AT the end of next week I will have spent 32 years as a "Nazi hunter" trying to facilitate the prosecution of people who in the service of Nazi Germany or in alliance with its regime engaged in persecuting and/or murdering innocent civilians categorised as "enemies" of the Third Reich.

I have dealt with many dozens of cases of all sorts of criminals from many nationalities and walks of life, from mass murderers to people who were charged with the murder of a single person. To this day, my policy has always been to never let any of these efforts become personal or to turn them into some sort of holy mission. The task, I believe, is important enough and does not require an emotional component more likely to harm myself and my family than to increase the chances of success.

I applied this approach to all of the cases I dealt with through the years, even when the war criminal sued me personally for libel (Sandor Kepiro in Hungary) or took out a lawsuit that blocked the publication of a book I wrote (Lithuanian Antanas Gecas in Scotland). I also applied it in the cases I was connected to in Australia, even those of mass murderers such as Latvian death squad officer Karlis Ozols or Lithuanian murder squad operative Leonas Pazusis.
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But there was one case in Australia I found myself more personally involved in than I ever wanted to be, the case of Karoly (Charles) Zentai, whose extradition to Hungary was blocked by the Australian High Court last week. On the surface, the Zentai case should not have drawn undue attention, let alone emotional involvement, because of the limited scope of the crime.

Yes, there were testimonies that Zentai was an avid participant in the 1944 manhunts in Budapest for Jews who were caught outside the local ghetto and brought to his barracks, where he was among the Hungarian soldiers who severely beat them. However, there was concrete evidence of only one case in which Zentai had committed murder. Not that the crimes of a murderer of only one person should ever be ignored, but in a tragedy of the scope of the Holocaust such a person's case normally would not stand out.

Yet the unique circumstances of this crime, and the manner in which it came to my attention, aroused my curiosity and interest. Several weeks after launching "Operation Last Chance" in Hungary on July 13, 2004, I received an envelope from Budapest with a collection of yellowing pages in Hungarian and a cover letter in English. The documents were a 1948 indictment in Hungary of Karoly Zentai for the murder of 18-year-old Jewish teenager Peter Balazs, and accompanying witness statements that confirmed his role in the crime. But it was the identity of the sender and the source of the documents that proved to be particularly intriguing. The documents had been collected by the victim's father, Dezso, a lawyer who, after surviving the Holocaust, sought to discover the circumstances of Peter's death and bring those responsible to justice.

His efforts convinced the Hungarian authorities to indict Zentai and ask the US authorities in occupied Germany, where Zentai had fled, to send him back to Budapest for trial. That never took place and, in 1958, the Balazs family was informed that Zentai was living in Riverton, Western Australia.

The request I received was heart-rending. Dezso Balazs had died in 1970 and it was his son, the victim's brother, who sent me the documents in the hope that I could determine whether Peter's murderer was still alive and, if so, help bring him to justice.

It is extremely rare to receive such a plea from a first-degree relative of a victim, but such a person can significantly empower an effort to bring a murderer to trial. Imagine my disappointment to learn that Peter's brother insisted on anonymity because his family was afraid that Zentai would arrange to murder them.

I had to respect their wish and thus suddenly found myself the main advocate for the Balazs family. Representing Holocaust victims was not unusual for me, but I never had a case in which I felt that I personally knew the victim, his father and brothers. Another reason for the issue becoming personal were the active efforts of the Zentai children to prevent their father's extradition. All of a sudden, I found myself pitted against them in the fight for public opinion, with the odds heavily against me. They were an ostensibly normal Australian family trying to save their elderly father from prosecution for a crime committed decades ago in a foreign country, where they claimed he would not get a fair trial. They were present at all the proceedings and always easily available to the local media.

Peter Balazs, on the other hand, was at best an image who was unable to physically attend any hearing, whereas I was a foreigner pleading for a just, but difficult to accept, cause. The ultimate clash took place in Perth in 2006 when I met three of Zentai's children at their request, and I realised that, in their mind, I was responsible for the predicament the family faced.

Of course, it was Hungary that had asked for Zentai's extradition, but they believed that if they could convince me of their father's innocence, the case would disappear. That did not happen. But one comment made by Ernie Steiner, Zentai's youngest son, made clear to me how important it was to advocate for Peter Balazs. "OK," he said to me at one point in the discussion, "we concede that the Holocaust took place; now will you stop?"

Last week after the heartbreaking decision of the High Court, which brought this eight-year saga to an ignominious end, I shared my pain and frustration with a colleague, who asked whether I would have conducted the same campaign to bring Zentai to justice had I known from the start that it was doomed. "Of course I would have," I responded, "it is our obligation to the victims and their families."