He was usually called a “Nazi hunter,” but the real object of Simon Wiesenthal’s relentless searching was not war criminals so much as justice.

He died Wednesday in Vienna, where he had lived, and he was to be buried today in Israel, where he felt his grave would be safer from desecration. You don’t apprehend more than 1,000 of Hitler’s henchmen without making enemies. You don’t sting the conscience of cultures that didn’t notice the Holocaust without stirring up resentment. You don’t blow the whistle on lasting anti-Semitism without inviting indignation. (All those who think too much has been made of the Inland Northwest’s Aryans and skinheads, raise your hands.)

“He was way above being brave. He was more than brave,” Holocaust survivor Eva Lassman said of Wiesenthal. “He was the only one with the courage to bring those bastards to justice.”

Like Lassman, a tireless speaker in the Spokane area about her own experiences, Wiesenthal knew the Third Reich’s atrocities intimately, and he dedicated the rest of his life to holding the individual perpetrators accountable. He tracked down Adolf Eichmann, who dispatched 3 million Jews to extermination camps. He spent the last nine months of World War II in a Nazi concentration camp, and he lost 89 family members and in-laws to the Holocaust.

But he saw the full breadth of Hitler’s evil. As Rabbi Mark Gellman has pointed out in a Newsweek tribute, Wiesenthal always calculated the Holocaust’s toll at 11 million, not just the 6 million victims who were Jews. Foreseeing that time and mortality would eventually end his personal crusade (“Criminals die, witnesses die and I will die.”), he stressed during a 1987 interview that genocide transcends any one episode of history. He protested the killings that occurred under Stalin in Soviet Russia, under Idi Amin in Uganda, under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

No doubt he was just as outraged over what has happened in Rwanda, what is happening in Sudan.

“We should fight for all people,” he said of the Nazi-hunting organization he led. “If not, why did we survive?”

Individuals of such dedication and principle are rare. Wiesenthal was 36 when Austria was liberated and 96 when he died this week. We won’t soon see another person willing to give 60 years trying to right a historic wrong.

“There are others that need to be hunted,” notes Eva Lassman. “I don’t know if there will be another courageous man to track them down.”

Until one comes along, the best way to honor Simon Wiesenthal’s legacy, is to recognize evil when we see it, denounce it as earnestly as we can, and insist — as unequivocally as Simon Wiesenthal and Eva Lassman have — on justice.