Portrait - Simon Wiesenthal

Interviewed in 1989, Simon Wiesenthal talks about his early life as an architect and his incarceration by the Nazis in the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mauthausen (from which he was liberated by the Americans). He also discusses the success of his organisation in prosecuting war criminals, perhaps most famously Adolf Eichmann.

In all, Simon Wiesenthal was believed to have brought 1,100 war criminals to trial. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, set up in the USA in 1977, has pressed for the extradition of numerous war crime suspects and campaigned for the rights of Holocaust survivors and for an end to pensions for former SS officers.