The Nazi Hunter: Simon Wiesenthal

The senior leadership of the Third Reich knew that they would be held responsible for their war crimes if Germany lost the war, so many Nazi leaders committed in anticipation of defeat. Others died fighting the Allies, were murdered by the Soviets, died in Soviet concentration camps, or were executed after the Nuremberg trials. A few were released after several years of imprisonment and some even managed to escape capture entirely. Even those Nazis who managed to escape capture for many years could not rest easy, however. Thanks to Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, former Nazis were being brought to justice for their crimes as late as the 1990s.

Simon Wiesenthal was born in Austria-Hungary (in the modern day Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1908. He was educated at the Technical University in Prague and was trained as a architectural engineer in the former Soviet Union. At the time World War II began in September of 1939, Wiesenthal was living in a part of modern day Ukraine which was then a part of Soviet occupied Poland. His stepfather and stepbrother were killed by the Soviet secret police, but he managed to avoid deportation until after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After the German invasion, Wisenthal was sent to a series of concentration camps and narrowly escaped death on a number of occasions. He was one of the survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp although he weighed less than 100 pounds when the camp was liberated. His family was not so lucky, however, and most of them died in various camps throughout occupied Europe.