Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal (1908 – 2005) was an Austrian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his work as a Nazi hunter who pursued Nazi war criminals.

Following four and a half years in the German concentration camps such as Janowska, Plaszow, and Mauthausen during World War II, Wiesenthal dedicated most of his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazis so that they could be brought to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, in order to gather information for future war crime trials. Later he opened the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna. Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower, which describes a life-changing event he experienced when he was in the camp - a great work on forgiveness (if interested in the subject, listen here to the impressive story of my friend Hector Black). 

But, things are never as simple as they seem. Wiesenthal was in fact frequently on the payroll of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, a new biography asserts. And that's not all; lies about his C.V., education, made up stories about his time spent with partisans and in concentration camps... 

Difficult to find "truth" between the lines, the various opinions and commentators and really, does it matter apart from a historical point of view?