Collective responsibility or collective guilt, is the responsibility of organizations, groups and societies. Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools
(punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown
pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric
facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary
greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their
members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.
In ethics, both methodological individualists and normative individualists question the validity of collective responsibility.[5]
Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for actions
that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability seems to
deny individual moral responsibility. Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal. According to genocide scholarA. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt
accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal
discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal
thinking."
As the business practices known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability
mature and converge with the responsibilities of governments and
citizens, the term "collective responsibility" is beginning to be more
widely used.
Collective responsibility is widely applied in corporations,
where the entire workforce is held responsible for failure to achieve
corporate targets (for example, profit targets), irrespective of the
performance of individuals or teams which may have achieved or
overachieved within their area. Collective punishment,
even including measures that actually further harm the prospect of
achieving targets, is applied as a measure to 'teach' the workforce.
In culture
The concept of collective responsibility is present in literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst after they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.
1959's Ben-Hur and 1983's prison crime dramaBad Boys
depict collective responsibility and punishment.
The play 'An Inspector Calls' by J.B Priestley also features the theme
of collective responsibility throughout the investigation process.
In some countries with parliamentary systems, there is a convention that all members of a cabinet
must publicly support all government decisions, even if they do not
agree with them. Members of the cabinet that wish to dissent or object
publicly must resign from their positions or be sacked.
As a result of collective responsibility, the entire government cabinet must resign if a vote of no confidence is passed in parliament.
The Jewish faith recognizes two kinds of sin, offenses against other people, and offenses against God. An offense against God may be understood as a violation of a contract (the Covenant between God and the Children of Israel). Ezra, a priest and a scribe, was the leader of a large group of exiles. On his return to Jerusalem, where he was required to teach the Jews to obey the laws of God, he discovered that the Jews had been marrying non-Jews. He tore his garments in despair and confessed the sins of Israel before God, before he went on to purify the community. The Book of Jeremiah
(Yirmiyahu [ירמיהו]) can be organized into five sub-sections. One part,
Jeremiah 2-24, displays scorn for the sins of Israel. The poem in
2:1–3:5 shows the evidence of a broken covenant against Israel.
This concept is found in the Old Testament (or the Tanakh), some examples of it are the account of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah and in some interpretations, the Book of Joshua's Achan.
In those records, entire communities were punished for the actions of
the vast majority of their members. This was accomplished in as much as
it is impossible to state whether there were no other righteous people,
or that there were children who were too young to be responsible for
their deeds.
Through this framework of inductive reasoning,
both the account of the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah do identify
righteous people who happen to be the immediate or prospective family
members of a prophet or prophet's nephew, along with them. These sequences of events are reconciled for the former example afterwards as the etiological basis for the reader's presumed good fortunes in the Noahic covenant with all living creatures, in which God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth (a category implicitly broader than the unrighteous) by flood and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth",
and for the latter example pre-empted with an explicitly stated
numerical target of 9 other community members' lives to be put in peril
(and to have an ostensibly lower number of homes destroyed, being
located in Sodom) due to a hypothetical 10th's evaluation as unrighteous.
The practice of blaming the Jews for Jesus' death
is the longest-lasting example of collective responsibility. In this
case, the blame was not only cast upon the Jews of Jesus's time, it was
also cast upon successive generations of Jews. This practice is
documented in Matthew 27:25-66 New International Version (NIV) 25: "All
the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!'"
The announcement of the execution of 100 Polishroundup (Pol: łapanka) hostages as revenge for the assassination of five German policemen and one SS man by Armia Krajowa's
guerrilla fighters (referred to in the text as: a Polish "terrorist
organization in British service"). Warsaw, 2 October 1943.
Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is
often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools
(punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown
pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric
facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary
greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their
members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian and/or totalitarian tendencies in the institution and/or its home society. For example, in the Soviet Gulags, all members of a brigada (work unit) were punished for bad performance of any of its members.
Collective punishment is also practiced in the situation of war, economic sanctions, etc., presupposing the existence of collective guilt. Collective guilt, or guilt by association,
is the controversial collectivist idea that individuals who are
identified as a member of a certain group carry the responsibility for
an act or behavior that members of that group have demonstrated, even if
they themselves were not involved. Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal.
During the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany,
the Germans applied collective responsibility: any kind of help which
was given to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punished with death,
and not only the rescuer, but his/her family was also executed.This was widely publicized by the Germans.During the occupation, for every German killed by a Pole, 100-400 Poles were shot in retribution.
Communities were held collectively responsible for the purported Polish
counter-attacks against the invading German troops. Mass executions of łapanka hostages were conducted every single day during the Wehrmacht advance across Poland in September 1939 and thereafter.
Entitativity is the perception of groups as being entities in themselves (an entitative group), independent of any of the group's members.
Ethics
In ethics, individualists question the idea of collective responsibility.
Methodological individualists challenge the very possibility of
associating moral agency with groups, as distinct from their individual
members, and normative individualists argue that collective
responsibility violates principles of both individual responsibility and
fairness. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for
actions that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability
seems to deny individual moral responsibility. Does collective
responsibility make sense? History is filled with examples of a wronged
man who tried to avenge himself, not only on the person who has wronged
him, but on other members of the wrongdoer's family, tribe, ethnic
group, religion, or nation.
According to A. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt
accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal
discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal
thinking.
Manual scavenging is a term used mainly in India for "manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or sewer or in a septic tank or a pit".
Manual scavengers usually use hand tools such as buckets, brooms and
shovels. The workers have to move the excreta, using brooms and tin
plates, into baskets, which they carry to disposal locations sometimes
several kilometers away. The practice of employing human labour for cleaning of sewers and septic tanks is also prevalent in Bangladesh and Pakistan. These sanitation workers, called "manual scavengers", rarely have any personal protective equipment. The work is regarded as a dehumanizing practice.
The occupation of sanitation work is intrinsically linked with caste in India.
All kinds of cleaning are considered lowly and are assigned to people
from the lowest rung of the social hierarchy. In the caste-based
society, it is mainly the Dalits who work as sanitation workers - as manual scavengers, cleaners of drains, as garbage collectors and sweepers of roads.
It was estimated in 2019 that between 40 and 60 percent of the six
million households of Dalit sub-castes are engaged in sanitation work. The most common Dalit caste performing sanitation work is the Valmiki (also Balmiki) caste.
The construction of dry toilets
and employment of manual scavengers to clean such dry toilets was
prohibited in India in 1993. The law was extended and clarified to
include ban on use of human labour for direct cleaning of sewers,
ditches, pits and septic tanks in 2013. However, despite the laws, manual scavenging was reported in many states including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan in 2014. In 2021, the NHRC observed that eradication of manual scavenging as claimed by state and local governments is far from over. Government data shows that in the period 1993–2021, 971 people died due to cleaning of sewers and septic tanks.
The term "manual scavenging" differs from the stand-alone term
"scavenging", which is one of the oldest economic activities and refers
to the act of sorting though and picking from discarded waste. Sometimes called waste pickers or ragpickers,
scavengers usually collect from the streets, dumpsites, or landfills.
They collect reusable and recyclable material to sell, reintegrating it
into the economy's production process. The practice exists in cities and towns across the Global South.
Definition
Manual scavenging refers to the unsafe and manual removal of raw (fresh and untreated) human excreta from buckets or other containers that are used as toilets or from the pits of simple pit latrines. The safe and controlled emptying of pit latrines, on the other hand, is one component of fecal sludge management.
The official definition of a manual scavenger in Indian law from 1993 is as follows:
"manual
scavenger" means a person engaged in or employed for manually carrying
human excreta and the expression "manual scavenging" shall be construed
accordingly
In 2013, the definition of manual
scavenger was expanded to include persons employed in cleaning of septic
tanks, open drains and railway tracks. It reads:
"Manual scavenger" means a person engaged or
employed, at the commencement of this Act or at any time thereafter, by
an individual or a local authority or an agency or a contractor, for
manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling in any
manner, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or
pit into which the human excreta from the insanitary latrines is
disposed of, or railway track or in such other spaces or premises, as
the Central Government or a State Government may notify, before the
excreta fully decomposes in such manner as may be prescribed, and the
expression “manual scavenging” shall be construed accordingly.
The definition ignores many other sanitation workers like fecal
sludge handlers, community and public toilet cleaners, workers cleaning
storm water drains, waste segregators, etc. Such workers are not
required to handle excreta directly, but get in contact due to poor
working conditions, lack of segregation, and the interconnectedness of
excreta management with solid waste management and storm water
management, states notable sanitation crusader and investigative
journalist Pragya Akhilesh.
The 2013 Act adds that a person engaged or employed to clean excreta
with the help of equipment and using the protective gear as notified by
the Union government shall not be deemed to be a manual scavenger.
Bhasha Singh argues that this clause gives the government an escape
clause as all forms of manual scavenging can be kept outside the purview
of the law by arguing that the person are using protective gear.
In 2021, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of India advocated for the term to include other types of hazardous cleaning.
There is a very clear gender division of various types of work
that is called manual scavenging in India. The cleaning of dry toilets
and carrying the waste to point of disposal is generally done by women,
while men are involved in cleaning of septic tanks and sewers. There is
an economic reason for this distribution - the municipality employs
workers to clean sewers and septic tanks and hence the salary is better.
Cleaning private toilets, on the other hand, pays little and is
therefore handed over to the women.
The women involved are referred to differently - 'dabbu-wali' in
Bengal, 'balti-wali' in Kanpur, 'tina-wali in Bihar, tokri-wali in
Punjab and Haryana, 'thottikar' in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, 'paaki'
or 'peeti' in Odisha, 'vaatal' in Kashmir.
These names directly refer to the tools (dabbu, balti, tokri) used by
the women to carry waste or dustbin (thottikar) or excreta (paaki,
peeti).
Manual scavenging is done with basic tools like thin boards and either buckets or baskets lined with sacking and carried on the head. Due to the hazardous nature of the job, many of the workers have related health problems.
Scavengers risk suffering from respiratory disorders, typhoid, and
cholera. Scavengers may also contract skin and blood infections, eye and
respiratory infections due to exposure to pollutants, skeletal disorder
caused by the lifting of heavy storage containers, and burns due to
coming into contact with hazardous chemicals combined with waste.
The data obtained by Safai Karmachari Andolan for 2017-2018 found that
the average age of deceased sewer workers to be around 32 years, that
is, they do not even reach the age of retirement and a family often
loses its breadwinner very early.
Not all forms of dry toilets
involve "manual scavenging" to empty them, but only those that require
unsafe handling of raw excreta. If on the other hand the excreta is
already treated or pre-treated in the dry toilet itself, as is the case
for composting toilets, and urine-diverting dry toilets for example, then emptying these types of toilets is not classified as "manual scavenging". Container-based sanitation
is another system that does not require manual scavenging to function
even though it does involve the emptying of excreta from containers.
Also, emptying the pits of twin-pit (see pit latrine
for details) toilets is not classified as manual scavenging in India,
as if used and emptied appropriately, the excreta is already treated.
The practice of manual scavenging in India dates back to ancient
times. According to the contents of sacred scriptures and other
literature, scavenging by some specific castes of India has existed
since the beginning of civilization. One of the fifteen duties of slaves enumerated in Naradiya Samhita was of manual scavenging. This continues during the Buddhist and Maurya period also.
Scholars have suggested that the Mughal women with purdah required enclosed toilets that needed to be scavenged. It is pointed out that the Bhangis (Chuhra) share some of the clan names with Rajputs,
and propose that the Bhangis are descendants of those captured in wars.
There are many legends about the origin of Bhangis, who have
traditionally served as manual scavengers. One of them, associated with Lal Begi Bhangis, describes the origin of Bhangis from Mehtar.
Manual scavenging is historically linked to the caste system in India. Not only cleaning of toilets, but all types of cleaning jobs are considered lowly in India. The elites assigned the most lowly and polluting jobs for members of the Dalit community. The caste-based assignment of cleaning jobs can be traced back to the
rise of Hinduism and revival of the Brahmanical order during the Gupta period, considered the golden era in the history of the Indian sub-continent. The workers usually belonged to the Balmiki (or Valmiki) or Hela (or Mehtar) subcastes; considered at the bottom of the hierarchy within the Dalit community itself.
Before the passage of the 1993 Act that prohibit employment for
manual scavengers, local governments employed 'scavengers' to clean dry
latrines in private houses and community or public facilities. These jobs were institutionalised by the British.
In London, cesspits containing human waste were called 'gongs' or
'jakes' and men employed to clean them 'Gongfermours' or 'Gongfarmers'.
They emptied such pits only in the night and dumped it outside the
city. They had designated areas to live and were allowed to use only
certain roads and by lanes to carry the waste. The British organized systems for removing the excreta and employed Bhangis as manual scavengers. They also brought Dalits working as agricultural labourers in the rural areas for the job in urban areas. This formal employment of Bhangis and Chamars for waste management by the British reinforced the caste based assignment. Even today, sanitation department jobs are almost unofficially 100% reserved for people from the Scheduled caste groups.
Current prevalence
Despite the passage of two pieces of legislation, the prevalence of manual scavenging is an open secret. According to the Socio Economic Caste Census 2011, 180,657 households within India are engaged in manual scavenging for a livelihood. The 2011 Census of India found 794,000 cases of manual scavenging across India.
The state of Maharashtra, with 63,713, tops the list with the largest
number of households working as manual scavengers, followed by the
states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tripura and Karnataka. Manual scavenging still survives in parts of India without proper sewage systems or safe fecal sludge management practices. It is thought to be prevalent in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
In March 2014, the Supreme Court of India declared that there were 96 lakh
(9.6 million) dry latrines being manually emptied but the exact number
of manual scavengers is disputed – official figures put it at less than
700,000. An estimate in 2018 put the number of "sanitation workers" in India at 5 million, and 50% of them being women.
However, not all sanitation workers are manual scavengers. Another
estimate from 2018 put the figure at one million manual scavengers,
stating that the number is "unknown and declining" and that 90% of them
are women.
The biggest violator of this law in India is the Indian Railways
where many train carriages have toilets dropping the excreta from
trains on the tracks and who employ scavengers to clean the tracks
manually. The situation is being improved in 2018 by the addition of on-train treatment systems for the toilet waste.
Bezwada Wilson,
an activist, at the forefront in the battle to eradicate manual
scavenging, argues that the practice continues due to its casteist
nature.
He also argues that the failure of implementation of the 1993 Act is a
collective failure of the leadership, judiciary, the administration, and
the Dalit movements to address the concerns of the most marginalized
community.
Unlike infrastructure projects like metros, the issue receives little
or no priority from the Government and hence the deadline to comply with
the 1993 Act has been continuously postponed.
An example that demonstrates the apathy of the government is the fact
that none of the Rupees 100 Crore (1,000 million) allocated in the
budgets for financial years 2011-12 and 2012-13 was spent.
Such is the stigma attached to manual scavengers that even
professionals who work for their emancipation get labelled (for example,
Bhasha Singh was wrongly labelled 'manual scavenging journalist').
Prolific investigative journalists like Pragya Akhilesh who is one of
the most notable sanitation crusaders in India for her critique of the
SBM is also wrongly labelled as 'Toiletwoman of India' to diminish her
decade long contribution to this area.
Threats and harassment
In
India, women who practice manual scavenging face pressure from their
respective communities if they miss a day since toilets are cleaned
every day. Many women have no choice but to turn up to clean the
toilets. The practical requirement that they do not miss a day prevents
them from pursuing alternate occupations like agricultural labor. And in
the event that they are able to find the means and support to stop
manual scavenging, women still face extreme pressure from the community.
Initiatives for eradication
Legislation
In the late 1950s, freedom fighter G. S. Lakshman Iyer banned manual scavenging when he was the chairman of Gobichettipalayam Municipality, which became the first local body to ban it officially.Sanitation is a State subject as per entry 6 of the Constitution. Under
this, in February 2013 Delhi announced that they were banning manual
scavenging, making them the first state in India to do so. District
magistrates are responsible for ensuring that there are no manual
scavengers working in their district. Within three years of the ruling
municipalities, railways and cantonments were required to make
sufficient sanitary latrines available.
But by using Article 252 of the constitution which empowers
Parliament to legislate for two or more States by consent and adoption
of such legislation by any other State, the Government of India has
enacted various laws. The continuance of such discriminatory practice is violation of ILO's Convention 111 (Discrimination in Employment and Occupation). The United Nations human rights chief welcomed in 2013 the movement in India to eradicate manual scavenging.
In 2007 the Self Employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual
Scavengers was passed to help in transition to other occupations.
The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993
After
six states passed resolutions requesting the Central Government to
frame a law, "The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of
Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993", drafted by the Ministry of Urban
Development under the Narasimha Rao government,
was passed by Parliament in 1993. The act punishes the employment of
scavengers or the construction of dry (non-flush) latrines with
imprisonment for up to one year and/or a fine of Rs 2,000. No convictions were obtained under the law during the 20 years it was in force.
The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013 or M.S. Act 2013
Government
has passed the new legislation in September 2013 and issued Government
notification for the same. In December, 2013 Government also formulated
Rules-2013 called as "The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers
and their Rehabilitation Rules 2013" or "M.S. Rules 2013". The hearing
on 27 March 2014 was held on manual scavenging of writ petition number
583 of 2003, and Supreme Court has issued final orders and case is
disposed of with various directions to the Government. The broad
objectives of the act are to eliminate unsanitary latrines, prohibit the
employment of manual scavengers and the hazardous manual cleaning of
sewer and septic tanks, and to maintain a survey of manual scavengers
and their rehabilitation.
Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (Amendment) Bill, 2020
The Bill calls for a complete mechanization of cleaning sewers and septic tanks.
Activism
In India in the 1970s, Bindeshwar Pathak introduced his "Sulabh"
concept for building and managing public toilets in India, which has
introduced hygienic and well-managed public toilet systems. Activist Bezwada Wilson founded a group in 1994, Safai Karmachari Andolan, to campaign for the demolition of then newly illegal 'dry latrines' (pit latrines)
and the abolition of manual scavenging. Despite the efforts of Wilson
and other activists, the practice persists two decades later. In July 2008 "Mission Sanitation" was a fashion show held by the United Nations as part of its International Year of Sanitation.
On the runway were 36 previous workers, called scavengers, and top
models to help bring awareness of the issue of manual scavenging.
The Movement for Scavenger Community (MSC) is an NGO founded in
2009 by Vimal Kumar with young people, social activists, and like-minded
people from the scavenger community. MSC is committed to working
towards the social and economic empowerment of the scavenger community
through the medium of education.
The "Campaign for Dignity" (Garima Abhiyan) in Madhya Pradesh in India has assisted more than 20,000 women to stop doing manual scavenging as an occupation.
Pragya Akhilesh is an investigative journalist. Her writings on
this area in platforms like the Indian Express, The Wire, Outlook,
Deccan Herald and Hindustan Times has transformed the dialogue on
sanitation workers and has transformed the course of truthful journalism
in India despite violent attacks by the Hindu right wing government in
India. She is one of the biggest sanitation crusaders rightfully called
as the 'sanitation woman of India' like Rajendra Singh is called the
'Water man of India.'
She has been wrongly labelled as the ‘toilet woman of Delhi’ like
Bhasha Singh is called 'a manual scavenging journalist' by the
government for her prolific contribution highlighting SBM's
irregularities focusing on merely infrastructure building rather than
protecting the rights of thousands of sanitation workers in India. Since
2010 she has highlighted the government's failure to recognise the
labour movement of sanitation workers and the failure to eradicate and
rehabilitate manual scavengers in India.
Manual emptying of toilets also took place in Europe. Historically the excreta was known as night soil and in Tudor England the workers were called gong farmers.
In Pakistan municipalities still rely on Christian sweepers. In
the city of Karachi, sweepers keep the sewer system flowing, using their
bare hands to unclog crumbling drainpipes of feces, plastic bags and
hazardous hospital refuse, part of the 1,750 million litres of waste the
city's 20 million residents produce daily. Christians make up a small
percentage of Pakistan's population, and they fill majority of the
sweeper jobs. When Karachi's municipality tried to recruit Muslims to
unclog gutters, they refused to get down into the sewers, instead
sweeping the streets. The job was left to Christians and lower-caste
Hindus.
Waste storage practices in homes in Sierra Leone are poor, adding
to collection difficulties. Unsorted waste is often stored in old leaky
buckets, and used plastic bags instead of a bin lined with plastic
bags. Like most African countries, waste collection is a problem.
Garbage collected by collection workers, who are not provided with
personal protective equipment like gloves, from communal skips is moved
straight for the city's two disposal sites. Scavengers try to earn a
living from scouring through rotting rubbish, plastic bags and raw
sewage for discarded things they can sell.
After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives. He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky, a Jew himself, was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a "Jewish fascist", likened his organisation to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections.
Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any
wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event.
With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of
several memoirs containing tales that are only loosely based on actual
events. In particular, he exaggerated his role in the capture of Eichmann in 1960. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna in 2005 and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.
Early life
Simon Wiesenthal (circa 1940–1945)
Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908, in Buczacz (Buchach), Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine. His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews. A reservist in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Asher was called to active duty in 1914 at the start of World War I. He died in combat on the Eastern Front
in 1915. The remainder of the family—Simon, his younger brother Hillel,
and his mother Rosa—fled to Vienna as the Russian army took control of
Galicia. The two boys attended a German-language Jewish school. The
family returned to Buczacz in 1917 after the Russians retreated. The
area changed hands several more times before the war ended in November
1918.
Wiesenthal and his brother attended high school at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Buchach, where classes were taught in Polish.
There Simon met his future wife, Cyla Müller, whom he would marry in
1936. Hillel fell and broke his back in 1923 and died the following
year. Rosa remarried in 1926 and moved to Dolyna
with her new husband, Isack Halperin, who owned a tile factory there.
Wiesenthal remained in Buczacz, living with the Müller family, until he
graduated from high school—on his second attempt—in 1928.
With an interest in art and drawing, Wiesenthal chose to study architecture. His first choice was to attend the Lwów Polytechnic, but he was turned away because the school's Jewish quota had already been filled. He instead enrolled at the Czech Technical University in Prague,
where he studied from 1928 until 1932. He was apprenticed as a building
engineer through 1934 and 1935, spending most of that period in Odessa. He married Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Galicia.
Sources give differing reports of what happened next.
Wiesenthal's autobiographies contradict each other on many points; he
also over-dramatised and mythologised events.
One version has Wiesenthal opening an architectural office and finally
being admitted to the Lwów Polytechnic for an advanced degree. He
designed a tuberculosis sanatorium and some residential buildings during
the course of his studies and was active in a student Zionist organisation. He wrote for the Omnibus, a satirical student newspaper, and graduated in 1939.Author Guy Walters states that Wiesenthal's earliest autobiography does not mention studies at Lwów. Walters quotes a curriculum vitae
Wiesenthal prepared after World War II as stating he worked as a
supervisor at a factory until 1939 and then worked as a mechanic in a
different factory until the Nazis invaded in 1941. Wiesenthal's 1961 book Ich jagte Eichmann (I chased Eichmann)[]
states that he worked in Odessa as an engineer from 1940 to 1941.
Walters says that there is no record of Wiesenthal attending the
university at Lwów, and that he does not appear in the Katalog Architektów i Budowniczych (Catalogue of Architects and Builders) for the appropriate period.
World War II
In Europe, World War II began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. As a result of the subsequent partitioning of Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,
the city of Lwów was annexed by the Soviets and became known as Lvov in
Russian or Lviv in Ukrainian. Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in
Dolyna, was arrested as a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison.
Wiesenthal's mother moved to Lvov to live with Wiesenthal and Cyla.
Wiesenthal bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under
Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and
intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the city,
which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June
1941.
By mid-July Wiesenthal and other Jewish residents had to register
to do forced labour. Within six months, in November 1941 the Nazis had
set up the Lwów Ghetto using Jewish forced labour. All Jews had to give up their homes and move there, a process completed in the following months. Several thousand Jews were murdered in Lvov by Ukrainian nationals and German Einsatzgruppen in June and July 1941.
In his autobiographies, Wiesenthal tells how he was arrested on 6 July,
but saved from execution by his former foreman, a man named Bodnar, who
was now a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. There are several versions of the story, which may be apocryphal.
In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp
and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. He painted
swastikas and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and
Cyla was put to work polishing the brass and nickel. In exchange for
providing details about the railways, Wiesenthal obtained false identity
papers for his wife from a member of the Armia Krajowa,
a Polish underground organisation. She travelled to Warsaw, where she
was put to work in a German radio factory. She spent time in two labour
camps as well. Conditions were harsh and her health was permanently
damaged, but she survived the war. The couple was reunited in 1945, and
their daughter Paulinka was born the following year.
Every few weeks, the Nazis staged a roundup in the Lvov ghetto of
people unable to work. These roundups typically took place while the
able-bodied were absent doing forced labour. In one such deportation,
Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly Jewish women were transported by
freight train to Belzec extermination camp
and murdered in August 1942. Around the same time, a Ukrainian
policeman shot Cyla's mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while she was being evicted. Between Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal, 89 of their relatives were murdered during the Holocaust.
Forced labourers for the Eastern Railway were eventually kept in a
separate closed camp, where conditions were a little better than at the
main camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal prepared architectural drawings for
Adolf Kohlrautz, the senior inspector, who submitted them under his own
name. To obtain contracts, construction companies paid bribes to
Kohlrautz, who shared some of the money with Wiesenthal. He was able to
pass along further information about the railroads to the underground
and occasionally left the compound to obtain supplies, even
clandestinely obtaining weapons for the Armia Krajowa and two pistols
for himself, which he brought with him when he escaped in late 1943.
According to Wiesenthal, on 20 April 1943, Second Lieutenant
Gustav Wilhaus, second in command at the Janowska camp, decided to shoot
54 Jewish intellectuals in celebration of Hitler's 54th birthday.
Unable to find enough such people still alive at Janowska, Wilhaus
ordered a roundup of prisoners from the satellite camps. Wiesenthal and
two other inmates were taken from the Eastern Railway camp to the
execution site, a trench 6 feet (1.8 m) deep and 1,500 feet (460 m) long
at a nearby sandpit. The men were stripped and led through "the Hose", a
six- or seven-foot wide barbed wire corridor to the execution ground.
The victims were shot and their bodies allowed to fall into the pit.
Wiesenthal, waiting to be shot, heard someone call out his name. He was
returned alive to the camp; Kohlrautz had convinced his superiors that
Wiesenthal was the best man available to paint a giant poster in honour
of Hitler's birthday.
On 2 October 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him
that the camp and its prisoners were about to be liquidated. Kohlrautz
gave Wiesenthal and fellow prisoner Arthur Scheiman passes to go to
town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard, to buy stationery. The two men
escaped out the back of the shop while their guard waited at the front
counter.
Wiesenthal did not mention either of these events—or Kohlrautz's
part in them—when testifying to American investigators in May 1945, or
in an affidavit he made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions,
and researcher Guy Walters questions their authenticity. Wiesenthal
variously reported that Kohlrautz was killed on the Soviet Front in 1944 or in the Battle of Berlin on 19 April 1945.
Prisoners at Mauthausen greet American forces, May 1945
After several days in hiding, Scheiman rejoined his wife, and
Wiesenthal was taken by members of the underground to the nearby village
of Kulparkow, where he remained until the end of 1943. Soon afterwards
the Janowska camp was liquidated; this made it unsafe to hide in the
nearby countryside, so Wiesenthal returned to Lvov, where he spent three
days hiding in a closet at the Scheimans' apartment. He then moved to
the apartment of Paulina Busch, for whom he had previously forged an
identity card. He was arrested there, hiding under the floorboards, on
13 June 1944 and taken back to the remains of the camp at Janowska.
Wiesenthal tried but failed to commit suicide to avoid being
interrogated about his connections with the underground. In the end
there was no time for interrogations, as Soviet forces were advancing
into the area. SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok, the new camp commandant, rounded up the remaining prisoners and transported them to Przemyśl,
97 kilometres (60 mi) west of Lvov, where he put them to work building
fortifications. By September Warzok and his men were reassigned to the
front, and Wiesenthal and the other surviving captives were sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.
By October the inmates were evacuated to Gross-Rosen concentration camp,
where inmates were suffering from severe overcrowding and a shortage of
food. Wiesenthal's big toe on his right foot had to be amputated after a
rock fell on it while he was working in the quarry. He was still ill in
January when the advancing Soviets forced yet another evacuation, this
time on foot, to Chemnitz.
Using a broom handle for a walking stick, he was one of the few who
survived the march. From Chemnitz, the prisoners were taken in open
freight cars to Buchenwald, and a few days later by truck to Mauthausen concentration camp,
arriving in mid-February 1945. Over half the prisoners did not survive
the journey. Wiesenthal was placed in a death block for the mortally
ill, where he survived on 200 calories a day until the camp was
liberated by the Americans on 5 May 1945. He weighed 41 kilograms
(90 lb) when he was liberated.
Nazi hunter
Within
three weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal had prepared a
list of around a hundred names of suspected Nazi war criminals—mostly
guards, camp commandants, and members of the Gestapo—and presented it to a War Crimes office of the American Counterintelligence Corps
at Mauthausen. He worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who
were carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail. When Austria was partitioned in July 1945, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so the American War Crimes Office was moved to Linz.
Wiesenthal went with them, and was housed in a displaced persons camp.
He served as vice-chairman of the area's Jewish Central Committee, an
organisation that attempted to arrange basic care for Jewish refugees
and tried to help people gather information about their missing family
members.
Wiesenthal worked for the American Office of Strategic Services for a year, and continued to collect information on both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. He assisted the Berihah, an underground organisation that smuggled Jewish survivors into the British Mandate for Palestine.
Wiesenthal helped arrange for forged papers, food supplies,
transportation, and so on. In February 1947, he and 30 other volunteers
founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz to gather information for future war crimes trials. They collected 3,289 depositions from concentration camp survivors still living in Europe. However, as the US and the Soviet Union lost interest in conducting further trials, a similar group headed by Tuviah Friedman
in Vienna closed its office in 1952, and Wiesenthal's closed in 1954.
Almost all of the documentation collected at both centres was forwarded
to the Yad Vashem archives in Israel. Wiesenthal, employed full-time by two Jewish welfare agencies, continued his work with refugees.
As it became clear that the former Allies were no longer interested in
pursuing the work of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, Wiesenthal
persisted, believing the survivors were obliged to take on the task. His work became a way to memorialise and remember all the people that had been lost. He told biographer Alan Levy in 1974:
When the Germans first came to my
city in Galicia, half the population was Jewish: one hundred fifty
thousand Jews. When the Germans were gone, five hundred were alive. ...
Many times I was thinking that everything in life has a price, so to
stay alive must also have a price. And my price was always that, if I
lived, I must be deputy for many people who are not alive.
Though most of the Jews still alive in Linz had emigrated after the
war, Wiesenthal decided to stay on, partly because the family of Adolf
Eichmann lived a few blocks away from him. Eichmann had been in charge of the transportation and deportation of Jews in the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question: a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, finalised at the Wannsee Conference, at which Eichmann took the minutes.
After the war, Eichmann hid in Austria using forged identity papers
until 1950, when he left via Italy, and moved to Argentina under an
assumed name.
Hoping to obtain information on Eichmann's whereabouts, Wiesenthal
continuously monitored the remaining members of the immediate family in
Linz until they vanished in 1952.
Document under the name of Ricardo Klement that Adolf Eichmann used to enter Argentina in 1950
Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed along that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954. Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany,
received independent confirmation of Eichmann's whereabouts in 1957,
but German agents were unable to find him until late 1959.
When Eichmann's father died in 1960, Wiesenthal made arrangements for
private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of the family,
as Otto Eichmann was said to bear a strong resemblance to his brother
Adolf, and there were no current photos of the fugitive. He provided
these photographs to Mossad agents on 18 February. Zvi Aharoni,
one of the Mossad agents responsible for Eichmann's capture in Buenos
Aires on 11 May 1960, said the photos were useful in confirming
Eichmann's identity. On 23 May, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion
announced Eichmann was under arrest and in Israel. The next day
Wiesenthal, while he was being interviewed by reporters, received a
congratulatory telegram from Yad Vashem. He immediately became a minor
celebrity, and began work on a book about his experiences. Ich jagte Eichmann: Tatsachenbericht (I chased Eichmann. A true story)
was published six weeks before the trial opened in spring 1961.
Wiesenthal helped the prosecution prepare their case and attended a
portion of the trial. Eichmann was sentenced to death and was hanged on 1 June 1962.
Meanwhile, both of Wiesenthal's employers terminated his services
in 1960, as there were too few refugees left in the city to justify the
expense. Wiesenthal opened a new documentation centre (the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime) in Vienna in 1961. He became a Mossad operative, for which he received the equivalent of several hundred dollars per month.
He maintained files on hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals and
located many, about six of whom were arrested as a result of his
activities. Successes included locating and bringing to trial Erich Rajakowitsch [de], responsible for the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, and Franz Murer, the commandant of the Vilna Ghetto. In 1963 Wiesenthal read in the newspaper that Karl Silberbauer, the man who had arrested famed diarist Anne Frank,
had been located; he was serving on the police force in Vienna.
Wiesenthal's publicity campaign led to Silberbauer being temporarily
suspended from the force, but he was never prosecuted for arresting the
Frank family.
Despite Wiesenthal's protests, in late 1963 his centre in Vienna
was taken over by a local community group, so he immediately set up a
new independent office, funded using donations and his stipend from the
Mossad.
As the 20-year statute of limitations for German war crimes was about
to expire, Wiesenthal began lobbying to have it extended or removed
entirely. In March 1965 the Bundestag
deferred the matter for five years, effectively extending the
expiration date. Similar action was taken by the Austrian government.
But as time went on, it became more difficult to obtain prosecutions.
Witnesses grew older and were less likely to be able to offer valuable
testimony. Funding for trials was inadequate, as the governments of
Austria and Germany became less interested in obtaining convictions for
wartime events, preferring to forget the Nazi past.
Franz Stangl was a supervisor at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, part of Action T4,
an early Nazi euthanasia programme that was responsible for the deaths
of over 70,000 mentally ill or physically deformed people in Germany. In
February 1942, he was commander at the Sobibor extermination camp and in August of the same year he was transferred to Treblinka. During his time at these camps, he oversaw the deaths of nearly 900,000 people.
While under US detention for two years, he remained unidentified as a
war criminal because so few witnesses had survived Sobibor and Treblinka
that authorities never realised who he was. He escaped while on a
roadwork detail in Linz in May 1948. After he made his way to Rome, the Caritas relief agency provided him with a Red Cross passport and a boat ticket to Syria. His family joined him there a year later and they emigrated to Brazil in 1951.
It was probably Stangl's former son-in-law who informed Wiesenthal of Stangl's whereabouts in 1964.
Concerned that Stangl would be warned and escape, Wiesenthal quietly
prepared a dossier with the assistance of Austrian Minister of Justice
Hans Klecatsky. Stangl was arrested outside his home in São Paulo on 28 February 1967 and was extradited to Germany on 22 June. A month later Wiesenthal's book The Murderers Among Us
was released. Wiesenthal's publishers advertised that he had been
responsible for locating over 800 Nazis, a claim that had no basis in
fact but was nonetheless repeated by reputable newspapers such as the New York Times. Stangl was sentenced to life in prison and died of heart failure in June 1971, having confessed his guilt to biographer Gitta Sereny the previous day.
Known as "the Mare of Majdanek", Hermine Braunsteiner was a guard who served at Majdanek and Ravensbrück concentration camps. A cruel and sadistic woman, she earned her nickname for her propensity to kick her victims to death.
She served a three-year sentence in Austria for her activities in
Ravensbrück, but had not yet been charged for any of her crimes at
Majdanek when she emigrated to the United States in 1959. She became an
American citizen in 1963.
Wiesenthal was first told about Braunsteiner in early 1964 via a
chance encounter in Tel Aviv with someone who had seen her performing
selections at Majdanek—deciding who was to be assigned to slave labour
and who was to murdered immediately in the gas chambers.
When he returned to Vienna he had an operative visit one of her
relatives to clandestinely collect information. Wiesenthal soon traced
Braunsteiner's whereabouts to Queens, New York, so he notified the Israeli police and the New York Times. Despite Wiesenthal's efforts to expedite the matter, Braunsteiner was not extradited to Germany until 1973. Her trial was part of a joint indictment
with nine other defendants accused of killing 250,000 people at
Majdanek. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981, was released
on health grounds in 1996, and died in 1999.
Josef Mengele was a medical officer assigned to Auschwitz concentration camp
from 1943 until the end of the war. As well as making most of the
selections of inmates as they arrived by train from all over Europe, he
performed unscientific and usually deadly experiments on the inmates. He left the camp in January 1945 as the Red Army approached and was briefly in American custody in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, but was released.
He took work as a farmhand in rural Germany, remaining until 1949, when
he decided to flee the country. He acquired a Red Cross passport and
left for Argentina, setting up a business in Buenos Aires in 1951.
Acting on information received from Wiesenthal, West German authorities
tried to extradite Mengele in 1960, but he could not be found; he had
in fact moved to Paraguay in 1958. He moved to Brazil in 1961 and lived there until he drowned while swimming in 1979.
Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele in several locations: on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960, Cairo in 1961, in Spain in 1971, and in Paraguay in 1978, the latter 18 years after he had left.
In 1982, he offered a reward of $100,000 for Mengele's capture and
insisted as late as 1985—six years after Mengele's death—that he was
still alive.
The Mengele family admitted to authorities in 1985 that he had died in
1979; the body was exhumed and its identity was confirmed. Earlier that year Wiesenthal had served as one of the judges at a mock trial of Mengele, held in Jerusalem.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles was founded in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who paid Wiesenthal an honorarium for the right to use his name.
The centre helped with the campaign to remove the statute of
limitations on Nazi crimes and continues the hunt for suspected Nazi war
criminals, but today its primary activities include Holocaust
remembrance, education, and fighting antisemitism.
Wiesenthal was not always happy with the way the centre was run. He
thought the centre's Holocaust museum was not dignified enough and that
he should have a larger say in the overall operations. He even wrote to
the board of directors requesting Hier's removal, but in the end had to
be content with being a figurehead.
Shortly after Bruno Kreisky
was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal
pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had
been members of the Nazi Party. In an address in June, Kreisky's Minister of Education and Culture Leopold Gratz characterised Wiesenthal's Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime
as a private spy ring, invading the privacy of innocent parties. In an
interview a week later, Kreisky himself described Wiesenthal as a
"Jewish fascist", a remark he later denied making. Wiesenthal discovered
that he would be unable to sue, because under Austrian law Kreisky was
protected by parliamentary immunity.
When his re-election in 1975 seemed unsure, Kreisky proposed that his Social Democratic Party should form a coalition with the Freedom Party, headed by Friedrich Peter. Wiesenthal had documents proving that Peter had been a member of the 1 SS Infantry Brigade,
a unit that had exterminated over 13,000 Jewish civilians in Ukraine in
1941–42. He decided not to reveal this information to the press until
after the election, but forwarded his dossier to President Rudolf Kirchschläger.
Peter denied having participated in, or having knowledge of, any
atrocities. In the end, Kreisky's party won a clear majority and did not
form the coalition.
In a press conference a short time after the election and
Wiesenthal's revelations, Kreisky said Wiesenthal used "the methods of a
quasi-political Mafia."
Wiesenthal filed a libel lawsuit (although Kreisky had the power to
declare immunity if he so chose), and when Kreisky later accused
Wiesenthal of being an agent of the Gestapo, working with the Judenrat in Lvov, these accusations were incorporated into the lawsuit as well.
The suit was decided in Wiesenthal's favour in 1989, but after
Kreisky's death nine months later his heirs refused to pay. When the
relevant archives were later opened for research, no evidence was found
that Wiesenthal had been a collaborator.
Kurt Waldheim
When Kurt Waldheim
was named secretary-general of the United Nations in 1971, Wiesenthal
reported—without checking very thoroughly—that there was no evidence
that he had a Nazi past.
This analysis had been supported by the opinions of the American
Counterintelligence Corps and Office of Strategic Services when they
examined his records right after the war.
However, Waldheim's 1985 autobiography did not include his war service
following his recuperation from a 1941 injury. When he returned to
active duty in 1942, he was posted to Yugoslavia and Greece, and had
knowledge of murders of civilians that took place in those locations
during his service there. The Austrian news magazine Profil published a story in March 1986—during his campaign for the presidency of Austria—that Waldheim had been a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA). The New York Times
soon reported that Waldheim had failed to reveal all of the facts about
his war service. Wiesenthal, embarrassed, attempted to help Waldheim
defend himself. The World Jewish Congress
investigated the issue, but the Israeli attorney general concluded that
their material was insufficient evidence for a conviction. Waldheim was
elected president in July 1986.
A panel of historians tasked with investigating the case issued a
report eighteen months later. They concluded that, while there was no
evidence that Waldheim had committed atrocities, he must have known they
were occurring, yet did nothing. Wiesenthal unsuccessfully demanded
that Waldheim resign. The World Jewish Congress successfully lobbied to
have Waldheim barred from entering the United States.
In 1968, Wiesenthal published Zeilen der hoop. De geheime missie van Christoffel Columbus (translated in 1972 as Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus),
which was his first non-fiction book not on the subject of the
Holocaust. In the book, Wiesenthal put forward his theory that Christopher Columbus was a Sephardi Jew from Spain who practised his religion in secret to avoid persecution. (The consensus of most historians is that Columbus came from the Republic of Genoa, on the northwestern coast of present-day Italy.) Wiesenthal argued that the quest for the New World
was not motivated by wealth or fame, but rather by Columbus's desire to
find a place of refuge for the Jews, who were suffering immense
persecution in Spain at the time (and in 1492 would be subjected to the Edict of Expulsion). Wiesenthal also believed that Columbus's concept of "sailing west" was based on Biblical prophecies (certain verses in the Book of Isaiah) rather than any prior geographical knowledge.
Awards and nominations
Wiesenthal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1985, the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. Rumour had it that
the Nobel Committee would give the prize to a Holocaust-related
candidate. Fellow Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel,
also nominated, began a campaign in hopes of winning the prize,
travelling to France, Ethiopia and Oslo for speaking tours and
humanitarian work. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre urged Wiesenthal
to lobby for the prize as well, but other than delivering a lecture in
Oslo, Wiesenthal did little to promote his candidacy. When Wiesel was
awarded the 1986 prize, Wiesenthal claimed the World Jewish Congress
must have influenced the committee's decision, a claim the WJC denied.
Biographer Tom Segev speculates that the loss may have been because of the negative publicity over the Waldheim affair.
In 1992, Wiesenthal was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.
Wiesenthal received many death threats over the years. After a bomb placed by neo-Nazis exploded outside his house in Vienna on 11 June 1982, police guards were stationed outside his home 24 hours a day.
Cyla found the stressful nature of her husband's career and the
dragged-out legal matters regarding Kreisky to be overwhelming, and she
sometimes suffered from depression.
Wiesenthal spent time at his office at the Documentation Centre
of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna even
as he approached his 90th birthday. He finally retired in October 2001, when he was 92. The last Nazi he had a hand in bringing to trial was Untersturmführer Julius Viel, who was convicted in 2001 of shooting seven Jewish prisoners.
"I have survived them all. If there were any left, they'd be too old
and weak to stand trial today. My work is done," said Wiesenthal. Cyla died on 10 November 2003, at age 95, and Wiesenthal died on 20 September 2005, age 96. He was buried in Herzliya, Israel.
In a statement on Wiesenthal's death, Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis
said, "Without Simon Wiesenthal's relentless effort to find Nazi
criminals and bring them to justice, and to fight anti-Semitism and
prejudice, Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds and
reconciling itself. He was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable
to our freedom, stability and peace."
In 2010 the Austrian and Israeli governments jointly issued a commemorative stamp honouring Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal became an avid stamp collector after the war, following
advice from his doctors to take up a hobby to help him relax. In 2006 his collection of Zemstvo stamps sold at auction for €90,000 after his death.
Dramatic portrayals
Wiesenthal was portrayed by Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky in the film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File (1974). After the film's release, Wiesenthal received many reports of sightings of the subject of the film, Eduard Roschmann, commandant of the Riga Ghetto.
These sightings proved to be false alarms, but in 1977 a person living
in Buenos Aires who saw the movie reported to police that Roschmann was
living nearby. The fugitive escaped to Paraguay, where he died of a
heart attack a month later. In Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil, the character of Yakov Liebermann (called Ezra Liebermann and played by Laurence Olivier in the film)
is modelled on Wiesenthal. Olivier visited Wiesenthal, who offered
advice on how to play the role. Wiesenthal attended the film's New York
premiere in 1978. Ben Kingsley portrayed him in the HBO film Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989). Judd Hirsch portrayed him in the Amazon Prime Video series Hunters (2020).
Wiesenthal has been the subject of several documentaries. The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal was produced in 1994 by filmmakers Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel for River Lights Pictures. The documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, narrated by Nicole Kidman, was released by Moriah Films in 2007. Wiesenthal is a one-person show written and performed by Tom Dugan that premiered in 2014.
Autobiographical inconsistencies
A number of Wiesenthal's books contain conflicting stories and tales, many of which were invented. Several authors, including Segev and British author Guy Walters,
feel that Wiesenthal's autobiographies are not reliable sources of
information about his life and activities. For example, Wiesenthal would
describe two people fighting over one of the lists he had prepared of
survivors of the Holocaust; the two look up and recognise each other and
have a tearful reunion. In one account it is a husband and wife, and in another telling it is two brothers. Wiesenthal's memoirs variously claim he had spent time in as many as eleven concentration camps; the actual number was five.
A drawing he made in 1945 that he claimed was a scene he witnessed in
Mauthausen had actually been sketched from photos that appeared in Life magazine that June.
He particularly over-emphasised his role in the capture of Eichmann,
claiming that he prevented Veronika Eichmann from having her husband
declared dead in 1947, when in fact the declaration was denied by
government officials.
Wiesenthal said that he had retained his Eichmann file when he sent his
research materials to Yad Vashem in 1952; in fact he sent all his
materials there, and it was his counterpart, Tuviah Friedman in Vienna, who had retained materials on Eichmann. Isser Harel, director of the Mossad at the time, has stated that Wiesenthal had no role in the capture of Eichmann.
Walters and Segev both noted inconsistencies between Wiesenthal's
stories and his actual achievements. Segev concluded that Wiesenthal
lied because of his storytelling nature and survivor guilt. Daniel Finkelstein described Walters's research in Hunting Evil as impeccable and quoted Ben Barkow:
"Accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a
liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made".
In 1979, Wiesenthal told The Washington Post:
"I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish
dead [in the Holocaust], but rather about 11 million civilians dead,
including 6 million Jews." In a 2017 interview, Yehuda Bauer
said that he had told Wiesenthal not to use this figure. "I said to
him, 'Simon, you are telling a lie,' ... [Wiesenthal replied] 'Sometimes
you need to do that to get the results for things you think are
essential.'" According to Bauer and other historians, Wiesenthal chose
the figure of 5 million non-Jewish victims because it was just lower
than the six million Jews who were murdered, but high enough to attract
sympathy from non-Jews. The figure of eleven million Nazi victims became
popular and was referred to by President Jimmy Carter in the executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
List of books and journal articles
Books
Ich jagte Eichmann. Tatsachenbericht (I chased Eichmann. A true story). S. Mohn, Gütersloh (1961)
Writing under the pen name Mischka Kukin, Wiesenthal published Humor hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang ("Humor Behind the Iron Curtain"). Gütersloh: Signum-Verlag (1962)
The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. New York: McGraw-Hill (1967)
Zeilen der hoop. De geheime missie van Christoffel Columbus. Amsterdam: H. J. W. Becht (1968). Translated as Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus. New York: Macmillan (1972)
"Mauthausen: Steps beyond the Grave". In Hunter and Hunted: Human History of the Holocaust. Gerd Korman, editor. New York: Viking Press (1973). pp. 286–295.
Max and Helen: A Remarkable True Love Story. New York: Morrow (1982)
Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom. New York: Henry Holt (1987)
Justice, Not Vengeance. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld (1989)
Journal articles
"Latvian War Criminals in USA". Jewish Currents 20, no. 7 (July/August 1966): 4–8. Also in 20, no. 10 (November 1966): 24.
"There Are Still Murderers Among Us". National Jewish Monthly 82, no. 2 (October 1967): 8–9.
"Nazi Criminals in Arab States". In Israel Horizons 15, no. 7 (September 1967): 10–12.
Anti-Jewish Agitation in Poland: (Prewar Fascists and Nazi
Collaborators in Unity of Action with Antisemites from the Ranks of the
Polish Communist Party): A Documentary Report. Bonn: R. Vogel (1969)
"Justice: Why I Hunt Nazis". In Jewish Observer and Middle East Review 21, no. 12 (24 March 1972): 16.
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