Death of a renowned Nazi hunter

Special report for Mercopress

The death of the feared Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal does not mean that the ageing Nazi criminals who have enjoyed safe refuge in Latin America for more than 50 years can now be certain of escaping detection and justice. His predecessors have vowed to carry on his work with the focus still on South America where most of the Nazi war criminals took refuge.

Here for Mercopress is an exclusive report by Harold Briley, who, as the BBC Central Europe Correspondent based in Vienna, knew Weisenthal well. He interviewed Weisenthal at the height of his Nazi-hunting campaign and was shown his thousands of files on Nazis in his Documentation Centre in the Austrian Capital. Weisenthal explained in his own words, the reasons for his campaign. Here is his remarkable story.

Simon Weisenthal, sitting at his desk with a giant map of Nazi Germany on the wall behind him, pinpointing its concentration camps and the possible whereabouts of Nazi fugitives, told me the harrowing story of his wartime years in which his mother and more than 80 other relatives were sent to the gas chambers by their Nazi captives. He himself survived four-and-a-half years in five concentration camps and eight other camps, an emaciated prisoner close to death when he was liberated from Mathausen in Austria in 1945, to discover later that his wife had also survived.

Saved by Hitler's Birthday!

He showed me the scars on his wrists where he had tried to commit suicide to avoid being forced, under torture by the Gestapo, to reveal the identity of friends who helped him escape from one camp, only to be recaptured. He lost so much blood and became so weak he could not talk.

He came closest to death when he was ordered to dig a grave with several other concentration camp inmates, lined up ready to be shot. As an architect by profession, he was the camp artist. At the last minute, as the firing squad raised their rifles, he was called out of the line and ordered to paint a special poster for the guards' celebration that night of Hitler's birthday. He said thereafter he always celebrated two birthdays ? his own and Hitler's!

Most Nazis escaped to South America

On the recording on which I have now been listening to his voice, he told me: "Most of the Nazis escaped to South America ? to Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia. I never yet found a Nazi in a place with a bad climate!"

They were helped by the secret ex-Gestapo organisation known as ODESSA, believed to have been directed by an ex-SS Colonel in Peru. It was in South America that Weisenthal focused his campaign.

It was he who first detected the whereabouts of Adolf Eichman, living in Buenos under an assumed name, Ricardo Klement, an apparently inoffensive Mercedes Benz worker who might never otherwise have been unmasked as the officer given the task by Hitler of the Holocaust's heinous mass murder of Jews, which the Nazis called "the Final Solution". Eichman, who had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1950, was controversially kidnapped ten years later, in a Buenos Aires street by Israeli Secret Agents, and subsequently sentenced at a show case trial and hanged in Israel.

It was that success in 1961, which encouraged Weisenthal to re-launch his campaign which had been interrupted by the Cold Wear when many Nazis took refuge in Eastern Europe.

Stangl captured; Mengele escapes.

Weisenthal told me his greatest coup was finding and bringing to justice Franz Stangl, responsible for 700-thousand deaths as Commander of the notorious Treblinka Extermination Camp. After years of dedicated detective work, Weisenthal tracked him down in Brazil in Sao Paulo working as a mechanic for Volkswagen. He was extradited to Germany, sentenced to life imprisonment and died in jail. Weisenthal said at his trial: "If I had done nothing else in my life but bring this evil man to justice, I would not have died in vain".

His greatest disappointment was his failure to find Doctor Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" for his torture and horrific medical experiments on living people in Auschwitz concentration camp. Despite intensive efforts, Mengele moved from place to place in South America, first emigrating to Argentina, where he worked as a carpenter in Vicente Lopez with the name of "Helmut Gregor". He would meet Adolf Eichman in the ABC café in downtown Buenos Aires. Then he lived for several years in Paraguay before settling in Brazil, by this time confident enough to resume using his real name, Josef Mengele. He was helped and became friends in Argentina with Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel, Hitler's most decorated air ace, who lost a leg in the war. Afterwards, Rudel was entrusted by Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann, to fly tons of Nazi stolen gold and other valuables to Argentina in what was code-named "Operation Land of Fire". Rudel became a successful businessman, served President Juan Peron as consultant to the National Institute of Aeronautics in Cordoba, and formed a chain of sports and flying clubs in Europe and South America, while glorifying Hitler and helping fugitives like Mengele.

I tried to help try and track down Mengele when I became BBC Latin America Correspondent. Unknown to Weisenthal, Mengele died in 1979 only a few weeks before I arrived in South America. He had a stroke while bathing on a Brazilian beach and was buried anonymously in a cemetery, identified only several years later. Weisenthal's Mission carries on

When I asked Weisenthal why he had devoted his life to hunting down Nazis, he declared: "It is the obligation of the survivors because we must educate our generation about what happened and prevent future generations undergoing the same experiences". And why continue for half a century after war? "It is a moral duty which cannot be limited by time".

He tracked down and brought to justice 1,100 Nazis guilty of war crimes. But he said most of the 150,000 Nazis known to be guilty escaped. He said: "Theirs was a cruelty without risk in the concentration camps and ghettoes. We lost eleven million civilian witnesses, killed by the Nazis. And hundreds of thousands of incriminating documents were destroyed. We can never find all the criminals. But my work is done. I found the mass murderers I was looking for".

But others have vowed to carry on his mission. The Jewish Branch of the Simon Weisenthal Centre, led by a New York lawyer named Efraim Zuroff, aged 56, born towards the end of the war, is using modern methods of tracking and filing and offering big money rewards to trace remaining Nazis in what is called "Operation Last Chance". In three years, it has spread to nine countries and yielded the names of 380 suspects, many of whom have been referred to local prosecutors. Weisenthal is dead. But his life's work goes on.

Harold Briley, London.