Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends »

Tom Segev, who writes a weekly column in Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading daily newspaper, is the author of The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust and other pathbreaking books, including One Palestine, Complete, which was named one of the ten best books of 2000 by the New York Times Book Review. He lives in Jerusalem.

www.doubleday.com

This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten.

Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget.

For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel’s Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel.

Segev’s challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal’s own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was.

For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero—depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier—and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal’s existence is as compelling as the fiction. Simon Wiesenthal is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

…meticulous and forceful…[Segev's] book delivers not merely an intimate account of Wiesenthal's life and times, but also judicious examinations of the many controversial and little-known aspects of that life…It cannot have been simple work for Mr. Segev to sort out all of Wiesenthal's stories, but sort he does. It's one of his biography's achievements that you see its subject absolutely plain. Mr. Segev admires Wiesenthal but does not turn away from the sketchier aspects of his personality.

Introduction: The Glass Box 1

1 "Eichmann Is My Passion" 12

2 "During That Period, We Never Took Hitler Seriously" 29

3 "See You on the Soap Shelf" 44

4 "Who Knows Her? Who Has Seen Her?" 64

5 "The Duty of an Austrian Patriot" 81

6 "That's How I Became a Stamp Collector" 96

7 "I Hope You're Not Coming to See Me" 119

8 "I Always Said He's in Buenos Aires" 137

9 "Sleuth with 6 Million Clients" 158

10 "You May Have Thought He Was Happy, but He Also Cried Sometimes" 177

11 "A Huge Mass of Rotten Flesh" 196

12 "Auschwitz Lines" 213

13 "What Would You Have Done?" 229

14 "Kreisk Is Going Mad" 241

15 "Better Than Any Monster 255

16 "Mr. Wiesenthal, I Claim, Had Different Relations with the Gestapo from Mine" 272

17 "It's Not Easy to Be My Wife" 292

18 "The Children...Were Actually the Same Children" 311

19 "Only So That Mengele's Name Would Not Be Forgotton" 332

20 "As If I Were Already Dead" 351

21 "Sleazenthal" 362

22 "We All Made Mistakes in Our Youth" 385

Acknowledgments 411

Notes 415

Index 463