The Murderers among us [antikvár]

I have lived in Vienna for a number of years, and I hadn't been in the city long before I began to hear about Simon Wiesenthal. In 1960, Wiesenthal v^^as identified on the front pages of the papers in Vienna and the rest of the world as der Eichmann-Jdger—the Eichmaim-hunter—for his role in helping the Israeli government track down Adolf Eichmann, the supreme logistics expert of Hitler's "fiaial solution of the Jewish question." In 1963 Wiesenthal again made news when he pointed out to the embarrassed officials of Vienna's police department that the ex-Gestapo man who had arrested Anne Frank in Amsterdam in 1944 was now a member in good standing of the Vienna force. Numerous other notorious Nazis in Germany and Austria had been apprehended, I knew, thanks to Wiesenthal's dogged sleuthing. I became curious about the man and his bizarre detection agency. Wiesenthal himself, I learned, had been hounded by the Nazis through more than a dozen concentration camps, from his native Poland to Austria, and had survived thanks to a series of near-miracles. Most of his relatives, including his mother, had been exterminated. In 1945, after his liberation, he had volunteered to work for the United States Army in its himt for war crimmals in Austria, and he had subsequently been employed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and the Counter-intelligence Corps. In 1947, with meager volunteer help, he had set up at Linz, Austria, a small Documentation Center, where he helped his fellow Jews trace missing relatives and where he set about tracing some of the thousands of Nazi killers he knew were still at large. By 1954, denazification seemed momentarily a dead issue in Germany and Austria, and he closed the Documentation Center and went into