VIENNA, Sept 20: Simon Wiesenthal, who waged an untiring campaign to track down Nazi war criminals and keep alive the memory of Jews killed in Germany in the 1940s, died on Tuesday at the age of 96.
Simon Wiesenthal, a Jew and former concentration camp inmate, was best known for helping with the discovery in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, the man Adolf Hitler entrusted with carrying out The Nazi genocide programme against the Jews.
The man who helped trace some 1,100 Nazis from his small, file-crammed Vienna office, died early on Tuesday in his apartment, the Jewish Community of Vienna said. Guests from many countries are expected to attend a memorial on Wednesday.
Mr Wiesenthal will be buried in Israel.
“Simon Wiesenthal acted to bring justice to those who had escaped justice,” Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
“Wiesenthal’s personal mission has ended, and there are others who are carrying on with the work,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, on radio.
Mr Wiesenthal, born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine, travelled the world into his old age, lecturing on the Holocaust, and until last year came into his office, the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna, collecting data on former Nazis.
He maintained that his motivation was not anger but justice.—Reuters
