A Time to Settle Accounts : Books: Simon Wiesenthal sums up his years as a Nazi hunter in what he says is his last volume. But he vows the search for war criminals will go on.

Nearly 82, he walks slower these days, his back stoops and the skin sags around his pale blue eyes. It’s time to sum up his life, he says, time to make a final reckoning of his work for the past 45 years.

But if anyone thinks Simon Wiesenthal has given up his personal crusade to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, they are badly mistaken.

“Maybe it’s my craziness, because I will never stop,” he says, the barest trace of a smile on his ghost-white face. “I tell my wife, the great things in life are never done by normal people. They’re done by crazy people.”

Ever since he was freed by U.S. troops from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on May 5, 1945, Wiesenthal has been a one-man band of retribution, tracking down Hitler’s henchmen throughout the world. His trophies have been a grim Who’s Who of the Third Reich, ranging from mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann to lesser-known clerks and camp guards.

Now, as the 45th anniversary of his liberation approaches, the Polish-born survivor has written his autobiography, “Justice Not Vengeance,” as a final testament. The author of eight other books, he says this will be his last writing, a benediction to his friends and a chance to settle accounts.

The American publication of Wiesenthal’s book coincides with National Holocaust Remembrance Week, April 22 through 29, which is being marked by forums in Los Angeles and other cities. But as he sits in the sun room of a Manhattan hotel, Wiesenthal dwells less on the past than on the turmoil sweeping Europe today.

A former architect and engineer, Wiesenthal speaks in a thick German accent; English words do not come easily to him. The anecdotes he tells sometimes end in mid-sentence, confusing a listener. But his voice is animated and intense, making him sound at times like a feisty young man of 30.

“It’s all happening so quickly, the breakdown of the world as we have known it,” he says, sipping a cup of black coffee. “Today, there is sunshine and shadows for those of us who can still remember.

“Sunshine, because people are becoming free. Shadows, because the enemies of the Jews, the enemies of freedom, are as open as they have always been.”

Wiesenthal, who escaped death three times in concentration camps, says rapid German re-unification is frightening but inevitable. He lost most of his family to Hitler’s gas chambers, but insists that millions of German citizens--better educated and sobered by the post-war years--will never repeat the horrors of the Nazi period.

“The partition of Germany was a punishment for the crimes of Hitler, but this was not a punishment forever,” he says. “You cannot take a country and say, ‘Half of you is here, and half of you will always be there.’

“Every Jew has in his subconscious a bad feeling about this . . . but the lesson of Hitler is a lesson for the next few generations. And I think they will not forget it.”

Surprising words from a man who stumbled into an American officer’s barracks 45 years ago with the names of Nazi camp guards and other murderers scrawled on a piece of paper. A trembling skeleton of less than 110 pounds, Wiesenthal was in wretched health for weeks after his liberation. It took him months to learn that his wife, Cyla, who had been separated from him years before, was also alive.

Some survivors tried to pick up the threads of their life and forget. But Wiesenthal believed it was his duty to make the world remember.

“Our enemies should know they’re not forgotten,” he says. “When I come before the 6 million Jews in the next world and they ask me, what did I do for them, I will be able to say, I did not forget you.”

Starting out as an assistant to U.S. military officials, Wiesenthal eventually formed his own group, the Documentation Center of the Jewish Victims of Nazism. Working from a small office in Vienna, he developed a network of intelligence agents and informants to flush out war criminals, many of whom were in foreign countries living under false names.

Aided at times by Israeli security agents, he helped bring some of Hitler’s most notorious thugs to justice--including Eichmann, a bureaucrat who had drawn up elaborate plans for the final solution. After a lengthy pursuit, intricately chronicled in “Justice Not Vengeance,” Eichmann was arrested in Argentina, tried by an Israeli court, sentenced to death in 1962 and hanged.

In later years, Wiesenthal participated in the unsuccessful search for Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who conducted grotesque experiments on Jewish children at Auschwitz and was later reported to have died in South America. He tracked down Karl Silberbauer, the SS officer who rounded up Anne Frank’s family, and publicly identified Hermine Braunsteiner, a sadistic guard at the Majdanek camp in Poland, who was found living quietly in Queens, N.Y.

To date, Wiesenthal has helped arrest some 1,100 war criminals, and the search goes on. Next month, he says, a plane from Buenos Aires will land in Germany; aboard it will be Josef Schwammberger, a 78-year-old former SS ghetto commander thought to be responsible for the deaths of 1,500 to 2,000 Jews.

Although West Germany requested the extradition, much of the groundwork was done by Wiesenthal’s Vienna office. He was also greatly assisted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the world’s leading organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

Throughout his career, Wiesenthal has been accused of seeking blind vengeance. Some critics, such as human rights lawyer Ramsey Clark, have asked what purpose is served by bringing aging, sometimes senile war criminals to trial in a foreign land, years after their crimes. Wiesenthal smiles at the question and says the Schwammberger case, like so many others, speaks for itself.

“People will say, why are you doing this? When you bring an old man before a trial, the sympathy of the audience is always for the old man. And there is a chance that a German doctor will declare Schwammberger unfit to stand trial.

“But we must do it. Why? Because such situations are a warning for the murderers that we will never rest. That even 50 years later, their neighbors will know who was their neighbor.”

Surveying the world today, Wiesenthal praises developments in West Germany. No country has published more books criticizing the Third Reich, and young people there are determined to acknowledge the country’s past, he says.

The situation is different in other countries. Asked about East Germany’s April 12 statement accepting responsibility for the Holocaust, Wiesenthal’s eyes flash with contempt.

“Now they are feeling guilty, OK,” he says. “This was a place where terrorists for the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) were trained. They never paid a penny of restitution to survivors of the camps. They never helped West Germany produce witnesses for the trials (of war criminals). They were an absolute police state.”

As in the past, Wiesenthal refuses to visit Canada. He is critical of that country’s “slow pace” in evaluating the war crimes that may have been committed by thousands of former Ukranian SS officers now living there.

“Canada is a democratic country, and I wish not to come as a troublemaker,” he says. “So I’m not going there. Their own population should take care of this, not me.”

As for Poland, the old wounds of anti-Semitism will take years to heal, he says. But as political changes continue to rock Eastern Europe, Wiesenthal cautions that it is dangerous to view everything from a Jewish standpoint.

“It reminds me of an old joke,” he says. “One Jew is reading a newspaper to another Jew who is illiterate. He reads about an earthquake in China. And the illiterate Jew asks, ‘this earthquake . . . it’s good for the Jews?’

“What I am trying to say is, we have to see things in a new light. We live in a world where ideology is collapsing. We have seen the collapse of Nazism. We see the collapse of Communism. No one man can foretell the future.”

Wiesenthal insists he will continue with his work as long as his health permits. But the inevitable question is asked: Who will carry on the pursuit of war criminals when he is gone?

“The future is with the center in Los Angeles,” he says. “They carry on educational activities, so people will know. And they are very involved in seeing what’s going on against Jews around the world. They are dynamite, these people in Los Angeles. I give them advice, but they do much of the work.”

For an example, Wiesenthal points to the center’s campaign that convinced the Sorbonne not to award an honorary degree to Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas. The group learned he had written an anti-Semitic tract, had it translated into French and sent the publication to French President Francois Mitterand.

“This work will go on because there are many lessons that people must still learn,” Wiesenthal says. “The history of man is a history of crimes.”

The most important lesson, he says, is that parents must teach their children. With tears in his eyes, he tells the story of a former SS officer who had been arrested after the war and spent two years in an Austrian jail for his part in rounding up Jews. The man, now an insurance agent, told Wiesenthal that his 17-year-old son was reading books critical of the Nazis and was turning against him.

“He came to me for advice, and what could I say?” says Wiesenthal. “I told him my own story. I told him that my daughter, when she was 9, was confused because she had no grandparents and all her friends had grandparents. She was angry, she wanted to know why she had no family.

“I could not poison the soul of a 9-year-old girl. So I called friends in Austria, and had them call her and pretend to be members of her family. It was only when she was 12 that I finally told her the story of her people.”

Wiesenthal shakes his head sadly.

“I told this to the man, because I realized for the first time that those on the other side could suffer, too. I told him to tell his son everything. I said he would lose his son, but that one day, when his son was a man, he would respect his father for his courage. Courage to tell the truth.”

In his 1987 book “Every Day Remembrance Day,” Wiesenthal went through the calendar year documenting historical atrocities against Jews. It was an eye-opening account of hatred through the centuries, and the author says the secretaries who typed up his manuscript had nightmares for weeks.

On April 26, 1343, for example, a ritual murder accusation was raised against the Jews of Germersheim, Germany, and the whole Jewish community was burned at the stake. In 1881, 762 Jews died in a pogrom in Kiev. On this day in 1933, Hitler formed the Gestapo, the secret police of the Third Reich.

“People are always asking me to speak at synagogues, in a congregation on days of commemoration,” Wiesenthal says softly. “But I am never going. No. Because for me, every day is a commemoration day.”