WARSAW, Poland - The Simon Wiesenthal Center on Wednesday launched a drive to track down remaining Nazi war criminals in Poland by offering a $12,000 reward for information leading to their prosecution, drawing criticism from prominent Polish figures.

The Los Angeles-based center opened a telephone hotline and plans to broaden its campaign with newspaper ads in the next months. Efraim Zuroff, its chief Nazi hunter, said a similar drive already has led to eight investigations in Lithuania and one in Latvia.

But critics worried it sent a message that Poland, which was invaded by Germany in 1939 and lost millions of its own people, hasn't effectively worked to bring Nazi-era suspects to justice. They also said the offer of money could encourage false accusations against innocent people.

Bronislaw Geremek, a former Polish foreign minister whose father was a rabbi murdered at the Auschwitz death camp, said he was filled with "disgust and anxiety" that an outside group was coming in with offers of money.

"I wish instead that the whole world knew how much good Poles did for other Poles by saving Jews," he said on Radio Zet.

Adam Michnik, the editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper and a respected communist-era dissident, said the reward was dangerous.

"A denunciation for money provokes my anxiety. It opens the doors to the hell of squaring of accounts, of false charges and of demagogic generalizations," Michnik wrote in a front-page editorial Wednesday.

"I have great respect for Simon Wiesenthal and his achievements," Michnik wrote, referring to the legendary Nazi hunter who brought about 1,100 criminals to justice in decades of work. But this idea of the Wiesenthal Center seems misguided to me."

Zuroff argued that rewards were a common method for tracking down criminals.

"There is nothing unusual about it," he said by phone from Jerusalem.

The group's effort, dubbed Operation Last Chance, was launched two years ago in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and was later expanded to include Austria and Romania - countries that were allied with the Nazis during World War II.

Zuroff said he did not know how many Nazi-era criminals could be living in Poland today, but believed there were "many."

"This is not an accusation against Poland," Zuroff said. "We're trying try to do our best to bring as many murderers to justice as possible while it still can happen."

Criticism also came from Witold Kulesza, the deputy head of Poland's National Remembrance Institute, a state body that prosecutes Nazi and communism-era crimes in Poland. Kulesza stressed that Poland has worked for decades to track down and prosecute Nazi perpetrators.