Simon Wiesenthal is Born

On this day in 1908, Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and Jewish rights activist Simon Wiesenthal was born in Buczacz, Austro-Hungary. Throughout World War II, Wiesenthal was transferred to five different concentration camps before being liberated from Mauthausen in 1945. He spent his time searching internationally for Nazi criminals and ensuring their legal prosecution, working with the U.S. Army and various American intelligence organizations to do so. He was also a strong advocate for the promotion of Holocaust education.At a young age, Wiesenthal lost his father to the bloodshed of World War I. He initially applied to study architecture at the Polytechnic Institute in Lwów, Poland, but due to increasing quota restrictions toward Jews, he ended up at the Technical University of Prague. In the mid-1930s, when he was just graduating, Russia occupied Lwów. The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the Soviet Union arrested Wiesenthal’s stepfather, shot his stepbrother, and forced him to close his business. By bribing an NKVD secret police officer, he was able to avoid deportation. In 1941, he managed to avoid death but was taken to the Janowska Labour Camp, outside the city of Lyov. Shortly after being detained, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Ostbahn Labour camp. In 1942, the Nazis launched the Final Solution, during which time Wiesenthal and his wife lost 89 family members, including his mother, who was sadly sent to the Belzec death camp. Wiesenthal’s wife was able to escape with fake papers under the disguise of a Pole and began working in both Warsaw and Rhineland.Wiesenthal was able to escape Ostbahn and then also escaped Janowska, which he was sent back to after escaping the former. When Wiesenthal arrived, the prisoners remaining in Janowska were spared and sent into the Schutzstaffel (SS), a group of Hitler’s guards who needed more support to defend against the Red Army. The prisoners and guards trekked from Janowska to Upper Austria, where Mauthausen was found. Wiesenthal was imprisoned again; he was incredibly weak and on the verge of dying when, in May 1945, an American unit liberated Mauthausen. In the years after WWII ended, Wiesenthal worked for the U.S. Army’s War Crimes Section, the Army's Office of Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps, and he led the Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of Austria, all in an effort to track down Nazi criminals and provide aid to those who had been affected by the war. Later, he opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, where he could continue his work independently from the U.S. One of Wiesenthal’s main goals was to track down Adolf Eichmann, which he ultimately accomplished; in 1961, Eichmann was captured, tried, and executed. Additionally, Wiesenthal was able to prosecute Karl Silberbauer, the officer who arrested Anne Frank, as well as nine SS officers who had exterminated Lwów’s Jews.During Wiesenthal’s lifetime, he was able to track down more than 1,100 war criminals and published a book of memoirs in 1967, titled The Murderers Among Us, he has since listened to many survivor stories, turned to the media for calls to action, and received honors by various governments, as well as the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award. He also worked on several movies; he was a producer on the Academy Award-winning documentary film, Genocide (1981). Total