During the last week
in January 2005, two significant but ostensibly contradictory events
regarding the Holocaust took place in Berlin. On January 26, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center launched “Operation: Last Chance,” which
offers financial rewards of up to 10,000 euros for information
leading to the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war criminals,
at a press conference at the Bundestag and on the next day Germany
marked the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
death camp in an official state ceremony in the same building.
If six decades have already elapsed since the end of the systematic
implementation of the Final Solution at the most notorious of the
Nazi camps, is it still possible to hold any of the Holocaust perpetrators
accountable? Current statistics on the prosecution of Nazi war
criminals worldwide and the results of “Operation: Last Chance” in
the eight countries in which it was launched prior to Germany clearly
provide an affirmative answer.
“Operation: Last Chance” was conceived by Aryeh Rubin,
the founder and president of the Targum Shlishi Foundation of Miami,
Florida, who over the past fifteen years has actively supported
and assisted the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s efforts to bring
Nazi war criminals to justice. With time running out on these endeavors,
however, he believed that a more proactive approach, which included
financial rewards, should be attempted and guaranteed a generous
contribution to undertake the project as a joint program of Targum
Shlishi and the Wiesenthal Center, whose Jerusalem Office was entrusted
with its implementation and coordination.
“Operation: Last Chance” was officially launched in
July 2002 in Lithuania (July 8), Estonia (July 10) and Latvia (July
11). There were several reasons for starting the project in the
Baltics. One was the extensive role played by the local population
in the murders and the extremely high victimology rate in all three
countries. (Over 95% of the Jews who were living under the Nazi
occupation in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were murdered.) The
fact that practically all the Jews killed were murdered near their
homes (rather than in the death camps in Poland) increased the
likelihood of being able to obtain information regarding the identity
of the killers. In addition, we assumed that the relatively large
number of local Nazi war criminals who had been convicted by the
Soviets after World War II and had already served their sentences
and had returned to their countries of origin might be willing
to reveal the identities of their fellow perpetrators in return
for the financial reward. While this possibility certainly raised
a daunting moral dilemma, the fact remains that in numerous instances
of mass murder, only perpetrators could possibly identify the killers
and they were our only hope of being able to bring some of the
guilty to justice.
The project was launched at press conferences held in each of
the capitals, which were followed by ads in the local media, which
purposely focused on the atrocities committed by the local population.
Thus, for example, the illustration used in the ads in Lithuania
was of the murder of Jews by Lithuanians in the Lietukis garage
in Kovno, a well-known atrocity in which more than fifty Jews were
murdered by a gang of Lithuanians wielding crowbars and who shoved
fire hoses into the mouths of some of their victims and turned
on the water until their stomachs burst. The murders were witnessed
by a crowd of men, women, and children who cheered as each Jew
succumbed, and after all the Jews had been killed, sang the Lithuanian
national anthem.
The caption of the ad published in the national media noted, “Lithuanian
Jewry did not disappear. They were brutally murdered at Ponar (Vilnius),
Fort IX (Kaunas), Kuzai Forest (Siauliai) and over one hundred
places of mass murder.” Besides announcing the reward of
$10,000, it listed the phone numbers of the local Jewish community,
the local special prosecutor for crimes committed by totalitarian
regimes (Nazi and Communist), as well as the contact numbers of
the Israel office of the SWC.
In Lithuania, we benefited from the help provided by the local
Jewish community, headed by Dr. Shimon Alperovich, which agreed
to serve as our local partner and to record the incoming information.
The issue of local partners ultimately turned out to be more complicated
than originally anticipated. One would imagine, that local Jewish
communities would be more than happy to support the project and
provide the necessary technical assistance, but that was not the
case. In fact, several communities, such as Estonia and Germany,
refused outright to cooperate, whereas the Latvian Jewish community
was publicly critical of the project even though they had initially
agreed to cooperate.
A good part of the opposition by these communities undoubtedly
stemmed from a fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet while this
concern was shared by all the communities, there were those such
as Lithuania and Romania (headed by the late Prof. Cajal and Julian
Sorin) which chose to provide excellent public support and cooperation,
whereas others rushed to join the local critics. In retrospect,
the responses of the local Jewish communities were not necessarily
a function of their size (Romania has approximately 9,000 Jews
and Lithuania 5,000, whereas Germany has over 100,000 Jews and
Latvia has 12,000), but rather of the courage of their leaders
and their commitment to bringing the murderers to justice. The
latter factor was often influenced by whether these leaders’ relatives
had been murdered in that country during the Shoa.
During its initial year of operation, “Operation: Last Chance” received
the names of well over 200 suspects, mostly from Lithuania. Encouraged
by this success, the project was expanded in September 2003 to
Poland, Romania, and Austria. Our principle in this regard was
to focus exclusively on those countries in which the local population
and/or its government (Romania for example) played an active role
in the murder of its Jewish community and/or other Jews. While
this fact was quite well known in the Baltics, the situation in
the next three countries was more complex. The Poles, for example,
were severely victimized by the Nazis (three million Poles, including
a significant percentage of the Polish intelligentsia, were murdered)
and were not given an integral role in the implementation of the
Final Solution in Poland. Yet numerous Poles did play a role in
the murder of Jews, a fact which many Poles refused to acknowledge,
preferring to foster their country’s image as a victim of
the Nazis.
In Romania, the government’s role in the mass murder of
Jews in Romania and in the territories it annexed as well as in
the Ukraine was largely covered up, a fact reinforced by statements
by President Iliescu and others that “the Holocaust did not
take place in Romania.” Even though Iliescu subsequently
retracted this statement, little effort was invested in educating
the Romanian public about the crimes of its wartime government
headed by Marshal Antonescu, who in certain circles is still considered
a national hero. In fact, since Romania became a democracy not
a single Holocaust perpetrator had been investigated, let alone
prosecuted, and rehabilitations had been granted to several Romanian
Nazi war criminals.
As far as Austria is concerned, its record on bringing Nazi war
criminals to justice has been utterly abysmal, with not a single
conviction recorded during the past three decades. This is not
that surprising, however, in view of the fact that until about
fifteen years ago, Austria touted itself as “Hitler’s
first victim,” rather than as Germany’s zealous partner
in crime. (Many of the leading Holocaust perpetrators, such as
Adolf Eichman, Franz Stangl, Artur Seyss-Inquart, and Odilo Globocnik
were Austrians.)
In the wake of this expansion of “Operation: Last Chance,” we
encountered our first legal challenge based on data protection.
Questions apparently posed by right-wing nationalist elements prompted
inquiries by the Polish Office for Data Protection which questioned
the legality of the project and whether the transfer of information
regarding Polish citizens to another country (in this case Israel)
without their knowledge, was not a violation of Polish law. We
later encountered a similar challenge in Hungary.
Another worrisome phenomenon, which we encountered at this state,
was a plethora of anti-Semitic phone calls to our hotline in Austria.
Out of approximately one hundred calls, more than ninety were of
persons who called to express unequivocally anti-Semitic (and often
anti-American) views. Typical of such calls were those who identified
Bush and Sharon as “the real war criminals” and demanded
the financial reward. Others sent copies of the ad we published
in the Austrian mass circulation daily Kronen Zeitung under the
caption “Der Morder sind unter uns” (The murderers
are among us) along with similar comments to our office in Jerusalem.
A recurring theme of these calls, letters, and emails was when
will the Jews stop milking us due to the past?
While we received anti-Semitic responses in practically every
country, it was only in Austria that their number was so large
and in direct disproportion to the number of serious leads received.
Elsewhere, we received not only hundreds of names of suspects (see
accompanying table) but also expressions of support and information
of historical value. In many cases the people who submitted the
information stated that they did not want any reward, but felt
an obligation to inform us. One such example was the following
story received from Lithuania about the fate of the Jewish community
of Panemunelis (in Yiddish Panemunok), a shtetl with about one
hundred Jews, about whose murder during the Shoa no details were
hereto known.
The informant related that as a young boy, in August 1941, he
saw a wagon with ten Jews aboard, five from the Olkin family and
five from the Jaffe family, along with four armed Lithuanians whom
he named headed in the direction of the nearby town of Rokiskis.
Thirty minutes later he heard shots ring out from the nearly Karolishkis
Forest and some time after that he saw the same wagon return to
the shtetl with only the four armed Lithuanians aboard and with
a large pile of clothes in the wagon. According to the informant,
who began his letter by stating that he did not want any reward,
two of the four Lithuanians in question were no longer alive. Unfortunately,
as it turned out, all four had already died by the time we received
this information. Nonetheless, the information received shed hereto-unknown
historical light on the cruel fate of this Jewish community.
In the summer of 2004, “Operation: Last Chance” was
expanded to Croatia and Hungary. The launch of the project in the
former was unique for three reasons, two of which were excellent,
while the third was terrible. The first was that President Mesic
himself granted us a meeting on the day of the launch to express
his support. The second was the receipt of a complete dossier on
former Slavonska Pozega police chief Milivoj Asner, including anti-Jewish
and anti-Serb directives he had personally signed into law which
clearly proved his complicity in Holocaust crimes. The third were
death threats against Croatian Jews (whose community leaders chose
to ignore our request for assistance), and the offer of rewards
for the murder of the Croatian Justice Minister ($75,000), our
local partner (Dr. Zorin Pusic of the Civic Committee for Human
Rights – $50,000) and myself ($25,000).
In Hungary we were challenged on legal grounds, as noted above,
and the project aroused an intense internal polemic regarding its
validity in which the critics were led by a well-known Holocaust
historian of Jewish origin. Here too extremely incriminating evidence
was submitted, in this case by the brother of a young Jew murdered
in Budapest in 1944 by a Hungarian Army officer named Karoly Zentai,
who escaped to Australia in 1950 and had never been tried for his
crimes. To date he and Asner are the most likely to be brought
to trial from among the suspects whose names were received in the
framework of “Operation: Last Chance.”
With Germany just started, as these lines are being written in
early February 2005, we are hopeful that the project will register
its most successful results in the country which was the seat of
Nazi power and whose nationals played such an important role in
the implementation of the Final Solution. Contrary perhaps to common
thinking, many Nazi war criminals have been convicted during the
past several years and we are cautiously optimistic that “Operation:
Last Chance” will help increase that ever-so-significant
figure.
Having said that, it is now quite clear that any assessment of
the project cannot be limited to its concrete judicial results.
Besides attempting to facilitate the prosecution and punishment
of Nazi war criminals, “Operation: Last Chance” has
played an integral and important role in the struggle for historical
truth in post-Communist Europe, where new national narratives (and
textbooks) are being written about World War II and the Holocaust
and the issue of local complicity in the murder of the Jews remains
disputed and painful. Under these circumstances, “Operation:
Last Chance” has a significant role not only in ensuring
historical accuracy but also in helping combat contemporary anti-Semitism
and paving the way for better relations between Jews and non-Jews
in Europe. |