A COUPLE YEARS LEFT TO CATCH NAZI WAR CRIMINALS

JERUSALEM • Efraim Zuroff was poring over microfilm in the archives of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, in 1986 when the breakthrough came.

The American-born Israeli was looking at the Red Cross’s records of the millions of people who moved across Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many of the names on the 16 million index cards belonged to Jewish concentration camp survivors. But Zuroff realized that the records might also include their captors.

With his heart racing, he started to compare the Red Cross files with a list of 49 wanted Nazi war criminals. After just a few minutes he had found 16 of them, including details of where they moved after the war.

“That was it,” he said. “That was the moment I went from researcher to Nazi hunter.”

For the past 31 years, Zuroff has led a global hunt for the men and women responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. As the lead investigator for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which confronts anti-Semitism, the 68-year-old has traced the “rat line” routes that Nazis used to escape from the scenes of their crimes.

Around 40 Nazi war criminals have been tried or investigated as a result of his work, from the commander of a concentration camp in Croatia to a Hungarian man accused of murdering a Jewish teenager for not wearing a yellow star.

But Zuroff concedes that the chase is probably almost over. More than 70 years after the last gas chambers were shuttered, old age will likely catch up with the remaining Nazi war criminals before justice does.

“There are a couple more years left, not more,” he says.

The most vigorous pursuit of Nazi war criminals today is taking place in Germany, where the law allows prosecutors to charge anyone who worked in a death camp or an SS mobile killing unit as an accessory to murder, regardless of whether they killed anyone themselves.

Among those who may go on trial this year is Helma Kissner, a female radio operator at Auschwitz who is accused of involvement in 260,000 murders. Kissner is 92.

Zuroff is unmoved by the suggestion that a woman of her age should not go on trial for crimes committed long ago.

“I’ve never encountered a single case of a Nazi war criminal who ever expressed any regrets or remorse,” he says. “These are the last people on earth who deserve any sympathy because they had absolutely no sympathy for their victims.”

He still has a few names on his “most wanted” list, mainly members of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads that murdered Jews wherever they found them.