Simon Wiesenthal, the man responsible for finding Adolph Eichmann so he could be brought to justice, passed away last night in his sleep. I am not very clear on the afterlife, but I am clear on one thing: God Himself will honor Weisenthal. He is one of the people who would not let the world forget, and would not let the Nazis sleep easily after murdering the six million.
Wiesenthal, who helped find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann and the policeman who arrested Anne Frank, died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
“I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice,” Hier told The Associated Press.
A survivor of five Nazi death camps, Wiesenthal changed his life’s mission after the war, dedicating himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. He himself lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.
It is simply inconceivable to me that you can “lose” 89 relatives. That sentence should read “Eighty-nine of Weisenthal’s relatives were murdered by the Nazis.”
“When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said.
[…]Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust.
“We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word ‘Holocaust,'” he told AP in 1999. “What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.”
And that school of thought survives in the world today.
Simon Wiesenthal’s name will be remembered long after the names of the Nazis are erased from memory.
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A minor correction. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have seen the name”Adolph” (which is Swedish) used instead of the correct name “Adolf” (which is Germanic) for Hitler and Eichmann.
Anyway may Simon Wiesenthal rets in peace. He had many enemies and surivived them all.
May G-d Bless Simon Weisenthal!
With all due respect to Mr. Wiesenthal, whom I honor as a great hero, there is a controversy as to whether he “tracked down Eichmann.” This has been claimed by the Wiesenthal Center, but the Mossad team that tracked Eichmann has disputed this. I met the man who led the team, Peter Malkin [who died a few years ago] at the Holocaust Museum and read his book “Eichmann in my Hands” and Wiesenthal is not mentioned.
I don’t know the truth of it, but I don’t want the memory of a great man like Wiesenthal to be in the slightest tarnished by an attribution that might be open to dispute.