Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that December 31 is the anniversary of the birth of Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer Simon Wiesenthal who "studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp."

Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal : Know Thy Neighbour (1980) - The Fifth Estate
From 1980 Fifth Estate host Ian Parker interviews famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, who charges that at the time Canada was harbouring as many as 1,000 war criminals from WWII.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_cA4jnrX9c

Images:
1. Simon Wiesenthal 'Humour is the weapon of unarmed people - it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.'
2. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal with grandson
3. Front row (left to right) Ida Wiesenthal, Andrea Wiesenthal; me (39 years ago!), Ethel Wiesenthal Schwartz. Back Melvin Schwartz; Jeanette Wiesenthal; Rose Wiesenthal; Jacob Wiesenthal
4. Simon Wiesenthal obituary picture

Front row (left to right) Ida Wiesenthal, Andrea Wiesenthal; me (39 years ago!), Ethel Wiesenthal Schwartz. Back Melvin Schwartz; Jeanette Wiesenthal; Rose Wiesenthal ; Jacob Wiesenthal . (New York, 1967).

Biographies:
1. wiesenthal.com/about/about-simon-wiesenthal/biography.html
2. encyclopedia.com/people/history/austria-and-hungary-history-biographies/simon-wiesenthal

1. Background from wiesenthal.com/about/about-simon-wiesenthal/biography.html
Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908 in Buczacz, in what is now the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine. When Wiesenthal's father was killed in World War I, Mrs. Wiesenthal took her family and fled to Vienna for a brief period, returning to Buczacz when she remarried. The young Wiesenthal graduated from the Gymnasium in 1928 and applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov. Turned away because of quota restrictions on Jewish students, he went instead to the Technical University of Prague, from which he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932.

In 1936, Simon married Cyla Mueller and worked in an architectural office in Lvov. Their life together was happy until 1939 when Germany and Russia signed their "non-aggression" pact and agreed to partition Poland between them; the Russian army soon occupied Lvov, and shortly afterward began the Red purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners and other professionals. In the purge of "bourgeois" elements that followed the Soviet occupation of Lvov Oblast at the beginning of World War II, Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs - Soviet Secret Police) and eventually died in prison, his stepbrother was shot, and Wiesenthal himself, forced to close his business, became a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Later he saved himself, his wife, and his mother from deportation to Siberia by bribing an NKVD commissar. When the Germans displaced the Russians in 1941, a former employee of his, then serving the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary police, helped him to escape execution by the Nazis. But he did not escape incarceration. Following initial detention in the Janwska concentration camp just outside Lvov, he and his wife were assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn Works, the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad.

Early in 1942, the Nazi hierarchy formally decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem" -- Annihilation. Throughout occupied Europe a terrifying genocide machine was put into operation. In August 1942, Wiesenthal's mother was sent to the Belzec death camp. By September, most of his and his wife's relatives were dead; a total of eighty-nine members of both families perished.

Because his wife's blonde hair gave her a chance of passing as an "Aryan," Wiesenthal made a deal with the Polish underground. In return for detailed charts of railroad junction points made by him for use by saboteurs, his wife was provided with false papers identifying her as "Irene Kowalska," a Pole , and spirited out of the camp in the autumn of 1942. She lived in Warsaw for two years and then worked in the Rhineland as a forced laborer, without her true identity ever being discovered.

With the help of the deputy director, Wiesenthal himself escaped the Ostbahn camp in October 1943, just before the Germans began liquidating all the inmates. In June 1944, he was recaptured and sent back to Janwska where he would almost certainly have been killed had the German eastern front not collapsed under the advancing Red Army. Knowing they would be sent into combat if they had no prisoners to justify their rear-echelon assignment, the SS guards at Janwska decided to keep the few remaining inmates alive. With 34 prisoners out of an original 149,000, the 200 guards joined the general retreat westward, picking up the entire population of the village of Chelmiec along the way to adjust the prisoner-guard ratio.

Very few of the prisoners survived the westward trek through Plaszow, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald, which ended at Mauthausen in upper Austria. Weighing less than 100 pounds and lying helplessly in a barracks where the stench was so strong that even hardboiled SS guards would not enter, Wiesenthal was barely alive when Mauthausen was liberated by an American armored unit on May 5, 1945.

As soon as his health was sufficiently restored, Wiesenthal began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. After the war, he also worked for the Army's Office of Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of Austria, a relief and welfare organization. Late in 1945, he and his wife, each of whom had believed the other to be dead, were reunited, and in 1946, their daughter Pauline was born.

The evidence supplied by Wiesenthal was utilized in the American zone war crime trials. When his association with the United States Army ended in 1947, Wiesenthal and thirty volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, for the purpose of assembling evidence for future trials. But, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, both sides lost interest in prosecuting Germans, and Wiesenthal's volunteers, succumbing to frustration, drifted away to more ordinary pursuits. In 1954, the office in Linz was closed and its files were given to the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel, except for one - the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, the inconspicuous technocrat who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish Department, had supervised the implementation of the "Final Solution."

While continuing his salaried relief and welfare work, including the running of an occupational training school for Hungarian and other Iron Curtain refugees, Wiesenthal never relaxed in his pursuit of the elusive Eichmann who had disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World War II. In 1953, Wiesenthal received information that Eichmann was in Argentina from people who had spoken to him there. He passed this information on to Israel through the Israeli embassy in Vienna and in 1954 also informed Nahum Goldmann, but the FBI had received information that Eichmann was in Damascus, Syria. It was not until 1959 that Israel was informed by Germany that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires living under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was captured there by Israeli agents and brought to Israel for trial. Eichmann was found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.

Encouraged by the capture of Eichmann, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, this time in Vienna, and concentrated exclusively on the hunting of war criminals. One of his high priority cases was Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, the fourteen year-old German-Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis after hiding in an Amsterdam attic for two years. Dutch neo-Nazi propagandists were fairly successful in their attempts to discredit the authenticity of Anne Frank's famous diary until Wiesenthal located Silberbauer, then a police inspector in Austria, in 1963. "Yes," Silberbauer confessed, when confronted, "I arrested Anne Frank."

In October 1966, sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by Wiesenthal, went on trial in Stuttgart, West Germany, for participation in the extermination of Jews in Lvov. High on Wiesenthal's most-wanted list was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland. After three years of patient undercover work by Wiesenthal, Stangl was located in Brazil and remanded to West Germany for imprisonment in 1967. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison.

Wiesenthal's book of memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, was published in 1967. During a visit to the United States to promote the book, Wiesenthal announced that he had found Mrs. Hermine Ryan, nee Braunsteiner, a housewife living in Queens, New York. According to the dossier, Mrs. Ryan had supervised the killings of several hundred children at Majdanek. She was extradited to Germany for trial as a war criminal in 1973 and received life imprisonment.

The Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna is a nondescript, sparsely furnished three-room office with a staff of four, including Wiesenthal. Contrary to belief, Wiesenthal does not usually track down the Nazi fugitives himself. His chief task is gathering and analyzing information. In that work he is aided by a vast, informal, international network of friends, colleagues, and sympathizers, including German World War II veterans, appalled by the horrors they witnessed. He has even received tips from former Nazis with grudges against other former Nazis. A special branch of his Vienna office documents the activities of right-wing groups, neo-Nazis and similar organizations.

Painstakingly, Wiesenthal culls every pertinent document and record he can get and listens to the many personal accounts told him by individual survivors. With an architect's structural acumen, a Talmudist's thoroughness, and a brilliant talent for investigative thinking, he pieces together the most obscure, incomplete, and apparently irrelevant and unconnected data to build cases solid enough to stand up in a court of law. The dossiers are then presented to the appropriate authorities. When, as often happens, they fail to take action, whether from indifference, pro-Nazi sentiment, or some other consideration, Wiesenthal goes to the press and other media, for experience has taught him that publicity and an outraged public opinion are powerful weapons.

The work yet to be done is enormous. Germany's war criminal files contain more than 90,000 names, most of them of people who have never been tried. Thousands of former Nazis, not named in any files, are also known to be at large, often in positions of prominence, throughout Germany. Aside from the cases themselves, there is the tremendous task of persuading authorities and the public that the Nazi Holocaust was massive and pervasive. In the final paragraph of his memoirs, he quotes what an SS corporal told him in 1944: "You would tell the truth [about the death camps] to the people in America. That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn't believe you. They'd say you were mad. Might even put you into an asylum. How can anyone believe this terrible business - unless he has lived through it?"

Among Mr. Wiesenthal's many honors include decorations from the Austrian and French resistance movements, the Dutch Freedom Medal, the Luxembourg Freedom Medal, the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the French Legion of Honor which he received in 1986. Wiesenthal was a consultant for the motion picture thriller, The Odessa File(Paramount, 1974). The Boys from Brazil (Twentieth Century Fox, 1978), a major motion picture based on Ira Levin's book of the same name, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as Herr Lieberman, a character styled after Wiesenthal.

In 1981, the Wiesenthal Center produced the Academy AwardTM-winning documentary, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson Welles, and introduced by Simon Wiesenthal.

Wiesenthal lives in a modest apartment in Vienna and spends his evenings answering letters, studying books and files, and working on his stamp collection. He lived there with his wife Cyla untill her death November 10, 2003.

As is to be expected, Simon Wiesenthal has received numerous anonymous threats and insulting letters. In June 1982, a bomb exploded at the front door of his house causing a great deal of damage. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Since then, his house and office have been guarded by an armed policeman. One German and several Austrian neo-Nazis were arrested for the bombing. The German, who was found to be the main perpetrator, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Wiesenthal is often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter. According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?', there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler', Another will say, I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes', Another will say, 'I built houses', But I will say, 'I didn't forget you'."

2. Background from encyclopedia.com/people/history/austria-and-hungary-history-biographies/simon-wiesenthal
Simon Wiesenthal by Lisa Frick
Born Szymon Wiesenthal, December 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Galicia (now part of Ukraine); died of kidney disease, September 20, 2005, in Vienna, Austria. Nazi war crimes investigator and human-rights activist. Simon Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust but lost his mother and many other family members during the ordeal in which six million European Jews were annihilated. After his release from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals and is credited with bringing more than 1,100 offenders to justice. Because of his devotion to the task, he was nicknamed the "deputy for the dead."
Szymon Wiesenthal (later known as Simon) was born on December 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. His father, Hans, was a sugar wholesaler and an officer in the Austrian Army; he died in combat in 1915. For a Jewish boy, Buczacz was not the safest place to live. Area Jews faced persecution from the Cossacks—peasants who served in the czar's cavalry and lived in communal settlements around Ukraine. When Wiesenthal was ten years old, a Cossack gashed his leg open with a saber as he crossed the street. Wiesenthal faced anti-Semitism again when he was denied admission to the Polytechnic Institute in the Ukrainian city of Lvov because of limits on Jewish enrollment. Instead, he studied architectural engineering at the Technical University in Prague, Czechoslovakia, graduating in 1932.

In 1936, Wiesenthal married his high school sweetheart, Cyla Müller, and opened an architectural practice in Lvov. Within a few years the Soviet Union's Red Army overran the city and began purging Jewish professionals. Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested and his stepbrother shot. Forced to close his office, Wiesenthal found work in a bedspring factory.

In 1941, invading German soldiers displaced the Russian officers and gathered up the city's Jews for execution. Wiesenthal watched as a soldier shot half the group, gulping swigs of liquor in between executions. Wiesenthal's life was spared when the church bells rang and the soldiers retreated for evening mass. He and his wife were taken to a labor camp where he was given the job of painting swastikas on captured locomotives. In 1942, Wiesenthal's mother was executed. That same year, his wife, who was blonde and could pass for a Pole, was smuggled out of the area by the Polish underground and taken to Warsaw. Later recaptured, she was sent to western Germany to make machine guns for the Nazis.

During the Holocaust, Wiesenthal spent time in a dozen concentration camps and narrowly escaped alive. On April 20, 1943, Wiesenthal was among a group of men selected for execution in honor of German dictator Adolf Hitler's birthday. During the proceedings, an official decided someone needed to paint a swastika banner for the occasion and chose Wiesenthal for the honors, thus sparing his life again. In October of 1943, Wiesenthal persuaded an official to help him escape. Within a few months, though, he was returned to the Janowska camp on the outskirts of Lvov. Wiesenthal tried to kill himself but was revived for interrogation.

By the mid-1940s, the Germans had begun retreating toward Austria as Allied forces advanced. Many prisoners died during the journey, but Wiesenthal survived and on May 5, 1945, U.S. troops rolled into Austria, liberating Wiesenthal and other survivors. His 6-foot frame weighed less than 100 pounds. As soon as Wiesenthal regained his strength, he began gathering evidence for the War Crimes Unit of the U.S. Army in Austria. By the year's end, Wiesenthal was reunited with his wife, whom he feared dead. The next year, their daughter, Paulinka, was born.

While many survivors went back to their careers and tried to move on, Wiesenthal refused to forget the atrocities he had witnessed. He spent the remainder of his life tracking down war criminals, believing his survival gave him an obligation to pursue justice—through the proper channels—for those who had died. Wiesenthal opened the Jewish Documentation Centre to gather information on war criminals and cultivate relationships with contacts around the globe. Located in Austria, the center became a repository of concentration camp testimony.

Following the war, many war criminals fled Europe and tried to blend in by living ordinary lives. Many did not escape Wiesenthal's sleuthing. He was a clever detective, known for his extraordinary memory, and fluent in Polish, German, English, Yiddish, and Russian. Wiesenthal's work led to the arrest of several high-profile war criminals, including Franz Stangl, who was hiding in Brazil. Stangl, a Polish death camp commandant, was extradited to West Germany for trial and died in prison there. Wiesenthal also tracked down Gestapo aide Karl Silberbauer, who had arrested Anne Frank and her family.

Once, Wiesenthal tipped off a New York Times reporter, who hunted down Valerian D. Trifa, who had led a massacre of Jews in Romania. At the time, Trifa was working as an archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in Michigan. He was deported to Portugal, where he died. Wiesenthal also located concentration camp guard Hermine Braun-steiner, who had escaped to the United States in the 1950s, married and settled in the New York City borough of Queens. She was infamous for shooting small children and selecting women for the gas chambers. She received a life term.

Many times, Wiesenthal was criticized for his efforts, particularly for his publicity stunts, yet he always downplayed critics. According to the Washington Post, he once remarked, "I'm doing this because I have to do it. I am not motivated by a sense of revenge. Perhaps I was for a short time in the very beginning." Wiesenthal went on to note that he had to do it so people do not forget. "If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years." Besides criticism, Wiesenthal faced real danger, too. In 1982, his Vienna house was fire-bombed, though he escaped unharmed and refused to move. German and Austrian neo-Nazis were later charged.

Wiesenthal wrote several books about his efforts, including 1967's The Murderers Among Us and 1989's Justice, Not Vengeance. His life was also the topic of a 1989 HBO movie, Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story, based on his memoirs. Wiesenthal also promoted human rights. Later in life, he urged war criminal trials for those responsible for genocide in the former Yugoslavia. He also lectured and gave countless interviews, many times denouncing far-right politics. He also reminded world leaders of their duty to combat racism.

Over his lifetime, Wiesenthal was bestowed with many honors, including the establishment of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is dedicated to Jewish defense, education, and commemoration. Other honors include the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 1980, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000, and honorary British knighthood in 2004.

Wiesenthal's wife predeceased him in 2003. On September 20, 2005, Wiesenthal died of a kidney ailment in Vienna. Survivors include his daughter and three grandchildren. Sources: CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/20/obit.wiesenthal/index.html (September 20, 2005); Economist, September 24, 2005, p. 102; Independent (London), September 21, 2005; New York Times, September 21, 2005, p. A1, p. C18; People, October 3, 2005, p. 87; Washington Post, September 21, 2005, p. A1, p. A18."

FYI SGT Mark Anderson SGT Jim Arnold SSgt Terry P. Maj Robert Thornton SFC (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarland Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarterLTC Greg Henning SGT Gregory Lawritson SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT (Join to see) SGT (Join to see) CWO3 (Join to see) LTC (Join to see)Col Carl Whicker SPC Margaret Higgins

I have his books. He did a great job tracking down Nazis after the war

Thank you for the great history share sir