- Swaminathan Natarajan
- BBC World Service
It has been 80 years since the beginning of the Holocaust and 75 since the Nuremberg trials, which put some of the designers of that mass extermination on the bench. All the guilty, even without punishment, must be old and surely they will not have much time left in this world.
Why then does Dr. Efraim Zuroff continue on his adventure of locating the Nazi criminals who were not tried?
As he told the BBC, he has many reasons, but the first and most important is that they have not regretted what they did.
“In all these years I have never encountered a Nazi criminal who expressed remorse and seek to repair what he did, “he said from his house in Israel.
Dr. Zuroff, head of the Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its office in Jerusalem, is horrified when it is suggested that the advanced age of these criminals could be considered a mitigating factor.
Its purpose is to bring to justice the hundreds of fugitive Nazis that it estimates still remain in the world.
The knock on the door
Two suspects are currently on trial in Germany and Zuroff is closely following the trial.
Josef Schutz, 100, is accused of work as a guard for more than three years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in the outskirts of Berlin, where he was allegedly an accessory to 3,512 murders.
The second case is that of a 96-year-old woman, Irmgard Furchner, employed between June 1943 and April 1945 as secretary to the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, near the Polish city of Gdansk. 11,430 inmates lost their lives in that period.
“As long as this effort continues, in theory these people can’t sleep soundly and they can never be sure that someone won’t knock on their door one day,” Zuroff says.
For him, the passage of time does not diminish guilt nor an old age excuses having committed heinous crimes.
A successful prosecution provides justice to victims and their families and acts as a deterrent to potential new perpetrators of abuse, Zuroff believes.
Legal victories
Over the past 40 years, Zuroff has tried to trace more than 3,000 suspected Nazi crimes scattered across 20 countries, although some died before he could find them.
No more than forty cases ended in a trial and even fewer ended with a conviction. Despite this, thanks to the legal changes adopted, Zuroff is optimistic about the outcome of the two causes that are followed in Germany.
“12 or 13 years ago, to accuse someone in Germany you had to prove that they had committed a specific crime against a specific victim and that they had done so out of hatred.”
According to him, this made it almost impossible to seat anyone on the bench, but now that requirement has been removed.
“Today, all you need is to prove that this person served in an extermination camp, which had gas chambers and high mortality, and this can be shown through the documentation ”.
Loss of thrust
At the end of World War II, many countries captured Nazi collaborators and brought them to trial.
“The Nuremberg trials were the tip of the iceberg,” explains Zuroff. “In each European country, there were hundreds of cases, sometimes thousands. In West Germany between 1949 and 1985 more than 200,000 investigations were opened, with more than 120,000 accusations, but less than 7,000 convictions ”.
However, the initial enthusiasm for bringing the Nazis to justice it was reduced from the 1960s. According to Zuroff, authorities have found reasons not to devote time and resources to this effort.
“Let’s compare a serial killer to a Nazi criminal. In any normal country, the police would be looking for a serious killer before a 90-year-old Nazi, because they will keep killing until they are stopped. How likely is a 90-year-old Nazi to murder someone? Zero, ”says Zuroff.
So if the Nazis are to face justice, it is hunters like Zuroff who will have to do the dirty work, and they are in a race against time. Zuroff told the British newspaper The Guardian that he must be the only person who wishes good health to the Nazis who still live.
About ten years ago, he launched what he called “Operation Last Chance,” in which he offered a $ 25,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of Nazis not yet tried.
Successes
Dr. Zuroff’s greatest success to date was the conviction of the last known death camp commander: Dinko Sakci, who led the Jasenovac camp in present-day Croatia in 1944.
Up to 100,000 people were killed in the field. Thanks to Zuroff’s work, Sakic was sentenced to 20 years in prison on October 4, 1998.
As Zuroff left the court after hearing the verdict, he was approached by a tall man who wanted to thank him.
“If it hadn’t been for you, this trial would never have taken place,” he told her. “I have no idea who it was,” says Zuroff.
That man was the brother of Milo Boskovic, a Montenegrin doctor who was imprisoned in the camp in 1944. He was chosen by Sakic to show how he punished resistance activities.
“Milo Boskovic told Sakic that he did not want to be hanged. Sakic pulled out his gun and shot him in the head. He murdered him, ”says Zuroff.
“I can assure you that your brother never dreamed that a democratic Croatia would put Dinko Sakic, then the great national hero, on trial, but that’s what happened.”
Sakic never showed regret, which for Zuroff is the typical attitude.
Setbacks
Many times, the perseverance of the doctor Zuroff gets no reward.
He tried to bench Hungarian official Sandor Kepiro and the case went to trial in 2011 in Budapest after much effort.
Zuroff accused Kepiro of being one of 15 Hungarian officers involved in the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942, in which more than 3,000 people died.
Kepiro and other officers had already been convicted in 1944 of carrying out an unauthorized operation, but this had no consequences.
The court rejected the evidence that Zuroff wanted to present. He had spent 5 years on that case and had traveled to Novi Sad to meet with surviving victims. The judicial setback was painful for him.
“The days that followed, when I was waiting to go back to Israel, I started crying. It was too much, “recalls Zuroff, adding:” At the end of the day, I am thinking of the victims, the survivors. What happened to them is much worse than what happened to me“.
Personal motives
When Zuroff traveled to Lithuania to investigate what had happened to the Jews there, he was faced with his own link to the tragedy.
They named him Efraim, in memory of his great-uncle of the same name who was a rabbi in the Baltic country and died a victim of the holocaust.
Zuroff visited his old apartment, as well as 35 places in Lithuania and five in Belarus where massacres were perpetrated.
“Every day I went to two or three mass graves and prayed for the victims. I knew that I was standing on a huge grave that in its day was full of hundreds and sometimes thousands of dead ”.
“I know my great-uncle was one of them and the barrier he created was shattered. It was a very intense emotional experience, ”he recalls.
He tells that of the 220,000 Jews living in Lithuania at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, 212,000 were murdered.
“My great-uncle, Rabbi Efraim Zar, was arrested on July 13, 1941 in Vilna by a group of Lithuanian vigilantes who were looking for Jews with beards. They took him to Lukoshkis prison and it seems that he was killed there or in the Ponar massacre, where 70,000 Jews died. “
“I did not find the murderers,” he laments.
The future
Like their prey, Nazi hunters grow old too.
Zuroff is 73 years old and has 15 grandchildren. He knows that the remaining Nazis will likely die before his grandchildren are adults.
He is proud that his work helps keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, and believes that the methods employed by Nazi hunters can serve to prosecute others responsible for crimes against humanity.
But his experience leads him to doubt the ability of existing judicial systems to bring justice to the victims of genocide and he cites the case of Rwanda, where he traveled to offer his expert advice after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.
There were 140,000 suspects jailed, he says, but bringing them all to trial was a daunting logistical and legal challenge.
“Most of the Rwandan judges had been killed during the genocide and most of the courtrooms destroyed. Not even a first world country could have fully done justice to such a crime. It is simply impossible ”.
He is aware of the great legal, logistical and political challenge of prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide, but he is not willing to throw in the towel.
“I didn’t choose this because I thought it was an easy job,” he says. “I chose it out of a sense of responsibility and an obligation towards the people who were killed.”
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