Confessions of a Nazi hunter

GROWING UP in Brooklyn, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff’s dream was to become the first Orthodox Jew to play in the NBA.

“To be perfectly honest I wasn’t good enough so basketball’s loss is Nazi hunting’s gain,” Dr Zuroff told a capacity crowd at the Chabad Lubavitch Centre in Leeds on Sunday.

Dr Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said “the good news is that we have more or less won the fight against the Holocaust denier in the Western world.

“But that doesn’t mean there will never be anyone who will deny the Shoah in the future. There will always be such people.”

Holocaust denial in the Arab world remained “a tremendous problem. They think the Shoah is made up and they have no concept of what actually happened.”

He claimed to be “the only Jew who wishes for a long life for Nazis” — at least until he caught them. Dr Zuroff believes hundreds are still alive.

But the “sad truth is that many countries don’t want to prosecute”.

He had yet to come across a Nazi who regretted their actions.