By
Roland Eggleston
Sixty years after the end of World War II, Jewish organizations
are making what they are calling a last-ditch effort to track
down Nazi war criminals in Germany before they and their
victims die of old age. The initiative is sponsored by the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, named for the Nazi
hunter who brought the infamous German war criminal Adolf
Eichmann to justice. The campaign follows similar projects
in the Baltic states in 2002 and others last year in Austria,
Romania, Croatia, and Hungary.
Munich, 3 February 2005 (RFE/RL) -- The opening of the campaign
to hunt down surviving Nazi war criminals was timed to
coincide with the 60th anniversary on 27 January of the
liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
It also coincides with growing alarm in Germany over the
activities of a far-right political party, the German National-Democratic
Party (NPD), which denies the Holocaust. During the Auschwitz
commemoration, NPD politicians walked out of a regional parliament
in the German state of Saxony rather than join in a minute's
silence for Holocaust victims.
It was in this atmosphere that the director of the Wiesenthal
center, Efraim Zuroff, launched the campaign. It is called
Operation Last Chance in recognition of the fact that most
surviving ex-Nazis are now in their 80s or older. In a few
years they will be too old to provide testimony or to be
punished.
At the top of the wanted list is Aribert Heim, a doctor
in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration
camps. The Wiesenthal center says Heim conducted medical
experiments on Jewish prisoners and that hundreds died. Heim
escaped prosecution after the war and opened a practice in
the health resort of Baden-Baden, specializing in women's
ailments. He fled in 1962 after being warned that he was
being investigated.
The historian Stefan Klemm, who works with Zuroff at the
Wiesenthal center, said there is reason to believe Heim is
still alive. "We have concrete indications that [Heim]
is still alive," Klemm said. "They are based, among
other things, on the fact that he has a fortune of about
1 million euros in a Berlin bank and that when he dies it
should go to his heirs. The fact that it has not been claimed
by heirs makes clear that he is still alive."
A reward of 130,000 euros ($168,000) has been offered for
information about Heim's whereabouts.
Zuroff says he believes there are hundreds of old Nazis
like Heim who are still living and should be prosecuted for
what they did. He has offered a reward of $10,000 for information
leading to the prosecution and punishment of a Nazi war criminal.
Smaller sums are offered to those who provided sufficient
information to launch an investigation.
Also on the wanted list are five men in German uniform who
photographed each other laughing as they raped a young German
woman, Marianne Kohn, in the French town of Annemasse in
1944. The victim's body was later found in a mass grave.
German TV recently showed the black-and-white photographs
taken by the rapists in the hope that they might be identified.
Kohn was a member of a group smuggling children out of Nazi-occupied
France into neutral Switzerland. She was successful for a
time but was caught and imprisoned early in 1944.
Operation Last Chance is also seeking a Croatian general,
Milivoj Asner, who is said to have been the wartime controller
of the town of Slavonska Pozega. Last year Zuroff gave the
Croatian attorney general a file claiming that Asner persecuted
people during the Nazi era. Asner has since disappeared.
Operation Last Chance has established a telephone hot line
in Germany for those with information (0800 204 054) and
a website at http://www.operationlastchance.com.
URL: http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/2/B495BACA-1F35-4387-AC9F-FFD466D89302.html
|