Simon Wiesenthal — nazi hunter with roots in the Russian Empire
Simon Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908 in Buczacz, in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Buchach in Ukraine. Buczacz itself was Austrian, not Russian: his connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father. Asher Wiesenthal, a wholesaler in sugar and other goods, had emigrated from the Russian Empire to Buczacz in 1905, after the pogroms of that period.
Called up into the Austro-Hungarian army, Asher was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915. When Russian forces occupied Galicia, his widow Rosa took Simon and his younger brother Hillel to Vienna, where Simon went to school; they returned to Buczacz after the Russian withdrawal in 1917, and in 1925 Rosa remarried and moved to the Carpathians. Simon stayed in Buczacz, graduated from the gymnasium in 1928 on his second attempt, and studied architecture, including at the Polytechnic in Lwów, where he later practised as an architectural engineer. In 1936 he married Cyla Müller.
After the Soviet occupation of Lwów in 1939 his stepfather was arrested by the NKVD and died in a Soviet prison. Under German occupation from 1941, Wiesenthal was held in a series of camps; his mother was deported to Bełżec in August 1942, and dozens of relatives of his and his wife's were killed in the Holocaust. He was liberated from Mauthausen in May 1945.
He worked with the United States Army gathering evidence on war crimes, and in 1947 he and some thirty volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz to collect material for future trials. In 1953 he received information that Adolf Eichmann was in Argentina and passed it to Israel; Wikipedia notes that his memoirs, which he told with a storyteller's freedom, exaggerated his part in Eichmann's capture in 1960. In 1961 he opened a documentation centre in Vienna and continued to trace war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles was named after him in 1977, and he was the subject of the 1989 film Murderers Among Us, with Ben Kingsley.
He died in his sleep in Vienna on 20 September 2005, aged ninety-six, and is buried in Herzliya, Israel.
"Father emigrated from the Russian Empire to Austrian Galicia in 1905"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Father from the Russian Empire; born in Buczacz, Austria-Hungary
The connection is paternal: Buczacz itself was Austro-Hungarian, not Russian. Eighty-nine relatives of Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla were murdered in the Holocaust.
His father, Asher Wiesenthal, emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the pogroms, settling in Buczacz in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary. Simon Wiesenthal was born there on 31 December 1908.
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Father from the Russian Empire; born in Buczacz, Austria-Hungary. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing."