"What keeps me going is the sense of obligation to the victims—the need to try to bring their murderers to justice"

As director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, American-born Israeli historian Efraim Zuroff coordinates the center’s worldwide effort to locate Nazi war criminals and bring them to justice. In a career spanning 28 years he has not only tracked down those who helped perpetrate the Holocaust, but also convinced often-hesitant governments to prosecute them.

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In 2002 Zuroff helped launch Operation Last Chance, which offers financial rewards in exchange for information leading to the identification and prosecution of war criminals living—often openly—in Europe, the Balkans, and South America. He also writes the center’s annual status report, which lists the most wanted Nazis still at large and grades individual nations on their willingness and determination to prosecute identified war criminals.

It has been 63 years since the end of World War II—why is it still important to pursue Nazi war criminals?
Four basic principles guide our activities. The first is that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. The second is that we don’t think people deserve a medal for reaching an old age. The third is that if we set a chronological limit on the prosecution of people who committed genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity, the practical implication would be that if they elude justice until a certain age, they’re off the hook. And the fourth principle is that we feel we have an obligation to every victim of the Nazis to try to hold accountable the persons who made them victims.

What led you to this work, and what keeps you motivated?
I got into it mainly because I was the right person in the right place at the right time. I’d always been interested in trying to understand how something like the Holocaust could have taken place, and began graduate work to help me in that understanding. I then met Simon Wiesenthal, and that further focused my attention on the issue. In terms of persevering, what keeps me going is the sense of obligation to the victims—the need to try to bring their murderers to justice.

Who is the single most important war criminal captured through your efforts or those of your coworkers?
I would have to say Dinko Sakic, the commandant of Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia—90,000 to 100,000 civilians were murdered there by the Ustashe, the Croatian fascists. We discovered him in Argentina and helped facilitate his extradition to Zagreb. Sakic’s trial was probably the most important to date of a Nazi-era war criminal in post-Communist Europe, because it exposed Croatians to the nature and scope of the crimes committed by the Ustashe. Because the trial was conducted in a Croatian courtroom, by a Croatian judge, no one could say that it was Serb or Communist propaganda—indeed, some observers called the trial a watershed in the history of democratic and independent Croatia.

And who would you say is the most important World War II war criminal still at large?
Alois Bruner—one of Adolf Eichmann’s chief lieutenants. If he’s alive he’s 96 and living in Syria, but there’s some doubt as to whether he’s still alive. If Bruner is dead, the “most wanted” would be Aribert Heim, a doctor in the camps at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen. He murdered hundreds of inmates by injecting a form of gasoline into their hearts. Our assumption is that he’s currently in South America.

Tell us about your annual status report.
The report chronicles the progress, or lack thereof, on the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals worldwide. We provide statistics on the number of convictions each year, the number of ongoing investigations, and the number of new investigations. And we give grades to each country. While we document the progress made each year, we also want to influence and encourage countries to do as much as they can with regard to this issue.

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