Below is the entire text of Reuters‘ acknowledgment of Simon Wiesenthal’s life.
VIENNA (Reuters) – Simon Wiesenthal, the veteran Nazi hunter who helped bring over 1,100 Nazi war criminals to trial, has died in Vienna at the age of 96, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Tuesday.
Wiesenthal died in his sleep, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters by phone.
Wiesenthal, born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine, helped to catch major figures such as Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s chief henchmen in the campaign to exterminate Jews, and Franz Stangl, ex-commandant of the Treblinka death camp.
“Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust,” Hier said in a statement on the center’s Web site.
“He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice,” he added.
Now, it may be that they just haven’t put the full obituary online yet. I may be seeing bias where there is none.
Or perhaps they simply do not like the Jews.
It is a decidedly crap obituar. Factual I suppose, but hardly does the man justice.
Justice is the one thing that Reuters would wish to avoid. If they gave someone justice, they might receive it.
With all due respect to Mr. Wiesenthal, whom I honor as a great hero, there is a controversy as to whether he “tracked down Eichmann.†This has been claimed by the Wiesenthal Center, but the Mossad team that tracked Eichmann has disputed this. I met the man who led the team, Peter Malkin [who died a few years ago] at the Holocaust Museum and read his book “Eichmann in my Hands†and Wiesenthal is not mentioned.
I don’t know the truth of it, but I don’t want the memory of a great man like Wiesenthal to be in the slightest tarnished by an attribution that might be open to dispute.