Doctor hunts Third Reich's monsters down to last Nazi

Published on Tuesday 24 May 2011 16:37

AS THE world's only full-time Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff has a unique job - and it's far from over following the trial that ended with death camp guard John Demjanjuk's conviction in a Munich court a fortnight ago.

Whether skulking in the jungles of Brazil or on the pampas of Argentina, in a retirement home in Austria or a flat in Germany, Dr Zuroff has a simple message for the servants of Hitler: "There is no hiding place."

He revealed to The Scotsman how he continues to stalk the men and women bound up in history's greatest crime - and how keeping the memory of the dead alive after the last Nazi is gone must forever continue.

He rejoiced when 91-year-old Demjanjuk was found guilty for helping to murder more than 28,060 Jews at a Nazi extermination camp in Poland in the Second World War.

"But it's not over," he said. "There are hundreds, maybe thousands, still out there and the Demjanjuk verdict makes it plain that with a will, we can try to get them into court and we can prosecute them for their crimes."

Demjanjuk's case was unique; no-one was left alive to place him in the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland in 1943 where 250,000 men, women and children were? murdered.

No-one could say whether he pushed Jews into the gas chamber, or made the soup in the camp kitchens.

"But the verdict," said Dr Zuroff, "was the first to place a suspect in the middle of a criminal enterprise. It was enough to be there. We now don't have to prove specific actions. And that is important when we go after all the others.

"I welcome this sea change in the attitude of German prosecutors. For so long after the war German justice was erratic. Some got tried, most got away. While many are dead, many are not. And I want to see as many of them as possible stand trial."

Dr Zuroff, 63, an orthodox Jew from New York, heads the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, named after the post-war Nazi hunter who lost 89 members of his family in the Holocaust, which claimed six million Jewish lives.

Dr Zuroff became a Holocaust scholar in the 1960s and is now a world authority on the history's industrial mass murder.

In 2002, his agency founded Operation Last Chance which is a final push to bring the killers of the SS and Gestapo, the German army and the SD security service to book.

As a result, the names of more than 100 suspects have been handed to prosecutors and over the past decade there have been 89 court rulings against Nazi war criminals. Last year, 852 suspects were investigated.

"Nowadays, the Germans realise that it is to their credit to prosecute," Dr Zuroff said. "But time is running out. The amount left make it doable."

Dr Zuroff is plagued by the "big fish", the regime servants who got away.One of them was Nazi "Dr Death", Aribert Heim.

Heim performed experiments without anaesthetic on inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He escaped to Brazil after the war.

Dr Zuroff travelled to South America in 2008, convinced Heim would be captured within weeks. Now there are claims he died in Cairo in 1992.

"In some ways Heim was my biggest failure," Dr Zuroff said. "I think he may have worked for West German intelligence.

"I have no concrete evidence, but I think it's a safe bet and … why he was never prosecuted."