IN MEMORIAM: SIMON WIESENTHAL 1908-2005

Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, died in Vienna at the age of 96 on September 20. Mr. Wiesenthal is known for instigating the search and recollection of Nazi war criminals around the world. Besides his books

(The Murderers Among Us and Justice, Not Vengeance), he is recalled in movies and by the organizations to promote tolerance and study genocide which he helped establish.

These include the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles with its Museum of Tolerance, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York with its Tolerance Center, and the Institute for the Study of Genocide.

He is known to long-term members and officers of the Institute for the Study of Genocide as the honorary founder of the ISG, having supported its foundation (after he gave a speech at John Jay College of Criminal Justice) in 1981 and assisted it at the time with legal, moral and financial support. He also asked the ISG to assist him in convening a conference in New York in 1993, ��The Path Beyond Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina,�� which brought together human rights leaders and victims who had fled from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. One of the suggestions from that conference about exclusion of suspected war criminals from post-war governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina was later adapted in the Dayton Accords of 1995.

��Calling himself the ��bad conscience of the Nazis,�� he vowed to continue his efforts ��until the day I die.�� His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes are brought to light so that the new generation knows about them, so it ��should not happen again.�� It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87^th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal�� (New York Times, September 21, 2005). For a fuller account of his life and controversies, see the New York Times, September 21, 2005, 1.