WIESENTHAL, SIMON

born Dec. 31, 1908, Buczacz, Austria-Hungary [now Buchach, Ukraine] founder and head (since 1961) of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. Wiesenthal was a longtime Nazi hunter who, with the cooperation of the Israeli, West German, and other governments, tracked down some 1,000 war criminals. Wiesenthal received a degree in architectural engineering from the Technical University of Prague (1932) and settled in Lww, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). When the city was seized by the Soviet Union in 1939, he had to close his bourgeois architectural practice but avoided being exiled to Siberia by bribing a commissar of the NKVD (Soviet secret police). After the Germans replaced the Soviet occupiers at Lww in 1941, he was dragooned into forced labour and spent the last three years of the war miraculously evading death in a series of labour and concentration camps. Eighty-nine members of his and his wife's Jewish families were annihilated by the Nazis, but, after liberation in 1945, he and his wife, who had managed to pass as a Pole for much of the war, were reunited. As soon as he had recovered his health, Wiesenthal began helping the U.S. Army gather evidence with which to prosecute Nazi war criminals. In Linz, Austria, in 1947, he and 30 volunteers opened the Documentation Centre on the Fate of Jews and Their Persecutors for the purpose of aiding Jewish refugees and providing evidence for war crimes trials. In 1954 the Linz office closed and its files were conveyed to Israel, but Wiesenthal continued on his own to ferret out former Nazis. Encouraged by the arrest of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, he opened the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna in 1961 and, over the years, sought out Gestapo agents, SS officers, and other Nazis for trials, principally in West Germany. In 1967 he was primarily responsible for locating Fritz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps. Wiesenthal wrote a number of books, including KZ. Mauthausen (1946; Concentration Camp Mauthausen), Ich jagte Eichmann (1961; I Hunted Eichmann), Verjhrung (1964; Statute of Limitations), The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs (1967), Segel der Hoffnung (1972; Sails of Hope), and Der Fall Jaworska (1975; The Case of Jaworska).