The announcement was made in Hungary, where the Center launched a new stage in a campaign to bring alleged war criminals across the region to justice.
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Officials said the action is part of “Operation: Last Chance”, which aims to discover the whereabouts of alleged war criminals across Central and Eastern Europe, 60 years after an estimated six million Jews perished in the Holocaust.
Toll-free phone lines, publications and financial rewards are among the non lethal weapons used by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter, to track down elderly people, who once carried out Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution to exterminate all Jews and others he did not like.
“Operation: Last Chance” was originally launched in 2002 in the Baltics, and soon expanded to Poland, Romania and Austria. After the campaign was launched in Croatia, it was finally time for Hungary, which was a close ally of Nazi Germany during most of World War Two when 600,000 Hungarian Jews were massacred.
The Israel Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, told BosNewsLife he is frustrated that in countries like Hungary “not a single war criminal was brought to justice” since the collapse of Communism in 1989, although many people collaborated with Nazi Germany.
“Among the Central and Eastern European countries only Croatia has recently prosecuted a Nazi war criminal. A general is now on the run after he saw his name appear,” said Zuroff, who recently met the Croatian president to work out a strategy to find suspects.
MANY SUSPECTS
296 suspects have already been identified across the region and so far 73 people have had their cases send to local prosecutors, Zuroff stressed. Zuroff admitted that “Operation: Last Chance” comes late, but said his Center lacked the resources to start the campaign earlier in former Communist countries.
“Before you were totally dependent on the Communist authorities who played there own political games and only released information that would serve their purposes. Today the archives are open in most countries and there is full access and maximum or almost maximum research can be carried out,” he said.
He added his organization is offering roughly 10-thousand dollars for each tip that leads to the prosecution and punishment of a Nazi war criminal. While money encouraged people to come forward with information on neighbors or others involved in war crimes, not everyone accepted the rewards, Zuroff explained.
NO CASH
“I have to say that in many cases many people have submitted very important information and openly said that they don’t want the money,” he said. “But there is no question that the money and the publicity around “Operation: Last Chance” was the trigger for people to come forward to unburden themselves with information they have been walking around with for sixty years.”
Among those approaching the Center with information was a woman in a Hungarian village who lived near the garden “where three Hungarian Jews were buried after being forced to dig their own graves,” said Nazi hunter Leibish Polnauer of Israel who is the son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors. “They were killed by Hungarians who were guarding a group of refugees on their way to a concentration camp or labor camp,” he stressed, quoting the unidentified woman. “The guards were angry because a hungry Jewish girl had successfully backed for a piece of bread from another child, in exchange for her red back.”
Yet the founder of the Targum Shlishi Foundation, which supports “Operation: Last Chance”, denies that searching for elderly Nazis must be seen as seeking revenge. “This is not about revenge, this is about justice”, said the soft spoken Aryeh Rubin, whose parents suffered in the Holocaust. “It is too late for revenge,” he told BosNewsLife. “This people lived (their) lives for 60 years. They raised families. They lived normal lives, while their victims lie as dust in the ground.”
MOVE CRITICIZED
Some historians as well as right wing commentators and politicians in Hungary have criticized the hunt for Hungarian fascists, saying it only singles out one group while for instance Communist criminals remain at large. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center says it has only a mandate to investigate war crimes, and that it encourages Hungarians to initiate similar actions against Communists.
It hopes that the prosecution of alleged war criminals in local courts, will help people to better understand their troubled history. “This comes at a crucial time, at a time when history is rewritten,” said Zuroff.
“Operation: Last Chance” is also scheduled to be launched in Argentina, where many European Nazis are believed to hide. Germany will follow in September, while organizers also plan to launch the action in Ukraine, after elections later this year, BosNewsLife learned.
