The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs

by Simon Wiesenthal, Joseph Wechsberg (Editor)

Overview

"Simon Wiesenthal since the end of World War II has had one major aim in life — to track down as many as possible of the SS men who took part in the administration of the concentration and extermination camps run by the Third Reich... The writing of this book was actually done by the well-known journalist Joseph Wechsberg to whom Wiesenthal told his stories and who contributes a series of profiles of the narrator. It is a dramatic and knowledgeable account... [Wiesenthal's is] a remarkable career, which is movingly... reported in these pages." — Eugene Davidson, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

"The Wiesenthal memoirs should have been published before, and they must be published again in a new edition when Wiesenthal has yet more to tell... Wiesenthal's best friend is luck... so fascinating in his own casebooks." — Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books

Product Details

BN ID:	2940186006084
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	08/30/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	197,464
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Born in Buczacz (Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine), Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) attended a Jewish Gymnasium and studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In 1936, he married Cyla Müller and worked in an architect’s office in Lvov (Poland, now Ukraine), where the couple lived until the outbreak of World War II, when the Soviets occupied Lvov. Wiesenthal was forced to take a job as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. After the German occupation in 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were interned in the Janowska concentration camp. When deportations to the death camps began in 1942, Cyla was able to pass as a non-Jew and was taken out of the camp by an underground organization.

From Janowska Wiesenthal was sent into forced labor at the German Eastern Railways. In 1943 he escaped, but was recaptured; he attempted suicide twice and was sent back to Janowska. He was then in Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald and finally Mauthausen, Austria where Wiesenthal was liberated in May 1945 by the US Army. At 6 feet tall he weighed less than 100 lbs but recovered and was reunited with Cyla at the end of 1945. Dozens of members of his and his wife’s families had died in the camps.

Wiesenthal assisted the War Crimes Section of the US Army and later worked for the US Army’s Office of Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the US Zone of Austria. He also worked for Bricha, a Zionist organization for clandestine immigration to Palestine. Wiesenthal then dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and having them prosecuted. He established the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz (1947-54) where Wiesenthal was vice-president of the local Jewish Community, and worked for the AJDC (Joint Distribution Committee) and ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training) in nearby refugee camps reopened in the 1950s for Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from the Soviet Bloc. Wiesenthal moved his office to Vienna in 1961. In 1953, Wiesenthal learned that Adolf Eichmann, coordinator of the “Final Solution”, was in Argentina and forwarded this information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna. Israel’s intelligence service captured Eichmann in 1960 in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel for trial. Found guilty, Eichmann was executed in 1962.