GREENSBURG – On Holocaust Remembrance Day, 70 years after Hitler’s Nazi regime collapsed and surrendered to Allied forces, Dr. Efraim Zuroff pledged never to forget the six million Jews who lost their lives during the course of World War II.

One of the world’s foremost Holocaust experts, who has committed three and a half decades of his life to tracking down war criminals yet to be held accountable for their actions, Dr. Zuroff flew more than 7,000 miles to speak to a large crowd of Tree City residents and students at the Greensburg Community High School auditorium Thursday night. What they saw was an impassioned presentation from a man whose lifelong mission has its roots in war-time atrocities that began more than a decade before he was born.

Zurhoff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, headlined the evening portion of GCHS’ semi-annual Chautauqua program and gave a wholly engaged audience insight into the process of hunting down Nazis and their collaborators decades after the Holocaust, as well as the inspiration that drives him and a select few others to continue their work.

Zurhoff said those who grew up following World War II have an obligation to remember the heinous acts of the Holocaust, and that the effort to hunt down and bring to trial those responsible shouldn’t be dimmed by the passage of time.

Often called “The Last Nazi Hunter,” Dr. Zuroff said the decades that have passed since the Holocaust occurred have done nothing to change the fact that millions of people were brutally murdered under Hitler’s Third Reich and its collaborators – and the guilt of those responsible is something time can’t erase.

“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers,” Zuroff said. “They’re just as guilty today as they were the day that they committed that crime, and there’s no reason to ignore them just because they’ve been able, until now, to elude justice.”

Zuroff touched on the notion that the advanced age of those he seeks should, in the eyes of some, preclude the former war criminals from punishment.

“Just because someone who committed murder – or in some cases mass murder – reaches the age of 90, that doesn’t turn them into a righteous gentile.” To that end, Zuroff said he has never encountered a former Nazi war criminal who has expressed even an inkling of remorse for his or her actions.

And he’s encountered plenty.

One of Zuroff’s biggest accomplishments was tracking down Dinko Sakic, the Croatian commandant of Jasenovac, a concentration camp noted for the cruelty of its guards and Sakic’s propensity to take part in the killings himself.

Sakic, in 1998, was the last known living commander of a World War II concentration camp. He was convicted of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity that October and spent the rest of his life in prison.

In spite of success in tracking down a host of Holocaust perpetrators, Zuroff acknowledged his work is a vocation in which frustration abounds.

Time is the biggest enemy of the Nazi hunter today, as the few members of the SS and those who followed it that are still living are now in their 90s.

“I’m the only Jew in the world who prays for the good health of Nazi war criminals,” Zuroff quipped.

As an effort to garner information, Zuroff started Operation Last Chance, which offers money in exchange for information that can help locate surviving Nazis and their collaborators. Zuroff noted his institution’s namesake, Simon Wiesenthal, was initially opposed to such an action, but the results have paid dividends.

The Holocaust expert said his Center takes out advertisements in newspapers to cull information, and journalists’ interviews with suspected war criminals – often conducted under false pretenses – have aided his team in the past as well.

As much as its proprietors seek justice for the millions murdered at the hands of the Nazi regime, Zuroff said dispelling Holocaust denial and distortion, both of which have roots in anti-Semitism, are other major goals. Zuroff said Holocaust denial, an ideology which downplays the policies of the Nazis, disputes the existence of gas chambers and other devices of murder in concentration camps, and includes the belief that the number of people killed during the Holocaust is overstated – among other racist or anti-Semitic notions – has largely been eliminated throughout the world. Holocaust distortion, Zuroff said, is “a systematic attempt in post-Communist Europe to hide the participation of Nazi collaborators” that remains a problem.

Zuroff has been at the forefront of breaking down the proverbial walls put up in places such as Lithuania and Estonia regarding those countries’ roles in the Holocaust. He said education is “the central component of justice.”

Dr. Zuroff said Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who helped find and bring to justice more than a thousand Nazi war criminals, could have been an architect but instead chose to make a career of pursuing his persecutors. The reason, he claimed, was that one day, after death, the survivors of the Holocaust would meet with those who lost their lives. Wiesenthal said those who died would ask what the survivors did with the time they were given.

Zuroff said Wiesenthal knew what he would say in response: “I didn’t forget you.”

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