Simon Wiesenthal, who survived a dozen concentration camps, then spent his life bringing Nazi war criminals to justice and searing the Holocaust into the conscience of the world, died Tuesday. He was 96.
Wiesenthal died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
He had been in declining health since the death of his wife, Cyla, in November 2003.
"The Jewish people owe him a great deal, and I believe that humanity in general does too -- because he dealt in a systematic way, determinedly and unrelentingly, with the prosecution of war criminals," Avner Shalev, the chairman of Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, said Tuesday. He set "a standard for the need to establish some sort of justice and to work for moral values the world cherishes."
Wiesenthal's biographers credited him with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler's major and minor killers and other Nazi war criminals after World War II. He was instrumental in bringing to justice well-known figures such as Adolf Eichmann -- the Nazi bureaucrat who implemented Hitler's "Final Solution," the state-sponsored extermination of millions of Jews -- and lesser-known officials such as Franz Stangl, commandant of the death camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, in German-occupied Poland, who had a role in at least 900,000 deaths.
But Wiesenthal's contribution to history was far more complex. For years, especially during the Cold War, when many wanted to forget or evade the horrors of Hitler and his followers, Wiesenthal was an insistent reminder that their evil acts must be remembered and accounted for.
He frequently called himself a "deputy for the dead."
"When history looks back," Wiesenthal said, "I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it." He said on many occasions: "If we pardon this genocide, it will be repeated, and not only on Jews. If we don't learn this lesson, then millions died for nothing."
Wiesenthal's chief legacy, said Robert J. Lifton, author of "The Nazi Doctors," a book about physicians who helped perpetrate the Holocaust, "wasn't so much his identifying particular Nazi criminals, because that could be exaggerated and oversimplified." Rather, Lifton said in an interview, "it was his insisting on an attitude of confronting what happened and constantly keeping what happened in mind and doing so at times when a lot of people would have preferred to forget."
He "bullied, cajoled and massaged" officials and ordinary people to confront those horrors, said Hella Pick, author of "Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice," but he "never swerved from his conviction that an essential part of the process of coming to terms with the Holocaust is to catch the mass murderers and give them fair trials. He deserves to be counted as one of the handful of individuals who have helped to condition moral and ethical attitudes during a period of great upheaval and self-doubt."
Wiesenthal's efforts were unprecedented, said Michael Berenbaum, former president of Survivors of the Shoah, a visual-history foundation. "In one sense, the entire quest for justice in the aftermath of genocide is futile, because you cannot punish all the killers, and the punishment itself is incommensurate with the nature of the crime," said Berenbaum, who is now the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
"And yet the need for the illusion of justice is so essential to the task of rebuilding that we need to go forward on it.
"What Wiesenthal did is to harp on this as a lifelong commitment, because he really believed in justice."
Wiesenthal was lionized and mythologized in books, films and television. But he made it clear that he was not a "Jewish James Bond" engaging in acts of derring-do. Instead, with a photographic memory and extraordinary tenacity, he investigated elaborate disappearances and brought to bay men and women who had committed unspeakable acts.
"The crusade he was on, hunting down war criminals, symbolically gave a sense of immediacy and contemporaneity to the Holocaust," said historian Peter Novick, author of "The Holocaust in American Life." Wiesenthal's efforts to snare villains from Queens to Buenos Aires made the Holocaust "a living event, rather than something to be memorialized."
A character in "The Odessa File," Frederick Forsyth's 1972 novel about hunting down former officers of the SS, an elite Nazi unit that included those who ran the killing camps, offered a concise description of Wiesenthal: "He lives in Vienna. Jewish chap, came from Polish Galicia originally. Spent four years in a series of concentration camps, 12 in all. Decided to spend the rest of his days tracking down wanted Nazi criminals.
