Nazi hunter retires: 'My work is done'

Simon Wiesenthal, the man who has spent the past six decades hunting Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust, is to close his files for the last time.

The concentration camp survivor, now 94, says his work is done and no more war criminals remain left to find. "I found the mass murderers I was looking for, and I have outlived all of them," he said. "If there's a few I didn't look for, they are now too old and fragile to stand trial. My work is done."

Mr Wiesenthal has tracked down more than 1,000 war criminals, many of whom fled Germany at the end of the Second World War. One of his greatest successes was helping to find Adolf Eichmann in 1960. One of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and an architect of the "final solution", he was living under an assumed name in Argentina at the time.

But Mr Wiesenthal was equally concerned with the "small cogs" who helped to run the Holocaust machine. He located the Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer, who deported Anne Frank, and he was instrumental in bringing Fritz Strangl, the head of the Sobibor and Treblinka camps, to justice in 1967.

A Jewish rights organisation called the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was established in Los Angeles in 1977, in honour of his life's work.

In an interview with Format magazine, Mr Wiesenthal, an Austrian, said: "It is very difficult to get the public to really understand the crimes of these people ... Still I have to bother with people and groups who claim that the Holocaust never happened."

Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 to a comfortable Jewish family in Buczacz in present-day Ukraine, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, before moving to Prague to train as an architect.

His studies were interrupted by the war, most of which he spent in labour and concentration camps. When he was released he learned that 89 members of his family had died in the Holocaust, although his wife, Cyla, had escaped persecution.

He travelled to Nuremberg to pore over 110,000 tonnes of documents for evidence leading to Nazis suspected of being involved in the genocide of about six million Jews.

He worked initially for the war crimes section of the US Army, and in 1947 helped found a centre in Linz, where Hitler spent much of his childhood, dedicated to collecting information for war-crime trials.

The centre closed in 1954 after governments lost interest in Nazi war crimes because of the Cold War. But the capture of Eichmann by Israeli secret service agents and his trial and execution a year later reignited the desire for justice that went on to become Mr Wiesenthal's life work.