday.

Simon Wiesenthal finally retired in October 2001, when he was 92.

Cyla died on 10 November 2003, at age 95, and Simon Wiesenthal died on 20 September 2005, age 96.

Simon Wiesenthal was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable to our freedom, stability and peace.

Simon Wiesenthal became an avid stamp collector after the war, following advice from his doctors to take up a hobby to help him relax.

Simon Wiesenthal was portrayed by Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky in the film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File.

Olivier visited Simon Wiesenthal, who offered advice on how to play the role.

The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal was produced in 1994 by filmmakers Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel for River Lights Pictures.

The documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, narrated by Nicole Kidman, was released by Moriah Films in 2007.

Simon Wiesenthal is a one-person show written and performed by Tom Dugan that premiered in 2014.

Several authors, including Segev and British author Guy Walters, feel that Simon Wiesenthal's autobiographies are not reliable sources of information about his life and activities.

For example, Simon Wiesenthal would describe two people fighting over one of the lists he had prepared of survivors of the Holocaust; the two look up and recognise each other and have a tearful reunion.

Simon Wiesenthal particularly over-emphasised his role in the capture of Eichmann, claiming that he prevented Veronika Eichmann from having her husband declared dead in 1947, when in fact the declaration was denied by government officials.

Simon Wiesenthal said that he had retained his Eichmann file when he sent his research materials to Yad Vashem in 1952; in fact he sent all his materials there, and it was his counterpart, Tuviah Friedman in Vienna, who had retained materials on Eichmann.

Isser Harel, director of the Mossad at the time, has stated that Simon Wiesenthal had no role in the capture of Eichmann.

Segev concluded that Simon Wiesenthal lied because of his storytelling nature and survivor guilt.

Daniel Finkelstein described Walters's research in Hunting Evil as impeccable and quoted Ben Barkow: "Accepting that Simon Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made".