June 19 2015 at 05:42pm iol.co.za
Nazi-hunter visits SA
By ILANIT CHERNICK

Pretoria - Dr Efraim Zuroff is a man of mammoth stature. The 66-year-old is a world-renowned Nazi hunter, a career he never planned on pursuing. “I wanted to be the first Jewish Orthodox basketball player - that was the career I saw myself pursuing,” he said.

Zuroff, who grew up in New York, has lived in Israel for 45 years, working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He searches for Nazi war criminals throughout the world and encourages countries housing them to bring them to trial.

“People ask me what my job is like… I tell them I’m one-third detective, one-third political lobbyist and one-third historian,” he said with a smile on Thursday.

Zuroff was born in New York and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home, attending Yeshiva University. He studied history there and then pursued his Master’s degree in Holocaust studies at the The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Israel, where he also completed his PhD.

During his time there, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in America was looking for an academic director and Zuroff took the job.

“America had started prosecuting Nazi war criminals. I suggested I do research for the Wiesenthal Center in Israel because Israel had the largest Holocaust database.”

The thing that changed everything for Zuroff was an assignment in his sixth year working at the Wiesenthal Center.

“It was to do with an investigation of Joseph Mengele (the notorious physician of Auschwitz Concentration Camp) which indirectly led me to discover how to use refugee records to trace post-war immigration of more than 7 000 Nazi war criminals around the world.” Explaining how his job works, he said they usually receive a tip-off via their hotline or e-mail.

“From there, if it’s viable, we look into the suspect and investigate to see if we can back up the claims. If the evidence or lead does pan out, we approach the country housing the suspect and lobby them to bring him or her to trial,” he said. “It can be a frustrating process sometimes because some countries, like the Ukraine, don’t have laws against what we do but choose not to investigate or press charges when approached.”

Zuroff said one of the biggest challenges of his job is actually convincing countries to bring Nazi war criminals and collaborators to trial.

“No country in the world will ever say no if they’re made aware of it but when it’s a 90-year-old, it’s hard to equate them to being a serial killer.”

What keeps Zuroff passionate about what he does is the pain, suffering and fate of the Holocaust victims.

“We owe it to the victims and we owe it to their families.”

He acknowledged that not all those who perpetrated crimes during the Holocaust can be prosecuted but wants to use those they do prosecute as an example to others who are hiding.

“We can’t bring all of them to trial - it’s not possible, but we want them to have something to fear - to worry when and if the knock on their door will come.”

Zuroff is in South Africa to address the Sinai Indaba conference in Joburg this weekend.

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