Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff

Hunting for Nazi War Criminals with Operation Last Chance

Efraim Zuroff is in a race against time. His quest: to track down and help facilitate the prosecution of aging Nazi war criminals, bringing justice to millions of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Zuroff is the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and co-founder of Operation Last Chance, a campaign offering financial rewards for information leading to the capture, conviction and punishment of Nazi war criminals. Chasing his search for justice to every corner of the globe, Efraim Zuroff is the world’s last Nazi Hunter.

I am one of those lucky people who gets up everyday with a smile on his face, knowing that he’s doing something important.

Our operation is run exactly the opposite of regular criminal investigations and that’s because as Nazi war criminals age, time is running out. We don’t start with the crime and then try to find the person who committed it – we start with a suspect against whom there is valid evidence and indications of his or her participation.

The biggest reward is currently 310,000 Euros for information leading to the capture of Dr. Aribert Heim, also known as "Dr. Death." Heim murdered hundreds of inmates at the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen, by injecting phenol (gasoline) directly into the victims' hearts.

Heim is now in his 90s. At one point, we were fairly convinced he was in South America, but when we got there, it turned out this person was not Dr. Heim. Since then, we have received a lot of leads from South America and we’re working very closely with the German police special task force out of Stuttgart to find him. Aribert Heim is the only Nazi war criminal for whom there is a special task force.

In the 27 years I’ve been involved in facilitating the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, there has never ever been a case of a Nazi who expressed any remorse.

Nazi War Criminals all over the World

Bringing Nazi war criminals to justice is more difficult in some countries than in others. This has to do with the historical record in these countries and the lack of willingness to face the past and local complicity. This has led to a very dangerous phenomenon that could be called either Holocaust distortion or Holocaust deflection -- a way of presenting the events of the Holocaust in a way that deflects blame from local killers onto German and Austrian Nazis.

Holocaust Collaboration throughout Europe

Wherever the Nazis were, they found willing and zealous collaborators who helped implement their plan against the Jewish people. The collaboration in Western, Southern, Northern and Central Europe generally stopped at the train station.

In other words, Dutch police rounded up Dutch Jews, Norwegian police rounded up Norwegian Jews, Greek police rounded up the Jews of Greece, French police rounded up the Jews of France and the same is true in Belgium, Luxemburg and other places. Those collaborators did not carry out the murders themselves. They brought the Jews to the trains that took them to Nazi death camps.

But in Eastern Europe, the situation was very different; a significant percentage of murders were carried out by the locals. In Lithuania, for example, 212,000 of the 220,000 Jews were murdered by their neighbors.

This is a very difficult historical record to accept and it’s much easier for Lithuanians to say that the Holocaust is really when those “nasty Germans and Austrians came and murdered our Jews.”

Why Hunt Nazi War Criminals

One of the greatest achievements I was involved in was the prosecution and conviction of Dinko Sakic, who was the commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Balkans, a camp where at least 90,000 civilians were murdered. We found him in a casino with the help of an Argentinean journalist and orchestrated his extradition from Argentina to Croatia, where he was put on trial. He’s still in prison today, having received the maximum sentence of 20 years.

This work is still so important because the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. Our generation has an obligation to the victims of the Holocaust. That obligation is to make sure everyone who was a victim has an effort made on their behalf to see their killer held accountable.