Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal was an Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who spent the half-century after his liberation from Mauthausen tracking down former SS officers and concentration-camp guards. He helped locate Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and provided evidence used in the prosecution of Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, and Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank.

Born on December 31, 1908, in Buczacz in the Austro-Hungarian crown land of Galicia, now Buchach in western Ukraine, Simon Wiesenthal was the son of Asher Wiesenthal, a wholesale sugar merchant, and Rosa Rapp. His father was killed serving in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Eastern Front in 1915, and the family fled to Vienna during the war before returning to Buczacz.

He earned a diploma in architectural engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1932, having been refused admission to the Lwów Polytechnic under Polish quotas restricting Jewish students.

Wiesenthal practised architecture in Lwów until the German invasion of 1941, surviving the Janowska, Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps before his liberation by United States forces on May 5, 1945. He founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz in 1947 and reopened it in Vienna in 1961, compiling dossiers on thousands of suspects. He authored The Murderers Among Us in 1967 and The Sunflower in 1969 and died in Vienna on September 20, 2005, aged 96.

His name Simon derives from the Hebrew name Shimon, meaning he has heard. Simon is a common masculine name in English, German, and French-speaking countries.