Nazi-hunter: We still have a few more years
ISRAEL: 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 realised 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 Weisenthal Centre, a Jewish group that 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 today, as he sits in his office in west Jerusalem, 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.
Zuroff still has a few names on his ‘‘most wanted’’ list, mainly members of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads that murdered Jews wherever they found them.
‘‘This is the nitty gritty of Nazi hunting,’’ he says. ‘‘Any person we can get into court, we’re happy.’’ - Telegraph Group