Simon Wiesenthal; The Life and Legends

New York: Doubleday, 2010. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Dan Porges (Author photograph). viii, [2], 482, [4] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Tom Segev (born March 1, 1945) is an Israeli historian, author and journalist. He is associated with Israel's New Historians, a group challenging many of the country's traditional narratives. Segev worked during the 1970s as a correspondent for Maariv in Bonn. He writes a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz. His books have appeared in fourteen languages. In The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1993), Segev explores the impact of the Holocaust on the identity, ideology and politics of Israel. Although controversial, it was praised by Elie Wiesel. In One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, a New York Times Editor's Choice Best Book (2000) and a recipient of a National Jewish Book Award in the Israel category, Segev describes the era of the British Mandate in Palestine (1917-1948). Segev's history of the social and political background of the Six-Day War, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2006) states that there was no existential threat to Israel. Segev also doubts that the Arab neighbors would have attacked Israel. Large segments of the Israeli population had a real fear that the Egyptians and Syrians would eliminate them. That fear pressured the Israeli government that it opted for a pre-emptive attack. The Jordanian army's attack on West Jerusalem provided a pretext to invade East Jerusalem, according to Segev. Even though the occupation of East Jerusalem was not politically planned, the author considers that it was always desired. This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero-depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier-and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is compelling. Simon Wiesenthal is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.