The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen is a good opportunity to set the record straight on Austria, Efraim Zuroff figures.

"For years they peddled this message that they were the first, and worst, victims of the Nazis," said the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel director. "But anyone who knows the history of the Shoah knows the Austrians were willing, zealous collaborators."

Beyond the gas chambers and labor camps of Mauthausen, from which Simon Wiesenthal himself was liberated, the depth of the country's collective guilt is overwhelming. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler; Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Final Solution; and Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland, were only a few of the numerous Austrians who implemented the Nazis' plan to destroy European Jewry.

Austria contributed more volunteers to the SS, per capita, than did Germany. Some 40 percent of the personnel and most of the commanders of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were Austrians, and as much as 80% of Eichmann's staff was recruited from his Austrian compatriots.

Not until the early 1990s, after the fallout from the Kurt Waldheim scandal, did Austria begin to confront its wartime legacy.

"They finally started admitting that they weren't necessarily victims, but were also participants," Zuroff said. "They admitted that they bore part of the blame." However, he added, "that was never translated into practical action with Nazi war criminals; it never produced a serious effort to bring Nazis to justice."

As evidence of this, Zuroff pointed out that Austria hasn't had a conviction of a Nazi war criminal in 30 years.

Austria, he said, still "has the responsibility to see to it that those Austrian perpetrators who were involved in these crimes be brought to trial. That has not been the case....

"It's true that by [the early 1990s] many of the leading Austrian criminals had died. But today, [the United States] is still prosecuting, Germany is still prosecuting, and other countries are still prosecuting – so why can't Austria prosecute?"

That is not to say that there has been no movement at all on war crimes cases. The Simon Wiesenthal Center last year credited Austria with opening more investigations into suspected Nazi war criminals, although Zuroff added the caveat that the center provided almost all the names and information to the Austrian government.

"In theory, we're not the ones who should be finding these people," he said, "They are. If they were doing this properly, they would have a special office for this, like in Germany, and they would really make an effort."

Zuroff believes that Austria is more interested in appearing to be earnest than in actually hunting and trying war criminals.

"The Austrians are smart enough to realize that the more cases they open up, the better they'll look," he said. "They know they're being watched. But has anything come out of these investigations? Of course not.

"Sadly, in a country where there is no political will to proceed, to really bring Nazis to justice, there will be no prosecutions."

Jerusalem Post, May 8, 2005