[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
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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.
____________________