Simon Wiesenthal

Born in Austria in 1908, Wiesenthal studied architecture and was living in Lwów when war broke out. Between late 1941 and May 1945 he passed through Janowska, Kraków-Płaszów, Gross-Rosen, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and finally Mauthausen. After liberation he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz in 1947, gathering evidence for trials and helping refugees trace lost relatives, then opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961. He may have played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, captured in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked with Austrian authorities to build the case against Franz Stangl, sentenced to life in 1971. In 1970 he publicly identified four Nazi Party members in Bruno Kreisky's new cabinet; Kreisky called him a "Jewish fascist" and accused him of Nazi collaboration, a libel suit Wiesenthal won in 1989. He was drawn into the 1986 Kurt Waldheim affair, embarrassed after having previously cleared the presidential candidate despite Waldheim's Wehrmacht service and probable knowledge of atrocity. A storyteller with a loose grip on fact, Wiesenthal exaggerat