Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna Jew who has devoted his life to collecting material on Nazis who killed Jews and are still roaming around free throughout the world with false identity documents, arrived here today for a tour throughout the United States, during which he will address public meetings in various cities on his experiences in tracing Nazi war criminals.
Mr. Wiesenthal, who was himself an inmate in several Nazi annihilation camps, addressed this morning leaders of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and answered questions to press representatives on his activities in hunting hidden Nazis guilty of deporting and of mass-killing of Jews. He said that he has a list of 22,500 such Nazi war criminals.
Franz Stangl, the commander of the Nazi death camps in Treblinka and Sobibor, where hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in gas chambers, is one of those who was traced by Mr. Wiesenthal and arrested in Sao Paulo, Brazil. West Germany, Austria and Poland have applied to Brazil for Stangl’s extradition in order to put him on trial for the murder of 700,000 persons. He is now held in a prison in Sao Paulo pending a decision of a Brazilian court as to whether he should be extradited.
Mr. Wiesenthal will address a public meeting in New York tomorrow, arranged jointly by the Farband-Labor Zionist Organization and the Organization of Nazi Victims in the United States. A book of his memoirs, entitled “The Murderers Among Us,” was published in New York this week by McGraw-Hill publishing company.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.