NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 25 - After the storm came the siege. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, terror from crimes seen and unseen, real and rumored, gripped New Orleans. The fears changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters. Edwin P. Compass III, the police superintendent, said that tourists - the core of the city's economy - were being robbed and raped on streets that had slid into anarchy.

The mass misery in the city's two unlit and uncooled primary shelters, the convention center and the Superdome, was compounded, officials said, by gangs that were raping women and children.

A month later, a review of the available evidence now shows that some, though not all, of the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public.

Beyond doubt, the sense of menace had been ignited by genuine disorder and violence that week. Looting began at the moment the storm passed over New Orleans, and it ranged from base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life.

Police officers said shots were fired for at least two nights at a police station on the edge of the French Quarter. The manager of a hotel on Bourbon Street said he saw people running through the streets with guns. At least one person was killed by a gunshot at the convention center, and a second at the Superdome. A police officer was shot in Algiers during a confrontation with a looter.

It is still impossible to say if the city experienced a wave of murder because autopsies have been performed on slightly more than 10 percent of the 885 dead.

[On Wednesday, however, Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state's medical incident commander for Hurricane Katrina victims, said that only six or seven deaths appear to have been the result of homicides. He also said that people returning to homes in the damaged region have begun finding the bodies of relatives.

[Superintendent Compass, one of the few seemingly authoritative sources during the days after the storm, resigned Tuesday for reasons that remain unclear. His departure came just as he was coming under criticism from The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which had questioned many of his public accounts of extreme violence.]

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Superintendent Compass said that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue. Asked about reports of rapes and murders, he said: "We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault."

On Sept. 4, however, he was quoted in The Times about conditions at the convention center, saying: "The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets."

Those comments, Superintendent Compass now says, were based on secondhand reports. The tourists "were walking with their suitcases, and they would have their clothes and things taken," he said last week. "No rapes that we can quantify."

Rumors Affected Response

A full chronicle of the week's crimes, actual and reported, may never be possible because so many basic functions of government ceased early in the week, including most public safety record-keeping. The city's 911 operators left their phones when water began to rise around their building.

To assemble a picture of crime, both real and perceived, The New York Times interviewed dozens of evacuees in four cities, police officers, medical workers and city officials. Though many provided concrete, firsthand accounts, others passed along secondhand information or rumor that after multiple tellings had ossified into what became accepted as fact.

What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.

On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.

A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.

"It's part of human nature," General Mason said. "When you get one or two reports, it echoes around the community."

Faced with reports that 400 to 500 armed looters were advancing on the town of Westwego, two police officers quit on the spot. The looters never appeared, said the Westwego police chief, Dwayne Munch.

"Rumors could tear down an entire army," Chief Munch said.

During six days when the Superdome was used as a shelter, the head of the New Orleans Police Department's sex crimes unit, Lt. David Benelli, said he and his officers lived inside the dome and ran down every rumor of rape or atrocity. In the end, they made two arrests for attempted sexual assault, and concluded that the other attacks had not happened.

"I think it was urban myth," said Lieutenant Benelli, who also heads the police union. "Any time you put 25,000 people under one roof, with no running water, no electricity and no information, stories get told."

Crimes of Opportunity

The actual, serious crime began, in the recollection of many, before the catastrophic failure of the levees flooded the city, and much of it consisted of crimes of opportunity rather than assault. On the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, in the half hour or so that the eye of Hurricane Katrina fell on the city - an illusory moment of drawn breath, sunshine and fair breezes - the looters struck, said Capt. Anthony W. Canatella, the police commander in the Sixth District.

Using a chain hitched to a car, they tore open the steel doors at the back of a pawn shop called Cash America on Claiborne Avenue. "Payday Advances to 350," read a sign where the marquee would have been.

"There was nothing in there you could sustain your life with," Captain Canatella said. "There's nothing in there but guns and power tools."

The Sixth District - like most of New Orleans, a checkerboard of wealth and poverty - was the scene of heavy looting, with much of the stealing confined to the lower-income neighborhoods. A particular target was a Wal-Mart store on Tchoupitoulas Street, bordering the city's elegant Garden District and built on the site of a housing project that had been torn down.

The looters told a reporter from The Times that they followed police officers into the store after they broke it open, and police commanders said their officers had been given permission to take what they needed from the store to survive. A reporter from The Times-Picayune said he saw police officers grabbing DVD's.

A frenzy of stealing began, and the fruits of it could be seen last week in three containers parked outside the Sixth District police station. Inside were goods recovered from stashes placed by looters in homes throughout the neighborhood, said Captain Canatella, most but not all still bearing Wal-Mart stickers.

"Not one piece of educational material was taken - the best-selling books are all sitting right where they were left," Captain Canatella said. "But every $9 watch in the store is gone."

One of the officers who went to the Wal-Mart said the police did not try to stop people from taking food and water. "People sitting outside the Wal-Mart with groceries waiting for a ride, I just let them sit there," said Sgt. Dan Anderson of the Sixth District. "If they had electronics, I just threw it back in there."

Three auto parts stores were also looted. In a house on Clara Street, Sergeant Anderson picked his way through a soggy living room, where car parts, still in their boxes, were strewn about. On the wall above a couch, someone had written "Looters" with spray paint.

"The nation's realizing what kind of criminals we have here," Sergeant Anderson said.

Among the evacuees, there was gratitude for efforts by the police and others to help them get out of town, but it was clear that some members of the public did not have a high opinion of the New Orleans Police Department, with numerous people citing cases of corruption and violence a decade ago.

"Don't get me wrong, there was bad stuff going on in the streets, but the police is dirty," said Michael Young, who had worked as a waiter in the Riverwalk development.

French Quarter Is Spared

As the storm winds died down that Monday, small groups that had evacuated from poor neighborhoods as far away as the Lower Ninth Ward passed through the historic French Quarter, heading for shelter at the convention center.

"Some were pushing little carts with their belongings and holding onto their kids," said Capt. Kevin B. Anderson, the French Quarter's police commander. He said his officers gave food, water and rides. "That also served another purpose," he said. "That when they came through, they didn't cause any problems."

The jewelry and antique shops in the French Quarter were basically left untouched, though squatters moved into a few of the hotels. Only a small grocery store and drugstores at the edge of the quarter were hit by looters, he said. From behind the locked doors of the Royal Sonesta hotel on Bourbon Street, Hans Wandfluh, the general manager, said he had watched passers-by who seemed to be up to no good. "We heard gunshots fired," Mr. Wandfluh said. "We saw people running with guns."

At dusk on Aug. 29, looters broke windows along Canal Street and swarmed into drugstores, shoe stores and electronics shops, Captain Anderson said. Some tried, without success, to break into banks, and others sought to take money from A.T.M.'s.

The convention center, without water, air-conditioning, light or any authority figures, was recalled by many as a place of great suffering. Many heard rumors of crime, and saw sinister behavior, but few had firsthand knowledge of violence, which they often said they believed had taken place in another part of the half-mile-long center.

"I saw Coke machines being torn up - each and every one of them was busted on the second floor," said Percy McCormick, a security guard who spent four nights in the convention center and was interviewed in Austin, Tex.

Capt. Jeffrey Winn, the commander of the SWAT team, said its members rushed into the convention center to chase muzzle flashes from weapons to root out groups of men who had taken over some of the halls. No guns were recovered.

State officials have said that 10 people died at the Superdome and 24 died around the convention center - 4 inside and 20 nearby. While autopsies have not been completed, so far only one person appears to have died from gunshot wounds at each facility.

In another incident, Captain Winn and Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann, the assistant SWAT commander, said they both shot and wounded a man brandishing a gun near people who had taken refuge on an Interstate highway. Captain Winn said the SWAT team also exchanged gunfire with looters on Tchoupitoulas Street.

The violence that seemed hardest to explain were the reports of shots being fired at rescue and repair workers, including police officers and firefighters, construction and utility workers.

Cellphone repair workers had to abandon work after shots from the Fischer housing project in Algiers, Captain Winn said. His team swept the area three times. On one sweep, federal agents found an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, Captain Winn said.

For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.- Nathan Levy contributed reporting from Austin, Tex., for this article.

Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 96. His death was announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a new calling: memorializing the six million of his fellow Jews and perhaps five million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, and bringing their killers to justice.

His results were checkered: claims that he flushed out nearly 1,100 war criminals were sometimes wrong or disputed. But his role as a stubborn sleuth on the trail of history's archfiends helped keep the spotlight on a hideous past that he said too much of the world was disposed to forget.

"To young people here, I am the last," he told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993. "I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history."

From the cramped three-room office of his Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Mr. Wiesenthal spent years collecting and disbursing tips on war criminals through a network of informers, government agents, journalists and even former Nazis. He recounted these efforts in a memoir published in 1967, "The Murderers Among Us," and a second volume, "Justice, Not Vengeance," in 1989.

With a grave and tenacious manner, undercurrents of humor and a flair for gaining attention, he was lionized in 1989 in an HBO movie "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story," based on his memoirs and starring Ben Kingsley. A character modeled on him was played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film "The Boys from Brazil" (though Mr. Wiesenthal was mortified by his depiction as a bumbler). And he served as a consultant for yet another thriller, "The Odessa File."

Dozens of nations and institutions honored him: the list of his awards, typed single-space, takes up nearly an entire dense page. But one prize that eluded him, to his great disappointment, was the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Wiesenthal, a bulky figure with a clipped mustache who sometimes laughed that people mistakenly saw him as harmless, pressed his searches despite vilification and threats of death and kidnapping made against him, his wife, Cyla, and their daughter, Pauline. In 1982 his house in Vienna was damaged by a firebomb, but he escaped unharmed. (German and Austrian neo-Nazis were charged, and one went to jail.) Yet he rejected entreaties to move, insisting that there was a symbolic purpose in doing his work from a longtime redoubt of Nazism and anti-Semitism where, he once said, his efforts were "unhappily tolerated."

Calling himself "the bad conscience of the Nazis," he vowed to continue his efforts "until the day I die." His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes "are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not happen again."

It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal.

He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging a list of property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and August 1943: "Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing, 100 freight cars of shoes," along with 400,000 gold watches, 145,000 kilograms of gold wedding rings and 4,000 karats of diamonds "over 2 karats."

Of the 700,000 people known to have been taken to Treblinka, he wrote in the 1960's, "about 40 are now alive." He suggested that train stations in Europe should get plaques reading: "Between 1942 and 1945 trains passed through here every day with the sole purpose of taking human beings to their annihilation."

In recent years he also spoke out in favor of war crimes trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and lent his name to a Holocaust study center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

"Survivors should be like seismographs," Mr. Wiesenthal wrote. "They should sense danger before others do, identify its outlines and reveal them. They are not entitled to be wrong a second time or regard as harmless something that might lead to catastrophe."

Sometimes he taught his lessons with an acerbic wit. Failing to sway a Jewish lawyer who persisted in defending the right of neo-Nazis to march even through a Jewish neighborhood, Mr. Wiesenthal offered a final rebuke: "A Jew may be stupid, but it's not obligatory."

Once, in West Germany, he related, he defused a harangue by a speaker who accused him of dining on Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner. "You are mistaken," he replied. "I don't eat pork."

He became embroiled in Austrian politics, feuding bitterly with the Socialist chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. He was also assailed for siding with Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and Austrian president who concealed his wartime service with a German intelligence unit implicated in atrocities in the Balkans.

Critics challenged Mr. Wiesenthal's claims to have played a role in the seizure of Adolf Eichmann, who directed the transport of European Jews to Hitler's death camps and was kidnapped by the Israelis from Argentina in 1960, then tried, convicted and hanged. He also promulgated many false sightings in the bungled hunt for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz death camp doctor who fled to South America and drowned in Brazil in 1979.

Serge Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who with his German-born wife, Beate, was instrumental in tracking down the Nazi Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, called Mr. Wiesenthal an egomaniac and faulted him for not supporting their anti-Nazi demonstrations in South America and Europe. But Mr. Klarsfeld credited him with blazing the trail by his early and often lonely quest for justice after the war.

Mr. Wiesenthal was credited with a crucial role in many other cases. His investigations in S縊 Paulo led to the arrests of Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland, who was extradited to West Germany in 1967 and died three years later while serving a life sentence, and Gustav Franz Wagner, a former deputy commandant at Sobibor, who died during extradition proceedings in 1980. He was instrumental in the arrest and extradition from Argentina of Josef Schwammberger, an SS officer convicted in the killings of prisoners and slave laborers at camps in Poland and sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 1992.

Mr. Wiesenthal tracked down Karl Silberbauer, at the time a Vienna police officer, who had been the Gestapo aide responsible for arresting Anne Frank and her family in their secret annex in Amsterdam, a feat of sleuthing that buttressed the credibility of Anne's diary in the face of neo-Nazi claims that it was fabricated.

He unmasked Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a whip-wielding guard at the Maidanek death camp who was living in Queens and who was sentenced to life in West Germany. And he put a reporter for The New York Times on the trail of Valerian D. Trifa, a leader of the fascist Iron Guard in Bucharest who fomented a massacre of the Jews, later found refuge in Michigan as archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in the United States and was deported in 1984, to Portugal, where he died three years later.

Mr. Wiesenthal penetrated veils of secrecy shrouding the Nazi euthanasia program and doctors who conspired in killing "useless eaters." He also traced the escape routes of SS criminals and other Nazis, documenting the underground network known from its German initials as Odessa. And as much as tracking down fugitive Nazis himself, he took it as his mission to goad governments around the world not to drop their pursuit and prosecution of war criminals.

But his efforts in the hunt for Eichmann and Mengele, two of Nazi Germany's most heinous criminals, were disputed.

He often claimed to have placed Eichmann in Buenos Aires as early as 1953, and later to have turned over crucial photos of Eichmann to Israeli agents. But Isser Harel, the Israeli Mossad chief who masterminded Eichmann's abduction, vehemently contradicted Mr. Wiesenthal, denying that any such meeting with agents took place and crediting the success to information supplied by a West German prosecutor, Fritz Bauer. Subsequent accounts lent credence to Mr. Harel's version.

In the case of Mengele, wanted for grisly pseudomedical experiments on twins and other helpless subjects at Auschwitz, Mr. Wiesenthal had a shrewd insight in 1964. He urged West German authorities to monitor a close associate of the Mengele family, Hans Sedlmeier, in G・zburg, a Bavarian town where the Mengele family had its farm-machinery business.

Mr. Sedlmeier had indeed been in regular contact with the fugitive in Paraguay and Brazil. But he also had friends on the local police force and, tipped off to a search, concealed letters and other evidence that would have led to Mengele. The crucial lead evaporated, not to be re-examined for more than 20 years, by which time Mengele was already dead.

Over the years, Mr. Wiesenthal publicized a host of detailed and spurious "sightings" of Mengele in Paraguay, Egypt, Spain and a tiny Greek island, Kythnos. Benjamin Varon, former Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, publicly suggested that Mr. Wiesenthal might have been embellishing to coax money from contributors. His comments, in a Jewish magazine, Midstream, in 1983, provoked a rebuke from Mr. Wiesenthal's supporters, who accused him of "profaning" Mr. Wiesenthal's "sacred mission."

Although he continued to voice suspicions of fakery for years after a body was authoritatively identified as Mengele's in 1985, Mr. Wiesenthal eventually acknowledged the truth of the scientific findings that Mengele had indeed drowned and was dead.

But clearly Simon Wiesenthal haunted his quarry. One of Mengele's fanatical Nazi protectors in Brazil, Wolfgang Gerhard, told of dreams in which he hitched the Nazi-hunter to an automobile and dragged him to his death.

One of the most rancorous episodes in Mr. Wiesenthal's postwar career pitted him against Chancellor Kreisky, who was also Jewish and whom Mr. Wiesenthal accused in the 1970's of pursuing a politically expedient alliance with former Nazis to strengthen his Socialist Party. Mr. Kreisky fired back with intimations that Mr. Wiesenthal had collaborated with the Gestapo, a charge that Mr. Wiesenthal labeled ludicrous, and that was never backed up.

That fracas was followed a decade later by Mr. Wiesenthal's dispute with the World Jewish Congress over the Waldheim affair.

In early 1986, when the former secretary general ran as the conservative party candidate for president, the Jewish Congress investigated his wartime record, uncovering evidence that he had not sat out most of the war, as he had always claimed. Instead he had apparently served as a lieutenant with a German Army intelligence and propaganda unit that had carried out deportations and atrocities in the Balkans, and had initialed reports of "severe" measures to be taken against captives.

From the outset Mr. Wiesenthal took issue with the accusations, but not for reasons of politics, he asserted.

"The truth was simpler," he wrote in his book, "Justice, Not Vengeance." "I was not prepared to attack Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi or a war criminal because from all I knew about him and from all that emerged from the documents, he had been neither a Nazi nor a war criminal."

In 1993 Eli M. Rosenbaum, former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and later director of the Justice Department Office of Special Investigations, a Nazi-hunting task force, linked Mr. Wiesenthal to a Waldheim cover-up.

In a book, "Betrayal" (St. Martin's), Mr. Rosenbaum and a co-author, William Hoffer, wrote that Mr. Wiesenthal, acting on an Israeli request, had discovered Mr. Waldheim's secret in French-held war archives as far back as 1979 but for political or other reasons misled the Israelis. When evidence of Mr. Waldheim's true record began to emerge, according to the book, Mr. Wiesenthal allied himself with Mr. Waldheim to save his own reputation.

For his part, Mr. Wiesenthal contended that he had correctly informed the Israelis that Mr. Waldheim had not been a member of the Nazi Party or the SS and that the World Jewish Congress was unfairly trying for its own purposes to brand Mr. Waldheim a war criminal. While he faulted Mr. Waldheim's credibility, Mr. Wiesenthal defended his own conduct. In a world where people believe in Jewish conspiracies, he told an interviewer, "accusations from Jewish sources must be able to stand up to all tests of credibility."

Although a reviewer for The New York Times took issue with "Betrayal" for appearing to equate Mr. Wiesenthal and Mr. Waldheim in villainy, its documentation was widely praised, winning a jacket endorsement from Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and writer.

But Mr. Wiesenthal was never one for backing down. Castigated once as a meddler by an Austrian justice minister, he freely acknowledged that no one had appointed him "the lawyer for six million dead people."

"No such appointment exists," he went on. "But I've worked for over 20 years for the memory of these people, and I believe I've earned the right to speak for them."

Simon Wiesenthal was born on Dec. 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Galicia, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later became part of Ukraine. His father, Hans, was a commodities wholesaler and Austrian Army officer who died in combat in 1915. In Buczacz, Jews endured murderous pogroms by the Cossacks, and in one such assault young Simon was slashed by a marauder's saber. In high school the boy fell in love with a classmate, Cyla M・ler, a distant relation of Sigmund Freud; though teenagers, they were considered betrothed.

Mr. Wiesenthal wanted to study at the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov but was denied admission because of a quota on Jewish students. Instead he attended the Technical University of Prague, where in 1932 he received a degree in architectural engineering.

In 1936 he and Cyla married, and he took a job in an architectural office in Lvov. Three years later, when Germany and Russia partitioned Poland, the Red Army overran Lvov, purging Jews. Mr. Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested and died in prison and his stepbrother was shot. Mr. Wiesenthal was reduced to working as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Only by bribing a Soviet secret police commissar, he wrote, was he able to save himself, his wife and mother from deportation to Siberia.

In July 1941, Mr. Wiesenthal recounted, after the invading Germans replaced the Russians, he and other Jews were lined up in a courtyard to be shot. After about half the group had been executed, the soldiers withdrew for a church service and he was spared. He was then held in the Janowska concentration camp outside Lvov before he and his wife were sent to a forced labor camp serving the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad.

In 1942, as the Germans began to implement their "final solution" by exterminating Jews, Mr. Wiesenthal's mother was transported to the Belzec death camp, where she was killed. In all, Mr. Wiesenthal and his wife lost 89 family members to the German liquidation.

With false papers provided by the Polish underground in return for railroad charts that partisans needed for sabotage, Cyla Wiesenthal was spirited out of the labor camp in 1942 as a Pole. She hid in Warsaw, narrowly escaping incineration in a German flamethrower assault, and was sent to the Rhineland as a forced laborer making machine guns for the Germans.

With the connivance of an official, Mr. Wiesenthal himself escaped the labor camp in October 1943. But the following June he was recaptured and sent back to the Janowska camp where, he related, he slit his wrists with a contraband razor blade. Revived by the Gestapo for interrogation, he tried to hang himself but was too weak.

With the Red Army advancing on the retreating Germans, the SS guards moved their last remaining 34 prisoners westward, picking up new prisoners on the march. Few survived the trek, with stops at the camps in Plasgow, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald and ending at Mauthausen in Austria. There Mr. Wiesenthal, weighing 97 pounds, was liberated by Americans on May 5, 1945.

Almost as soon as he could stand, he began collecting evidence on the atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. He also served the Office of Strategic Services and the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States occupation zone in partitioned Austria. By the end of 1945 he and his wife had found each other, and the following year their daughter, Pauline, was born. The Wiesenthals were married for 67 years before Mrs. Wiesenthal died on Nov. 10, 2003.

Also in 1946, after supplying evidence for war crimes trials in the American zone, Mr. Wiesenthal and 30 volunteers founded the Jewish Historical Documentation center in Linz, Austria, to collect evidence for future trials. But the developing cold war dulled interest in Nazi-hunting - both the Americans and the Russians were secretly recruiting Nazi scientists and spymasters. In 1954 the Linz office was closed and its files conveyed to the Holocaust archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

But after the successful seizure of Adolf Eichmann, for which Mr. Wiesenthal was quick to claim credit , he reopened his Jewish documentation center, this time in Vienna, and focused on an array of notorious Nazi fugitives.

In November 1977, Mr. Wiesenthal lent his name to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based institute for Holocaust remembrance. With an attached Museum of Tolerance and offices around the world, the center investigates and reports on anti-Semitism and bigotry worldwide. In 1981 the center produced a documentary, "Genocide," narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles. The next year the film won the Academy Award for best documentary.

According to a biography distributed by the center, Mr. Wiesenthal and his wife lived in a modest house in Vienna where he spent his time "answering letters, studying books and files and working on his stamp collection."

His books include "Concentration Camp Mauthausen" (1946), "I Hunted Eichmann" (1961), "The Sunflower" (1970) and "Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus" (1973), in which he concluded that the voyage in 1492 was in part an effort to find a homeland for Europe's persecuted Jews.

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.' "

Filed at 1:22 a.m. ET

Text of the joint statement issued Monday by six nations at talks in Beijing on North Korea's nuclear program:

For the cause of peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in northeast Asia at large, the six parties held in a spirit of mutual respect and equality serious and practical talks concerning the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula on the basis of the common understanding of the previous three rounds of talks and agreed in this context to the following:

1) The six parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the six-party talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning at an early date to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT) and to IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards.

The United States affirmed that is has no nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons.

The ROK (South Korea) reaffirmed its commitment not to receive or deploy nuclear weapons in accordance with the 1992 joint declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while affirming that there exist no nuclear weapons within its territory.

The 1992 joint declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula should be observed and implemented.

The DPRK stated that it has the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

The other parties expressed their respect and agreed to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of light-water reactor to the DPRK.

2) The six parties undertook, in their relations, to abide by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and recognized norms of international relations.

The DPRK and the United States undertook to respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies.

The DPRK and Japan undertook to take steps to normalize their relations in accordance with the (2002) Pyongyang Declaration, on the basis of the settlement of unfortunate past and the outstanding issues of concern.

3) The six parties undertook to promote economic cooperation in the fields of energy, trade and investment, bilaterally and/or multilaterally.

China, Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Russia and the U.S. stated their willingness to provide energy assistance to the DPRK. The ROK reaffirmed its proposal of July 12, 2005, concerning the provision of 2 million kilowatts of electric power to the DPRK.

4) Committed to joint efforts for lasting peace and stability in northeast Asia. The directly related parties will negotiate a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula at an appropriate separate forum.

The six parties agreed to explore ways and means for promoting security cooperation in northeast Asia.

5) The six parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle of ''commitment for commitment, action for action.''

6) The six parties agreed to hold the fifth round of the six party talks in Beijing in early November 2005 at a date to be determined through consultations.

BEIJING, Sept. 19 - North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program this morning in return for security, economic and energy benefits, potentially easing tensions with the United States after a three-year standoff over the country's efforts to build atomic bombs.

The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in nuclear negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which Pyongyang promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Foreign powers said they would provide aid, diplomatic assurances and security guarantees and consider North Korea's demands for a light-water nuclear reactor.

The agreement is a preliminary one that would require future rounds of negotiations to flesh out, as it does not address a number of issues, like timing and implementation, that are likely to prove highly contentious. China announced that the six nations participating in the talks would reconvene in November to continue ironing out the details.

Even so, the agreement marks the first time since the United States accused North Korea of violating a previous accord in 2002 that the two countries have drawn up a road map for ending their dispute through peaceful means.

It also appears to rescue a diplomatic process that appeared to be on the verge of collapse after multiple rounds of negotiations failed to produce even a joint statement of principles. The Bush administration had said it was prepared to take tougher measures, including freezing North Korean assets abroad and pushing for international sanctions, if the latest round of talks collapsed.

"The problem is not yet solved but we hope it can be solved eventually through this agreement," said Christopher Hill, the chief American negotiator. "We have to take the momentum of this agreement and see that it is implemented."

Mr. Hill said that negotiations with the North Koreans were torturous at every stage and that he expects that the broad agreement will take time to put into practice. But he called the signing a "turning point."

"This is first time they have committed to completely dismantle their weapons in an international agreement," Mr. Hill said. "They cannot just stall and pretend it does not exist. I think they have gotten the message."

Mr. Hill said he was willing in principle to travel to Pyongyang in the near future to continue discussions, though he said any such trip would require approval from the Bush administration.

In Washington, President Bush reacted cautiously this morning, calling the North Korean move "a positive step."

"It was a step forward in making this word a more secure place," Mr. Bush said. "The question is, over time, will all parties adhere to the agreement."

Progress in the North Korean talks could give the United States and European countries some diplomatic momentum in their negotiations with Iran over that country's nuclear weapons program, which is not considered as advanced as the North Korean one.

More generally, it would appear to increase support for people inside the Bush administration who favored pursuing laborious negotiations with the North Koreans. Hardliners in the administration and in Congress had raised questions about the usefulness of negotiations with the country, which they have argued has no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons.

Critics of the agreement will likely point to the fact that it remains vague on the sequence of concessions that North Korea, the United States and other parties agreed to make, meaning that negotiation could drag on for many more months before any progress is made in slowing the North's program to develop nuclear weapons.

"It is significant that the countries have agreed on a broad set of principles," said Koh Yu Hwan, a North Korea expert at Dong Guk University in Seoul. "But they postponed addressing the hot-potato issues to prevent the talks from collapsing."

Most pointedly, the agreement finesses the North Korean demand that proved the biggest stumbling block in the latest round of talks - its condition that the outside world provide a light-water nuclear reactor that it says it will use to produce electricity. The issue is left essentially unresolved, potentially leaving both sides to claim that their views prevailed.

The agreement states that the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea will discuss providing North Korea with a light-water reactor "at the appropriate time." Appropriate is not defined in the text, leaving open the possibility that North Korea will continue to insist on receiving that concession as a first step before it gives up its nuclear weapons.

A senior American official said all the other parties made clear to North Korea that "the appropriate time" would come only after North Korea rejoined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and re-admitted nuclear inspectors. He added that North Korea would not be able to achieve those goals until it dismantles its nuclear program.

But the official acknowledged that the issue had proven to be the most sensitive one for the Bush administration. After the Chinese side introduced a compromise draft agreement on Friday, it took the administration the full weekend to decide whether it could accept the mention of the light-water reactor, the official said. He asked not to be identified in discussing the thinking of other administration officials.

One reason it proved sensitive is that it echoes a 1994 accord to end North Korea's nuclear program that had been negotiated by the Clinton administration. That accord, known as the "agreed framework," called for the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea in return for the North freezing and later ending its weapons program.

The Bush administration criticized the concessions the Clinton administration made to achieve that agreement and later accused North Korea of violating it, which led to the standoff.

The administration official emphasized that the new accord does not repeat what he viewed as the main mistake of the agreed framework because it does not focus on "freezing" the North's nuclear program, but makes its total abandonment the benchmark for progress.

"We were very careful not to get caught up in the notion of a freeze," he said. Although many details remain unresolved, the accord appears to be a significant victory for China. Beijing cajoled both the United States and North Korea to continue meeting each other despite repeated threats by both sides to discontinue negotiations.

In the latest round of talks, Beijing brokered the compromise agreement after four days of discussions left the talks in a deadlock. It then insisted that the text had to remain unchanged, forcing the parties to get approval for the agreement from their capitals. It took several days and some intensive bargaining sessions to line up support, but the Chinese draft was agreed to with only small alternations, participants in the talks said.

"I think they found the red line for the North Koreans and then stuck with that text," said the American official.

China has long argued that North Korea's nuclear problems cannot be dealt with through pressure or military force and must be addressed through comprehensive negotiations aimed at addressing Pyongyang's full range of concerns.

The Bush administration also overhauled the substance and the style of its approach to North Korea. Officials stopped using the accusatory language President Bush once used when he called North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" and called the nation's leader, Kim Jong-Il, a tyrant.

Instead, the Americans have worked closely with South Korea and China to address North Korea's security and economic concerns and reassured Pyongyang that it recognizes the country as sovereign. Officials relaxed their stand on the North retaining some kind of peaceful nuclear program.

The new agreement commits North Korea to scrap all of its existing nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities, to rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to re-admit international nuclear inspectors. North Korea withdrew from the treaty and expelled inspectors in 2002.

The United States and North Korea also pledged to respect each other's sovereignty and right to peaceful co-existence and to work toward normalization of relations. The two countries do not have full diplomatic relations and did not sign a peace treaty after the Korean War.

Washington declared as part of the agreement that it does not now have any nuclear weapons at its bases in South Korea and that it "has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons."

The DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's formal name.

On the question of civilian uses of nuclear power, today's agreement states that North Korea claims the right to pursue "peaceful uses of nuclear energy." It went on to say, "The other parties expressed their respect and agreed to discuss at an appropriate time the subject of the provision of light-water reactor to the DPRK."

Mr. Hill said he expected that a light-water reactor would cost $2 billion to $3 billion and would take a decade to build. While a light-water reactor does not produce fuel for atomic weapons as efficiently as the North's existing modified-graphite reactors do, American officials have said that it still raises proliferation risks and cannot be a first step in arranging the nuclear disarmament of the country.

North Korea has said it requires the new nuclear plant to provide electricity. But Mr. Hill said building a new nuclear plant would be an inefficient way of boosting its electricity supplies. He said the North considers a civilian nuclear plant a "trophy."

The agreement includes a commitment by South Korea to build power plants and transmission lines to provide the North with 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to roughly double to total supply of electrical power for its northern neighbor.

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 15 - President Bush called Thursday night for the rebuilding of the devastated Gulf Coast through the creation of a Gulf Opportunity Zone, a government enterprise that he said would provide help on taxes, housing, education and job training for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"The work that has begun in the Gulf Coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen," Mr. Bush said in remarks delivered in Jackson Square against the brightly lighted backdrop of St. Louis Cathedral, a symbol of the heart and soul of New Orleans for almost three centuries.

Mr. Bush delivered his speech, carried live by the major television networks, in the middle of the city's darkened French Quarter, where Army troops from the 82nd Airborne Division were on patrol. The Bush White House, well practiced in the art of presidential stagecraft, provided its own generators for the lighting and communications equipment that beamed Mr. Bush's remarks to the nation.

"And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives," Mr. Bush said.

The mayor of New Orleans announced Thursday that residents and business owners could return to some parts of the city during daylight.

Mr. Bush ordered an immediate review of emergency plans for all cities, and said there was a need for greater federal authority and a broader role for armed forces in certain emergencies. He called for a federal government assessment of his administration's response to the storm and said that he would work with both parties in Congress in an investigation of what went wrong.

"This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina," Mr. Bush said.

The president did not, however, embrace calls for an independent commission to investigate the disaster.

White House officials viewed the speech as the culmination of a pivotal week in which Mr. Bush tried to turn around his image as a chief executive slow to respond to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The speech was meant to portray Mr. Bush as a forceful leader in control of the crisis and sympathetic to the people in the region.

"Tonight, so many victims of the hurricane and flood are far from home and friends and familiar things," Mr. Bush said. "You need to know that our whole nation cares about you, and in the journey ahead you are not alone. To all who carry a burden, I extend the deepest sympathy of our country."

Mr. Bush, dressed uncharacteristically in shirt-sleeves for a formal national address, said that the Gulf Opportunity Zone, encompassing Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, would provide tax incentives and loans for small businesses, including, he pointed out, minority-owned enterprises. Mr. Bush also said the federal government would provide evacuees with accounts of up to $5,000 that they could use for job training and education.

In addition, he asked Congress to pass what he called an Urban Homesteading Act, which would provide building sites on federal land through a lottery to low-income citizens, free of charge. In return, Mr. Bush said, residents would promise to build on the lots, with either a mortgage or help from a charitable organization like Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. Bush spoke after he was driven through empty, pitch-black streets, where members of the 82nd Airborne stood on corners in the darkness saluting the motorcade.

"I am speaking to you from the city of New Orleans, nearly empty, still partly under water and waiting for life and hope to return," Mr. Bush said from a lectern set up in the grass and hidden behind camouflage netting in Jackson Square.

In the aftermath of the storm, Mr. Bush said, "we have seen fellow citizens left stunned and uprooted searching for loved ones, and grieving for the dead and looking for meaning in a tragedy that seems so blind and random."

In his fourth trip to the region since the storm, Mr. Bush directly addressed the suffering of the largely poor, black evacuees at the New Orleans Superdome and convention center: "We have also witnessed the kind of desperation no citizen of this great and generous nation should ever have to know - fellow Americans calling out for food and water, vulnerable people left at the mercy of criminals who had no mercy and the bodies of the dead lying uncovered and untended in the street."

The president said state and local officials would have the primary role in planning for reconstruction, and in changing zoning laws and building codes. He listed many of the relief efforts now under way, including the registration of evacuees and retraining for workers.

Mr. Bush also tackled the tough issues of race and poverty that have been the source of enormous criticism and caused even Republicans to question the administration's commitment: "As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."

Mr. Bush did not offer cost estimates for his proposals on Thursday night, but they were drawn from the kind of experiments - with "opportunity zones" and tax incentives - that Republicans have greatly preferred to huge federal spending efforts. The president seemed to try to balance a comprehensive government plan with an assurance that Washington would back away and allow Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama - and the city of New Orleans - to decide how to rebuild.

"That is our vision of the future, in this city and beyond: We will not just rebuild, we will build higher and better," he promised.

Aside from the opportunity zone, Mr. Bush also proposed "worker recovery accounts" of up to $5,000 that evacuees could use for job training and education. The proposal sounds much like the kinds of accounts set up after the passage of the North America Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990's to help retrain workers displaced by foreign competition, a program that met with mixed reviews.

But in his speech, Mr. Bush also left some of the most controversial ideas unmentioned. His words seemed to imply that New Orleans neighborhoods would be rebuilt on the same sites that were flooded, rather than letting that land return to its original state, as wetlands that could provide a relief valve in the case of a future flood. Many of the most vulnerable neighborhoods were largely occupied by the city's poorest, and relocating those neighborhoods opened issues that one White House official said today "are not for us to deal with."

"Protecting a city that sits lower than the water around it is not easy," Mr. Bush said, "but it can and has been done."

He added: "And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know: There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again."

The federal government, Mr. Bush said, will undertake a "close partnership" with Mississippi and Louisiana, with New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities so they can rebuild in a "sensible, well-planned way." He said the federal government will cover the majority of the costs of rebuilding the infrastructure in the disaster zone, from roads and bridges to schools and water systems.

The president said he expected the work to be done quickly, and that taxpayers would expect it to be performed "honestly and wisely." He promised to have a team of inspectors reviewing all expenditures.

But many Republicans predicted that the costs could run as high or higher than the war in Iraq, up to $200 billion, and noted that the White House had said $51.8 billion in emergency federal funds just approved by Congress, on top of an earlier $10 billion, would last for just a few weeks. Mr. Bush did not name a lead rebuilding official in the speech, as some White House officials are urging, and Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, did not rule out the naming of such an official at a later date. Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and John F. Welch Jr., the former chief executive of General Electric, are names often mentioned by Republicans as possibilities.

The president's proposal for an opportunity zone draws on more than a decade of federal experience with offering tax credits and other incentives for investment in economically depressed areas.

In 2002, the Bush administration selected New Orleans as a renewal community, eligible to share in billions of dollars worth of federal tax incentives intended to stimulate job growth and economic development. Last October, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said the program had helped create jobs and must expand across the Delta.

Mr. Bush's proposal goes further. He would provide tax breaks, loans and loan guarantees to encourage businesses to invest in areas hit by the hurricane.

The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said last year that federal agencies did not collect the data needed to assess the existing program or to show how the tax benefits had been used.

The president's comments were met with praise from local officials, including Ms. Blanco, who along with other local officials listened to Mr. Bush's speech from a bench in Jackson Square.

"Louisiana's people are strong, optimistic and determined to rebuild this great region, but we cannot do it without the resources of our nation and our government," she said. "I take the president at his word when he says those resources will be there when we need them."

BEIJING, Sept. 16 - China proposed a new compromise solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff and gave participating countries one day to accept or reject the offer, but there were mixed signals today about whether the United States and North Korea were prepared to come to terms.

Beijing drew up a new agreement - its fifth such attempt in the latest round of talks - that diplomats said promised North Korea the right to retain a peaceful nuclear energy program and to receive a new light-water reactor at some point. The agreement also reflects American demands that any such steps occur after Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear weapons, the diplomats said.

The new draft prompted a flurry of excitement in Beijing after three-days of stalemate in the six-nation nuclear talks, but by late today it appeared uncertain whether North Korea and the United States had made much progress bridging their differences.

North Korea issued a strongly worded statement late in the day in which it insisted that it must receive a new light-water nuclear reactor before it abandons its nuclear weapons program, a sequence the United States has repeatedly dismissed as unacceptable.

"The U.S. is demanding that we give up our nuclear deterrent facilities first. I think this is such a naïve request," the North Korea spokesman, Hyun Hak Bong, said, reading a prepared text. "Our response is: Don't even dream about it."

Mr. Hyun said North Korea requires nuclear weapons because it has to defend itself against the United States, which he said has targeted his country for a "pre-emptive strike."

Earlier in the day, after a series of meetings with the North Koreans and the Chinese, the chief American negotiator, Christopher Hill, sounded a more optimistic note. He suggested that China had pushed the North Koreans to soften their position. But he warned that the negotiations were so far inconclusive.

"At this point, I don't know where this will lead," Mr. Hill said. "We're still in business."

Mr. Hill declined to comment on the talks late today after he spent the evening on the phone with Washington.

Diplomats said that China, the host of the talks, which involve Japan, South Korea and Russia as well as North Korea and the United States, told all parties that they would have to vote up or down on a re-drafted communiqué that China circulated today.

The United States accused North Korea of violating a previous agreement to end its nuclear program in 2002. Talks have been under way since 2003 to reach a new agreement, but so far they have failed to achieve even a broad statement of principles.

The main sticking point in this round involves North Korea's demand for a light-water reactor, which it claims it needs to supply electricity. It has rejected a South Korean offer to distribute power across the border to North Korea instead, even though Seoul says this could double North Korea's electricity supplies in short order.

The North was promised a light-water reactor in a 1994 accord, now defunct. In the latest talks, it is demanding that it receive the reactor first, before dismantling its nuclear weapons

The United States has sent mixed signals about whether the North could get a new reactor at some point. But Washington has made clear that it could not do so before Pyongyang ends its nuclear program and readmits international inspectors.

The Russian delegate at the talks, Alexander Alexeyev, said the latest agreement has "compromise wording which could satisfy both sides" and held out hope that an accord could be reached Saturday.

It is unclear what will happen if this round of talks fails. Asian diplomats said the Chinese are eager to keep the talks alive, perhaps by declaring another recess and reconvening the negotiations in the near future. But the United States has said that the talks cannot go on indefinitely.