Nazi-hunter
At the time of his liberation, Wiesenthal stood at 1.80 m (5 ft, 11 in) and weighed less than 45 kg (99 lb.). As soon as his health improved, Wiesenthal claimed he began working for the U.S. Army, gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. Wiesenthal’s own résumé does not mention this work for the Americans, but lists his occupation at the time as the vice-chairman of the Jewish Central Committee for the U.S. zone, based in Linz, Austria. Its task was to draw up lists of survivors that other survivors could consult in their hunt for relatives.
He was also president of the Paris-based International Concentration Camp Organisation and was involved with the Berihah, who smuggled Jews out of Europe to Palestine. In February 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz to gather information for future trials. However, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost interest in further war crimes trials, the group drifted apart after compiling 3,289 reports. Wiesenthal continued to gather information in his spare time while working full time to help those affected by World War II.
During this time, Wiesenthal claimed to be instrumental in the capture and conviction of the transport manager of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. Wiesenthal was known to be helping in the manhunt for the former Nazi official, but the extent of his involvement with Eichmann's capture remains disputed. He was invited by Yad Vashem to talk about his part in tracking Eichmann down, but he failed to mention that his whole correspondence had gone through the Israeli embassy and that Israeli intelligence had been involved. Wiesenthal’s claims angered Isser Harel, then-head of the Mossad, who published his own memoirs in 1971 in which he made no mention of Wiesenthal. Harel's account has been disputed at book length, but Wiesenthal's contributions to Eichmann’s capture have never been confirmed. Nonetheless, Wiesenthal's work with Eichmann's wife and children might have proved essential in maintaining the hunt for Eichmann.
Important to this and other accusations is that Wiesenthal's ecumenical but determined attitude toward tracking human-rights abuses, represented by his comments "justice, not vengeance" and "I am not a hater," have put him at odds with a wide variety of institutions and people over the years. One such person is Elie Wiesel who took issue with Wiesenthal's efforts to recognize the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.
After Eichmann's 1962 execution in Israel, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which began to focus on other cases. The Center was funded in part by the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency, who also paid Wiesenthal a monthly stipend of $300 for about 10 years according to Tom Segev.
Among his most high-profile successes was the capture of Karl Silberbauer, the SD officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Silberbauer's confession helped discredit claims that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. During this period, Wiesenthal also located nine of the 16 Nazis later put on trial in West Germany for the murder of the Jewish population of Lviv and also the capture of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a former Aufseherin (literally, "female overseer") living in the Queens borough of New York City who had ordered and participated in the torture and murder of thousands of women and children at Majdanek. Braunsteiner's capture led to the establishment of the U.S. Office of Special Investigations to investigate Nazi activity within the U.S.
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