Celebrating famous Jews from Ukraine: Simon Wiesenthal
The famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was a living carrier of the Holocaust remembrance. All his life he remembered what the theories about the superiority of some over the other people lead to, and did not let others forget about it. First of all, to the criminals themselves.
In 1958, the Austrian political skeptics of the Holocaust questioned the authenticity of Anne Frank’s Diary and stated that they would believe in the facts of the Nazi crimes set forth in it only when the person was found who had arrested Anne.
In 1963, Inspector Karl Josef Silberbauer was found among the Vienna criminal police officers who admitted that it was he who on August 4, 1944 arrested the Frank family, who had been hiding for two years and one month in a house in Amsterdam.
When the Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was published, Silberbauer also bought one copy to make sure that the Jewish girl did not mention his name there. His name was not in the book. But he just the same was exposed.
The person who revealed the identity of Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer was Simon Wiesenthal.
Thanks to Wiesenthal, a lot of the Nazi criminals, who after World War II had hidden themselves in different parts of the world in the hope of avoiding punishment for the crimes committed, were exposed and brought to justice. Wiesenthal identified more than 20,000 Nazi names, of which about a thousand were tracked down and convicted.
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