[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 119 (Wednesday, September 21, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10254-S10257]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      RECOGNIZING THE LIFE AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF SIMON WIESENTHAL

  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 245 submitted earlier 
today.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the resolution by title.
  The journal clerk read as follows:

       A resolution (S. Res. 245) recognizing the life and 
     accomplishments of Simon Wiesenthal.

  There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the 
resolution.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to a man 
who dedicated himself to preserving the memory of the millions who 
perished in the Holocaust and to promoting human rights and preventing 
genocide.
  Simon Wiesenthal lived through unimaginable tragedy and horror as a 
prisoner in Nazi concentration camps

[[Page S10255]]

during World War II. He survived the Holocaust and spent the next 60 
years of his life tracking down the war criminals who had perpetrated 
terrible atrocities.
  During the course of World War II, Simon Wiesenthal spent 4 years in 
a series of 12 concentration camps. He was a prisoner in the Mauthausen 
camp when it was liberated by the U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.
  COL Richard Seibel who led the troops in liberating the camp 
described the horror that they found in a report to his superiors:

       Mauthausen did exist. Man's inhumanity to man did exist. 
     The world must not be allowed to forget the depths to which 
     mankind can sink, lest it should happen again.

  Mr. Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla had been separated by the war but 
were reunited shortly after it ended. Between the 2 of them, 89 family 
members were killed.
  They decided to start a family of their own and in 1946 had a 
daughter, Paulinka, who went on to have children and grandchildren of 
her own.
  Also following the war, Mr. Wiesenthal went to work for the War 
Crimes Office run by the Americans. This was just the start to a 
lifelong mission to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
  He opened his own Historical Documentation Center to collect 
information on war criminals that was used to search them out and 
prosecute them for their heinous crimes. The evidence collected at the 
documentation center was used in prosecutions at the International 
Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946.
  Credited with hunting down 1,100 major and minor Nazi war criminals 
since the end of World War II, Mr. Wiesenthal is most renowned for his 
role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann engineered Adolf 
Hitler's ``Final Solution of the Jewish Problem'' that led to the 
extermination of 6 million Jews as well as millions of non-Jews.
  Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. 
Observed at trial in 1961, Mr. Wiesenthal later described his 
impression of Eichmann:

       In my mind I had built up the image of a demonic superman. 
     Instead I saw a frail, nondescript, shabby fellow in a glass 
     cell between two Israeli policement; they looked more 
     colorful and interesting than he did. There was nothing 
     demonic about him; he looked like a bookkeeper who was afraid 
     to ask for a raise.

  I am privileged to say that I did personally know Simon Wiesenthal. I 
received him in my home to raise money for the Wiesenthal Center in Los 
Angeles. I also met with him in Vienna where I saw his small, cramped 
office and voluminous files.
  He was one of the most amazing people; he stayed the course, never 
gave up, and was the greatest Nazi hunter of our time.
  Dedicated in 1977 to all of the 11 million people of different 
nationalities, races, and creeds who died in the Holocaust, the Simon 
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles promotes tolerance and understanding 
through community involvement, educational outreach and social action, 
and confronts important issues such as racism, anti-Semitism, 
terrorism, and genocide.
  The center's founder and dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier said the following 
about Simon Wiesenthal's legacy:

       I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the 
     Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of 
     the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the 
     perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice.

  We have lost a leading voice for raising awareness and understanding 
of the Holocaust. It is imperative that his legacy and dedication to 
the millions who were killed because of their religion, race or 
nationality be remembered. We must do all that we can to ensure that 
human atrocities like this never happen again.
  Let me conclude with Mr. Wiesenthal's own words:

       When history looks back, I want people to know that the 
     Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away 
     with it. . . . If we pardon this genocide, it will be 
     repeated, and not only on Jews. If we don't learn this 
     lesson, then millions died for nothing.

  Mr. KOHL. Mr. President, today the world has lost one of the great 
crusaders for justice, Simon Wiesenthal. After suffering through many 
Nazi death camps, he emerged from the war with a mission to bring the 
architects of the Holocaust and their collaborators to account for 
their crimes. Later in life his work was valuable for establishing the 
facts of the Holocaust and keeping the memory of the suffering of the 
victims of the Holocaust alive. Simon Wiesenthal was a valuable voice 
of conscience when many around the world wanted to ignore these 
horrible crimes and forget this awful period of the 20th century.
  A successful Ukrainian architect before the war, when the Nazis 
invaded the Soviet Union, he was rounded up with his family and 
narrowly escaped death. He would spend the rest of the war in a variety 
of death and work camps. After the war he was eager to work with the 
Americans to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice for their 
war crimes during the Holocaust. When the Allies seemed to tire of 
bringing former members of the Third Reich to justice, Simon Wiesenthal 
continued his work on his own, painstakingly researching and 
identifying members of the Gestapo and SS.
  He may be most famously known as the man who found Adolf Eichmann, 
the organizer of Hitler's campaign to eradicate the Jews. Bringing 
Eichmann to justice was no doubt the most high profile of his 
successes, and he was able to use that spotlight to help him find and 
ferret out more criminals. In all he was involved in over 1,100 cases 
involving Nazi war criminals.
  Mr. Wiesenthal did more than just round up the perpetrators of the 
most notorious mass killing in history. He also used his name 
recognition to fight against rising anti-Semitism in Europe and around 
the world. He sounded the alarm over rising neo-Nazi movements, and 
fought against their malicious influence. His work documenting the 
Holocaust and the testimony of survivors was ground breaking and has 
formed am important part of what we know about that tragic period and 
the people who survived it.
  Mr. Wiesenthal has been seen as an important voice of justice, 
forcing the world to face a difficult reality about the evil in humans. 
His work laid bare the worst that man is capable of, but it also showed 
the importance of justice and the power of the human spirit.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, today we mourn the passing of a great man 
whose name has become synonymous with the pursuit of justice, Simon 
Wiesenthal. Mr. Wiesenthal dedicated his life to finding and 
prosecuting Nazi war criminals, and he was extraordinarily successful 
at doing so. He was a passionate, courageous man waging an often lonely 
yet critical fight.
  Born 96 years ago in what is now the Ukraine, Mr. Wiesenthal barely 
survived the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, emerging from a 
concentration camp at the end of the war weighing less than 100 pounds. 
Though the Nazis had not succeeded in taking his life, he had lost 89 
members of his family.
  Simon Wiesenthal took this incomprehensible grief and turned it into 
action, embarking on a lifelong quest to find Nazi war criminals and 
secure justice for their victims. He had already begun this work in the 
concentration camps, committing to memory details of his captors. After 
the war, he worked first for the U.S. Army's War Crimes Office and then 
opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria in 
1947, to continue that work on his own. The Center later moved to 
Vienna, where Mr. Wiesenthal worked every day in a small office 
building, surrounded by files, meticulously documenting and tracking 
the guilty. He worked in that office until last year, when his health 
would no longer permit it.
  In his most prominent success, information from Wiesenthal led 
Israeli agents to capture Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's 
extermination campaign, in Argentina in 1960. Wisenthal's other high-
profile arrests include Anne Frank's captor, Karl Silberbauer, and the 
commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, Franz Stangl. The vast 
majority of his work, though, was pursuing lesser-known and unknown 
Nazis and demanding accountability for their roles. In all, he is 
credited with bringing more than 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice.
  Those prosecutions not only brought punishment to the guilty but also 
affirmed to the world that justice, even when delayed, must always be 
done.

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  As we honor and thank Mr. Wiesenthal for the results of his work, we 
owe him a special debt for the way he went about that work. Despite his 
personal tragedy and despite the staggering scale of the atrocities, 
Mr. Wiesenthal sought, as he said, ``justice, not revenge.'' He broke 
the cycle of hate and elevated us all. Indeed, one of his strongest 
hopes was that his work would help us to rise above our history. As he 
said:

       The history of man is the history of crimes, and history 
     can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can 
     build, we must build, a defense against repetition.

  The 11 million victims of the Holocaust had no finer, more dedicated, 
more capable advocate than Simon Wiesenthal. The living had no finer 
example of a hero. Our only solace in his passing is that the 11 
million Simon Wiesenthal spoke for can finally say to him today: 
``Thank you for remembering us.''
  Mr. SALAZAR. Mr. President, I rise today to honor Simon Wiesenthal, a 
remarkable man, a Holocaust survivor, who dedicated his life to the 
pursuit of justice and worked to prevent anti-Semitism and prejudice of 
all kinds.
  After surviving imprisonment at five German concentration camps and 
escaping death several times, Mr. Wiesenthal continued to remember the 
6 million people who lost their lives during the Holocaust by working 
to bring over 1,100 war criminals to justice. He pursued justice, not 
revenge. He demanded public trials, not secret executions.
  He made sure society would remember those crimes against humanity so 
that future purveyors of ethnic cleansing would know that they could 
never escape retribution.
  Mr. Wiesenthal earned the respect of those throughout the world, 
having many honors and awards bestowed upon him. He received 
decorations from the Austrian and French resistance movements, the 
Dutch Freedom Medal, the Luxembourg Freedom Medal, the United Nations 
League for the Help of Refugees Award, the French Legion of Honor and 
the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal which was presented to him by 
President James Carter in 1980.
  Mr. Wiesenthal never questioned giving up his prewar trade of 
architecture. In a New York Times article in 1964, Mr. Wiesenthal 
described attending Sabbath services with a fellow camp survivor who 
had become a wealthy jeweler.
  The man asked why Wiesenthal had not resumed architecture--his prewar 
trade--for it would have made him rich.
  ``You're a religious man,'' Wiesenthal told his friend. ``You believe 
in God and life after death. I also believe.''
  ``When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who 
died in the camps and they ask us, `What have you done?' there will be 
many answers. You will say, `I became a jeweler.' Another will say, `I 
smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, `I built 
houses.'
  ``But I will say, `I didn't forget you.'''
  Thank you Mr. Wiesenthal for leaving an indelible mark on society. We 
owe you a debt of gratitude, and we will never forget you.
  Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
resolution and preamble be agreed to en bloc, the motion to reconsider 
be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating thereto be 
printed in the Record, without any intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The resolution (S. Res. 245) was agreed to.
  The preamble was agreed to.
  The resolution, with its preamble, reads as follows:

                              S. Res. 245

       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908, to 
     Jewish merchants in Buczacz, in what is now the Lvov Oblast 
     section of the Ukraine;
       Whereas after he was denied admission to the Polytechnic 
     Institute in Lvov because of quota restrictions on Jewish 
     students, Simon Wiesenthal received his degree in engineering 
     from the Technical University of Prague in 1932;
       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal worked in an architectural office 
     until he was forced to close his business and become a 
     mechanic in a bedspring factory, following the Russian army's 
     occupation of Lvov and purge of Jewish professionals;
       Whereas following the Germany occupation of Ukraine in 
     1941, Simon Wiesenthal was initially detained in the Janwska 
     concentration camp near Lvov, after which he and his wife 
     were assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn 
     Works, which was the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad;
       Whereas in August of 1942, Simon Wiesenthal's mother was 
     sent to the Belzec death camp as part of Nazi Germany's 
     ``Final Solution'', and by the end of the next month 89 of 
     his relatives had been killed;
       Whereas with the help of the Polish Underground Simon 
     Wiesenthal was able to help his wife escape the Ostbahn camp 
     in 1942, and in 1943 was himself able to escape just before 
     German guards began executing inmates, but he was recaptured 
     the following year and sent to the Janwska camp;
       Whereas following the collapse of the German eastern front, 
     the SS guards at Janwska took Simon Wiesenthal and the 
     remaining camp survivors and joined the westward retreat from 
     approaching Russian forces;
       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal was 1 of the few survivors of the 
     retreat to Mauthausen, Austria and was on the brink of death, 
     weighing only 99 pounds, when Mauthausen was liberated by 
     American forces on May 5, 1945;
       Whereas after surviving 12 Nazi prison camps, including 5 
     death camps, Wiesenthal chose not to return to his previous 
     occupation, and instead dedicated himself to finding Nazi war 
     criminals and bringing them to justice;
       Whereas following the liberation of Mauthausen, Simon 
     Wiesenthal began collecting evidence of Nazi activity for the 
     War Crimes Section of the United States Army, and after the 
     war continued these efforts for the Army's Office of 
     Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps;
       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal would also go on to head the 
     Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of 
     Austria, a relief and welfare organization;
       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal and his wife were reunited in 
     1945, and had a daughter the next year;
       Whereas the evidence supplied by Wiesenthal was utilized in 
     the United States Zone war crime trials;
       Whereas, after concluding his work with the United States 
     Army in 1947, Simon Wiesenthal and others opened and operated 
     the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, 
     for the purpose of assembling evidence for future Nazi 
     trials, before closing the office and providing its files to 
     the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel in 1954;
       Whereas despite his heavy involvement in relief work and 
     occupational education for Soviet refugees, Simon Wiesenthal 
     tenaciously continued his pursuit of Adolf Eichmann, who had 
     served as the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Department and 
     supervised the implementation of the ``Final Solution'';
       Whereas in 1953, Simon Wiesenthal acquired evidence that 
     Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina and passed this 
     information to the Government of Israel;
       Whereas this information, coupled with information about 
     Eichmann's whereabouts in Argentina provided to Israel by 
     Germany in 1959, led to Eichmann's capture by Israeli agents, 
     trial and conviction in Israel, and execution on May 31, 
     1961;
       Whereas following Eichmann's capture, Wiesenthal opened a 
     new Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Austria, for the 
     purpose of collecting and analyzing information to aid in the 
     location and apprehension of war criminals;
       Whereas Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested 
     Anne Frank, Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and 
     Sobibor concentration camps in Poland, and Hermine 
     Braunsteiner, who had supervised the killings of several 
     hundred children at Majdanek, are among the approximately 
     1,100 war criminals found and brought to justice as a result 
     of Simon Wiesenthal's investigative, analytical, and 
     undercover operations;
       Whereas Simon Wiesenthal bravely forged ahead with his 
     mission of promoting tolerance and justice in the face of 
     danger and resistance, including numerous threats and the 
     bombing of his home in 1982;
       Whereas the Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in 
     1977, to focus on the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, 
     commemorate the events of the Holocaust, teach tolerance 
     education, and promote Middle East affairs;
       Whereas the Simon Wiesenthal Center monitors and combats 
     the growth of neo-Nazi activity in Europe and keeps watch 
     over concentration camp sites to ensure that the memory of 
     the Holocaust and the sanctity of those sites are preserved;
       Whereas the Simon Wiesenthal Center played a pivotal role 
     in convincing foreign governments to pass laws enabling the 
     prosecution of Nazi war criminals;
       Whereas throughout his lifetime, Simon Wiesenthal has had 
     many honors and awards bestowed upon him, including 
     decorations from the Austrian and French resistance 
     movements, the Dutch Freedom Medal, the Luxembourg Freedom 
     Medal, the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees 
     Award, the French Legion of Honor, and the United States 
     Congressional Gold Medal, which was presented to him by 
     President James Carter in 1980;
       Whereas President Ronald W. Reagan once remarked, ``For 
     what Simon Wiesenthal represents are the animating principles 
     of Western civilization since the day Moses came down from 
     Sinai: the idea of justice, the idea of laws, the idea of the 
     free will.'';

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       Whereas President George H. W. Bush has stated that Simon 
     Wiesenthal, ``is our living embodiment of remembrance. The 
     two pledges of Simon Wiesenthal's life inspire us all -- 
     `Never forget' and `Never again'.'';
       Whereas President William Clinton has remarked of Simon 
     Wiesenthal, ``To those who know his story, one of miraculous 
     survival and of relentless pursuit of justice, the answer is 
     apparent. From the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, 
     only a few voices survived, to bear witness, to hold the 
     guilty accountable, to honor the memory of those who were 
     killed. Only if we heed these brave voices can we build a 
     bulwark of humanity against the hatred and indifference that 
     is still all too prevalent in this world of ours.''; and
       Whereas, at the end of a life dedicated to the pursuit of 
     justice and advocacy for victims of the Holocaust, Simon 
     Wiesenthal passed away on September 20, 2005, at the age of 
     96: Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved, That the Senate--
       (1) expresses its most sincere condolences to the family 
     and friends of Simon Wiesenthal;
       (2) recognizes the life and accomplishments of Simon 
     Wiesenthal, who, after surviving the Holocaust, spent more 
     than 50 years helping to bring Nazi war criminals to justice 
     and was a vigorous opponent of anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and 
     racism; and
       (3) recognizes and commends Simon Wiesenthal's legacy of 
     promoting tolerance, his tireless efforts to bring about 
     justice, and the continuing pursuit of these ideals.

     

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