Simon Wiesenthal

A graduate of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Simon Wiesenthal was an architect in the city of Lvov in the Ukraine when World War II broke out; due to the non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany, the Russians forced Wiesenthal, as with other Jews, from his livelihood; he was working as a mechanic in a bedspring factory when he was imprisoned in a labor camp working on a railroad for the duration of the war. He had smuggled his wife, a blonde who could pass for Polish, to safety through the underground, but both thought the other had died during the war. At various times during his captivity, he contemplated suicide rather than face torture; however, he made a wager with an SS Corporal who bet him that no one would ever believe the truth of what had gone on in the concentration camps. Wiesenthal had his purpose in life - to survive and bring the truth of the horrors of the Holocaust to the public at large, as well as bringing the perpetrators of those atrocities to justice. After the war's end, Wiesenthal went to an Allied base in Lidz, Austria with an extensive list of atrocities he had witnessed and offered his services to the Allies. He was permitted to make arrests of those people who had been accused of committing them, and from that small start, in 1947 he established the independent Jewish Documentation Center in Lidz (later in Vienna) where he started searching for war criminals. He was successful in aiding in the detection and ultimate capture and subsequent execution of SS Major Adolf Eichmann, who had helped devise "The Final Solution" - the transport and murder of Jews and other "inferior persons" to gas chambers in death camps. Wiesenthal estimated that he helped bring to trial at least 1,100 ex-Nazis.