Fighting for Justice: The Ongoing Battle Against Nazi War Criminals

Every so often, my inbox receives a notification from the Simon Wiesenthal Center announcing that yet another Nazi criminal has been identified and brought to trial. Behind these ongoing efforts stands a determined group led by Dr. Ephraim Zuroff, widely known as “the last Nazi hunter.” After receiving another annual report on current prosecutions, I decided to contact Zuroff directly to hear the remarkable story of a man who has devoted his life to pursuing justice for the victims of the Holocaust.

Dr. Zuroff, 73, was born and raised in New York City, a setting seemingly far removed from the pursuit of Nazi criminals. Yet as a committed Jew, named after his maternal uncle who was murdered in the Holocaust, he felt a personal obligation to engage in this mission. “I earned a degree in history at Yeshiva University and then moved to Israel to continue my studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During that period, I developed a deep interest in Holocaust research and completed both a master’s degree and a doctorate at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry,” he explains.

Dr. Ephraim Zuroff (Photo: Yosi Zamir / Flash 90)

After completing his studies, Zuroff returned to the United States. Soon afterward, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles learned of his academic background and offered him the role of its first academic director. He accepted enthusiastically. For several years, he helped build the Center’s library and archives and served as historical consultant for the international Holocaust documentary Genocide, which introduced many Americans to the depth of Jewish suffering during the war. At the time, he did not yet realize that this role would lead him toward a lifelong pursuit of Nazi criminals.

A Cause That Was Not Yet His

In the early years of his work at the Wiesenthal Center, Zuroff was not directly involved in hunting Nazi criminals. “I didn’t oppose the idea, but it simply wasn’t my focus,” he recalls. “My primary concern was Holocaust education and remembrance.”

When did your outlook change and lead you to pursue Nazi criminals?

“Several years later, I met Simon Wiesenthal himself. Witnessing his dedication made me understand how essential this work truly was. When I returned to Israel, I resolved to dedicate myself to tracking down Nazi criminals worldwide.”

Zuroff describes his role as consisting of three equal parts: detective, historian, and political activist. “The political dimension is often the most difficult, because it involves persuading governments to pursue justice,” he explains. “Even the United States, which later became a leader in this effort, took more than thirty years to begin acting seriously. Many criminals died before any action was taken.”

Bridging the Gap With Survivors

How can you realistically track people who are hiding their identities?

“At first, I was not personally searching for Nazis. I worked with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had established a special office to prosecute Nazis who had immigrated to America. They asked me to help bridge the gap between government investigators and Holocaust survivors, knowing survivors might hesitate to speak with official institutions.”

The Department of Justice representative assigned to him was not Jewish, which left a strong impression. “Here I was, Jewish and trained in Holocaust history, while he knew little about the subject, yet he was deeply committed. It strengthened my sense of responsibility to gather evidence and assist.”

Zuroff soon developed an ambitious idea: creating a database of Holocaust survivors across North America to assist in identifying perpetrators. The Wiesenthal Center declined to fund the project, so he eventually moved back to Israel. There, he approached Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, with a proposal to establish an Israeli branch. The idea was accepted, and the Center’s operations in Israel were built from the ground up.

The Difficulty of Eastern European Cases

Zuroff continued working closely with American prosecutors. “Most of the cases we handled involved perpetrators from Eastern Europe. Approximately 98 percent of my cases were connected to that region.”

The challenge was that documentation from Eastern Europe was extremely scarce. “I used to joke that if I received a dollar for every document about who smuggled the first gun into the Warsaw Ghetto, I would be wealthy. But finding documentation about who served as mayor of Kovno during the Holocaust was almost impossible.”

He explains that early research institutions, including Yad Vashem, initially focused more on Jewish resistance than on cataloging collaborators. This made evidence gathering far more complex. Eventually, however, persistent efforts by the U.S. Justice Department and independent researchers succeeded in uncovering dozens of cases.

Why focus primarily on Eastern European perpetrators?

“Because those who fled to Western countries after the war were largely from Eastern Europe. They emigrated in large numbers to the United States, Canada, England, and other English-speaking countries, believing they would be safer there than under Soviet rule. For years they were. Then they began to face justice.”

(Photo: shutterstock)

What’s happening right now with the activities of the U.S. Justice Department?

"I didn’t abandon that; I continued to work with the Americans concurrently, gathering witnesses who came forward in courts across the U.S. to testify against Nazi criminals. Interestingly," he adds, "most of our efforts were focused on Nazi criminals who operated in Nazi-occupied areas in Eastern Europe, such as Kovno, Lithuania, and other Eastern European countries. In fact, 98% of the cases I handled were Eastern European."

In reality, Nazi crimes in Eastern Europe left almost no documentation, making it extremely challenging for Zuroff and his team. "I often joked that if I received a dollar for every document I saw relating to the identity of the individual who smuggled the first gun into the Warsaw ghetto before the famous uprising, I’d probably be a rich man today. But if I wanted a document showing who was the mayor of Kovno during the Holocaust, I’d probably have to toil greatly just to find such a thing, if at all."

The reason for this, he explains, is that what interested ‘Yad Vashem’ and other government bodies at the time was armed resistance during the Holocaust by Jews. Today, the situation has shifted slightly, but the search for evidence is far more complex than before. Thus, it happened that Yad Vashem and other archives possessed vast material pertaining to every scrap of rebellion or resistance against the Nazis while they scarcely addressed the brutal activities of collaborators in Eastern Europe, for example. This is where the U.S. Justice Department stepped in, managing to uncover dozens of elusive Nazi criminals.

Why did you specifically focus on Nazis from Eastern Europe?

"Because, interestingly enough, those who fled to the U.S. were mainly Nazi criminals from Eastern European countries. These criminals immigrated en masse to America, Canada, England, and all the Anglophone countries known for their immigration policies." The fleeing Nazis hastily escaped to these countries with the Soviet occupation, also with the assumption—evinced to be justified—that the Soviets would more ruthlessly pursue former Nazis compared to Western countries. Yet years after moving to the safe U.S., they discovered the law's jaws closing in on them when Zuroff stood before them in the American judicial system.

Tracking Down Mengele's Associate

When we ask Dr. Zuroff to pinpoint one of his crucial battles against the fleeing Nazis, he recounts the story of Dr. Aribert Heim, a cruel doctor who was devoted to Nazi ideology wholeheartedly. “He used to perform cruel procedures on his patients without anesthesia. Holocaust survivors who were held at the Avensee concentration camp in Austria recounted horrific experiments Heim performed on prisoners that led to the brutal deaths of Jews. An inmate named Karl Lauter, who also worked in the Mauthausen hospital while Heim was there, testified that at the beginning of the Reich’s rule, he saw the Nazi exterminator brutally murder a prisoner who had approached him seeking treatment after his leg had become infected.

“As a result, we at the Wiesenthal Center launched a widespread search operation for this Nazi criminal. While the German government announced thirty years ago that he was dead, the Wiesenthal Center suspected that this Nazi criminal was still alive. I was the one who brought the ‘smoking gun’ when I managed to prove that this Nazi criminal was alive for at least another decade thereafter, severely embarrassing Germany’s attempts to shrug off the pursuit.” Zuroff based his statements on tax records submitted by Heim's lawyer, in which he requested tax relief—proof that the Nazi criminal had been alive for many long years after a German court in Baden-Baden willingly declared him dead.

What did you do to track down Heim?

"It was an unprecedented struggle," Zuroff recalls. "As part of our efforts to bring this Nazi criminal to justice, I even went to South America to track him down. In this case, the efforts were fruitless, and the cruel doctor likely died of old age."

Next, Zuroff had a new idea in the battle against the fleeing Nazis. “This occurred during my sixth year of working with the Americans,” he recounts. “I then identified a way to locate lists of thousands of elusive Nazi criminals using a rather brilliant method, and I decided to dedicate the next chapter of my struggle to that. For this purpose, I decided to resign from my position at the U.S. Department of Justice and embark on a public fight.”

“I had to do this,” he explains. “At that time, all the Anglophone countries that were significant targets for fleeing Nazis were avoiding fighting the criminals hiding within their borders. Besides the U.S., which had decided to act explicitly against the Nazis, Canada and Australia, for instance, were debating what to do about the issue and did not take any steps against those criminals. The British and New Zealanders behaved even more outrageously, acting as if they were unaware of such a problem regarding the presence of Nazis among them.”

“In collaboration with the Wiesenthal Center, I decided to flood those four countries with names of as many suspects who collaborated with the Nazis as possible, so they couldn’t ignore the problem. The Wiesenthal Center responded positively to this revolutionary idea, and we set off on our mission. The next step was establishing an office for the Center in Jerusalem under my direction, and the rest, as they say, is history—or in our case, a struggle for history.”

(Photo: shutterstock)

From that day forward, Zuroff embarked on an unprecedented operation during which the names of many Nazis were cross-referenced, even utilizing data from the Red Cross. The next step was transferring the information to governments, which as expected did nothing. Then Zuroff and his team brought out the big guns, engaging the media and inundating journalists with names of Nazi criminals. Therefore, periodically, news broke about yet another Nazi living near Dublin or in Manchester. The media barrage tipped the scales, and the Anglophone countries began passing laws one after another. “Canada passed a law to prosecute Nazis in '87, Australia in '89, and England in '91. They all passed laws allowing prosecution, thanks to our actions supported by local Jewish communities. Essentially, we forced them to understand they had to fight.”

To our question about the practical implications of these laws being passed, Zuroff sounds confident. “I see value in enacting these laws both legally and morally, as well as from the perspective of basic fairness. However, to say that those countries excelled in arresting Nazis after those laws were enacted—I cannot say that. I can say that the record of those countries was poor in the end, even after the strict laws were passed.” Zuroff sees the value of such laws in undermining the personal security of the Nazis living in those countries. “Since then, they began to fear for their lives and freedom, and for me, we’ve already ruined their lives that way.”

A Message for Future Generations

Isn’t it a bit premature for people to conclude that these individuals should end their lives in peace, considering how much time has passed, and aren’t they too old to stand trial today?

For about four decades, Ephraim Zuroff has heard the argument that too much time has passed since the Nazis committed their atrocities. “There are many who say these Nazis are so old, and maybe we should let them be, but I say the opposite. Just because time has passed doesn’t lessen the guilt of the criminal. The fact that they have reached the age of ninety doesn’t turn them into righteous individuals, so old age should not protect them. Furthermore, we owe it to the victims to seek justice.”

However, perhaps the most vital value for Zuroff is that prosecuting these Nazis even today sends a message to those who entertain immoral and murderous ideas—as the Nazis did—deterring them from acting on these thoughts with the understanding that one day they will be held accountable, even if sixty, seventy, or eighty years pass since committing the crime. "Besides, these Nazis are the last people on earth worthy of sympathy, for they had none for their victims," he sums up this chapter.

Is there anything you regret?

"I regret not being able to capture more Nazis," he answers emphatically.

Despite this reflection, Zuroff has achieved a significant amount. The most notable is the change in German handling of the prosecution of fleeing Nazi criminals, which was previously limited to those who were part of the decision-making circle—most of whom were already tried in the Nuremberg Trials. The implication of the law was that anyone who actually committed crimes in the camps could argue they were merely following orders from above. As a result of Zuroff's efforts, alongside others, the law was altered, and today the last remaining Nazi criminals involved in atrocities are being prosecuted in Germany, whom they thought would no longer have to face justice.