The
Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center is making a last ditch
effort to track down Nazis before they die of old age. Already
underway in eastern Europe, the project will be expanded
to Germany in June.
Time is running out for Simon Wiesenthal and the Nazis he's
been pursuing for the past 50 years. At 95, the Austrian
Jew is spearheading one final push to bring to justice the
perpetrators of the Holocaust before they die. Called "Operation
Last Chance," the project relies on rewards, advertising
campaigns, press conferences and telephone hotlines to urge
people to share what they know about Nazi war criminals who
escaped justice.
After being implemented in eastern Europe and Austria, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center plans to take its campaign to Germany.
Starting in June, it will begin tracking down Nazis who have
gone undetected for more than half a century. A reward of €10,000
($12,000) awaits anyone offering information that leads to
the sentencing of a person for Nazi crimes.
"There's no question that there is sufficient political
will in Germany today to bring Nazis to justice," Efraim
Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office,
told DW-RADIO.
New information
"
The basic idea behind this project is to reach individuals
who have information and otherwise would never have come
forward," Zuroff said. "With all due respect to
the prosecutors, we're talking about people who have chosen
until now not to make that information available."
The project was launched in 2002 in Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania and has since also been underway in Austria, Poland
and Romania -- with varied amounts of response.
"It's been extremely successful in the Baltics and
less successful in Austria," Zuroff said. "We've
received the names of close to 300 suspects and over 70 of
those names were submitted to prosecutors."
After the Center hands over the information, it's up to
the prosecutors to act on it, which isn't always a given. "We
chose to initiate the project in those countries in which
there are serious problems in bringing Nazis to justice,
and there's relatively little political will to do so," Zuroff
lamented. "This is a big part of the problem."
Many still in hiding
Zuroff is certain that there are still many former Nazis
in hiding in European countries, something which is evidenced
in trials over the past few years, including the indictment
earlier this month in Italy of three former SS officers for
the 1944 massacre of 560 civilians in the Tuscan village
Sant'Anna di Stazzema. The three German men, all in their
80s, were tried in absentia and it remains unclear whether
they will be extradited to Italy to serve their sentences.
"You have to remember that in order to carry out such
a heinous crime, which resulted in the murder of six million
Jews and millions of others, it takes hundreds of thousands,
millions of individuals who were involved in different ways," Zuroff
pointed out.
Around 2,000 war criminals could still be living in Germany,
Micha Brumlik, the director of Frankfurt's Fritz Bauer Institute,
which is devoted to researching the Holocaust, told the Die
Tageszeitung newspaper. Brumlik reportedly tried to convince
Zuroff not to offer rewards for information because people
would be motivated by money rather than morals.
Already too late?
Brumlik also doubted whether the Wiesenthal project would
lead to many indictments. "It would be extraordinarily
difficult to collect valid evidence," he told the paper.
He said the fact that suspects would be very old meant they
would likely never be tried or forced to serve jail sentences.
He said only nine of the cases "Operation Last Chance" had
handed over to prosecutors in the Baltics were actually being
investigated by the authorities.
Zuroff admitted, too, that he wasn't optimistic about prosecutions
taking place. But time is running out. Zuroff plans to expand
the project to Croatia, Hungary and Ukraine.
"There are still thousands of war criminals in Europe.
We're going wherever Jews were murdered," he told German
newsmagazine Focus.
DW staff (ncy)
Deutsche
Welle, 18.05.2004
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