(Telegraph-UK) Miranda Levy - Efraim Zuroff, 72, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel Office, is widely known as the "last Nazi hunter." In 42 years, Zuroff has submitted the names of more than 3,000 suspected Nazi war criminals to 20 countries. In 40 cases, legal action was taken against a Holocaust perpetrator. In 1989, he came across the testimonies of dozens of Lithuanian survivors and identified 1,284 potential war criminals. Out of a population of 220,000 Jews in Lithuania, just 8,000 survived. There were only 1,000 Germans present during the occupation of Lithuania, with the majority of the horrors perpetrated by "willing local collaborators." "The Lithuanians didn't put people on trains," says Zuroff. "They personally killed their Jewish neighbors, usually by shooting them and throwing them, one on top of each other, into pits dug in the forest." Zuroff cites as his biggest victory the case of Dinko Sakic, the sadistic commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, responsible for the murder of 2,000 people. He was found living in Argentina and prosecuted in 1998. When he received his 20-year sentence, Sakic said, "I would do it again; let's finish the job."
2020-10-22 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive