Wiesenthal, Nazi hunter

Scripps Howard: Simon Wiesenthal cheated the Nazis of the death they had planned for him by 60 years. He died Tuesday, quietly, peacefully, an honored man at age 96 in his longtime home in Vienna, Austria.
It was not a fate he could have imagined when he went into the Nazi death camps in 1941 nor likely when he left Mauthausen, filthy, lice-infested and weighing 99 pounds, four years later.
Six million of his fellow Jews -- 89 of them members of his family -- did not leave the camps and Wiesenthal made it his life's mission to see that they were not forgotten and that the Nazi overseers who methodically murdered them were brought to justice. He was implacable at both.
His Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna became a leading archive of the Holocaust and his name and work are memorialized at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. He was instrumental in tracking down 1,100 Nazi war criminals, including, most famously, the genocidal bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann and the policeman who sent Anne Frank to Bergen-Belsen and her death.
Police guard
His work was not universally popular, and not just with former Nazis and neo-Nazis against whom his home was under police guard. He was occasionally accused of being an obsessive, of being unable to let go the war or pursuing old men who, whatever their crimes once were, now were harmless in their dotage. Fortunately for justice, he did not flag until his own old age overtook him.
He said, "When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it."