NAZI hunters are making a final appeal to find the last surviving guards from Second World War death camps, with German prosecutors reopening their files to cast the net more widely after the conviction of John Demjanjuk earlier in the year.

Investigations have already begun after the precedent set by the success of the 18-month trial of the former Ukrainian SS guard at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland.

He was convicted of helping to murder 28,060 Jews in 1943; a verdict that means that low-ranking guards can be tried as accessories to murder without direct evidence that they personally killed camp inmates.

The Times has learnt that a secret fund has been created by a network of donors to offer cash rewards for information leading to the arrest of former guards, in the hope that this will speed up the process and lead to the identification of the last Nazis before they die.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre estimates that there could be 80 surviving guards from the four main death camps, about 40 of whom could be fit enough to stand trial.

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Efraim Zuroff, the centre's leading Nazi hunter, said that the situation in Germany had changed dramatically with the prosecution and five-year sentence passed on Demjanjuk.

"German prosecution policy until about three years ago was to consistently ignore anyone who was not an officer and was not German," said Mr Zuroff.

"In other words, there was no reason to look for these people. They have been off the radar for 60 years. Germany has become more proactive, and will seek their extradition, which has not been the case until now.

"But it is not as if we know exactly where these people live. That is why we are going to go to the public later this year and say, if you give us these people, we will compensate you. We are talking about people who could die any minute, so we want to maximise the number of cases," Mr Zuroff said.

The youngest suspects are already in their late 80s and some could be over 100.

However, the race to prosecute the last Nazis could yet be derailed by the outcome of Demjanjuk's appeal against conviction. The retired car mechanic was extradited from the United States to Germany to stand trial and was released by the court to live freely in southern Germany during his appeal, which could take another year.

"We do not want to wait too long, so we have already begun our investigations," said Kurt Schrimm, Germany's chief Nazi prosecutor.

"For decades the framework was different, but the Demjanjuk case showed that German courts could have jurisdiction in a case which had taken place outside of Germany, and that there was no need for the prosecution of individual actions," he said.

His office is reviewing its files to see if others may fit into the same category as Demjanjuk. He could not give an exact figure, but said there were probably "under 1000" possible suspects who could still be alive and liable to prosecution, living in Germany and abroad. He would not give any names.

"We have to check everything; from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor, or also in the Einsatzgruppen," he said, referring to the death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established.

There were investigations under way in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia, he said. "It is a question of looking at the records in local archives, working with people on the ground to filter out people who arrived from Germany during the late 1940s and 1950s."

It has not yet been tested in court whether the Demjanjuk precedent could be extended to guards in Nazi concentration camps where thousands died but whose sole purpose was not necessarily murder.

Murder and related offences are the only charges that are not subject to a statute of limitations in Germany.

But even the narrowest scenario, the prosecution of guards from the four death camps established solely for the purpose of killing - Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka - along with those involved in the Einsatzgruppen, could lead to scores more prosecutions.

"We are talking about an estimated 4000 people, to round it off," said Mr Zuroff. "Even if only 2 per cent of those people are alive, we are talking about 80 people. Let us assume half of them are not medically fit to be brought to justice, that leaves us with 40 people, so there is incredible potential. It could be a very interesting final chapter."

theaustralian.com.au