Simon Wiesenthal: In the popular imagination the name of Simon Wiesenthal, who has died aged 96, became synonymous with Nazi-hunting as an end in itself. Yet arguably his most important legacy was to convince a growing mass of public opinion that war crimes trials are an essential tool in healing the wounds of genocide. His abiding motto was "justice, not vengeance" and, to the end of his days, he contended that in democratic societies the rule of law must be paramount.
Wiesenthal remained convinced that only a series of miracles kept him alive through the tortures and ignominies he endured during the Holocaust, and the suicide attempts he made to escape from its horrors. Invariably, when he talked about the formative events of his life he expressed an almost childlike wonderment that he had survived the death camps. It seemed equally miraculous to him that, through a series of happy accidents, he had been reunited after the war with his wife Cyla, even though each believed the other had been killed.
The conviction that he had been preserved for a purpose became a driving force in his life. He felt that he owed it to the millions who had not survived the Holocaust - Gypsies, other non-Aryans and homosexuals, as well as Jews - to dedicate his life to their memory, to identify the mass murderers, to expose their crimes and have them brought to justice by due process of law.
Wiesenthal was born into a modest Jewish family in Buczacz, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now Buchach in Ukraine. But it was a much contested territory, constantly changing hands. The Cossacks invaded in 1915, driving Wiesenthal's mother and her two sons as refugees to Vienna. His father, an army reservist, had been killed soon after the outbreak of the first World War. The family returned to Buczacz in 1917, after the Russians withdrew from Galicia.
Before long, the Ukrainians occupied the area; then it was Poland's turn, and by 1920 the Soviets were there, remaining until Hitler's Wehrmacht drove them out after the invasion of Poland.
As a schoolboy, Wiesenthal was a gifted draughtsman and determined to become an architect. Unable, as a Jew, to study in nearby Lvov (now Lviv in Ukraine), he enrolled at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In the mid-1930s he returned to Lvov, married Cyla and worked for a building firm, designing villas for more prosperous members of the Jewish community.
Wiesenthal continued to study, qualifying as an architectural engineer in 1940, a year before the Nazis arrived. After that, he undertook only one more architectural project, a mausoleum destined to hold the ashes of Jewish concentration camp victims in Israel. It was never built, but in Austria, where professional titles are commonplace, he always liked to be addressed as Herr Ingenieur (Mr Engineer).
Until 1943 Wiesenthal remained in Lvov, imprisoned in the Janowska concentration camp, and later in a small, forced labour camp attached to an important railway repair yard, where conditions were more tolerable.
Initially employed to paint markers on railway wagons, Wiesenthal was singled out by the Nazi manager and assigned to design work and act as a go-between with Polish contractors. This enabled him to build contacts with the Polish underground, who helped his wife escape into hiding in Warsaw. Wiesenthal himself escaped from the camp in October 1943, hiding in and near Lvov.
Recaptured by the SS in 1944 and convinced that he faced torture and extermination, he made three suicide attempts. He was then moved from one concentration camp after another: first, back to Janowska, then to Plaszow (the scene of Spielberg's Schindler's List), and on to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Altogether he experienced 11 concentration camps, before spending six days in the freezing confines of an open freight wagon destined for Austria's notorious Mauthausen camp.
It was February 1945. Wiesenthal's condition was so bad that forced labour was out of the question. Instead, he was put into one of the huts reserved for those on the verge of death. Each day a count was made of the victims who had died overnight. Wiesenthal hung on; by the time the camp was liberated by the Americans in May 1945, he was little more than a bundle of bones.
His computer-like mind had survived in better condition than his body and he rallied himself to draw up a list of his Nazi tormentors. With this, he was able to convince Col Seibel, the US officer in charge of Mauthausen, to let him help the Americans search for fleeing Nazis and SS guards.
Wiesenthal had been told that his wife had been killed when the street she was living in was blown up after the Warsaw uprising. In fact the Nazis had not realised she was Jewish and she had ended the war with other Polish women as forced labourers in Germany. Cyla, for her part, had assumed that her husband had not survived. Yet within months, they were reunited.
In 1946 their only child, Paulinka, was born. That year, too, Wiesenthal published his first book, KZ Mauthausen, a dramatic collection of his drawings and collages of inmates and their keepers.
Unlike other Holocaust survivors, Wiesenthal rejected a return to "normal" civilian life. A sense of mission - and sheer obstinacy - led him to ignore his wife's pleas to give up.
In 1947 he stopped working with the US forces and went independent, opening his first Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz, the provincial capital of Upper Austria, not far from Mauthausen. His aims were to find the perpetrators and canvass the displaced persons camps for witnesses of atrocities who could record their testimony as a permanent record of what they had endured.
Soon the search for Adolf Eichmann, the Austrian Nazi official who had played a leading role in the extermination of European Jews, became an obsession for Wiesenthal. Eichmann's family still lived in the Linz area, and his wife and children were tracked down in Altaussee, an idyllic village in Styria.
On two occasions Wiesenthal thought he had accurate intelligence that Eichmann would visit his wife. However attempts to stake out the property failed, and in retrospect Wiesenthal thought it more likely that Eichmann's lookalike brother had been in the vicinity.
Crucially, however, Wiesenthal was able to prevent Eichmann's wife from having her husband officially declared dead, a move he felt would have ended the search for him.
Wiesenthal also insisted that thanks to an accidental encounter with a fellow stamp collector and a postcard from Buenos Aires in the man's possession, he discovered Eichmann's presence in Argentina several years before Israeli intelligence tracked him down in 1960.
With the onset of the cold war, the Western powers lost interest in Nazi-hunting and Wiesenthal's documentation team in Linz emigrated. By 1954 he had no alternative but to close the centre, sending all his files - except Eichmann's - to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and library in Jerusalem. At the same time, he sent a summary of his search for Eichmann to the president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann.
Wiesenthal assumed, as it turned out wrongly, that the WJC would use its resources to sustain the hunt, but Goldmann ignored Wiesenthal, setting the seal on an increasingly bitter confrontation between the congress and the Nazi-hunter.
Between 1954 and 1961, Wiesenthal's principal work was to organise language and technical training courses for refugees from eastern Europe. Eichmann's capture, however, and the public acknowledgment in Israel that Wiesenthal had played a significant role in keeping the search alive, brought him fame. Interest in bringing war criminals to account was also reawakened.
Wiesenthal decided to resume full-time Nazi-hunting and reopened his documentation centre in Vienna, but he never set up the large organisation that outsiders often assumed he had. Instead, he always worked alone, from cramped quarters, with a couple of secretaries and the occasional helper.
He always maintained that as a result of his work, some 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.
He announced his retirement in 2003, but continued to visit his office daily until spring 2004, when ill-health forced him to stay in his flat on the outskirts of Vienna.
In his last years he was heaped with honours, not least, in February 2004, Queen Elizabeth's award of an honorary knighthood, the KBE. In Austria, where he was at times treated as a pariah, he became a national icon.
Wiesenthal always had his detractors seeking to expose him as a fraud and an incompetent. Attacks from neo-Nazi quarters were inevitable, but there were also prominent Jews who labelled him a charlatan, claiming he was intellectually dishonest and insisting he was primarily motivated by self-aggrandisement.
In 1975 he clashed famously with Austria's chancellor Bruno Kreisky over the inclusion of former Nazis in the Austrian cabinet.
Another Jewish critic who never ceased to rile Wiesenthal was Elie Wiesel, the prominent thinker. They first crossed swords over Wiesenthal's contention that Jews must be as much concerned for the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust as for their own race.
He was deeply disappointed when in 1986 the Nobel peace prize committee failed to make a joint award to both men. The prize was awarded to Wiesel alone and Wiesenthal was convinced that his name was removed from the list in response to the WJC's campaign against him for refusing to put a war criminal's label on Dr Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria.
Wiesenthal remained confident that his legacy would be preserved through the work of the Wiesenthal Centre and its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, set up by two Americans whom he allowed to use his name.
Despite the world recognition he had gained he remained essentially modest in lifestyle. His wife died in 2003, His daughter, living in Israel, was only an intermittent visitor.
Wiesenthal found it hard to tolerate his critics. He was easily flattered, but above all he was deeply, almost naively, appreciative of friendship and loyalty. To the end he retained his sense of humour. Bitterness and hating almost never entered his lexicon. He was more than a Jewish hero. He was a hero of a cruel century.
Simon Wiesenthal; born December 31st, 1908; died September 20th, 2005