VIENNA (Stars and Stripes) — While the genocide committed during World War II by Nazi Germany has no precedent in modern history and nothing of such magnitude has been known in recorded history, the question of guilt that has been laid on the entire German people must end, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said here.

"It must end," said Wiesenthal, "so our grandchildren will not someday call the children of Germans `the offspring of mass murderers."'

Wiesenthal, a Polish-born Jew, spent four years in Nazi concentration camps and narrowly escaped death several times. He has collected more than 3,000 files on Nazi criminals and is working on 320 cases.

He said that young people living in Germany and Austria today deserve the right to live without a sense of guilt. He noted that the young people of today are basically "good."

"We sometimes can only see a few hundred from the left or right extremes who cause trouble," he added. "But, they do not represent the hundreds of thousands of good young people of our world."

A former architect who was born to a deeply religious family of a successful Jewish businessman in what is now Poland, Wiesenthal said that following his liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria by U.S. combat troops in May 1945, he not only saw the rubble of cities and towns but the rubble of human relations as well.

"I did not believe I could ever build a house again. My memory is a picture book. I can't forget what happened even though through my work I prolong my stay in the camps," said Wiesenthal, who has helped track down and apprehend some 300 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann.

Wiesenthal said that he is fighting time as well as some governments in his efforts to track down Nazi mass murderers and bring them to justice. He said that many witnesses to the terrors of the concentration camps have died and many of the men and women he seeks are more than 70 years old.

"But," he quickly added, "they know that we will not forget them even though it might be impossible to catch everyone of them and bring them to trial."

Wiesenthal, who was 36 years old and weighed only 90 pounds when he was liberated by American infantrymen, said that no one can ever be punished for the death of millions of people during World War II.

"A man's life is not so long," he continued. "But the guilty verdict is important for the future. The trial of Adolf Eichmann was more of a historical lesson for the world than a trial. By showing the world, through his testimony, that what we say happened DID HAPPEN, hopefully we may be able to prevent a future genocide.

"Men who committed mass murders must be caught and brought to trial. It is our obligation to those who were killed by them. If you pardon one genocide you open the door for the next," said Wiesenthal, whom his friends call "the watcher and warner."

Many Jews who lived through the terror of the Third Reich went to America or Israel following the war, trying to forget the time they spent in the Nazi concentration camps while seeking to rebuild their shattered lives. Wiesenthal volunteered to work for the U.S. Army and track down war criminals in Austria in 1945.

Leaving the Army, Wiesenthal set up a small documentation center in 1947 in Linz, Austria, where he helped his fellow Jews trace missing relatives and where he continued to track down Nazi murderers who were still roaming around.

Wiesenthal's center was located two doors from the home of the family of Adolf Eichmann. At that time witnesses abounded, memories were fresh, and Wiesenthal's center was successful in apprehending more than 1,000 war criminals.

"By 1954," said Wiesenthal, "de-Nazification seemed almost a dead issue. It was the time of the `Cold War'. And during the Cold War, Nazi criminals won. They had time to escape."

Wiesenthal closed his center. It seemed that the work he called "a divine service" was at an end. He packed his files and records and sent them to the Jewish archives in Jerusalem and went to work for the U.S. embassy as a director for schools assisting Hungarian refugees.

In 1959, the Israeli government asked Wiesenthal to help their agents track down Eichmann, the man who headed Hitler's "final solution."

"The Eichmann affair, the hunt and capture, was a mosaic," he says. "In 1953, Eichmann was in my hands. I had found him, through a stamp collector, and no one believed me. In 1959, working through tips, fragments of photos taken of his family, we were able to trace Eichmann to Argentina.

The Israelis took the lead provided by Wiesenthal and, in 1961, Eichmann was convicted and hanged in Israel.

Wiesenthal moved to Vienna and opened the present documentation center in the Rudolfsplatz. He is 64 now, balding, with a black mustache. Since he opened his Vienna office, Wiesenthal has tracked down Eric Raja, who sent Holland's Jews to their deaths; and William Rosenbaum, who received 18 life sentences for his crimes in Poland. Hermine Braunsteiner, also known as Hermine Ryan, a former camp guard at Majdanek, who allegedly murdered 600 children by gassing them, was found living as a housewife in a Jewish neighborhood in New York.

Wiesenthal also tracked down Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi who had apprehended Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam. Wiesenthal said it was his most "emotional case."

"He was a little man," explained Wiesenthal, "working in Vienna as a policeman, and he did not stand trial. But what he said killed neo-Nazi claims that the Anne Frank story was a Jewish lie."

Wiesenthal also helped track down Franz Stangl, commandant of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka, who was sentenced to life imprisonment. Stangl was responsible for nearly 700,000 deaths.

Among those Wiesenthal seeks today is Dr. Josef Mengele, the former chief doctor at Auschwitz who now lives in. Paraguay.

"We've spotted him many times," said Wiesenthal. "We have photos that were taken while he was walking along the street. But in South America asylum is a holy matter. There will be no more kidnapings as in the Eichmann case. We hope Mengele makes a mistake. We are waiting."

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