Film on Nazi hunter Wiesenthal debuts in Berlin

BERLIN, Feb 12 (Reuters) Simon Wiesenthal spent over half a century tracking down Nazi war criminals in a quest to deliver justice for the victims of Hitler's terror.

Now, just over a year after his death, a new film looks back on his amazing journey from concentration camp survivor to world-renowned super-sleuth, examining the charismatic and controversial man behind the headlines.

Cut from thousands of hours of archive footage and interviews, ''I Have Never Forgotten You - The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal'' describes the personal suffering that motivated Wiesenthal to dedicate his life to the pursuit of his Nazi tormentors.

The portrait that emerges is of a man obsessed with his drive to make the perpetrators of the Holocaust pay for their crimes, but equally determined not to let any feelings of hate cloud his mission or crimp his endearing sense of humour.

''Simon was interested in the truth not revenge,'' actor Ben Kingsley told reporters after a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, where it had its debut. Kingsley, who befriended Wiesenthal after portraying him in a 1989 movie, appears in the new documentary, which is narrated by Nicole Kidman.

Directed by American Richard Trank and filmed at locations in Austria, England, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States, ''I Have Never Forgotten You'' opens on the steps of the Mauthausen death camp where Wiesenthal landed in February 1945 after trips through Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Gross-Rosen.

He weighed 45 kg (99 pounds) and was unable to walk when Mauthausen was liberated three months later by the U.S. army.

But he had already begun taking notes on the horrible crimes he had witnessed and the names of those who had committed them -- the start of a six-decade quest to track down Nazi killers that won him both admirers and enemies.

The film documents how Wiesenthal worked painstakingly in pursuit of Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the transport of European Jews to Nazi death camps during the war. Eichmann was captured by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in 1960, contributing to Wiesenthal's emerging fame.

In the years that followed, he unmasked Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo man who arrested Anne Frank, Hermine Braunsteiner, a sadistic Maidanek death camp guard who was living in Queens, New York, and Franz Stangl, the deadly commandant at Treblinka.

The film also touches on his more controversial cases.

Wiesenthal was blamed for claiming Josef Mengele was hiding out in Paraguay long after the barbarous Auschwitz doctor had drowned in Brazil.

He became a despised figure in his adopted home of Austria after he questioned the SS past of politician Friedrich Peter.

Wiesenthal was spat on in the streets of Vienna and police were forced to escort his daughter Paulinka to school.

But he stubbornly refused to move because he felt the country had still not come to terms with its own Nazi history.

''If you want to cure malaria, you have to live with the mosquitos,'' Kingsley recalled Wiesenthal telling him.

The film also captures the remarkable 67-year marriage of Wiesenthal and his wife, Cyla, whose blond hair and green eyes helped her hide her Jewish heritage and survive the Holocaust.

The two were reunited after the war. Together, they had lost 89 relatives to the Nazi camps.

''Others were able to return to the semblance of a normal life,'' Cyla says in rare footage unearthed by Trank. ''For us, the war never ended.'' REUTERS PDM HS0915