By
ELINOR J. BRECHER
The first phase of Operation: Last Chance, a Simon Wiesenthal
Center Nazi-hunting venture in the Baltics, was so successful,
according to the Golden Beach investment manager who financed
it, that it's being expanded to other countries.
Aryeh Rubin, 53, left Monday for Warsaw, Bucharest and Vienna,
offering $10,000 to anyone whose tips lead to arrests and
convictions of Poles, Romanians and Austrians guilty of World
War II atrocities.
" The Holocaust has basically been forgotten or denied
in these places," said Rubin, who believes it's never
too late to track down elderly Nazis and their collaborators.
" These guys got away with it in 95 percent of cases."
Rubin and the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem director, Dr.
Efraim Zuroff, last summer made the offer in Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia, which led to information on 241 suspects -- "names
that nobody would recognize, but these were hands-on killers," said
Rubin.
The names of 13 Ukrainian collaborators reportedly living
in the United States were given to the Department of Justice's
Office of Special Investigations, Zuroff said.
One of those cases he believes "has potential."
Information on 10 suspects has been turned over to the chief
prosecutor of Latvia's Division of Investigation of Crimes
of Totalitarian Regimes, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
The names of 32 suspects were given to the chief prosecutor
of the Special Investigations Division of the Lithuanian
Procurator General for formal investigation. The prosecutor
has opened three murder investigations, Zuroff said.
" There's no question that the results clearly prove
that the motivation and thinking of the project were correct," he
said. "But one disappointment was that convicted murderers
who in many cases may have been the only witnesses who knew
what happened in sites of isolated murder didn't come forward."
However, ordinary people did come forward after reading
about the reward in local newspapers, Rubin said.
" The most poignant was in a Lithuanian town where
there were 50 Jewish families before the war and none afterward.
Somebody told Rubin that they saw them in a covered wagon
then heard the shots, saw the wagon return empty and the
clothing thrown in the street."
The Polish leg of the upcoming trip is special for Rubin,
who lost relatives there in the Holocaust.
"In a 45-day period, my father saw his father, brother
and niece die on the run" from the Nazis, he said.
Later this month, he and Zuroff plan to visit Germany, Ukraine
and Belarus to search for more names.
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