The Man Who Will Not FORGET

Believing passionately that justice should know 'no limits in time or distance, Simon Wiesenthal has ferreted out more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals

- Joseph Blank

FEBRUARY 1973

As the chief judge recapitulated the defendant's crimes, the two outwardly most impassive listeners in the crowded courtroom in Düsseldorf, West Germany, were the accused, former SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl, and Simon Wiesenthal, a private citizen who had tracked Stangl for 20 years and was responsible for bringing him to justice.

At the opening of the trial, seven months previously, the prosecutor had declared, "Stangl is the highest-ranking official of a death camp that West Germany had ever been able to try.”

In his two-and-half-hour review on that cold 22 December 1970, the judge said, “The defendant, as commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, supervised the murder of at least 4,00,000 men, women and children." The judge's words gave new life to an ugly piece of history that many people wanted to forget. Stangl, who had defended himself with, “I only did my duty", stood at attention to hear his sentence: life imprisonment.

Wiesenthal, a bulky man of 100 kilograms with grey, thinning hair, a grey moustache and bright, alert eyes, strode quickly from the courtroom. (All his movements give an impression of power, of urgency, as if there isn't ever enough time for him to do what he wants to do.) In the corridor he stopped by a waste-paper bin, opened his wallet and extracted a picture of Stangl that was tucked between photographs of his wife and daughter. He had kept it as a constant reminder of Stangl's innocent victims. Now, silently, Wiesenthal tore up the picture.

He felt no elation: “Stangl's sentence meant nothing to me. It was purely symbolic. No punishment could be equated with the enormity of the crime. The important thing was that guilt had been established, and justice done."

DEBT TO THE DEAD