Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908 in a small town near the present-day Ukrainian city of Lvov. He attended the Technical University of Prague after being turned away from the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov because of quota restrictions on Jewish students. He received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932 and opened an architectural office in Lvov. He was forced to close his business at the beginning of World War II. By September 1942, a total of eighty-nine members of both his and his wife's families perished. He was liberated from the Mauthausen death camp in Austria by the Americans on May 5, 1945. It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned during the war.
After the war, Wiesenthal began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army and other organizations. He spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals and speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism. His main function as a Nazi hunter was gathering and analyzing information and then passing it on to the appropriate authorities. According to him, his work helped bring about 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice; including Adolf Eichmann, Karl Silberbauer, and Franz Stangl. He died on September 20, 2005 in Vienna at the age of 96.
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