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Vol. 22, No. 1
Simon Wiesenthal was born Dec. 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Galicia (now the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When he applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov, he was rejected because of quota restrictions on Jewish students. Instead, he went to the Technical University of Prague where he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932 and worked in an architectural office in Lvov when the Nazis invaded Poland. He married Cyla Mueller in 1936.
Mr. Wiesenthal’s wife, a blond-haired woman, was able to pass as an “Aryan” and he made a deal with the Polish underground so that she was taken to Warsaw and worked as a forced laborer rather than in a concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal was a prisoner in several ghettos and concentration camps including Buchenwald and Mauthausen. Weighing less than 100 pounds, Mr. Wiesenthal was barely alive when an American armored unit liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. By the war’s end, he and his wife had lost 89 family members to the Nazi genocide.
After the war, Mr. Wiesenthal joined the American Commission for War Crimes and was later transferred to the O.S.S. at Linz, Austria. He helped to gather and prepare evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. In 1947, with 30 other volunteers, he founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz for the purpose of assembling evidence for future war crime trials. While the center closed in 1954, it was reopened in Vienna in 1961. Its task was to identify and locate Nazi war criminals. The center’s work was instrumental in bringing more than 1,100 Nazi criminals to justice. Wiesenthal has been honored with numerous awards for this work from many countries. He died Sept. 20, 2005, at his home in Vienna.
For a full biography, see the Simon Wiesenthal Center at www.wiesenthal.com along with a full list of honors and a bibliography.
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