9.20On this day in 2005, Simon Wiesenthal passed away. Born December 31, 1908, in Buchach, Galicia, (today Buchach, Ukraine), Simon Wiesenthal originally intended to have a career in engineering after studying architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague. After graduation, Wiesenthal settled in Lviv, Poland with his wife in the mid-1930s. Although both Wiesenthal and his wife supported the Zionist movement, they stayed in Lviv despite the threat of a German invasion of Poland, later explained that, like many others at the time, they did not take Hitler seriously. When the Germans occupied the city in 1941, Wiesenthal was placed in a forced labor camp at the German Eastern Railway plants. He was subsequently imprisoned in several other camps and liberated at Mauthausen in 1945.Working primarily by himself, Wiesenthal relied on historical documents, old address books, and telephone directories as his sources rather than sending agents and detectives to do fieldwork. In 1948, Wiesenthal participated in an abortive attempt made by three Israeli agents to apprehend Adolf Eichmann in Austria. In March 1953, he informed the Israeli Consul General in Vienna that Adolf Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, where Israeli agents abducted him in 1960. Eichmann’s final identification was based in part on information supplied by Wiesenthal, although he did not go to Argentina. Eichmann was subsequently put on trial and executed in 1962. Before his execution, Wiesenthal expressed his objection in a private letter, arguing that Eichmann should be kept alive and used as a witness in the trials of other Nazi criminals.One year after he identified Eichmann, in 1944, Wiesenthal identified Karl Silberbauer, an Austrian policeman serving in Amsterdam, who participated in the arrest of the Frank family. Wiesenthal was also a key figure in the prosecution of Hermine Brausteiner-Ryan, a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp, and Franz Stangl, a commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps.According to Wiesenthal, the extermination of Jews could be properly understood only in the context of the persecution of other groups. Thus, it would be up to future generations to remember the ravages of genocide, as the moral goal of Holocaust memory is taking individual responsibility for upholding human rights.