Simon wiesenthal interview

After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals , so that they could be brought to trial. In , 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.

Wiesenthal play

He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in , and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann , who was captured by Mossad in Buenos Aires in , and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl , who was sentenced to life imprisonment in In the s and s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians.

Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April , 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 In , 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 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event.

Simon wiesenthal center

With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs containing tales that are only loosely based on actual events. His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews. He died in combat on the Eastern Front in The remainder of the family—Simon, his younger brother Hillel, and his mother Rosa—fled to Vienna as the Russian army took control of Galicia.

The two boys attended a German-language Jewish school. The family returned to Buczacz in after the Russians retreated.