'Conscience of the Holocaust,' Nazi hunter Wiesenthal dies

Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down Nazi war criminals following the Second World War, has died. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna at the age of 96.

Wiesenthal brought 1,100 Nazi fugitives to trial. Among them was Adolf Eichmann, the man entrusted by Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

"I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

"In a way, he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice."

Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine. He had been an architect before the Second World War. A survivor of five Nazi death camps, Wiesenthal dedicated himself to being a voice for the six million Jews who died during the genocide.

He lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal was best known for helping to track down Adolf Eichmann, one of the leaders of the SS, the Nazi party's elite paramilitary force. He was found in Argentina and abducted by Israeli agents in 1960. Eichmann was tried for his crimes in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962.

He also located Karl Silberbauer, the Austrian policeman Wiesenthal said to have arrested Anne Frank. Frank was the Dutch teenager who had hid with her family in an Amsterdam house until they were found in August 1944. Frank was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she died. Officials never reacted to Wiesenthal's tip about locating Silberbauer.

"When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it," Wiesenthal once said.

Wiesenthal will be buried in Israel.