Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a " Jewish fascist", likened his organisation to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky, a Jew himself, was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971. He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. ![]() In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives. He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp (February to May 1945).Īfter the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. The question of whether Scott's use of the Walter Mitty metaphor to describe Franz Stangl is better applied to Scott's argument, I will leave to the reader to decide.Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 1908 – 20 September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. ![]() The story is well worth reading, and the tale was turned into a 1947 motion picture of the same name, starring Danny Kaye in the title role. The character of Walter Mitty is that of a mild-mannered daydreamer, who fantasizes about imaginary derring-do and spectacular exploits. Stangl, Franz Paul (1898 or 1908-1971) - police superintendent, Health Care Institute (HuPa - Heil- und Pflegeanstalten) Schloss Hartheim euthanasia facility 1940 commandant, concentration camp (Konzentrationslager - KL) Sobibor May-Sept 1942 commandant, KL Treblinka Sept 1942-Aug 1943 service, Action Command "Reinhard" (Einsatzkommando Reinhard) at Trieste, Italy įor the readers who may not be familiar with the reference to Walter Mitty, there is a droll short story - "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" - written by James Thurber. Another is that the two trials took place about 20 years apart. Trower - One big difference is that Poland had the death penalty and West Germany did not.
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