Holocaust survivor and tireless Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his Vienna home Tuesday at the age of 96.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said in a statement "Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust," the Los Angeles Times reported.
Wiesenthal's biographers credit him with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler's killers and other Nazi war criminals since World War II.
He "bullied, cajoled and massaged" officials and ordinary people to confront those horrors, said Hella Pick, author of "Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice," but he "never swerved from his conviction that an essential part of the process of coming to terms with the Holocaust is to catch the mass murderers and give them fair trials."
Wiesenthal's wife of 67 years, Cyla, who once said that living with the Nazi hunter was like being "married to thousands, or maybe millions, of dead," died in November 2003. He is survived by their daughter Paulinka.
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