A thought on the importance of witnesses

“Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.”
— Simon Wiesenthal

When he died in 2005 at the age of 96, Simon Wiesenthal was the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. A Holocaust survivor liberated from one of the death camps in 1945, Wiesenthal spent decades tracking down not Nazis, and to do that, he spoke with countless people to piece together stories that Nazis and their supporters wanted to bury.

About five years after his death, a biographer who had access to hundreds of thousands of his records published a book that found Wiesenthal was not quite a one-man army for justice, but had in fact quietly had the support through payroll of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. Tom Segev’s book Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends added detail to an effort that, regardless of who paid the bills, had a considerable impact for years after the Holocaust.