2/27/2024 0 Comments Franz stangl speaks youtubeBut he made it clear that he was not a “Jewish James Bond” engaging in acts of derring-do. Wiesenthal was lionized and mythologized in books, films and television. “What Wiesenthal did is to harp on this as a lifelong commitment, because he really believed in justice.” “And yet the need for the illusion of justice is so essential to the task of rebuilding that we need to go forward on it. “In one sense, the entire quest for justice in the aftermath of genocide is futile, because you cannot punish all the killers, and the punishment itself is incommensurate with the nature of the crime,” said Berenbaum, who is now the director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Wiesenthal’s efforts were unprecedented, said Michael Berenbaum, former president of Survivors of the Shoah, a visual-history foundation. He deserves to be counted as one of the handful of individuals who have helped to condition moral and ethical attitudes during a period of great upheaval and self-doubt.” He “bullied, cajoled and massaged” officials and ordinary people to confront those horrors, said Hella Pick, author of “Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice,” but he “never swerved from his conviction that an essential part of the process of coming to terms with the Holocaust is to catch the mass murderers and give them fair trials. Lifton, author of “The Nazi Doctors,” a book about physicians who helped perpetrate the Holocaust, “wasn’t so much his identifying particular Nazi criminals, because that could be exaggerated and oversimplified.” Rather, Lifton said in an interview, “it was his insisting on an attitude of confronting what happened and constantly keeping what happened in mind and doing so at times when a lot of people would have preferred to forget.” Wiesenthal’s chief legacy, said Robert J. If we don’t learn this lesson, then millions died for nothing.” “When history looks back,” Wiesenthal said, “I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.” He said on many occasions: “If we pardon this genocide, it will be repeated, and not only on Jews. He frequently called himself a “deputy for the dead.” For years, especially during the Cold War, when many wanted to forget or evade the horrors of Hitler and his followers, Wiesenthal was an insistent reminder that their evil acts must be remembered and accounted for. He was instrumental in bringing to justice well-known figures such as Adolf Eichmann - the Nazi bureaucrat who implemented Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the state-sponsored extermination of millions of Jews - and lesser-known officials such as Franz Stangl, commandant of the death camps at Treblinka and Sobibor, in German-occupied Poland, who had a role in at least 900,000 deaths.īut Wiesenthal’s contribution to history was far more complex. Wiesenthal’s biographers credited him with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler’s major and minor killers and other Nazi war criminals after World War II.
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