From The Australian.

Famed Nazi-hunter dies
From correspondents in Vienna
September 20, 2005

HOLOCAUST survivor Simon Wiesenthal, an untiring campaigner who helped track down hundreds of Nazi war criminals, has died in Vienna aged 96, his pressure group has announced.

Mr Wiesenthal helped bring more than 1100 Nazi criminals to justice, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which did not give the cause of death.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Los Angeles-based center, described Wiesenthal as “the conscience of the Holocaust”.

Mr Wiesenthal was the world’s most intrepid hunter of Nazi war criminals, bringing more than a thousand to trial in a global campaign to ensure no one forgot the horror of Adolf Hitler’s treatment of the Jews.

* A Jew, Mr Wiesenthal travelled the world into his old age, lecturing on the Holocaust and as director of the Jewish Documentation Centre collecting data on the whereabouts of the last unpunished villains of Nazi Germany.

* Those he helped to catch included major figures such as Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s chief henchmen in the campaign to exterminate Jews, and Franz Stangl, ex-commandant of the Treblinka death camp.

* He told Reuters on his 75th birthday in 1983 that he could never rest until he had hunted down the last of the great living killers of the Third Reich – “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele and former SS Colonel Walter Rauff.

* Rauff died of cancer aged 77 in Chile in May 1984, but Mr Wiesenthal went on searching for Mengele until in June 1985 a body exhumed in Brazil was identified as that of the man Mr Wiesenthal said exterminated 400,000 Jews, half of them children, as doctor at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

* When Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 Mr Wiesenthal was among millions of Jews forced into concentration camps. Altogether the Nazis were estimated to have murdered 11 million civilians, including six million Jews.

* Mr Wiesenthal spent four and a half years during World War Two in German concentration camps, including Buchenwald in Bavaria and Mauthausen in Austria. He slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt during this period to avoid torture. Some 89 members of his own family were killed by the Nazis.

* Mr Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, son of a wealthy Jewish businessman at Buczacz in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire with a large Jewish population. He attended elementary school in Vienna and high school in Buczacz.

* Asked why he spent his life hunting Nazis, he once said: “I am not a practising Jew. But I do believe.”

* In 1961 Mr Wiesenthal founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna which, helped by branches around the world and a network of former concentration camp inmates, was devoted to tracking down Nazis who escaped trial.

* Established in 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is an international Jewish human rights organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach and social action, its website says.