The first phase of Operation: Last Chance, a Simon Wiesenthal
Center Nazi-hunting venture in the Baltics, was so successful,
according to the Golden Beach investment manager who financed
it, that it's being expanded to other countries.
Aryeh Rubin, 53, left Monday for Warsaw, Bucharest and Vienna,
offering $10,000 to anyone whose tips lead to arrests and
convictions of Poles, Romanians and Austrians guilty of World
War II atrocities.
"
The Holocaust has basically been forgotten or denied in these
places," said
Rubin, who believes it's never too late to track down elderly
Nazis and their collaborators.
"
These guys got away with it in 95 percent of cases."
Rubin and the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem director, Dr.
Efraim Zuroff, last summer made the offer in Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia, which led to information on 241 suspects -- "names
that nobody would recognize, but these were hands-on killers," said Rubin.
The names of 13 Ukrainian collaborators reportedly living
in the United States were given to the Department of Justice's
Office of Special Investigations, Zuroff said.
One of those cases he believes "has
potential."
Information on 10 suspects has been turned over to the chief
prosecutor of Latvia's Division of Investigation of Crimes
of Totalitarian Regimes, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
The names of 32 suspects were given to the chief prosecutor
of the Special Investigations Division of the Lithuanian
Procurator General for formal investigation. The prosecutor
has opened three murder investigations, Zuroff said.
"
There's no question that the results clearly prove that the
motivation and thinking of the project were correct," he
said. "But one disappointment was that convicted murderers who in many cases may have
been the only witnesses who knew what happened in sites
of isolated murder didn't come forward."
However, ordinary people did come forward after reading
about the reward in local newspapers, Rubin said.
" The most poignant was in a Lithuanian town where there were
50 Jewish families before the war and none afterward. Somebody
told Rubin that they saw them in a covered wagon then heard
the shots, saw the wagon return empty and the clothing
thrown in the street."
The Polish leg of the upcoming trip is special for Rubin,
who lost relatives there in the Holocaust.
"
In a 45-day period, my father saw his father, brother and
niece die on the run" from
the Nazis, he said.
Later this month, he and Zuroff plan to visit Germany,
Ukraine and Belarus to search for more names.
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