Herb Kohl: “today the world has lost one of the great crusaders for justice, Simon Wiesenthal. After suffering through many Nazi…”

“today the world has lost one of the great crusaders for justice, Simon Wiesenthal. After suffering through many Nazi death camps, he emerged from the war with a mission to bring the architects of the Holocaust and their collaborators to account for their crimes. Later in life his work was valuable for establishing the facts of the Holocaust and keeping the memory of the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust alive. Simon Wiesenthal was a valuable voice of conscience when many around the world wanted to ignore these horrible crimes and forget this awful period of the 20th century. A successful Ukrainian architect before the war, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, he was rounded up with his family and narrowly escaped death. He would spend the rest of the war in a variety of death and work camps. After the war he was eager to work with the Americans to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice for their war crimes during the Holocaust. When the Allies seemed to tire of bringing former members of the Third Reich to justice, Simon Wiesenthal continued his work on his own, painstakingly researching and identifying members of the Gestapo and SS. He may be most famously known as the man who found Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of Hitler's campaign to eradicate the Jews. Bringing Eichmann to justice was no doubt the most high profile of his successes, and he was able to use that spotlight to help him find and ferret out more criminals.…”