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kathryn
~ Selkie Bride ~
Belgium
15320 Posts |
 Posted - 09/20/2005 : 03:59:17
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He was cool.
from today's LATimes.
Simon Wiesenthal, 'Conscience' of Holocaust, Dies
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 in his sleep at his home in Vienna, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Wiesenthal's wife of 67 years, Cyla, who once said that living with the Nazi hunter was like being "married to thousands, or maybe millions, of dead," died in November, 2003. He is survived by their daughter Paulinka.
"Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust," Hier said in a statement on the Wiesenthal Center's website.
Wiesenthal's biographers credited him with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler's major and minor killers and other Nazi war criminals since 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 like Franz Stangl, commandant of the prison 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 height of 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 warned 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 director of historical research for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and now 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," Berenbaum said. "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, using 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 and accurate 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.
"No rough stuff, mind you. He just keeps collating all the information about them that he can get; then, when he's convinced he's found one, usually living under a false name -- not always -- he informs the police. If they don't act, he calls a press conference and puts them in a spot. Needless to say, he's not terribly popular with officialdom in Germany or Austria."
When Wiesenthal began his quest for justice in 1945, he was unknown, a cadaverous man whose survival had made him believe in miracles. Yet he was known to say, "God must have been on leave during the Holocaust."
Fifty years later, on the anniversary of Austria's liberation, Wiesenthal was such a symbol of justice in the postwar world that he was asked to address thousands from the same Vienna balcony where Hitler stood in 1938 when he took over Austria.
Amid triumphs and acclaim, Wiesenthal also faced controversy, rancor and setbacks. He failed to find Josef Mengele, the physician who had conducted brutal experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. He was called a bully and a zealot by friends and relatives of Nazis he pursued, sometimes well into the quarry's later years.
Sometimes, no matter how shitty things get, you have to just do a little dance. - Frank
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Carl
- A 'Fifth' Catholic -
Ireland
11546 Posts |
Posted - 09/20/2005 : 08:17:29
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| Thanks for posting that, Kathryn. What a great man. I could'nt survive one concentration camp, let alone twelve. May he rest in the peace he so richly deserves. |
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Newo
~ Abstract Brain ~
Spain
2674 Posts |
Posted - 09/20/2005 : 08:46:01
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He'd have gotten my ear more if he'd pointed to the exciting intellectual climate in postwar US with the influx of Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun, an honorary SS member who used slave labour from the Dora camp to build research facilities for the V2 rockets in Peenemunde and went on to help the US space programme and be a consultant for Disney for a spell too. Or even Kurt Waldheim, whose membership of a couple of SA brigades escaped the attention of the UN when they made him SecretaryGeneral of the UN ah twice (got to be prime minister of Austria too). If you're going to expose Nazis, go all out.
--
Buy your best friend flowers. Buy your lover a beer. Covet thy father. Covet thy neighbour's father. Honour thy lover's beer. Covet thy neighbour's father's wife's sister. |
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larfatyou
- FB Fan -
36 Posts |
Posted - 09/20/2005 : 08:50:36
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| The only good Nazi is a tried and convicted and executed Nazi. Take that to heart. Mazel Tov, Simon. |
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PixieSteve
> Teenager of the Year <
Poland
4698 Posts |
Posted - 09/20/2005 : 11:24:02
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i thought you were calling a hunter who was a nazi cool for a minute.
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Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal dead at 96
