One of them, Hans Lipschis, aged 93, was arrested on May 6. After the war, he immigrated to the United States but was deported in 1983 for lying about his Nazi past.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, the director of the SWC-office in Jerusalem, chief Nazi hunter and author of the book “Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice”, a historian who played a significant role in bringing Nazis indicted for war crimes to trial, shares his opinion with Voice of Russia about the recent arrest of Hans Lipschitz - one of Auschwitz guards.

My first question is – what do you think about this arrest of Mr Lipschitz? What is your opinion about his arrest?

First of all, we are extremely pleased that Lipschitz has been arrested. This is a very important step. And we hope that there will be many additional arrests of Auschwitz guards in the coming months.

Okay, you are extremely pleased. And what are you going to do in the future in order to catch other criminals, to arrest them?

First of all, we have a project called Operation Last Chance, which offers financial rewards for anyone who will give us information which will lead to the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war criminals. And this project, which has already been launched in 13 countries, has brought us a lot of information and a lot of important cases. Legal action was taken in many of these cases. And we now are increasing the reward and hoping to get more information.

And how many people are being spotted at the moment?

Listen, it’s not a question of how many people we are looking for because we work opposite to the police. The police start with the crime and then they try to find the person who committed the crime. But when you are dealing with crimes that took place 65 years ago and the Holocaust, if we worked like the police we would be wasting 98% of our time because the people who committed the crimes are already dead. So, we work on the basis of information about suspects who are alive and we have to verify whether those suspects are really Nazi war criminals.

Do you have enough evidence of the guilt of Mr Lipschitz? Will he be convicted?

First of all, it’s not the question of what evidence we have because this case is being presented by the prosecutors in Stuttgart. After the conviction in May 2011 of Ivan Demjanjuk there is a basis to convict any person who served in a death camp. And there is no question that Hans Lipschitz served in the Auschwitz- Birkenau death camp from October 1941 until January 1945 when the camp was evacuated by the Nazis.

My last question is – what is the statute of limitations for such people?

There is no statute of limitations in Germany on war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Nazi war crimes, no such thing.

Information:

 Hans Lipschis, a former guard of the Auschwitz concentration camp, was arrested in Germany. Lipschis served in Auschwitz from 1941 until its evacuation in 1945. The prosecutors in Stuttgart claim to have indisputable evidence of Lipschis’ implication in murders of camp prisoners. The suspect however denies his affiliation with the Nazis, saying that he worked in Auschwitz only as a cook.

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