Army of Sambre and Meuse

The Army of Sambre and Meuse (French: Armée de Sambre-et-Meuse) was one of the armies of the French Revolution. It was formed on 29 June 1794 by combining the Army of the Ardennes, the left wing of the Army of the Moselle and the right wing of the Army of the North. Its maximum paper strength (in 1794) was approximately 120,000.

After an inconclusive campaign in 1795, the French planned a co-ordinated offensive in 1796 using Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's Army of the Sambre et Meuse and the Army of the Rhine and Moselle commanded by his superior, Jean Victor Moreau. The first part of the operation called for Jourdan to cross the Rhine north of Mannheim and divert the Austrians while the Army of the Moselle crossed the southern Rhine at Kehl and Huningen. This was successful and, by July 1796, a series of victories forced the Austrians, commanded by Archduke Charles to retreat into the German states. By late July, most of the southern German states had been coerced into an armistice. The Army of Sambre and Meuse maneuvered around northern Bavaria and Franconia, and the Army of the Rhine and Moselle operated in Bavaria.

Internal disputes between Moreau and Jourdan and with Jourdan's subordinate commanders within the Army of the Sambre and Meuse prevented the two armies from uniting. This gave the Austrian commander time to reform his own forces, driving Jourdan to the northwest. By the end of September 1796, Charles had permanently separated the two French armies, forcing Jourdan's command further northwest and eventually across the Rhine. On 29 September 1797, the Army of Sambre and Meuse merged with the Army of the Rhine and Moselle to become the Army of Germany.

## Background

Initially, the rulers of Europe viewed the 1789 revolution in France as an internal matter between the French king and his subjects. In 1790, Leopold succeeded his brother Joseph as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; by 1791, the danger to his sister, Marie Antoinette and her children, alarmed him. In August 1791, in consultation with French émigré nobles and Frederick William II of Prussia, Leopold's Declaration of Pillnitz articulated that the interests of the monarchs of Europe were as one with the interests of Louis and his family. He and his fellow monarchs threatened unspecified consequences if anything should happen to the royal family. French émigrés continued to agitate for support of a counter-revolution, and on 20 April 1792 the French National Convention declared war on Austria. In this War of the First Coalition (1792–1798), France ranged itself against most of the European states sharing its land or water borders, plus Portugal and the Ottoman Empire.

Although initially successful in the campaigns of 1792 and 1793, the French army lost some effectiveness during the Reign of Terror, during which its generals were intimidated or executed and many of the army's experienced officers left France for safer havens. Elements of the armies that were later formed into the Army of Sambre and Meuse participated in the conquest of the Dutch Republic and the siege of Luxembourg. The various elements of the army won a victory at the Battle of Fleurus on 16 June 1794. The merging of the forces into the Army of Sambre and Meuse was made official soon afterwards. Shortly after Fleurus, the position of the First Coalition in Flanders collapsed and the French armies overran the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic in the winter of 1794–1795. French and Coalition military strategy subsequently focused on the Rhine river as the principle line of defense: for each side, control of the opposite bank or at least, the river's principal crossings, was the basis of defensive strategy.

### Geopolitical terrain

#### Geography

The Rhine River flows west along the border between the German states and the Swiss Cantons. The 80 mi (130 km) stretch between Rheinfall, by Schaffhausen and Basel, is the High Rhine (Hochrhein); it cuts through steep hillsides over a gravel bed, and moves in torrents in such paces as the former rapids at Laufenburg. A few miles north and east of Basel, the terrain flattens. The Rhine makes a wide, northerly turn, in what is called the Rhine knee, and enters the so-called Rhine ditch (Rheingraben), part of a rift valley bordered by the Black Forest on the east and Vosges mountains on the west.

The Rhine looked different in the 1790s than it does in the twenty-first century; the passage from Basel to Iffezheim was "corrected" (straightened) between 1817 and 1875. Construction of a canal to control the water level occurred from 1927 to 1974. In 1790, the river was wild and unpredictable, in some places more than four times wider than in the twenty-first century, even under normal conditions. Its channels wound through marsh and meadow and created islands of trees and vegetation that were periodically submerged by floods. Systems of viaducts and causeways made access reliable at Kehl, by Strasbourg, and at Hüningen, by Basel. In 1796, the plain on both sides of the river, some 19 mi (31 km) wide, was dotted with villages and farms. At the furthest edges of the flood plain, especially on the eastern side, the old mountains created dark shadows on the horizon. Tributaries cut through the hilly terrain of the Black Forest, creating deep defiles in the mountains, and became rivulets through the flood plain to the river.

#### Politics

The German-speaking states on the east bank of the Rhine were part of the vast complex of territories in central Europe called the Holy Roman Empire. The number of territories in the Empire included more than 1,000 entities. Their size and influence varied, from the Kleinstaaten (little states) that covered no more than a few square miles to large and powerful states. The states and territories involved in late 1796 included the Breisgau (Habsburg), Offenburg and Rottweil (imperial cities), the princely states of Fürstenberg, Neuenburg and Hohenzollern, the Margraviate of Baden, the Duchy of Württemberg, and several dozen ecclesiastic polities. Rule varied: they included free imperial cities of different sizes, such as the powerful Augsburg and the minuscule Weil der Stadt; ecclesiastical territories, also of varying sizes and influence, such as the wealthy Abbey of Reichenau and the powerful Archbishopric of Cologne; and such dynastic states as Württemberg. When viewed on a map, the Empire resembled a Flickenteppich (patchwork carpet). Some states included non-contiguous pieces, the Habsburg domains and Hohenzollern Prussia also governed territories outside the Empire, such as the Habsburg territories in eastern Europe and northern Italy; for others, a village could belong predominantly to one polity but have a farmstead, a house or even one or two strips of land that belonged to another polity. There were also territories surrounded by France that belonged to Württemberg, such as the county of Solm, the archbishopric of Trier and Hesse-Darmstadt. Among the German-speaking states, the Holy Roman Empire's administrative and legal mechanisms provided a venue to resolve disputes between peasants and landlords, between and within jurisdictions. Through the organization of Imperial Circles (Reichskreise), groups of states consolidated resources and promoted regional and organizational interests, including economic cooperation and military protection.

## Purpose and formation

### Military challenges

By 1792 the armies of the French Republic were in a state of disruption; experienced soldiers of the Ancien Régime fought side by side with volunteers. Recruits, urged on by revolutionary fervor from the special representatives—agents of the legislature, sent to ensure cooperation among the military—lacked the discipline and training to function efficiently; frequently insubordinate, they often refused orders and undermined unit cohesion. After a defeat, they were capable of mutiny, as Théobald Dillon learned when his troops lynched him in 1792.

The problems of command became more acute following the 1793 introduction of mass conscription (levée en masse). French commanders walked a fine line between the security of the frontier and the Parisian clamor for victory. Add to this the desperate condition of the Army—in training, supplies and leadership—and the military leadership faced a crisis. They were constantly under suspicion from the representatives of the new regime and sometimes from their own soldiers. Failure to achieve unrealistic expectations implied disloyalty and the price of disloyalty was an appointment with Madame guillotine: several of the highest ranking generals, including the aged Nicolas Luckner, Jean Nicolas Houchard, Adam Philippe Custine, Arthur Dillon and Antoine Nicolas Collier, were killed. Francisco de Miranda's failure to take Maastricht landed him in La Force Prison for several years. Many of the old officer class had emigrated, forming émigré armies; the cavalry in particular suffered from their departure and the Hussards du Saxe and the 15éme Cavalerie (Royal Allemande) regiments defected en masse to the Austrians. The artillery arm, considered by the old nobility to be an inferior assignment, was less affected by emigration and survived intact.

Military planners in Paris understood that the upper Rhine Valley, the south-western German territories and Danube river basin held strategic importance for the defense of the Republic. The Rhine offered a formidable barrier to what the French perceived as Austrian aggression and the state that controlled its crossings controlled the river and access into the territories on either side. Ready access across the Rhine and along the Rhine bank between the German states and Switzerland or through the Black Forest, gave access to the upper Danube river valley. For the French, control of the Upper Danube or any point in between, was of immense strategic value and would give the French a reliable approach to Vienna.

### Original formation

The basic unit of the army, the demi-brigade, mixed the men of the old army with the recruits from the levee en masse. Ideally, it was designed to include the regular infantry inherited from the old Royal regiments of the King, who were relatively well trained and equipped, dressed in white uniforms and wearing tarleton helmets, with the national guard units, who were less well-trained or equipped, with blue uniforms, and the fédéré volunteer battalions, who were poorly trained and equipped, with no uniform other than a red phrygian cap and a cockade of France. In 1794, the right flank of the Armies of the Center, later called the Army of the Moselle, the entirety of the Armies of the North and the Ardennes formed the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, on 29 June 1794. The remaining units of the former Army of the Center and the Army of the Rhine united initially on 29 November 1794 and formally on 20 April 1795, under command of General Jean-Charles Pichegru as the Army of the Rhine and Moselle. These were the French armies involved in the successes at Fleurus and the Lowlands, but the strength of the units had been enhanced by untrained conscripts.

Pressures exerted by the Coalition forces on the French front at the Rhine required the movement of the Army of Sambre and Meuse troops from the Fortress of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands into a unit on the middle Rhine. These units were reorganized into task forces that wcould engage the Austrian and Coalition forces directly in the Rhineland. Its paper strength equaled close to 83,000 men, although its actual strength was considerably less. By 1 October 1795, some of the troops had been assembled in five locations to form an advanced guard of 63,615, men commanded by the veteran General of Division François Joseph Lefebvre. General Louis Friant's division of 3,296 men remained at the Luxembourg fortress and General Antoine Morlot's division of 3,471 remained in Aachen.

#### Hochheim am Main (Zeilsheim and Niederliederbach)

- Divisional position unnamed

\*Generals of Brigade Jean François Leval, Jean-Baptiste Jacopin and Jean-Joseph Ange d'Hautpoul

\*10th and 13th Demi-brigades Legere

\*8th, 90th and 119th Demi-brigades de Ligne

\*1st, 6th and 9th Chasseurs de Cheval

: \*Total 12,618 men

#### Herdenheim and Helsheim

- General of Division Jacques Louis François Delaistre de Tilly

\*General of Brigade Bernard Étienne Marie Duvignau and Jean Thomas Guillaume Lorge

\*23rd, 27th and 72nd Demi brigades de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\*Guard Unit Yonne (3 battalions)

\*12th Chasseurs de Chaval

: \* Total: 9,861 men

#### Weilbach am Main

- General of Division Paul Grenier

\*Generals of Brigade Henri Simon, Jean-Baptiste Olivié, and Christophe Ossvald

\*110th and 173rd Demi brigades de Ligne

\*112th and 172nd Demi brigades de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\*19th Chasseurs de Chaval

\*4th Hussars

: \*Total 11,150 men

#### North bank of Main, by streams of Wicker and Weilbach

- General of Division André Poncet

\*Generals of Brigade Jean-Baptiste Schlachter and Jean-de-Dieu Soult

\*53rd, 87th, 66th and 116th Demi brigades (3 battalions each)

\* 7th and 11th Dragoons

: \*Total: 9,384 men

#### Plateau west of Mainz

- General of Division Jean Étienne Championnet

\*Generals of Brigade Claude Juste Alexandre Louis Legrand and Louis Klein

\* 59th, 132nd and 181st Demi brigades de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\* 1st and 12th Dragoon Regiments

: \*total: 9,816 men

#### Biebrich and Kastel

- General of Division Bernadotte

\*Generals of Brigade Charles Daurier and Gabriel Barbou des Courières

\* 21st Demi-brigade de Legere

\* 71st, 111th and 123rd Demi brigades de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\* 2nd Hussars and 3rd Chasseurs de Chaval

: \*Total: 8,223

#### Langenhain and Marxheim

- General of Division Louis-Auguste Juvénal des Ursins d'Harville

\*6th, 8th, 10, and 13th Cavalry Regiments (four squadrons each)

: \* Total 1,593 men

#### Ehrenbreitstein castle

- General of Division François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers

\* Generals of Brigade Gilbert Bandy de Nalèche and Jean Hardy

\* 1st, 9th, 21st, 26th and 178th Demi brigades de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\*11th Chasseurs de Chaval

\*31st Gendarmes (1 battalion)

: \*Total 11,240 men

#### Dusseldorf

- General of Division Claude-Sylvestre Colaud

\* Generals of Brigade Louis Bastoul and Charles Jean Theodore Schoenmezel

\* 34th, 112th and 175th Demi brigade de Ligne (3 battalions each)

\* four composite battalions of unknown composition

\* 2nd and 14th Dragoons

\*Total 8,911 men

## Campaign of 1795

In 1795 the French sent the Army of the Sambre and Meuse, also called the northern army, and the Army of the Rhine and Moselle, sometimes called the southern army, in thrusts across the Rhine. After winning a bridgehead on the east bank, the northern French army under Jourdan advanced south to the Main River. On 8 September 1795, Jourdan's northern army crossed the Rhine north of Düsseldorf. Besieging the Bavarian garrison in Düsseldorf, the rest of the Army of Sambre and Meuse swept south as far as the Lahn River, by 20 September. Hemmed in by Lefebvre and 12,600 French troops, Count Hompesch surrendered the Bavarian garrison at Düsseldorf on 21 September.

Threatened by Jourdan's incursion, the Habsburg commander, François Sébastien Charles Joseph de Croix, Count of Clerfayt, shifted his army north to oppose him. This movement gave Pichegru the opportunity to move his army against the weakened rear guard of Clerfayt's force. Despite having a sizable garrison force, Baron von Belderbusch turned over Mannheim and its 471 guns to the Army of Rhine and Moselle after negotiations. The Austrians were furious at their ally but could do nothing to prevent the French from gaining this valuable bridgehead. Pichegru, the commander of the southern French army, proved uncooperative, which allowed Clerfayt to maneuver the bulk of the Austrian forces against Jourdan. Clerfayt crossed the Main to the east, gaining a dangerously exposed position on the French left flank. After being repulsed at Höchst, the French withdrew northwards, eventually abandoning the east bank of the Rhine.

## Campaign of 1796

The campaign of 1796 was part of the French Revolutionary Wars in which republican France pitted itself against a fluid coalition of Prussians and Austrians and several other states of the Holy Roman Empire, the British, Sardinians, Dutch and royalist French emigres. The French had won several victories but the campaigns of 1793 through 1795 had been less successful. The Coalition partners had difficulty coordinating their war aims and their efforts faltered. In 1794 and 1795, French victories in northern Italy salvaged French enthusiasm for the war and forced the Coalition to withdraw further into Central Europe. At the end of the Rhine Campaign of 1795, the Habsburg Coalition and the French Republicans called a truce between their forces that had been fighting in Germany. The agreement lasted until 20 May 1796, when the Austrians announced that the truce would end on 31 May.

The Austrian Army of the Lower Rhine included 90,000 Habsburg and Imperial troops. The 20,000-man right wing, first under Duke Ferdinand Frederick Augustus of Württemberg, then later under Wilhelm von Wartensleben, stood on the east bank of the Rhine behind the Sieg River, observing the French bridgehead at Düsseldorf. The garrisons of Mainz Fortress and Ehrenbreitstein Fortress included 10,000 more. The remainder of the Imperial and Coalition army, the 80,000-strong Army of the Upper Rhine, secured the west bank behind the Nahe River. Commanded by Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser, this force anchored its right wing in Kaiserslautern on the west bank, while the left wing under Anton Sztáray, Michael von Fröhlich and Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé guarded the Rhine from Mannheim to Switzerland. The original Austrian strategy was to capture Trier and to use their position on the west bank to strike at each of the French armies in turn. After news arrived in Vienna of Napoleon Bonaparte's successes in northern Italy, Wurmser was sent to there with 25,000 reinforcements and the Aulic Council gave Archduke Charles command over both Austrian armies in the Rhineland and ordered him to hold his ground.

Two French armies opposed the Imperial and Coalition troops. Jean Victor Moreau's commanded both armies, but the northern army, Sambre and Moselle, was large enough for a sub command: Jourdan. The 80,000-man Army of Sambre and Meuse held the west bank of the Rhine down to the Nahe and then southwest to Sankt Wendel. On the army's left flank, Jean Baptiste Kléber had 22,000 troops in an entrenched camp at Düsseldorf. The Army of the Rhine and Moselle, directly commanded by Moreau, was positioned behind (west of) the Rhine from Hüningen, where Pierre Marie Barthélemy Ferino commanded the furthest right wing, northward, along the Queich River near Landau, and with its left wing extended west toward Saarbrücken. The far right wing under.

The French plan called for a spring (April–May–June) offensive, during which two French armies would press against the flanks of the Coalition's northern armies in the German states and a third army approached Vienna through Italy. Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's army would push south from Düsseldorf, hopefully drawing troops toward themselves, while Moreau's army massed on the east side of the Rhine by Mannheim; a deft feint toward Mannheim caused Charles to reposition his troops. Once this occurred, Moreau's army executed a forced march south and, on 23 June, overwhelmed the bridgehead at Kehl. The Imperial troops there included only 7,000 troops recruited that spring from the Swabian Circle polities; despite their lack of experience and training, they held the bridgehead for several hours before retreating toward Rastatt. Moreau reinforced the bridgehead with his forward guard and his troops poured into Baden unhindered. In the south, by the Swiss city of Basel, Ferino's column moved quickly across the river and advanced (eastward) up the Rhine along the Swiss and German shoreline toward Lake Constance, spreading into the southern end of the Black Forest. Worried that his supply lines would be overextended or his army would be flanked, Charles retreated to the east. By the end of July, the entirety of the Swabian Circle, most of Bavaria, Franconia, Baden and Wuerttemberg had reached a separate peace with the French. which disarmed the Imperial army, and gave French free rein to demand supplies from the southern polities.

With Charles absent from the north, Jourdan recrossed the Rhine and drove Wartensleben behind the Lahn river. The Army of Sambre and Meuse defeated its opponents at Friedberg, Hesse on 10 July, while Charles was busy at Ettlingen. Jourdan captured Frankfurt am Main on 16 July. Leaving behind François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers with 28,000 troops to blockade Mainz and Ehrenbreitstein, Jourdan pressed up the Main River. Following Carnot's strategy, the French commander continually operated against Wartensleben's north flank, causing the Austrian general to fall back. Jourdan's army numbered over 46,000 men, while Wartensleben counted 36,000 troops; Wartensleben refused to attack the larger French force. Buoyed up by their forward movement and by the capture of Austrian supplies, the French captured Würzburg on 4 August. Three days later, the Army of Sambre and Meuse, under the temporary direction of Kléber, won another clash with Wartensleben at Forchheim on 7 August. Despite this success, though, the two French armies remained separated.

### Losing the initiative in late summer

Archduke Charles saw that if he could unite with Wartenbsleben, he could pick off the French armies in succession. Having sufficient reinforcements and having transferred his supply line from Vienna to Bohemia, he moved north to unite with Wartensleben. With 25,000 of his best troops, Charles crossed to the north bank of the Danube at Regensburg. On 22 August 1796, Charles and Friedrich Joseph, Count of Nauendorf, encountered Bernadotte's division at Neumarkt. The outnumbered French were driven north west through Altdorf bei Nürnberg to the Pegnitz River. Leaving Friedrich Freiherr von Hotze with a division to pursue Bernadotte, the Archduke thrust north at Jourdan's right flank. The French fell back to Amberg as Charles and Wartensleben's forces converged on the Army of Sambre and Meuse. On 20 August, Moreau sent Jourdan a message vowing to closely follow Charles, which he did not do. In the Battle of Amberg on 24 August, Charles defeated the French and destroyed two battalions of their rear guard. The Austrians lost 400 killed and wounded out of 40,000 troops. Of a total of 34,000 soldiers, the French suffered greater losses of 1,200 killed and wounded plus 800 men and two colors captured. Jourdan retreated first to Sulzbach and then behind the Regnitz river where Bernadotte joined him on 28 August. Hotze and his Habsburg troops reoccupied Nürnberg and Jourdan, who had expected Moreau to keep Charles occupied in the south, found himself outnumbered.

### Collapse in September 1796

As Jourdan fell back to Schweinfurt, he saw a chance to retrieve his campaign by offering battle at Würzburg, an important stronghold on the Main River. At this point, the petty jealousies and rivalries that had fostered in the Army over the summer came to a head. Jourdan had a spat with his wing commander Kléber and that officer suddenly resigned his command. Two generals from Kléber's clique, Bernadotte and Colaud, also made excuses to leave the army immediately. Faced with this mutiny, Jourdan replaced Bernadotte with General Henri Simon and divided Colaud's rebellious units among the other divisions. Jourdan marched south with 30,000 men of the infantry divisions of Simon, Jean Étienne Championnet, Paul Grenier and with Jacques Philippe Bonnaud's reserve cavalry. Lefebvre's division, 10,000-strong, remained at Schweinfurt to cover a possible retreat.

Anticipating Jourdan's move, Charles had already rushed his army toward Würzburg, where they engaged on 1 September. Marshaling the divisions of Hotze, Sztáray, Kray, Johann Sigismund Riesch, Johann I Joseph, Prince of Liechtenstein and Wartensleben, the Austrians won the Battle of Würzburg on 3 September, forcing the French to retreat to the Lahn river. Charles lost 1,500 casualties out of 44,000 troops against 2,000 French casualties. The losses at Würzburg compelled the French to lift the siege of Mainz on 7 September and to move those troops to reinforce their lines further east. On 10 September, Marceau reinforced the Army of Sambre and Meuse with 12,000 troops that had been blockading the east side of Mainz. Jean Hardy's division from the west side of Mainz retreated to the Nahe river and dug in. The French government belatedly recognized the difficulties in which the Army of the Sambre and Meuse struggled and transferred two divisions commanded by Jacques MacDonald and Jean Castelbert de Castelverd from the idle Army of the North. MacDonald's division stopped at Düsseldorf while Castelverd's was placed in the French line on the lower Lahn. These reinforcements brought Jourdan's strength back to 50,000 but the French abandonment of the sieges at Mainz and later Mannheim and Philippsburg, released about 27,000 Habsburg troops to reinforce Charles' now overwhelming numbers. Moreau continued in the south to press toward Vienna, seemingly oblivious to Jourdan's situation.

Over the next few days, most of the Army of Sambre and Meuse returned to the west bank of the Rhine, except for a small rear guard. After his disastrous panic at Diez in which he prematurely abandoned a critical bridge position, Jean Castelbert de Castelverd held east bank entrenchments at Neuwied, Poncet crossed at Bonn while the other divisions retired behind the Sieg river. Jourdan handed over command to Pierre de Ruel, marquis de Beurnonville, on 22 September. Charles left 32,000 to 36,000 troops commanded by Franz von Werneck in the north, 9,000 more in Mainz and Mannheim to insure the Army did not recross the Rhine, and moved south with 16,000 men to intercept Moreau.

## Reformation as the Army of Germany (1797)

Archduke Charles ruined the French strategy in the north; the Army of Sambre and Meuse withdrew across the river and remained inactive for the rest of the year. On 18 April 1797, with Napoleon's army threatening Vienna, Austria and France agreed to terms of an armistice, which was followed by five months of negotiation, leading to the Peace of Campo Formio which concluded the War of the First Coalition on 18 October 1797. The peace treaty was to be followed up by the Congress of Rastatt. Campo Formio's terms held until 1798, when both groups recovered their military strength and began the War of the Second Coalition. Despite the renewal of military action, the Congress continued its meetings in Rastatt until the assassination of the French delegation in April 1799. The Army of Sambre and Meuse remained in cantonment until 29 September 1797, when it was united with other units, to form the Army of Germany.

## Commanders

## Citations and notes

One of the armies of the French Revolution formed on 29 June 1794

Military units and formations established in 1794


Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal KBE (31 December 1908 – 20 September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp (late 1941 to September 1944), the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp (September to October 1944), the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp (February to 5 May 1945).

After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. In 1947, he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz, Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives. He opened the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in 1961 and continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. He played a small role in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960, and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly after Bruno Kreisky, a Jew himself, was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a "Jewish fascist", likened his organisation to the Mafia, and accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Wiesenthal successfully sued for libel, the suit ending in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the case of Kurt Waldheim, whose service in the Wehrmacht and probable knowledge of the Holocaust were revealed in the lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered negative publicity as a result of this event.

With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs containing tales that are only loosely based on actual events. In particular, he exaggerated his role in the capture of Eichmann in 1960. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on 20 September 2005 and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, headquartered in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.

## Early life

Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908, in Buczacz (Buchach), Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine. His father, Asher Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905 to escape the frequent pogroms against Jews. A reservist in the Austro-Hungarian Army, Asher was called to active duty in 1914 at the start of World War I. He died in combat on the Eastern Front in 1915. The remainder of the family—Simon, his younger brother Hillel, and his mother Rosa—fled to Vienna as the Russian army took control of Galicia. The two boys attended a German-language Jewish school. The family returned to Buczacz in 1917 after the Russians retreated. The area changed hands several more times before the war ended in November 1918.

Wiesenthal and his brother attended high school at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Buchach, where classes were taught in Polish. There Simon met his future wife, Cyla Müller, whom he would marry in 1936. Hillel fell and broke his back in 1923 and died the following year. Rosa remarried in 1926 and moved to Dolyna with her new husband, Isack Halperin, who owned a tile factory there. Wiesenthal remained in Buczacz, living with the Müller family, until he graduated from high school—on his second attempt—in 1928.

With an interest in art and drawing, Wiesenthal chose to study architecture. His first choice was to attend the Lwów Polytechnic, but he was turned away because the school's Jewish quota had already been filled. He instead enrolled at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he studied from 1928 until 1932. He was apprenticed as a building engineer through 1934 and 1935, spending most of that period in Odessa. He married Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Galicia.

Sources give differing reports of what happened next. Wiesenthal's autobiographies contradict each other on many points; he also over-dramatised and mythologised events. One version has Wiesenthal opening an architectural office and finally being admitted to the Lwów Polytechnic for an advanced degree. He designed a tuberculosis sanatorium and some residential buildings during the course of his studies and was active in a student Zionist organisation. He wrote for the Omnibus, a satirical student newspaper, and graduated in 1939. Author Guy Walters states that Wiesenthal's earliest autobiography does not mention studies at Lwów. Walters quotes a curriculum vitae Wiesenthal prepared after World War II as stating he worked as a supervisor at a factory until 1939 and then worked as a mechanic in a different factory until the Nazis invaded in 1941. Wiesenthal's 1961 book Ich jagte Eichmann (I chased Eichmann) states that he worked in Odessa as an engineer from 1940 to 1941. Walters says that there is no record of Wiesenthal attending the university at Lwów, and that he does not appear in the Katalog Architektów i Budowniczych (Catalogue of Architects and Builders) for the appropriate period.

## World War II

In Europe, World War II began in September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a result of the partitioning of Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the city of Lwów was annexed by the Soviets and became known as Lvov in Russian or Lviv in Ukrainian. Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in Dolyna, was arrested as a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison. Wiesenthal's mother moved to Lvov to live with Wiesenthal and Cyla. Wiesenthal bribed an official to prevent his own deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the city, which was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.

By mid-July Wiesenthal and other Jewish residents had to register to do forced labour. Within six months, in November 1941 the Nazis had set up the Lwów Ghetto using Jewish forced labour. All Jews had to give up their homes and move there, a process completed in the following months. Several thousand Jews were murdered in Lvov by Ukrainian nationals and German Einsatzgruppen in June and July 1941. In his autobiographies, Wiesenthal tells how he was arrested on 6 July, but saved from execution by his former foreman, a man named Bodnar, who was now a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. There are several versions of the story, which may be apocryphal.

In late 1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. He painted swastikas and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and Cyla was put to work polishing the brass and nickel. In exchange for providing details about the railways, Wiesenthal obtained false identity papers for his wife from a member of the Armia Krajowa, a Polish underground organisation. She travelled to Warsaw, where she was put to work in a German radio factory. She spent time in two labour camps as well. Conditions were harsh and her health was permanently damaged, but she survived the war. The couple was reunited in 1945, and their daughter Paulinka was born the following year.

Every few weeks, the Nazis staged a roundup in the Lvov ghetto of people unable to work. These roundups typically took place while the able-bodied were absent doing forced labour. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly Jewish women were transported by freight train to Belzec extermination camp and murdered in August 1942. Around the same time, a Ukrainian policeman shot Cyla's mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while she was being evicted. Between Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal, 89 of their relatives were murdered during the Holocaust.

Forced labourers for the Eastern Railway were eventually kept in a separate closed camp, where conditions were a little better than at the main camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal prepared architectural drawings for Adolf Kohlrautz, the senior inspector, who submitted them under his own name. To obtain contracts, construction companies paid bribes to Kohlrautz, who shared some of the money with Wiesenthal. He was able to pass along further information about the railroads to the underground and occasionally left the compound to obtain supplies, even clandestinely obtaining weapons for the Armia Krajowa and two pistols for himself, which he brought with him when he escaped in late 1943.

According to Wiesenthal, on 20 April 1943, Second Lieutenant Gustav Wilhaus, second in command at the Janowska camp, decided to shoot 54 Jewish intellectuals in celebration of Hitler's 54th birthday. Unable to find enough such people still alive at Janowska, Wilhaus ordered a roundup of prisoners from the satellite camps. Wiesenthal and two other inmates were taken from the Eastern Railway camp to the execution site, a trench 6 feet (1.8 m) deep and 1,500 feet (460 m) long at a nearby sandpit. The men were stripped and led through "the Hose", a six- or seven-foot wide barbed wire corridor to the execution ground. The victims were shot and their bodies allowed to fall into the pit. Wiesenthal, waiting to be shot, heard someone call out his name. He was returned alive to the camp; Kohlrautz had convinced his superiors that Wiesenthal was the best man available to paint a giant poster in honour of Hitler's birthday.

On 2 October 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and its prisoners were about to be liquidated. Kohlrautz gave Wiesenthal and fellow prisoner Arthur Scheiman passes to go to town, accompanied by a Ukrainian guard, to buy stationery. The two men escaped out the back of the shop while their guard waited at the front counter.

Wiesenthal did not mention either of these events—or Kohlrautz's part in them—when testifying to American investigators in May 1945, or in an affidavit he made in August 1954 about his wartime persecutions, and researcher Guy Walters questions their authenticity. Wiesenthal variously reported that Kohlrautz was killed on the Soviet Front in 1944 or in the Battle of Berlin on 19 April 1945.

After several days in hiding, Scheiman rejoined his wife, and Wiesenthal was taken by members of the underground to the nearby village of Kulparkow, where he remained until the end of 1943. Soon afterwards the Janowska camp was liquidated; this made it unsafe to hide in the nearby countryside, so Wiesenthal returned to Lvov, where he spent three days hiding in a closet at the Scheimans' apartment. He then moved to the apartment of Paulina Busch, for whom he had previously forged an identity card. He was arrested there, hiding under the floorboards, on 13 June 1944 and taken back to the remains of the camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal tried but failed to commit suicide to avoid being interrogated about his connections with the underground. In the end there was no time for interrogations, as Soviet forces were advancing into the area. SS-Hauptsturmführer Friedrich Warzok, the new camp commandant, rounded up the remaining prisoners and transported them to Przemyśl, 97 kilometres (60 mi) west of Lvov, where he put them to work building fortifications. By September Warzok and his men were reassigned to the front, and Wiesenthal and the other surviving captives were sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.

By October the inmates were evacuated to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, where inmates were suffering from severe overcrowding and a shortage of food. Wiesenthal's big toe on his right foot had to be amputated after a rock fell on it while he was working in the quarry. He was still ill in January when the advancing Soviets forced yet another evacuation, this time on foot, to Chemnitz. Using a broom handle for a walking stick, he was one of the few who survived the march. From Chemnitz the prisoners were taken in open freight cars to Buchenwald, and a few days later by truck to Mauthausen concentration camp, arriving in mid-February 1945. Over half the prisoners did not survive the journey. Wiesenthal was placed in a death block for the mortally ill, where he survived on 200 calories a day until the camp was liberated by the Americans on 5 May 1945. He weighed 41 kilograms (90 lb) when he was liberated.

## Nazi hunter

Within three weeks of the liberation of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal had prepared a list of around a hundred names of suspected Nazi war criminals—mostly guards, camp commandants, and members of the Gestapo—and presented it to a War Crimes office of the American Counterintelligence Corps at Mauthausen. He worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who were carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail. When Austria was partitioned in July 1945, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so the American War Crimes Office was moved to Linz. Wiesenthal went with them, and was housed in a displaced persons camp. He served as vice-chairman of the area's Jewish Central Committee, an organisation that attempted to arrange basic care for Jewish refugees and tried to help people gather information about their missing family members.

Wiesenthal worked for the American Office of Strategic Services for a year, and continued to collect information on both victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. He assisted the Berihah, an underground organisation that smuggled Jewish survivors into the British Mandate for Palestine. Wiesenthal helped arrange for forged papers, food supplies, transportation, and so on. In February 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz to gather information for future war crimes trials. They collected 3,289 depositions from concentration camp survivors still living in Europe. However, as the US and the Soviet Union lost interest in conducting further trials, a similar group headed by Tuviah Friedman in Vienna closed its office in 1952, and Wiesenthal's closed in 1954. Almost all of the documentation collected at both centres was forwarded to the Yad Vashem archives in Israel. Wiesenthal, employed full-time by two Jewish welfare agencies, continued his work with refugees. As it became clear that the former Allies were no longer interested in pursuing the work of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, Wiesenthal persisted, believing the survivors were obliged to take on the task. His work became a way to memorialise and remember all the people that had been lost. He told biographer Alan Levy in 1974:

> When the Germans first came to my city in Galicia, half the population was Jewish: one hundred fifty thousand Jews. When the Germans were gone, five hundred were alive. ... Many times I was thinking that everything in life has a price, so to stay alive must also have a price. And my price was always that, if I lived, I must be deputy for many people who are not alive.

### Adolf Eichmann

Though most of the Jews still alive in Linz had emigrated after the war, Wiesenthal decided to stay on, partly because the family of Adolf Eichmann lived a few blocks away from him. Eichmann had been in charge of the transportation and deportation of Jews in the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question: a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, finalised at the Wannsee Conference, at which Eichmann took the minutes. After the war, Eichmann hid in Austria using forged identity papers until 1950, when he left via Italy, and moved to Argentina under an assumed name. Hoping to obtain information on Eichmann's whereabouts, Wiesenthal continuously monitored the remaining members of the immediate family in Linz until they vanished in 1952.

Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown to him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed along that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954. Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany, received independent confirmation of Eichmann's whereabouts in 1957, but German agents were unable to find him until late 1959. When Eichmann's father died in 1960, Wiesenthal made arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of the family, as Otto Eichmann was said to bear a strong resemblance to his brother Adolf, and there were no current photos of the fugitive. He provided these photographs to Mossad agents on 18 February. Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents responsible for Eichmann's capture in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, said the photos were useful in confirming Eichmann's identity. On 23 May, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann was under arrest and in Israel. The next day Wiesenthal, while he was being interviewed by reporters, received a congratulatory telegram from Yad Vashem. He immediately became a minor celebrity, and began work on a book about his experiences. Ich jagte Eichmann: Tatsachenbericht (I chased Eichmann. A true story) was published six weeks before the trial opened in spring 1961. Wiesenthal helped the prosecution prepare their case and attended a portion of the trial. Eichmann was sentenced to death and was hanged on 1 June 1962.

Meanwhile, both of Wiesenthal's employers terminated his services in 1960, as there were too few refugees left in the city to justify the expense. Wiesenthal opened a new documentation centre (the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime) in Vienna in 1961. He became a Mossad operative, for which he received the equivalent of several hundred dollars per month. He maintained files on hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals and located many, about six of whom were arrested as a result of his activities. Successes included locating and bringing to trial Erich Rajakowitsch [de], responsible for the deportation of Jews from the Netherlands, and Franz Murer, the commandant of the Vilna Ghetto. In 1963 Wiesenthal read in the newspaper that Karl Silberbauer, the man who had arrested famed diarist Anne Frank, had been located; he was serving on the police force in Vienna. Wiesenthal's publicity campaign led to Silberbauer being temporarily suspended from the force, but he was never prosecuted for arresting the Frank family.

Despite Wiesenthal's protests, in late 1963 his centre in Vienna was taken over by a local community group, so he immediately set up a new independent office, funded using donations and his stipend from the Mossad. As the 20-year statute of limitations for German war crimes was about to expire, Wiesenthal began lobbying to have it extended or removed entirely. In March 1965 the Bundestag deferred the matter for five years, effectively extending the expiration date. Similar action was taken by the Austrian government. But as time went on, it became more difficult to obtain prosecutions. Witnesses grew older and were less likely to be able to offer valuable testimony. Funding for trials was inadequate, as the governments of Austria and Germany became less interested in obtaining convictions for wartime events, preferring to forget the Nazi past.

### Franz Stangl

Franz Stangl was a supervisor at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, part of Action T4, an early Nazi euthanasia programme that was responsible for the deaths of over 70,000 mentally ill or physically deformed people in Germany. In February 1942, he was commander at the Sobibor extermination camp and in August of the same year he was transferred to Treblinka. During his time at these camps, he oversaw the deaths of nearly 900,000 people. While under US detention for two years, he remained unidentified as a war criminal because so few witnesses had survived Sobibor and Treblinka that authorities never realised who he was. He escaped while on a roadwork detail in Linz in May 1948. After he made his way to Rome, the Caritas relief agency provided him with a Red Cross passport and a boat ticket to Syria. His family joined him there a year later and they emigrated to Brazil in 1951.

It was probably Stangl's former son-in-law who informed Wiesenthal of Stangl's whereabouts in 1964. Concerned that Stangl would be warned and escape, Wiesenthal quietly prepared a dossier with the assistance of Austrian Minister of Justice Hans Klecatsky. Stangl was arrested outside his home in São Paulo on 28 February 1967 and was extradited to Germany on 22 June. A month later Wiesenthal's book The Murderers Among Us was released. Wiesenthal's publishers advertised that he had been responsible for locating over 800 Nazis, a claim that had no basis in fact but was nonetheless repeated by reputable newspapers such as the New York Times. Stangl was sentenced to life in prison and died of heart failure in June 1971, having confessed his guilt to biographer Gitta Sereny the previous day.

### Hermine Braunsteiner

Known as "the Mare of Majdanek", Hermine Braunsteiner was a guard who served at Majdanek and Ravensbrück concentration camps. A cruel and sadistic woman, she earned her nickname for her propensity to kick her victims to death. She served a three-year sentence in Austria for her activities in Ravensbrück, but had not yet been charged for any of her crimes at Majdanek when she emigrated to the United States in 1959. She became an American citizen in 1963.

Wiesenthal was first told about Braunsteiner in early 1964 via a chance encounter in Tel Aviv with someone who had seen her performing selections at Majdanek—deciding who was to be assigned to slave labour and who was to murdered immediately in the gas chambers. When he returned to Vienna he had an operative visit one of her relatives to clandestinely collect information. Wiesenthal soon traced Braunsteiner's whereabouts to Queens, New York, so he notified the Israeli police and the New York Times. Despite Wiesenthal's efforts to expedite the matter, Braunsteiner was not extradited to Germany until 1973. Her trial was part of a joint indictment with nine other defendants accused of killing 250,000 people at Majdanek. She was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981, was released on health grounds in 1996, and died in 1999.

### Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele was a medical officer assigned to Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 until the end of the war. As well as making most of the selections of inmates as they arrived by train from all over Europe, he performed unscientific and usually deadly experiments on the inmates. He left the camp in January 1945 as the Red Army approached and was briefly in American custody in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, but was released. He took work as a farmhand in rural Germany, remaining until 1949, when he decided to flee the country. He acquired a Red Cross passport and left for Argentina, setting up a business in Buenos Aires in 1951. Acting on information received from Wiesenthal, West German authorities tried to extradite Mengele in 1960, but he could not be found; he had in fact moved to Paraguay in 1958. He moved to Brazil in 1961 and lived there until he drowned while swimming in 1979.

Wiesenthal claimed to have information that placed Mengele in several locations: on the Greek island of Kythnos in 1960, Cairo in 1961, in Spain in 1971, and in Paraguay in 1978, the latter 18 years after he had left. In 1982, he offered a reward of \$100,000 for Mengele's capture and insisted as late as 1985—six years after Mengele's death—that he was still alive. The Mengele family admitted to authorities in 1985 that he had died in 1979; the body was exhumed and its identity was confirmed. Earlier that year Wiesenthal had served as one of the judges at a mock trial of Mengele, held in Jerusalem.

### Simon Wiesenthal Centre

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles was founded in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier, who paid Wiesenthal an honorarium for the right to use his name. The centre helped with the campaign to remove the statute of limitations on Nazi crimes and continues the hunt for suspected Nazi war criminals, but today its primary activities include Holocaust remembrance, education, and fighting antisemitism. Wiesenthal was not always happy with the way the centre was run. He thought the centre's Holocaust museum was not dignified enough and that he should have a larger say in the overall operations. He even wrote to the board of directors requesting Hier's removal, but in the end had to be content with being a figurehead.

## Later life

### Austrian politics

#### Bruno Kreisky

Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. In an address in June, Kreisky's Minister of Education and Culture Leopold Gratz characterised Wiesenthal's Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime as a private spy ring, invading the privacy of innocent parties. In an interview a week later, Kreisky himself described Wiesenthal as a "Jewish fascist", a remark he later denied making. Wiesenthal discovered that he would be unable to sue, because under Austrian law Kreisky was protected by parliamentary immunity.

When his re-election in 1975 seemed unsure, Kreisky proposed that his Social Democratic Party should form a coalition with the Freedom Party, headed by Friedrich Peter. Wiesenthal had documents proving that Peter had been a member of the 1 SS Infantry Brigade, a unit that had exterminated over 13,000 Jewish civilians in Ukraine in 1941–42. He decided not to reveal this information to the press until after the election, but forwarded his dossier to President Rudolf Kirchschläger. Peter denied having participated in, or having knowledge of, any atrocities. In the end, Kreisky's party won a clear majority and did not form the coalition.

In a press conference a short time after the election and Wiesenthal's revelations, Kreisky said Wiesenthal used "the methods of a quasi-political Mafia." Wiesenthal filed a libel lawsuit (although Kreisky had the power to declare immunity if he so chose), and when Kreisky later accused Wiesenthal of being an agent of the Gestapo, working with the Judenrat in Lvov, these accusations were incorporated into the lawsuit as well. The suit was decided in Wiesenthal's favour in 1989, but after Kreisky's death nine months later his heirs refused to pay. When the relevant archives were later opened for research, no evidence was found that Wiesenthal had been a collaborator.

#### Kurt Waldheim

When Kurt Waldheim was named secretary-general of the United Nations in 1971, Wiesenthal reported—without checking very thoroughly—that there was no evidence that he had a Nazi past. This analysis had been supported by the opinions of the American Counterintelligence Corps and Office of Strategic Services when they examined his records right after the war. However, Waldheim's 1985 autobiography did not include his war service following his recuperation from a 1941 injury. When he returned to active duty in 1942, he was posted to Yugoslavia and Greece, and had knowledge of murders of civilians that took place in those locations during his service there. The Austrian news magazine Profil published a story in March 1986—during his campaign for the presidency of Austria—that Waldheim had been a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA). The New York Times soon reported that Waldheim had failed to reveal all of the facts about his war service. Wiesenthal, embarrassed, attempted to help Waldheim defend himself. The World Jewish Congress investigated the issue, but the Israeli attorney general concluded that their material was insufficient evidence for a conviction. Waldheim was elected president in July 1986. A panel of historians tasked with investigating the case issued a report eighteen months later. They concluded that, while there was no evidence that Waldheim had committed atrocities, he must have known they were occurring, yet did nothing. Wiesenthal unsuccessfully demanded that Waldheim resign. The World Jewish Congress successfully lobbied to have Waldheim barred from entering the United States.

### Sails of Hope

In 1968, Wiesenthal published Zeilen der hoop. De geheime missie van Christoffel Columbus (translated in 1972 as Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus), which was his first non-fiction book not on the subject of the Holocaust. In the book, Wiesenthal put forward his theory that Christopher Columbus was a Sephardi Jew from Spain who practised his religion in secret to avoid persecution. (The consensus of most historians is that Columbus came from the Republic of Genoa, on the northwestern coast of present-day Italy.) Wiesenthal argued that the quest for the New World was not motivated by wealth or fame, but rather by Columbus's desire to find a place of refuge for the Jews, who were suffering immense persecution in Spain at the time (and in 1492 would be subjected to the Edict of Expulsion). Wiesenthal also believed that Columbus's concept of "sailing west" was based on Biblical prophecies (certain verses in the Book of Isaiah) rather than any prior geographical knowledge.

### Awards and nominations

Wiesenthal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. Rumour had it that the Nobel Committee would give the prize to a Holocaust-related candidate. Fellow Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, also nominated, began a campaign in hopes of winning the prize, travelling to France, Ethiopia and Oslo for speaking tours and humanitarian work. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre urged Wiesenthal to lobby for the prize as well, but other than delivering a lecture in Oslo, Wiesenthal did little to promote his candidacy. When Wiesel was awarded the 1986 prize, Wiesenthal claimed the World Jewish Congress must have influenced the committee's decision, a claim the WJC denied. Biographer Tom Segev speculates that the loss may have been because of the negative publicity over the Waldheim affair.

In 1992, Wiesenthal was awarded the Erasmus Prize by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.

In 2004, he was awarded an honorary KBE by the British Government.

### Retirement and death

Wiesenthal received many death threats over the years. After a bomb placed by neo-Nazis exploded outside his house in Vienna on 11 June 1982, police guards were stationed outside his home 24 hours a day. Cyla found the stressful nature of her husband's career and the dragged-out legal matters regarding Kreisky to be overwhelming, and she sometimes suffered from depression.

Wiesenthal spent time at his office at the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna even as he approached his 90th birthday. He finally retired in October 2001, when he was 92. The last Nazi he had a hand in bringing to trial was Untersturmführer Julius Viel, who was convicted in 2001 of shooting seven Jewish prisoners. "I have survived them all. If there were any left, they'd be too old and weak to stand trial today. My work is done," said Wiesenthal. Cyla died on 10 November 2003, at age 95, and Wiesenthal died on 20 September 2005, age 96. He was buried in Herzliya, Israel.

In a statement on Wiesenthal's death, Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis said, "Without Simon Wiesenthal's relentless effort to find Nazi criminals and bring them to justice, and to fight anti-Semitism and prejudice, Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds and reconciling itself. He was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable to our freedom, stability and peace."

In 2010 the Austrian and Israeli governments jointly issued a commemorative stamp honouring Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal became an avid stamp collector after the war, following advice from his doctors to take up a hobby to help him relax. In 2006 his collection of Zemstvo stamps sold at auction for €90,000 after his death.

## Dramatic portrayals

Wiesenthal was portrayed by Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky in the film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File (1974). After the film's release, Wiesenthal received many reports of sightings of the subject of the film, Eduard Roschmann, commandant of the Riga Ghetto. These sightings proved to be false alarms, but in 1977 a person living in Buenos Aires who saw the movie reported to police that Roschmann was living nearby. The fugitive escaped to Paraguay, where he died of a heart attack a month later. In Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil, the character of Yakov Liebermann (called Ezra Liebermann and played by Laurence Olivier in the film) is modelled on Wiesenthal. Olivier visited Wiesenthal, who offered advice on how to play the role. Wiesenthal attended the film's New York premiere in 1978. Ben Kingsley portrayed him in the HBO film Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989). Judd Hirsch portrayed him in the Amazon Prime Video series Hunters (2020).

Wiesenthal has been the subject of several documentaries. The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal was produced in 1994 by filmmakers Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel for River Lights Pictures. The documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, narrated by Nicole Kidman, was released by Moriah Films in 2007. Wiesenthal is a one-person show written and performed by Tom Dugan that premiered in 2014.

## Autobiographical inconsistencies

A number of Wiesenthal's books contain conflicting stories and tales, many of which were invented. Several authors, including Segev and British author Guy Walters, feel that Wiesenthal's autobiographies are not reliable sources of information about his life and activities. For example, Wiesenthal would describe two people fighting over one of the lists he had prepared of survivors of the Holocaust; the two look up and recognise each other and have a tearful reunion. In one account it is a husband and wife, and in another telling it is two brothers. Wiesenthal's memoirs variously claim he had spent time in as many as eleven concentration camps; the actual number was five. A drawing he made in 1945 that he claimed was a scene he witnessed in Mauthausen had actually been sketched from photos that appeared in Life magazine that June. He particularly over-emphasised his role in the capture of Eichmann, claiming that he prevented Veronika Eichmann from having her husband declared dead in 1947, when in fact the declaration was denied by government officials. Wiesenthal said that he had retained his Eichmann file when he sent his research materials to Yad Vashem in 1952; in fact he sent all his materials there, and it was his counterpart, Tuviah Friedman in Vienna, who had retained materials on Eichmann. Isser Harel, director of the Mossad at the time, has stated that Wiesenthal had no role in the capture of Eichmann.

Walters and Segev both noted inconsistencies between Wiesenthal's stories and his actual achievements. Segev concluded that Wiesenthal lied because of his storytelling nature and survivor guilt. Daniel Finkelstein described Walters's research in Hunting Evil as impeccable and quoted Ben Barkow: "Accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made".

In 1979, Wiesenthal told The Washington Post: "I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead [in the Holocaust], but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews." In a 2017 interview, Yehuda Bauer said that he had told Wiesenthal not to use this figure. "I said to him, 'Simon, you are telling a lie,' ... [Wiesenthal replied] 'Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.'" According to Bauer and other historians, Wiesenthal chose the figure of 5 million non-Jewish victims because it was just lower than the six million Jews who were murdered, but high enough to attract sympathy from non-Jews. The figure of eleven million Nazi victims became popular and was referred to by President Jimmy Carter in the executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

## List of books and journal articles

### Books

- Ich jagte Eichmann. Tatsachenbericht (I chased Eichmann. A true story). S. Mohn, Gütersloh (1961)
- Writing under the pen name Mischka Kukin, Wiesenthal published Humor hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang ("Humor Behind the Iron Curtain"). Gütersloh: Signum-Verlag (1962)
- The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. New York: McGraw-Hill (1967)
- Zeilen der hoop. De geheime missie van Christoffel Columbus. Amsterdam: H. J. W. Becht (1968). Translated as Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus. New York: Macmillan (1972)
- "Mauthausen: Steps beyond the Grave". In Hunter and Hunted: Human History of the Holocaust. Gerd Korman, editor. New York: Viking Press (1973). pp. 286–295.
- The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness New York: Schocken Books (1969)
- Max and Helen: A Remarkable True Love Story. New York: Morrow (1982)
- Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom. New York: Henry Holt (1987)
- Justice, Not Vengeance. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld (1989)

### Journal articles

- "Latvian War Criminals in USA". Jewish Currents 20, no. 7 (July/August 1966): 4–8. Also in 20, no. 10 (November 1966): 24.
- "There Are Still Murderers Among Us". National Jewish Monthly 82, no. 2 (October 1967): 8–9.
- "Nazi Criminals in Arab States". In Israel Horizons 15, no. 7 (September 1967): 10–12.
- Anti-Jewish Agitation in Poland: (Prewar Fascists and Nazi Collaborators in Unity of Action with Antisemites from the Ranks of the Polish Communist Party): A Documentary Report. Bonn: R. Vogel (1969)
- "Justice: Why I Hunt Nazis". In Jewish Observer and Middle East Review 21, no. 12 (24 March 1972): 16.

## See also

- Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies
- List of awards received by Simon Wiesenthal
- Beate Klarsfeld
- Serge Klarsfeld
- Yaron Svoray
- Efraim Zuroff

Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter

Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Commanders of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic

Commanders of the Order of Orange-Nassau

Commanders of the Order of Polonia Restituta

Czech Technical University in Prague alumni

Honorary Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Knights of the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp survivors

Officers of the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients

Recipients of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art

Recipients of the Decoration for Services to the Liberation of Austria

Recipients of the Grand Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria

Recipients of the Order of the White Lion


John Rolph

John Rolph (4 March 1793 – 19 October 1870) was a Canadian physician, lawyer, and political figure. He was elected to the Parliament of Upper Canada in 1824 to represent Middlesex County and was considered the leader of the Reform faction in the 1820s. In 1837 he helped plan the Upper Canada Rebellion, but acted as the government's emissary to negotiate a truce once the rebellion began. In the 1850s he was elected to the newly-formed Parliament of the Province of Canada, representing Norfolk County, and was appointed as Minister of Crown Lands and Minister of Agriculture. He founded several medical schools throughout his life, including the Rolph School, and incorporated new teaching techniques and medical practices into his lectures. His actions against rival medical schools decreased public confidence in the ability of medical professionals to regulate themselves.

Rolph grew up in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, and was educated in medicine and law at St John's College, Cambridge, Inner Temple, London, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He immigrated to Upper Canada in 1813 and lived on his father's farm in Port Talbot, where he practised law and medicine concurrently and opened a medical school called the Talbot Dispensary. In 1824, Rolph was elected to the Parliament of Upper Canada. He returned to England to petition the Colonial Office to allow the naturalisation of American citizens who moved to Canada, allowing them to vote and be elected to the provincial legislative assembly. He was a member of the committee that examined the feasibility of creating the City of Toronto. Elected as an alderman to Toronto's city council, he resigned after his council colleagues did not select him to be the city's mayor. Rolph joined the Executive Council of Upper Canada in 1836, but the entire council resigned a few weeks later when Lieutenant-General Francis Bond Head refused to consult them.

William Lyon Mackenzie persuaded Rolph to support the Upper Canada Rebellion after the latter was promised he would become president of a newly formed Republic of Canada. When the rebellion began, Rolph did not join the rebels at their headquarters. Bond Head did not know of Rolph's involvement with the rebellion and appointed Rolph as his emissary to bring the government's offer of a truce to the rebels. Rolph fled to the US when fellow Reform leader Thomas David Morrison was arrested. The Canadian government granted him amnesty and he returned to Canada in 1843. He created the Rolph School, a new educational institution for medicine, in Toronto. In 1851 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada. When Rolph became an opposition member of the government, his focus shifted to running his medical school and he declined to run in the 1857 provincial election. He retired as dean of his medical school in 1870 and died later that year after suffering a stroke.

## Early life and education

Rolph was born on 4 March 1793, in Thornbury, Gloucestershire. His father was Thomas Rolph, a surgeon from Grovesend. His mother was Frances Petty. Rolph was their fourth child and eldest surviving son. He was baptised at Seyntemaryes parish church. He moved to Cambridge in 1809 to study law and medicine at St John's College, Cambridge, then transferred to Inner Temple, London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge to study law in 1811.

He travelled to New York City in June 1812 to immigrate to Upper Canada. While he was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the War of 1812 began, and Rolph received a special passport from American president James Madison to travel to Upper Canada. Rolph went to the Niagara River intending to continue travelling to Canada when it was safe to do so. While waiting to cross the river, he tried solving one of Euclid's geometry problems. His problem-solving tactic involved drawing shapes. American authorities suspected these were sketches of Fort Niagara and arrested him. He was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Greenbush, New York. While imprisoned, he taught mathematics and grammar to other prisoners to alleviate his boredom. After the October 13, 1812 Battle of Queenston Heights, American forces released him and he finished his journey to Canada to live on his father's farm in Port Talbot.

Upon its creation in 1813, Rolph became paymaster for the 2nd Norfolk militia. The deputy inspector of accounts, a British government administrator, accused Rolph of accepting claims from officers who did not provide the appropriate vouchers. Although Rolph denied this accusation, he was considered in default to the government and his application for 800 acres (320 ha) of land as a retired officer was denied. Rolph initiated an organising committee to honour Port Talbot's founder Thomas Talbot, and he inaugurated the first celebration of the town's creation on 21 May 1817.

In August 1817, Rolph returned to England and studied at Cambridge University. He negotiated payments from his cousin concerning the sale of property in Thornbury that belonged to their families. He used the money to enrol in Guy's Hospital and St Thomas' Hospital to study medicine and return to Trinity Hall to study law. On 20 April 1820, he married Mary Slatter, who was labelled as a spinster. Although the marriage is recorded in a wedding register, Rolph never referred to this event in his life or his papers and a death record for Slatter has not been found.

Rolph was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1821. In September he returned to North America and settled in Charlotteville Township, Ontario. He bought a farm in St. Thomas, Ontario, and became a barrister. He opened a law office in Vittoria and practiced law and medicine concurrently. In 1823 he was elected as a school trustee and became a member of the Board of Education. In 1824 he moved to Dundas, Ontario. He would make frequent visits to York, Upper Canada, and converse with reformers and political figures William Warren Baldwin, Marshall Spring Bidwell, and Robert Baldwin about Upper Canada politics. Rolph dubbed this group "the cabinet". He worked with Charles Duncombe to provide medical services in Upper Canada. In 1823 Rolph and Duncombe opened a medical school called the Talbot Dispensary in St. Thomas. It closed after two years of operation.

## Reform politician

In 1824, Rolph ran for the 9th Parliament of Upper Canada to represent Middlesex County. He campaigned on making land deeds easier to obtain, improving public education and ensuring that all voters were able to participate in the election. Rolph obtained the highest number of votes and was elected as one of the representatives, with John Mathews elected as the other. In the legislature Rolph aligned with Reformer politicians and was considered their leader in the 1820s.

In the summer of 1826, Rolph travelled to England to petition the Colonial Office to naturalise American citizens who had moved to Upper Canada, granting them the right to vote and sit in the Canadian provincial legislature. The British government accepted his petition, and he returned to York in September with guidance on what to include in the legislation to fulfil his request. Rolph proposed a resolution that declared all Americans in Upper Canada as citizens, legislation that extended citizenship to more Americans than the Colonial Office had intended. Tories delayed passage of the bill until instructions from the Colonial Office arrived and then changed the legislation to support the Office's preferred stipulations. The amended legislation passed without Rolph's support. Rolph refused to make a second trip to London to petition the Office for more lenient legislation.

Rolph was re-elected to the legislative assembly in 1828. At the beginning of the legislative session, Rolph introduced a resolution that stated the Parliament did not support the current members of the lieutenant governor's executive council, which passed by a vote of 37 to 1. He served on the Assembly's Committee of Finance, which discovered that Tory politicians and judges were submitting extravagant expenditures. He decided not to run in the 1830 Upper Canada election.

## Return to medicine

In 1828, Judge John Walpole Willis ruled that the court of Upper Canada could not determine cases unless all the judges were present. Willis's ruling nullified most of the court's decisions since its establishment in 1794. Judge Levius Peters Sherwood continued to hold hearings and did not express his opinion on Wallis's ruling. Rolph and other lawyers submitted a request to the court for Sherwood to state his opinion on the ruling. When Sherwood refused, Rolph protested in the courtroom by taking off his lawyer's gown. Concerned that this protest would cause judges to become biased against him, Rolph refused new clients. He sold his law practice to his brother George in 1832 and focused on his medical career.

Rolph was licensed to practice medicine in Upper Canada in 1829, although he was practising medicine in the province throughout the 1820s. In 1831, Rolph moved to York to expand his medical practice and incorporate patients in York's hospital into a teaching institution. He was appointed to a medical board upon York's 1831 cholera outbreak. The board appointed Rolph as chairman of a committee to find a place to house patients with serious cases of the disease. In 1832, he opened the only medical school operating in Upper Canada at that time.

## Municipal politics

In spring 1833, Rolph was appointed to a committee to examine the incorporation of York to become the city of Toronto. That summer, he was appointed to a subcommittee that established the boundaries of the city and the five wards that would elect the councillors and aldermen to Toronto's city council. In Toronto's first city council election in 1834, Rolph declined to run on the Reform slate but ran with the Tories in St. Patrick's ward. He was elected as an alderman and councillor for the ward. He ran to be Toronto's first mayor, but lost to William Lyon Mackenzie because the reform majority on the council wanted Mackenzie to be honoured as the city's first mayor. Rolph resigned from council after his defeat. In 1834, he married Grace Haines; they had three sons and a daughter. Prior to the 1834 cholera outbreak, Rolph was appointed as a doctor to the reestablished Cholera Hospital. When Toronto declared the outbreak, Rolph was appointed to the board of the Cholera Hospital.

## Return to Provincial politics

`Francis Bond Head, the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, wanted to include moderate reformers on his first Executive Council of Upper Canada. He asked Robert Baldwin to join the council, but Baldwin declined the invitation because he wanted the council's Tory members to be dismissed. Bond Head then invited Rolph for an appointment, as Rolph was also seen as a moderate reformer. Rolph convinced Baldwin and John Henry Dunn to join him on the council. They were appointed as councillors on 20 February 1836. Bond Head made decisions without consulting the council. This led the public to believe the council supported Bond Head's decisions. Rolph led a campaign to have the council support a memorandum that would give more powers and oversight of administration to them. The memorandum was presented to Bond Head on 4 March. Bond Head rejected the memorandum and the entire council resigned on 12 March.`

Rolph ran for a seat in the 13th Parliament of Upper Canada in 1836 to represent Norfolk County. He became a candidate because he believed he had reestablished his political career when he joined the executive council. He did not campaign in the constituency but was elected with the largest margin among Reform candidates, while David Duncombe was elected the other legislator from Norfolk. He was one of the few reformers elected to the legislative assembly in that year and led the Reform party in Parliament.

After Rolph submitted objections to Bond Head's tactics in the previous election to the legislature. Lawmakers formed a Committee of Enquiry to investigate the matter which concluded that charges could not be upheld against Bond Head. Rolph called the report biased, pointing out that Reform witnesses did not testify before the committee and the committee's chair did not attach appendixes to the report, which would have outlined the evidence that supported the report's claims. He criticised Bond Head for inflaming divisions between Upper Canadian people based on nationality instead of uniting the people as Canadians.

## Upper Canada Rebellion

### Planning

On 28 July 1837, radical Reformers planned a congress to address grievances against the Upper Canada government and appointed Rolph as a congress delegate. He refused to participate in these plans; his views on the meeting or a rebellion were not published or written down.

In November 1837, the Patriote movement in Lower Canada sent a letter stating they were starting the Lower Canada Rebellion and encouraged the Upper Canadian reformers to begin the Upper Canada Rebellion. Mackenzie convinced Rolph to support an armed rebellion and suggested that he would become president of the State of Upper Canada upon the rebellion's success. Mackenzie argued to Rolph that the social and political system of Upper Canada required radical change based on the rights and liberties of its citizens. Rolph joined the rebellion to bring more independence to the legislature which would then more closely resemble the British governance system. He was hesitant to immediately begin the rebellion and wanted to survey support in rural areas. He sent Mackenzie north of Toronto to determine the level of support among farmers. Having learned Mackenzie planned to hold the rebellion in December, Rolph insisted that Anthony Van Egmond, a retired military officer from the Napoleonic Wars, should lead the military operation.

### Rebellion and retreat to the US

On 2 December 1837, Rolph learned the government was going to arrest Mackenzie. He sent a message to warn him and suggested starting the rebellion on 4 December. Samuel Lount received the message and told the rebels to gather in Montgomery's Tavern north of Toronto to begin the rebellion. Rebel leaders met on 4 December. After learning that the Lower Canada Rebellion had failed, Rolph advised abandoning their plan and dispersing the assembled troops. The other leaders convinced him to support the plan and Rolph returned to Toronto.

On 5 December, Bond Head appointed Rolph and Robert Baldwin as emissaries of the government to deliver a truce to the rebels. Rolph accepted the appointment because others who refused to help the government were suspected of supporting the rebels, and he did not want the government to suspect his involvement. Rolph and Baldwin convinced the rebels to stop their march towards Toronto and relayed Bond Head's offer of amnesty. They returned to Bond Head with the rebels' counter-offer, but Bond Head refused further negotiations. The two men returned to the rebels to relay Bond Head's response. Rolph met with Lount and Mackenzie separately and encouraged them to march towards the city immediately. Rolph spent the rest of the evening recruiting men in Toronto to meet the rebels upon their arrival. The rebels retreated to Montgomery's Tavern after a skirmish with government troops. Rolph abandoned his recruitment efforts and dispersed the men he had gathered. He sent a messenger to the rebels in Montgomery's Tavern calling for an end to the rebellion.

On 6 December Thomas David Morrison, another Reformer who organised the rebellion, was arrested by the Upper Canadian government. Rolph feared that the government would also arrest him, so he fled for the United States. Loyalist troops travelling towards Toronto stopped and questioned him near the Credit River. Rolph showed them a letter stating his sister was ill and claimed he was travelling to give her medical attention. The next day he arrived in Lewiston, New York. On 11 December, Bond Head issued a proclamation and £500 () reward for Rolph's arrest. Rolph was expelled from the Upper Canada legislature on 20 January 1838 for helping to plan the rebellion and replaced by William Salmon the following month.

## Years in the US

On 12 December 1837, Rolph and Mackenzie recruited Rensselaer Van Rensselaer to lead Patriot troops in an Upper Canada invasion. Rolph promised rebels would not interfere with Van Rensselaer's military operations, while Van Rensselaer claimed Rolph was president of the Executive Council for the Upper Canadian uprising. Rolph consented to have his name added to Mackenzie's State of Upper Canada proclamation as an endorser.

When the Patriots invaded and occupied Navy Island, Rolph joined a committee to visit the island and speak with Van Rensselaer on 26 December. The committee concluded Patriot forces, consisting of American members of Hunters' Lodges, were disorganised and Rolph rejected Mackenzie's appointment to be the Patriot's treasurer. He distanced himself from the Patriots to focus on his medical career. When the Patriots failed to invade Upper Canada, Mackenzie wrote an article in his newspaper accusing Rolph of sabotaging the Upper Canada Rebellion. Rolph wrote a rebuttal and attempted to publish it in a periodical called The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The publisher rejected Rolph's submission, citing concerns that a reader would need background knowledge of the rebellion to understand Rolph's story. This rebuttal was found among Rolph's papers after his death and published by John Charles Dent in his book Upper Canada Rebellion.

In 1838, Rolph received an honorary membership to the Monroe County Medical Society, which allowed him to practice medicine without completing an examination. He reopened his medical school in Rochester, New York, and many of the students he was teaching in Toronto moved to Rochester to continue their education.

## Return to Canada

### Medical practice

Rolph was granted amnesty in 1843 and returned to Toronto in August. He renovated the rear portion of his house into a dissecting room and held medical lectures there. In January 1844 he reestablished his medical school. Initially called the Rolph School, an Act of Legislature in 1851 incorporated it as the Toronto School of Medicine. He advertised the school as an alternative to the university education students could receive at King's College in Toronto.

In 1848, Rolph worked with the board of commissioners of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum to successfully dismiss their medical superintendent Walter Tefler. Rolph encouraged the board to hire George Park, his protege and brother-in-law. In August, Rolph became the temporary superintendent of the asylum after Park took a leave of absence. Rolph suspended a keeper named Mr. Hungerford for falsely accusing staff members of abusing patients. The board reinstated the keeper. This created conflict between Park and the board, who repeatedly fired Hungerford, only to have the board reverse the dismissal. The Executive Council dismissed Park and the new director reversed Park and Rolph's policies.

In 1850, the public criticised the Medical Board of Upper Canada for giving medical licenses only to those who had graduated from a university but were failing qualified candidates from the Toronto School of Medicine. To alleviate these concerns, Rolph and other doctors from his school were appointed to the board. Rolph was appointed president of a sub-committee to improve the effectiveness of the board. Many of Rolph and his allies' suggestions, such as incorporating the Upper Canada profession, and barring teachers from examining their students for their medical license, were not adopted.

### Return to politics

In 1849, the Parliament of the Province of Canada passed the Rebellion Losses Bill, which compensated citizens who had lost property during the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions. Citizens in Toronto opposed to the bill rioted. They believed it would financially compensate participants in the rebellions and blamed Reformers, including Rolph, for its passage. Rolph's family hid while rioters threw rocks through the windows of his house. In 1851, he was elected to represent Norfolk County in the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada and withdrew from running the administrative tasks of his medical school.

Francis Hincks, a co-premier of Canada, appointed Rolph as Minister of Crown Lands. Rolph successfully defended himself against critiques of the handling of timber-cutting licences near Peterborough. He was accused of stealing funds from the Treasury, but Rolph said he was using the money to pay moving expenses for his relocation to the Province of Canada's capital, reimbursement that was given to his predecessors. W. J. Boulton, a Tory legislator, accused Rolph of encouraging an attack on Toronto when he brought Bond Head's truce to the rebels during the Upper Canada Rebellion. Boulton used Lount's testimony of the event to support his claims. Mackenzie published similar accusations in his newspaper because he wanted to defend Lount's reputation. This caused a rift in Rolph and Mackenzie's relationship, although the event attracted little attention in other newspapers.

In August 1853, Rolph became the president of the Council and Minister of Agriculture. He proposed a bill called the Act for the Better Management of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, which transferred various decision-making powers from the board of directors to the medical superintendent. It became law in 1853. Rolph convinced Hincks to withdraw government financing of the University of Toronto's medical faculty. Rolph resented the centralisation of education in the province and wanted to reduce funding to rival medical schools. Hincks was accused of buying debentures for the Toronto, Simcoe and Huron Railways then using Toronto city funding to bail out the railway, thus making £10,000 in profit. Reformers encouraged Rolph to resign from Hincks's cabinet and assume leadership of the party. Hincks improved his public image, and Rolph supported him to avoid fracturing the Reform party.

In the 1854 election, Rolph was reelected with 55% of the vote. Augustin-Norbert Morin abandoned his alliance with Hincks and instead formed a coalition government with Upper Canadian Tories led by Allan MacNab. Rolph opposed this new coalition because the Tories would oppose reformer policies. A Tory legislator named John Langton tried to discredit Rolph's opinion by speaking about the Bond Head truce, but Rolph rebutted those comments with a prepared speech that outlined his account of the event.

### Focus on medical career

Upon the formation of the Morin-MacNab administration, Rolph's attendance in the legislature declined as he focused on his medical career. In 1854, the Toronto School of Medicine merged with Victoria College to become Victoria College's medical school. The medical staff at the school clashed with Rolph's autocratic leadership style, and opposed moving the school to a new location in the Yorkville neighbourhood in Toronto. They brought their grievances to the college's board of directors, but the board sided with Rolph and the medical staff resigned en masse. The college's students remained at Victoria College, and he remained dean of its medical faculty. He taught all the courses for the first two weeks of the school year while recruiting new faculty members. In 1856, the former staff established their own medical school and called it Toronto School of Medicine. Rolph attempted to advertise his school as "the medical department of Victoria College – The Toronto School of Medicine". His former staff successfully sued Rolph and stopped him from using the Toronto School of Medicine branding.

He declined to run in the 1857 legislative election and became chairman of the Medical Board. He continued to teach various topics at the medical school and hire other faculty members. In 1868, Rolph was appointed to the medical staff of the newly reopened Toronto General Hospital. He clashed with other board members from the Toronto School of Medicine. To end the conflict, the hospital stopped all clinical lectures on their property.

## Retirement and death

Rolph suffered a minor stroke in 1861 and lost the function of his right arm. In 1870, he was in declining health, so Victoria College appointed William Canniff as a sub-Dean to help administer the school. Rolph did not accept Canniff's help, following the Victoria College board of director's suggestion to retire. That summer, he had several minor strokes and lived with his daughter and her husband in Mitchell, Ontario. He suffered another stroke and died in Mitchell on 19 October 1870.

## Philosophy and views

### Religious beliefs

Rolph was an Anglican who thought everyone in Upper Canada should belong to the Church of England. He believed religious institutions deteriorated when government money supported them. Rolph's medical school did not require faculty or students to join a particular religion or denomination.

Rolph was initially supportive of clergy reserves since they supported his Anglican faith financially. His position changed as he observed the reserves were preventing land development in Canada. Rolph opposed an 1825 bill that would expand clergy reserves to other Christian denominations because of its vague language concerning who could claim the land. He feared ten people could create a congregation, claim land for religious purposes, then sell it for a profit. In 1837, he denounced clergy reserves because they led people to think a ceremony within the state-sponsored church would give them salvation, instead of seeking it outside of church institutions. Rolph kept this opinion when he returned to Canada, denouncing clergy reserves in the Canadian legislature in 1852.

The Church of England controlled King's College, and Rolph wanted it to be turned into a secular institution. He opposed government funding for its medical faculty at the exclusion of others and advocated for institutions to train lawyers and doctors without government funding. If funding was to be provided by the government, he wanted it to be available to all medical schools through endowments.

### Medical views

Rolph sought the latest medical trends in North America and Europe while practising medicine. He cited these trends when teaching at his school but also gave counter-arguments to the theories presented in his lectures. His research focused on the structure of organisms, and he was willing to research ideas that were considered fringe. Rolph did not focus research attention or his curriculum on studying the causes and effects of diseases or diagnosing patients. He experimented on animals to understand how the body reacts when approaching death. Rolph incorporated a French style of teaching medicine where he treated patients at a hospital in front of his students. In lectures at the end of his life, Rolph still taught older remedies to his students, including bloodletting.

## Legacy

### Historical reputation

Marian A. Patterson described Rolph as the "Father of Medical Education in Upper Canada". His Act for the Better Management of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum bill was part of a wider trend to transfer control of asylums away from ordinary members of society and towards medical professionals. However, his disputes with other medical schools and factions caused public trust of medical professionals and their ability to regulate themselves to decrease. His contemporaries highlighted his abilities as a researcher and public speaker but also accused him of lying and manipulating facts. Rolph used his reputation and political influence to control the governing councils of the Toronto hospitals and the medical licensing body of Upper Canada.

As a politician, Rolph's contemporaries had conflicting views on his actions. James Lesslie and Jesse Ketchum wanted to commission a portrait of Rolph in 1837 as a reward for his service, while Jonas Jones said he possessed a "vile and democratic heart". He could contemplate multiple perspectives on an issue and easily persuaded others to agree with his perspective. In his book on the Upper Canada Rebellion, John Charles Dent praised Rolph's actions and criticised William Lyon Mackenzie's leadership. Mackenzie's sons-in-law Charles Lindsey and John King published critiques of Dent's book that disputed Rolph's influence in the rebellion. Historians have struggled to write about Rolph because he rarely described his personal feelings to others and wrote few documents expressing his political opinions.

### In memoriam

A portrait of Rolph, painted in 1836, hangs in the library of the Academy of Medicine of Toronto. Rolph's pocket watch, given to him by a co-worker during the Upper Canada Rebellion, is displayed under the portrait. Rolph Road Public School in Leaside, a neighbourhood in Toronto, was named for Rolph and opened in 1939.

Upper Canada politician (1973–1870)

Members of the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada

Members of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada from Canada West