The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which on Wednesday is kicking off a final effort to track down and prosecute Nazi war criminals in Germany, is fuming at the organized German Jewish community for refusing to cooperate with the campaign.

Under the German phase of "Operation: Last Chance," to be launched the day before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Germany's Holocaust Remembrance Day, Germans are to be offered Euro10,000 for information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of those involved in the murder of Jews. The campaign includes an ad blitz and a hot line for tips.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office, told The Jerusalem Post that the official German Jewish leadership has declined to partner with it and provide the necessary on-the-ground logistical support.

"They didn't want to work with us, plain and simple," he said. "They said it's not the right time. Maybe in 10 years it will be the right time."

In a decade the remaining Nazis will most likely have died off; the campaign is being launched now because time is running out and this is the "last chance" to bring the criminals to justice, Zuroff explained.

"This is not the small community of 20 or 30 years ago. This is already a community that numbers over 100,000 and shouldn't be afraid of its shadow," Zuroff said, noting that other organized European Jewish communities that haven't wanted to participate in the effort have been smaller and more vulnerable to an anti-Semitic backlash.

"Germany is inexplicable, in my opinion. I find it very difficult to understand the reluctance. That's the choice they've made so they have to live with it. But we don't have to live with it. Operation: Last Chance will go on with or without the cooperation of the central council," he said, adding that he believes that most of the German Jewish community supports the center's campaign.

The Jerusalem Post tried for several weeks to talk with officials from the Central Council of Jews in Germany, to no avail.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center will instead be working with Honestly Concerned, a German-Jewish NGO fighting anti-Semitism.
Since Operation: Last Chance began two and a half years ago in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the center has already received leads on 329 suspects.

Just last week, information obtained in Hungary led to the outing of an 83-year-old former Hungarian army officer allegedly complicit in the murder of at least one Jew in 1944 who escaped to Perth, Australia. Perth's Channel 9 revealed Charles Zentai's past on a recent broadcast, and Zuroff believes the exposure could lead to his extradition to Hungary. Even without conviction, Zuroff is already racking up a victory: "We've changed his life. It's going to be downhill from now on."

So far the only money to be awarded was Euro5,000 to a Croatian man who supplied reams of compelling evidence against a suspect who has since fled to Austria.

But prosecuting war criminals is only one aim of the campaign, according to Zuroff.

Also important is educating local communities about their pasts and fighting Holocaust revisionism.

"It's part of the larger struggle against anti-Semitism because the best way of teaching people about the Holocaust is trials," he said. "When the person is tried in a local courtroom with local judges in the local language, it takes on a resonance and is incredibly convincing and better able to educate the public than any textbook."

Germany, however, is one country where Holocaust denial isn't the issue.

"It's one of the few countries where the issue is sufficient evidence rather than whether the country is or is not in favor" of prosecuting war criminals, according to Zuroff, who said Germany has one of the best success rates in completing such cases.

But, he added, "It's not like this is a high priority for the German government."

He estimates that thousands of Germans complicit in the persecution and murder of Jews during the Holocaust are still alive and could be tried, though he has no expectations of mass arrests.

Operation: Last Chance has been running and being fine-tuned in eight countries leading up to the launch of the German component.

"This is really the culmination of the operation," Zuroff said. "In terms of the potential for success, Germany is head and shoulders above any other country."