SIMON WIESENTHAL devoted his life to the documentation of the murder of European Jews by the Nazis and to the pursuit of their murderers. In doing so, he became the most famous of “Nazi-hunters”, helping to apprehend Franz Stangl, the commandant of the extermination camp at Treblinka, and Hermine Braunsteiner, of that at Majdanek, along with many others of lesser infamy.

Altogether, through the network of Simon Wiesenthal centres in the US, Europe and Israel, and the Jewish Documentation Centre he established in Vienna, he was credited with bringing more than 1,000 Nazi criminals to justice. He is notably supposed to have supplied the information that was to lead to the apprehension of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli secret services, leading to his trial and execution in Israel in 1962 — though this contention has not gone unchallenged.

His unrelenting pursuit of Nazi fugitives from justice became, over the years, the stuff of thriller novels and films. Frederick Forsyth put Wiesenthal into his novel The Odessa File and Ira Levin into his The Boys from Brazil — both of which translated into huge box-office earners on the screen. A number of other films were also apparently inspired by him.

Wiesenthal did not, however, win the Nobel Peace Prize for which his work might have seemed to make him a natural candidate. And the very dedication with which he pursued his goals exposed him from time to time in his career to painful and bitter controversy.

Not surprisingly, Wiesenthal became a figure of hate for neo-Nazis. Large sums were offered to kill him. Klaus Barbie (and possibly the PLO) considered assassinating him, and in 1982 a bomb destroyed part of his house and shattered his wife’s health. Hatred from such quarters was to be expected. What distressed Wiesenthal more were quarrels with other Jews and Nazi-hunting groups and individuals who were sceptical of his record. Among these were the Mossad chief Isser Harel and the Romanian and German-born Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 at Buczacz, near Lemberg, in the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His upbringing was comparatively comfortable. In the early years of the last century, a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism did not as yet pose a physical threat to the Jews of Austria-Hungary. Lemberg (subsequently and successively Lwow in Poland and Lvov in the Soviet Union, now Lviv in Ukraine) was a city where a Jewish family like the one into which Simon Wiesenthal was born could prosper.

That was decidedly less true of Poland, which gained its independence after the First World War, as he grew up. Wiesenthal was educated at a local gymnasium or grammar school, where he met his future wife, Cyla. He then studied architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague, returning to Lwow to set up in practice despite the increasingly hostile climate.

In his childhood, his family had already known all about invasion. They had fled when Galicia was conquered by the Russian armies in the opening battles of the First World War, returning with the Austrians in 1917. Then came the Ukrainians, threatening a massacre of Jews, then the Poles, then the Bolsheviks, then the Poles again.

“To survive under such circumstances is a school,” Wiesenthal once said, adding bleakly that: “Nobody could teach us anything new until a couple of liberations later, we got Hitler.”

The arrival of the Germans brought an end to the world Wiesenthal had known, and brought death to millions of Jews, among them more than 80 of his kinsmen. Any Jew who survived the horror needed rare luck. If he later became prominent, there was scope for malicious rumour spread by enemies; and Wiesenthal had many of those.

After he had been rounded up Wiesenthal was sent to a labour camp near Lwow, whose function was to service the railway. Harsh enough by the standards of any other time and place, the camp was, as he recalled, “an island of sanity in a sea of madness”. The two Germans in charge of it were almost humane, and Wiesenthal’s skills as a draughtsman helped to save him.

As the pace of the mass murder of Jews accelerated, Wiesenthal managed to get his wife out of the camp with help from the Polish resistance. He then escaped himself but was recaptured in June 1944. He ascribed his continuing survival to the belief among the SS unit which held him that guarding live prisoners would prevent its members from being sent to the horrors of the Eastern front.

Wiesenthal was then sent on a grim march westwards. By the end of the war he was in the notorious Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, where he was liberated by the US Army on May 5, 1945, weighing barely seven stone. He was soon recovered enough to help to organise relief work for displaced persons, and as a happy result made contact with his wife, who had ended the war as a forced labourer in Germany.