Wiesenthal was a Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and documenting their crimes.

After surviving several Nazi camps, including Janowska, Płaszów, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald, he was liberated by U.S. forces at the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945.

• He founded a Jewish historical documentation center in Linz, Austria, in 1947, and the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna in 1961, which he led until his retirement in 2003.

• He helped locate Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps; Karl Silberbauer, the Austrian police officer who arrested Anne Frank; and has claimed to have played a significant role in tracking down Adolf Eichmann.

• His honors include a Congressional Gold Medal (1980), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000), and an honorary British knighthood (2004).

• The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization founded in Los Angeles in 1977, is named in his honor.

His bibliography includes: • The Murderers Among Us (1967) • The Sunflower (1969)