Office of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal transplanted to Museum of Tolerance in West L.A.

By the time U.S. troops liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on May 5, 1945, Simon Wiesenthal was so weak from hunger and hard labor that he collapsed at their feet.

Days later, the survivor of Buchenwald and other notorious camps found the strength to embark on what would become a lifelong quest: to bring to justice the major and minor Nazi killers who had exterminated 6 million of his fellow Jews and millions of Gypsies, Poles and other "inferior" peoples.

For nearly half a century, Wiesenthal conducted much of his sleuthing from behind a darkly stained wooden desk in a compact Vienna office. There, in his Jewish Documentation Center, he pored over SS directories, photographs, city phone books and Holocaust survivors' letters in his bid to track offenders literally to the ends of the Earth. Biographers credit him with ferreting out 1,100 war criminals.

Now the famed Nazi hunter's office has been transplanted to the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, as part of an exhibit examining the Holocaust. Museum officials say the room is just as Wiesenthal left it at his death in 2005 at 96, down to the last pipe, newspaper clipping and sunflower tchotchke.