VIENNA, Austria - The Simon Wiesenthal Center said Sunday it hopes that newspaper advertisements will help it track down Nazi criminals in Austria before it is too late.

The center plans to start publishing ads Monday in Austrian media that promise rewards to people who help bring "concentration camp guards, Gestapo henchmen and mass murderers" to Austrian courts.

Headlined "The murderers are among us" and illustrated with a photo of a Nazi execution, the advertisements are part of a campaign called "Operation: Last Chance."

" This is really the last chance for Austria, which has not convicted a Nazi war criminal in more than a quarter of a century, to finally take legal action against Austrian Nazi murderers while justice can still be achieved," Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the center's Jerusalem office, said in a statement.

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Miami-based Targum Shlishi Foundation last year and earlier this year ran the advertising campaign in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They said they plan to launch similar campaigns in Poland and Romania in coming weeks.

The campaign in the Baltic countries resulted in the center receiving the names of 253 suspected Nazi war criminals. Of those, 67 of have been submitted to prosecutors in Lithuania, Latvia, the United States and Canada, the center said. At least eight murder investigations against more than three dozen suspects were underway because of the campaign, it added.