Posted on 06/18/2004 8:17:06 AM PDT by knighthawk
SIMON Wiesenthal, the last great Nazi hunter, will be knighted by Britain today in a tribute to his role in tracking down more than 1000 war criminals from the Third Reich.
The presentation for the appointment as Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, by John Macgregor, the British ambassador to Vienna, is likely to be a poignant one.
Mr Wiesenthal, 95, is ill - so frail that the ceremony will be conducted in his living room - and has withdrawn from the search for Nazi criminals.
Since many of the suspects are almost as old as Mr Wiesenthal, the witnesses as infirm as he is, and the victims dead, the chances of successfully bringing anyone else to trial are rapidly disappearing.
The citation by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says Mr Wiesenthal "has been untiring in his service to the Jewish communities in the UK and elsewhere by helping to right at least some of the awful wrongs of the Holocaust".
There was something final about the minister's wording, as if Mr Wiesenthal's mission was now over. The Nazi hunter's view, however, is that the search must continue in a different form -- as a way of reminding societies about their tarnished histories.
Mr Wiesenthal, an architect, was an inmate of 12 different Nazi concentration and labour camps from 1941.
Informed by a network of contacts gained in these and other camps, Mr Wiesenthal set up a documentation centre in the Austrian city of Linz, later moving all his files to Vienna. He played an important role in the hunt for Adolf Eichmann, one of the planners of the Holocaust, who was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960.
The small, quietly spoken man spearheaded the search for leading concentration camp staff, for the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, and successfully lobbied many governments to investigate men and women who had switched identities after the war and become respectable pillars of their new countries.
As anger built up in Jewish communities about the numbers of Nazis on the run, Mr Wiesenthal's work started to capture the public imagination and he was portrayed in at least two successful Hollywood films, The Boys From Brazil and The Odessa File.
It is the raising of public awareness about war criminals, rather than the number of convictions, that will be Mr Wiesenthal's true legacy.
Ping
Mr. Wiesenthal's relentless pursuit of Nazi war criminals should serve as an example to us Americans when it comes to terrorists. I wish him well despite his poor health.
Well deserved recognition for a man who understands terrorism and believed in seeking justice.
It is also worth noting that the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is one of the principle documentors of the upsurge in European anti-semitism.
True.
But I forgot, who again is his 'counterpart' that's been hunting down Jap War Criminals for the past 58 years?
Never mind, I just remembered, NOBODY is. Apparently 'all is forgiven'.
(like h*ll it is!)
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