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Nazi war criminal hunter Simon Wiesenthal is dead

Holocaust survivor who fought prejudice against all people

CONSCIENCE OF HOLOCAUST: Simon Wiesenthal is seen in his office in Vienna in this May 22, 1996 file photo . — PHOTO: AP

VIENNA: Simon Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor who helped track down Nazi war criminals and spent decades fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died on Tuesday. He was 96.

Mr. Wiesenthal, who helped find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann and the policeman who arrested Anne Frank, died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

``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,'' Rabbi Hier told The Associated Press.

A survivor of 12 Nazi camps who had trained as an architect, Mr. Wiesenthal changed his life's mission after the war, dedicating himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. He himself lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.

Mr. Wiesenthal 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 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.

``When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it,'' he once said.

Calls of condolence

Calls of condolence poured into Mr. Wiesenthal's office in Vienna, where one of his longtime assistants, Trudi Mergili, struggled to deal with her grief. ``It was expected,'' she said. ``But it is still so hard.''

Mr. Wiesenthal was first sent to a concentration camp in 1941, outside Lviv, Ukraine. In October 1943, he escaped from the Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began killing all the inmates. He was recaptured in June 1944 and sent back to Janwska, but escaped death as his SS guards retreated with their prisoners from the Soviet Red Army.

Mr. 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 camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 99 pounds when he was freed. He said he quickly realised ``there is no freedom without justice,'' and decided to dedicate ``a few years'' to that mission.

``It became decades,'' he added. Even after turning 90, Mr. 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. — AP

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