He survived the Holocaust and dedicated a large part of his life to pursuing escaped Nazi war criminals. But who was Simon Wiesenthal, really?
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The life story of Simon Wiesenthal resembles one of those incredible Hollywood films where the events of an entire century seem to unfold within a single character’s life. But unlike films, Wiesenthal’s life truly was like that. Here is his story.
Simon Wiesenthal’s Restless Childhood and Youth
Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, in the small town of Buchach, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland. Today, you can find this town in western Ukraine.
His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesale merchant who, three years before Simon’s birth in 1905, emigrated from the Russian Empire to escape anti-Jewish persecution. As a reservist in the Austro-Hungarian army, Asher was called up for active duty at the start of World War I in 1914 and fell in battle on the Eastern Front in 1915.
When the Russian army occupied Galicia, Simon’s mother, Rosa, left with him and his brother Hillel for Vienna. Both boys attended a German Jewish school. After the Russians withdrew in 1917, the family returned home to Buchach, although before the war ended in November 1918, the area changed hands several times. At that time, all of Galicia was rocked by power struggles between Ukrainian and Polish governments, and there were frequent Cossack raids and pogroms.
Simon and his brother attended a high school where instruction was in Polish. There, he met his future wife, Cyla Müller, whom he would later marry (in 1936).
However, that was still in the future. Reality remained cruel for the Wiesenthal family. In 1923, they suffered another heavy blow when Simon’s brother Hillel broke his spine in an accident and died from the injury the following year.
Simon, as a young man, was most interested in art and drawing, so he decided to study architecture. He initially wanted to study at the Lviv Polytechnic, but he was rejected because the Jewish quota at the school was already filled. Instead, he went to Prague, where he enrolled at the Czech Technical University, studying architecture from 1928 to 1932.
In 1932, he graduated in architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He worked as an architect in Lviv until the outbreak of World War II.
Simon Wiesenthal during the WW2
World War II in Europe began in September 1939 with Germany and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland. Following the partition of Poland according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the city of Lviv was annexed by the Soviets. Even then, before the Germans arrived, Wiesenthal had to bribe an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prohibited all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 km of the city. But the worst was yet to come.
In June 1941, the Germans replaced the Soviets and their anti-Jewish discrimination with a murderous regime aimed at exterminating the Jewish people.
The Holocaust and Concentration Camps
Almost immediately after the German occupation, Wiesenthal, along with other Jewish residents of Lviv, had to register for forced labor. A few months later, all Jews were forced to move into a newly established Jewish ghetto. That same year, Simon Wiesenthal and his relatives were sent to a concentration camp.
He survived several camps and lived to see the end of the war. However, his family and relatives were not so fortunate—about ninety of them perished in Nazi camps.
After liberation, which he experienced on May 5, 1945, in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, he vowed never to let himself be humiliated again. He didn’t return to his beloved architecture but began collecting testimonies and evidence of Nazi crimes during the war, initiating efforts to bring justice that would make him known worldwide.
Founding the Documentation Center and Hunting Nazis
Within three weeks of Mauthausen’s liberation, Wiesenthal prepared a list of around a hundred names of suspected Nazi war criminals—mostly camp guards, commanders, and Gestapo members—and submitted it to the American counterintelligence war crimes office in Mauthausen. Thus, he established the Documentation Center in Linz, whose mission was to collect evidence of Nazi crimes.
This work was challenging, lengthy, and often sorrowful. He created an individual file for each Nazi criminal, meticulously adding information obtained from witnesses and Holocaust survivors. His greatest achievements included his role in tracking down Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, capturing Franz Stangl – the commander of Treblinka – in Brazil, and verifying the authenticity of Anne Frank’s Diary by identifying Karl Silberbauer, the man who arrested Anne. Naturally, there were also failures in his work; his greatest disappointment was failing to capture and bring Josef Mengele to justice.
Simon Wiesenthal documentary:
The Fight for Memory and Human Rights
Wiesenthal did not focus solely on individual cases; he also worked to raise awareness about the Holocaust and combat antisemitism. He believed in the importance of historical memory and warned against repeating past horrors. In his books, such as The Sunflower and Justice, Not Vengeance, he reflected on forgiveness and moral dilemmas. He also opposed the views of some Jews on Germans, summarizing his stance on inherited guilt with the statement: young Germans are no worse than young Israelis. He continued his work until his death in his sleep on October 20, 2005.
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