LONDON
— The decision of a German court to close the file on a notorious
Nazi fugitive known as Dr. Death is a reminder that time
is running out to bring war criminals from World War II to
justice.
As my colleague Nicholas Kulish reports, a regional court in Baden-Baden said
on Friday that it had abandoned a criminal investigation
into Aribert Ferdinand Heim after concluding he died in Cairo
in 1992.
The Austrian-born Waffen-SS concentration
camp doctor, who fled Germany in the 1960s and eluded capture
for decades, would be 98 if he were still alive.
Almost 70 years after the end of World
War II, how many surviving Nazi criminals are still on the
run, and is there any further hope of hunting down members
of a dwindling band of geriatrics?
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, named
for the most prominent Nazi-hunter, believes there is.
Efraim Zuroff, who coordinates the
Center’s research on Nazi war criminals worldwide and is
quoted by Nick on the Heim case, said in April:
“Despite the somewhat prevalent assumption
that it is too late to bring Nazi murderers to justice, the
figures clearly prove otherwise, and we are trying to ensure
that at least several of these criminals will to be brought
to trial during the coming years.”
However, the name of the Center’s
program for tracking down remaining suspects — Operation
Last Chance — tells its own story.
The Center’s last full report noted
that in the 10 years to March 31, 2011, 89 legal decisions
had been won against Nazi war criminals and their collaborators
in seven countries.
Dr. Zuroff said in the Center’s preliminary
report for 2012 that it was not the age of the suspects that
was the biggest obstacle to prosecution but rather, in many
cases, a lack of political will.
In the United States, which has a
good record of pursuing suspects, two members of the House
of Representatives proposed legislation that would ban weapons
sales to any country that harbored wanted Nazis or modern-day
war criminals.
The sponsors of the bill named no
names. However, the Simon Wiesenthal Center highlighted obstacles
in post-Communist Eastern Europe.
“The campaign led by the Baltic countries
to distort the history of the Holocaust and obtain official
recognition that the crimes of the Communists are equal to
those of the Nazis is another major obstacle to the prosecution
of those responsible for the crimes of the Shoa [Holocaust],”
it said in its preliminary 2012 report.
Jewish groups in Australia last month
criticized a ruling by the country’s High Court not to extradite
Karoly “Charles” Zentai to his native Hungary for the alleged
wartime murder of a Jewish teenager.
The spur for continued prosecutions
is not only to obtain justice for surviving victims of Nazi
crimes but to serve as a reminder for younger generations
of the full horrors of World War II.
Scott Johnson wrote in an IHT Rendezvous
article in July of questions being raised in Europe about
whether history — and in particular the history of the Holocaust
and World War II more broadly — was being quietly erased.
As the Nazi-hunters contemplate what
must surely be the final years of their pursuit, their enterprise
received a belated boost last year when a German court convicted
Ivan Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp
in Poland.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center noted
that it was the first time in German legal history that a
Nazi war criminal was convicted without any evidence of a
specific crime with a specific victim.
It therefore, theoretically, paved
the way for the prosecution of anyone who had served in a
death camp or mobile killing unit.
The verdict prompted the Center to
launch Operation Last Chance II, offering rewards of up to
€25,000, or $32,500, for information leading to the prosecution
and punishment of such war criminals.
Where does all this leave the equally
dwindling band of survivors of Nazi crimes?
Israel’s Ynet News reported mixed
reactions in July to the announcement that 97-year-old Ladislaus
Csizsik-Csatary, wanted for his alleged involvement in the
deaths of 15,700 Jews, had been captured in Budapest.
“Why does God give these people such
long lives?” asked Pension Gesner, a Holocaust survivor.
“It’s too late because he has already lived his life.”
rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com
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