Wiesenthal is known for telling Israel (he claimed) in the early 1950s that Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Department who implemented the "Final Solution", was alive and well in Argentina. Ultimately, the Mossad obtained hard information on Eichmann's whereabouts and captured him in Buenos Aires, just outside his house on Garibaldi Street (see Isser Harel's memoir of Operation Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street). Wiesenthal's claim is highly disputed (and questionable). But Wiesenthal's importance has nothing to do with his at-best incidental role in nabbing Eichmann.
Instead, Wiesenthal was a symbol: a survivor of the worst that man can do to man who would seek justice against evil. After helping Allied forces work up evidence dossiers on Nazi war criminals immediately after WWII, he became a tireless pursuer of Nazi criminals hiding throughout the world. He helped bring to justice the Gestapo policeman who captured Anne Frank, nine of the 16 SS officers who were tried in 1966 for participating in extermination of Jews in Lvov, and the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps. He put together the pieces of the puzzles: tracing hints and spare bits of information from an informant network that would make most spymasters proud to discern the path that Nazis had taken to escape from the Allies after WWII. He had a flair for the dramatic too: he announced that he had tracked down Hermine Braunsteiner, the Nazi "house mother" who helped execute hundreds of Jewish children at Majdanek when he was on tour in the US for his first memoir, The Murderers Among Us. His name, even more than Beate Klarsfeld, became a shibboleth for the fear that Nazis had of being caught and brought to justice after WWII.
He lived modestly in Vienna, frequently villified, a lightning rod on Jewish affairs. But Wiesenthal earned his reputation because he abandoned a potentially lucrative lifestyle as an architect (he received a degree in architecture from the Technical University of Prague in 1932) to become a Nazi hunter for a simple reason:
He was often asked why he had become a searcher of Nazi criminals instead of resuming a profitable career in architecture. He gave one questioner this response: "You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.' "
RIP
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