VIENNA, Oct 12 (AFP) - Almost 30 years after Austria's last Nazi trial ended in acquittal, prosecutors here have begun searching for surviving Austrian SS soldiers and policemen linked to World War II atrocities.

The investigation was prompted by a list of 47 names handed to the government in August by Efraim Zuroff, an Israeli who taken on the mantle of retired Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

The men he named served in SS batallions stationed in Salzburg and Vienna who were sent to France, Italy, Russia and Poland, where thousands of Jews were murdered in the ghetto of Bialystok between 1941 and 1943.

Like Wiesenthal, Zuroff says no country with Nazi war criminals has done less to punish them than Austria and has challenged the state to find the men before they die.

" In Germany people who served in these units were investigated," said Zuroff, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.

" But in Austria there was not the political will to persecute them, it was was not perceived as possible or a popular thing to do."

The news magazine Profil has tracked down three of the men on the list.

They found one in hospital recovering from a stroke, and another who had served at Bialystok in an old-age home in Vienna.

Now 83, he is suffering from Parkinson's disease and says he has no recollection of the war years.

The third was the former commander of SS unit 16 which historians accuse of murdering 2,000 partisans in the mountains of neighbouring northern Italy.

Members of the unit account for a third of the names on Zuroff's list, but the 85-year-old former commander living in the southern city of Klagenfurt said his men merely carried out orders and there were no massacres.

" War is war. But we played according to military rules and we endured hard times too," he said, adding that he learnt of the Holocaust after the war when he was captured by the British.

The justice ministry admits that is has been slower to find the men.

" I'm sure people are still alive who were involved in war crimes, but that is not the point. The point is whether you can get evidence against them," said Matthias Gruenewald of the ministry's team dealing with Nazi crimes.

Not only suspects but witnesses still alive could be sickly and forgetful, Gruenewald said, and added that a similar search for 100 suspects 10 years ago did not lead to one prosecution.

Forty-four were still alive, but prosecutors found enough evidence to charge only two and both were too ill to stand trial, he said.

" They are still alive, one was linked to a massacre near Rome and the other accused of killing civilians in France. We check on them every year, but we doubt we will be able to take them to court."

Gruenewald said the SS policemen could find reprieve in laws no longer on the statute books because Austria's penal code compels courts to compare past and present law and judge according to the one most favourable to the accused.

It means that six men on Zuroff's list who belonged to units sent to Bialystok need not fear prosecution.

" In Poland crimes used to lapse after 25 years. Today you can prosecute Nazis in Poland but Austrian citizens who committed crimes in Poland in 1945 had to be prosecuted before 1970."

But law lecturer Helmut Fuchs said nothing hindered the prosecution of Nazis who committed crimes in Austria, as Zuroff argues many on the list did.

" Nazi crimes were illegal here under the laws of the time too. So crimes committed in Austria should not be hard to prosecute."

The justice ministry this week called on Germany, which has convicted 15 former SS policemen, to search its archives at Ludwigsburg for information about the 47.

Annexed by Hitler in 1938, Austria was long seen as the first victim of Nazism and only in 1991 did then chancellor Franz Vranitzky admit that it bore responsibility for the Holocaust.
Before statehood was restored in 1955, Austria executed 30 Nazis and imprisoned 27, and since then its has jailed only 20. In the last trial in 1975, SS soldier Johann Gogl was acquitted of murder.

Zuroff's list is part of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's "last chance" campaign in which it has also urged Poland, Romania and the Baltic states to bring Nazis to justice.

He believes they should not be spared because of old age and ill health.

" Sympathy for them is misplaced. They showed none for the women and children they killed."