Lessons from the Nazi hunter
As the anniversary of the passing of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal approaches, his lessons of bringing those who kill Jews to justice continue to amplify.
By Joseph Frager
JNS
Sep 20, 2024
Simon Wiesenthal during a visit to Yad Vashem 1985
Sept. 20 marks 19 years since Simon Wiesenthal, Holocaust survivor and legendary Nazi hunter, passed away. Wiesenthal represented the long arm of the Jewish people, and in his book Murderers Among Us, he described how he tracked down more than 800 Nazis.
He is most famous for his help in finding mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960. Eichmann was hanged in Israel on June 1, 1962. Wiesenthal is also responsible for bringing Franz Stangl, commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, to justice. He also located Hermine Braunsteiner, “the mare of Majdanek,” so named because she used to kick her victims to death with her steel-toed boots. She had become an American citizen and was living in Queens, N.Y., until Wiesenthal ensured she was brought to justice.
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| Franz Stangl | |
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Wiesenthal taught us invaluable lessons.
The State of Israel carries on his legacy. Since Oct. 7, Israel has been tracking down each and every person involved in the savage massacre, rape and abduction of innocent Jews on that day. It is estimated that at least 6,000 Gazans attacked Israel. Israel’s intelligence forces, through lengthy investigations, have identified almost every terrorist involved in the brutality and barbarism. Hamas’s filming of their assault has helped determine the perpetrators. The capture of Hamas computers has helped as well. Just as Wiesenthal hunted down the Nazis, Israel is doing the same against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
The international community has not given Israel the credit it deserves for removing evil from the world. If Israel weren’t taking care of business, these very same terrorists would spread to U.S. shores.
Israel has killed numerous high-profile Hamas terrorists, including Rafa’a Salameh and Mohammed Deif in Khan Yunis; Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran; Fuad Shakr in Beirut; and Hamas commander Mohammed Jabarah in Lebanon.
A letter written in May by Salameh to Yahya Sinwar and his brother, Muhammad Sinwar, was found a few weeks ago at a bombing site, indicating that his brigade was in trouble. It said that half of his men were killed or incapacitated while many others fled. At the time he wrote the letter, Salameh said he had one-fifth of his original personnel and 10% of his rockets remaining. He had, Salameh told the Sinwar brothers, depleted 60% of his small arms and 70% of his anti-tank weapons.
On Aug. 12, Israel killed some 20 terrorists, including Islamic Jihad’s central Gaza brigade commander, on a strike on a school complex where the terrorists were hiding inside a civilian site and with human shields. Israel took out Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau in Beirut a week later, and it continues to root out terrorist leaders and actors.
Yet the extensive measures the Israel Defense Forces take to protect the Gazan population from combat zones have emboldened Hamas to continue to embed its operatives and military infrastructure in the humanitarian area.
That, of course, leads to condemnation by the world community, which is what happened on Sept. 12 when Israel struck another school where Hamas terrorists were hiding within a civilian center. The United Nations complained that some of its employees were killed in the strike. Yet those employees were not innocent bystanders. Israel was able to prove that at least three of the nine terrorists killed worked for the UNWRA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Israel has repeatedly shown that the organization has been complicit in not only the events of Oct. 7 but throughout the war. Hamas servers were found under UNRWA schools, tunnels have been found under the schools, and many UNRWA workers participated in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Similar to Wiesenthal and his search for Nazis, not a day goes by that Israel does not render justice to the participants of the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The long arm of the Jewish people is getting longer and stronger. Sinwar’s days are numbered.
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