Dr. Efraim Zuroff, as told to Robyn Stubbs
I am one of those lucky people who gets up every day with a smile on his face, knowing that’s he’s doing something important.
I am actually named after the only person on my mother’s side who was murdered in the Holocaust. When I was born, my father sent a cable to my mother’s father, who was in Europe helping the survivors, indicating that my mother had given birth to a boy. My grandfather sent back a cable saying, “Suggest: Name him Efraim.” Efraim was my grandfather’s brother who had been killed in Lithuania during the Holocaust.
The Chase Is On: Hunting Dr. Death
Each case is a different story, depending on where the people are living and where they committed their crime. I have personally gone to different countries to find these people but I don’t do that in every case.
Our operation is run exactly the opposite of regular criminal investigations and that’s because as Nazi war criminals age, time is running out. We don’t start with the crime and then try and find the person who committed it – we start with a suspect against whom there is valid evidence and indications of his or her participation.
The biggest reward is currently 310,000 Euros for information leading to the capture of Dr. Aribert Heim, also known as "Dr. Death." Heim murdered hundreds of inmates at the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen, by injecting phenol (gasoline) directly into the victim’s hearts.
Heim is now in his 90s. We’re hoping he’s in good shape; he was actually a professional athlete who played ice hockey in his youth. The question is not his chronological age but rather, his physical and mental state.
At one point, we were fairly convinced that he was in South America. We had what appeared to be an excellent lead – a person who ostensibly fit the description to a tee living in Chile – but when we got there, it turned out this person was not Dr. Aribert Heim. That was a great disappointment and it was back to the drawing board. Since then, we have received a lot of leads from South America and we’re working very closely with the German police special task force out of Stuttgart to find him. Aribert Heim is the only Nazi war criminal in the world for whom there is a special task force.
Many Nazi war criminals we have caught lived in countries where much has been written about the Holocaust. In theory, you would assume that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust have learned about the nature of the Holocaust and its terrible tragedies, and in their latter years, might have reached the conclusion that they were part of something terrible and had made an awful mistake. But, in the 27 years that I’ve been involved in facilitating the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, there has never, ever been a case of a Nazi who expressed any remorse.
You Can Run But You Can’t Hide
After Germany fell, Nazi war criminals wanted to get as far away as possible from the scene of the crime; most of them were coming from countries that then became part of the Soviet Union, which was making serious efforts to find these people and bring them to justice (not so much because they murdered Jews but because they collaborated with the Nazis). In that respect, the major Anglo-Saxon western democracies (United States, Canada, Australia and the UK) really fit the bill.
They were far away from the scene of the crime, they were anti-communist countries who would not readily turn these people over to the Communists, they had not been invaded by the Nazis, there were already local émigré groups from their own country there who didn’t really care if these people murdered Jews, and they were countries of immigration and economic opportunity: It was a perfect fit.
Bringing Nazi war criminals to justice is more difficult in some countries than others. This has to do with the historical record in these countries and the lack of willingness to face both the past and local complicity. This has led to a very dangerous phenomenon that could be called either Holocaust distortion or Holocaust deflection, which is actually more dangerous than Holocaust denial.
The Holocaust is the most documented tragedy in human history and I don’t think anyone actually believes it that didn’t take place, even the people who supposedly claim that it didn’t. But Holocaust distortion is a way of presenting the events of the Holocaust in a way that deflects blame from local killers onto German and Austrian Nazis.
Let me explain. Wherever the Nazis were, whether it was the countries they occupied or the countries they allied with, they found willing and zealous collaborators who helped implement their plan against the Jewish people. The collaboration in Western, Southern, Northern and Central Europe generally stopped at the train station.
In other words, Dutch police rounded up Dutch Jews, Norwegian police rounded up Norwegian Jews, Greek police rounded up the Jews of Greece, French police rounded up the Jews of France and the same is true in Belgium and Luxemburg and other places. Those collaborators in those countries did not carry out the murder themselves. They brought the Jews to the trains and those trains took them to Nazi death camps.
But in Eastern Europe, the situation was very different. Over there, quite a significant percentage of murders were carried out locally and by the locals. Take a country like Lithuania, for example, where 212,000 of the 220,000 Jews living in Lithuania under Nazi occupation were murdered. There was only one train to Auschwitz – that’s because the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews were murdered within Lithuania and in many cases, by their neighbors.
This is a very difficult historical record to accept and it’s much easier for Lithuanians to say that the Holocaust is really when those “nasty Germans and Austrians came and murdered our Jews.”
One of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers is David Irving , who served a prison sentence in 2006 for denying the Holocaust. He’s one of the only people with the charisma and the intellectual capabilities to convince anybody of such a ridiculous presumption that the Holocaust never took place.
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| David Irving is an English author and Holocaust denier |
One of the greatest achievements I was involved in was the prosecution and conviction of Dinko Sakic, who was the commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Balkans, a camp where at least 90,000 civilians were murdered. We found him in a casino with the help of an Argentinean journalist and orchestrated his extradition from Argentina to Croatia, where he was put on trial. He’s still in prison today, thank God, having received the maximum sentence of 20 years. My sense was that in Croatia, they could not try him for genocide so they tried him for the criminal responsibility for the people who were killed during his tenure as camp commander. But if you have to choose between imperfect justice and no justice, it’s a real no-brainer.
I want to remind you of the basic principles of why this work is still so important.
One: The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators.
Two: The people who reach old age don’t deserve a medal simply because they reached old age – if someone committed murder as a young man and he’s not brought to justice, the fact that he becomes an old man doesn’t change his crime.
Three: If we were to set up an artificial chronological limit on prosecution, it would basically mean that we’re saying you can get away with genocide. If you’re lucky enough, smart enough, rich enough to elude justice until you reach old age, you’re off the hook.
And finally, something which was always emphasized by our mentor, Simon Wiesenthal, the great Nazi Hunter, our generation has an obligation to the victims of the Holocaust. That obligation is make sure everyone who was turned into a victim has an effort made on their behalf to see their killer held accountable.
What everyone has to remember is that all the victims of the Holocaust are someone’s grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, son, daughter, nephew, niece … if someone murdered your grandmother and many years went by and suddenly the murderer was found, you wouldn’t say, “Ah, to hell with it – let him off.” You’d say, “Why? You murdered my grandmother, my wonderful grandmother! She never hurt a fly!” They obviously have to be punished.
Every one of the victims of the Holocaust was someone’s family member and as such, worthy of an effort being made to bring their killers to justice.
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