Nazi hunter's quest nears its end

For someone who enjoys the awesome reputation as the world's last Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff is disarmingly candid about how he started in the business of tracking down the perpetrators of genocide. Born in 1948, he had neither direct experience of the Holocaust nor any burning teenage ambition to bring mass murderers to justice. In fact he was more interested in basketball.

"As a youth growing up in New York, my sole ambition was to become the first orthodox Jew to play in the NBA - the National Basketball Association," he admits.

But all that changed in the early summer of 1967, when the man who now heads the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was 18 and Israel was on the brink of war.

Zuroff was sitting at home with a copy of the New York Times looking at a map and graphics of the Middle East. They showed an Israel surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by hostile Arab neighbours. "My instinctive reaction was, there's going to be another Holocaust, even though I hardly knew what the Holocaust was really about."

The Six Day War brought the issue of Jewish identity and the Holocaust into sharp focus for Zuroff, and he went to study the subject at New York's Yeshiva University and the University of Jerusalem. He moved to Israel, joined the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and has since published numerous books on the subject and established himself as a world authority on Nazi genocide.

Yet the next few days are likely to be both a high point of Zuroff's career and the beginning of the end of the road for the hunters of Hitler's Nazis. As a direct result of his efforts, the world's two most-wanted Nazi war crimes suspects are facing justice.

Last week Zuroff was in Budapest to attend the opening of the trial of 97-year-old Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian police captain accused of killing more than 1200 Jewish, Serbian and Roma civilians in the Serbian town of Novi Sad in 1942. Zuroff tracked down Kepiro in 2006. He says his court appearance "may be the last Nazi trial in eastern Europe".

Under Zuroff's direction, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre launched its "Operation Last Chance" in 2002 in a bid to bring the last surviving Nazi war criminals to justice.

As a result the names of more than 100 suspects have been handed to prosecutors and over the past decade there have been 89 court rulings against Nazi war criminals. Last year 852 suspects were being investigated.

Yet part of the campaign's success has been put down to a sea change in the German judiciary's attitude to war criminals.

"Nowadays, the Germans realise that it is to their credit to prosecute," Zuroff says. And while just after World War II thousands of suspects were at large, now only a handful remain alive.

"In other words the amount left in the queue make it doable."

The same cannot be said of Austria, the country of Hitler's birth, which Zuroff accuses of having a deplorable record on the prosecution of its Nazi criminals.

"They have not convicted one of these people in more than 30 years and this is absolutely outrageous," Zuroff says. He cites the case of Erna Wallisch, a former Austrian death camp guard who was exposed in 2006 as having admitted taking Jewish inmates to the gas chambers.

A request that she be prosecuted was turned down by the then Austrian justice minister on the grounds that Wallisch was merely guilty of "passive complicity in genocide" and therefore could not be prosecuted under Austrian law.

"I just could not believe it," Zuroff says. "I put their reluctance down to sheer lack of political will and the kind of thinking that makes some Austrians think they were Hitler's first victims."

Despite the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's recent successes, there was probably always going to be the "big fish" who got away. For Zuroff, it was Aribert Heim, the Nazi "Doctor Death" who conducted hideous experiments - including removing victims' kidneys without anaesthetic - on inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Heim, who briefly worked undetected as a doctor in post-war West Germany, eventually fled abroad. After numerous alleged sightings of him in various countries Zuroff went to South America in 2008, convinced Heim would be captured within weeks. But he was never caught, and months later a New York Times investigation claimed Heim died in Cairo in 1992, having lived there for years.

"In some ways Heim was my biggest failure," Zuroff says. Yet in the light of fresh revelations this year about CIA and West German intelligence links with Nazis after the war, Zuroff thinks it quite possible Heim worked for West German intelligence. "I have no concrete evidence, but I think it's a safe bet and ... why he was never prosecuted."

Heim is now almost certainly dead, and Alois Brunner, the other top Nazi still unaccounted for, is also presumed dead in Syria. But Zuroff says hundreds - possibly thousands - of minor Nazi war criminals are still at large. The majority will probably never be brought to justice.

"Time is running out and it's now or never. Basically we have run into injury time," Zuroff says. So is the last Nazi hunter about to become a redundant fighter without a cause? Efraim Zuroff does not think so.

His main concern right now is eastern Europe, which, with the exception of Poland, he sees as being engaged in a post-Cold War drive to rewrite history and gloss over its involvement in the Holocaust.

He says an important part of this process is the attempt by many new eastern European countries to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet oppression.

"The argument goes like this," Zuroff says. "If communism equals Nazism then communists committed genocide, so Jews, many of whom were communists, also committed genocide. If Jews committed genocide, then what are you bothering us about with our murders? If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty."

Zuroff says his current task is to find the right language to combat the arguments of those east Europeans who want to rewrite history to escape blame for their countries' complicity in the Holocaust.

The three Baltic states - especially Latvia's SS-veteran supporting Fatherland and Freedom party, which is an ally of the British Conservatives in the European Parliament - are prime culprits, he maintains.

"This will keep me busy for the next decade."

Eichmann files stay classified

Germany's foreign intelligence service is still refusing to de-classify thousands of secret documents detailing the hidden past of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious architect of the Holocaust whose trial began in Israel 50 years ago.

Eichmann was responsible for organising the mass transportation of millions of Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps throughout World War II.

Historians are unanimous in concluding that he played a central role in masterminding the "Final Solution".

There has been speculation that Eichmann almost certainly acted as a BND informer and that the intelligence agency's reluctance to declassify its file on him is part of a continued attempt to keep its reputation clean until Germany's World War II generation is dead and buried.

The Bild newspaper has launched a legal bid to get the BND to open its Eichmann file.

A German court ruled last year on behalf of a German journalist working in Argentina that the BND was no longer legally entitled to withhold the information.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's office has claimed it is necessary to keep the information secret for foreign policy reasons. The court disputes this - so there is an ongoing legal row. Eichmann was famously tracked down by Mossad agents in 1960 while ostensibly in hiding in Argentina.

The then West German government claimed it had no idea where Eichmann was until the Israeli intelligence agency captured him.

However Bild recently gleaned some key information from just a few of the 4000 pages of the BND's secret Eichmann file which tells another story.

It shows that West German intelligence already knew in 1952 that Eichmann was in Argentina, where he was living with his wife and children under his own name.

- INDEPENDENT