End of an era

Some called him "Holocaust's avenging angel" whereas others like President Ronald Reagan of the United States described him as one of the "true heroes" of the 20th Century.

Yes you guess it right! We are talking about Simon Wiesenthal, who left for the hereafter on Tuesday, fully merited both descriptions. Ever since World War II ended in 1945, this survivor of two stints in German concentration camps in 1941-43 and 1944-45 respectively, launched a tireless campaign to bring to justice those who planned and implemented perhaps history's worst genocide - the Holocaust - launched by Adolf Hitler to achieve, what he euphemistically described as "the final solution to the Jewish problem".

Jews had been persecuted before. It was during the period of the Roman Empire from the first to the fourth centuries that the process of deporting them to live in specially designated areas, began. From the 14th Century, these came to be called ghettos in Europe after the Venice Ghetto which had an iron foundry (ghetto) before it was assigned to Jews. Throughout history, Jews have had to live with discrimination. What, however, began in Germany in 1933 when Hitler first came to power and spread to almost all over Europe as World War II progressed, has few parallels in the history of savagery.
The year 1933 saw not only the boycott of Jewish business and establishment of "Jewish quotas" in professions and schools in Germany but the setting up of a concentration camp at Dachau near Munich to which Jews and others considered undesirable by the Nazis were sent. The other notorious concentration camp in Germany - Buchenwald near Weimar - was established in 1937.

It was, however, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, which signaled the beginning of World War II, that the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazis to concentrate and eventually destroy Europe's Jews began taking shape. The process was completed by March 1942. The result was the establishment of concentration camps - Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mojdanek, Chelmno, Bergen-Belsen, Sascenhousen and Mauthausen, to name the more notorious - all over German-occupied Europe.

Six million Jews, two-thirds of Europe's total Jewish population, had perished by 1945 when Allied Forces destroyed Hitler's Third Reich. As the whole world reacted in shock and disbelief to the horrific chapters in human savagery that had been scripted by the Nazis, Wiesenthal, dozens of whose family members including his mother, step-father and step-mother were among those killed, got to work. Two years after World War II ended, he set up the Jewish Documentation Centre at Vienna. What followed was one of the most committed, painstaking and systematic hunt for the authors of the genocide, many of whom had began living under assumed names in different parts of the world, particularly in Latin America.

Efforts by him and his dedicated team brought to justice 1,100 of them including Adolf Eichmann, who supervised it all and who was executed in 1961. With his passing, the curtain finally descends on an era whose message for posterity must be never again.