As world leaders head to Auschwitz for a ceremony of remembrance and reconciliation, a Jewish campaigner will tell Germans today that Nazi killers still live among them.

Dr Ephraim Zuroff has doggedly hunted war criminals for a quarter of a century and leads the chase since the retirement of his mentor, Simon Wiesenthal, who is now aged 96.

In Berlin this afternoon, Dr Zuroff will tell Germany - as he has told most of Eastern Europe on a sweep through the region - that thousands of Nazis and their collaborators are still alive, and time is running out to make them answer for their part in the Holocaust.

Operation Last Chance is the latest battle in Dr Zuroff's war against forgetting. And he accuses Europe, especially the former Soviet bloc, of encouraging a kind of collective amnesia over how many Nazis and local allies massacred Jews with a terrible zeal.

"You have to remember that in order to carry out such a heinous crime, which resulted in the murder of six million Jews and millions of others, it takes hundreds of thousands, millions of individuals who were involved in different ways," Dr Zuroff says.

"Unfortunately, there is a pitiful lack of political will to investigate these war criminals. Sometimes governments see us as the problem for shoving this issue in their faces. But we are telling them the truth about what happened in their countries, and the only way to deal with the past, and move on, is to put these criminals on trial."

For many nations, the issue was slammed shut after the Nuremberg Trials, which took place between November 1945 and April 1949 and which tried and hanged some of Adolf Hitler's most senior henchmen for crimes against humanity.

After surviving the concentration camps that killed 87 of his relatives, Mr Wiesenthal helped the Americans compile evidence for the Nuremberg Trials, and then established the Jewish Documentation Centre in the Austrian town of Linz.

But in the 1950s, while German and Polish courts worked steadily through thousands of other war crimes cases, interest in fugitives from justice began to wane as the Cold War gripped public and official concern.

As Mr Wiesenthal closed his base in Linz, lamenting the speed with which Nazi atrocities were receding into history, his US allies had good reason to look the other way.

Recently declassified documents show that the US army and CIA recruited Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's intelligence chief on the eastern front, to make use of his information on the Soviet Union and his wartime spy network.

Mr Gehlen's operation later became West Germany's BND federal intelligence service and, according to Hans-Georg Wieck, the man who ran the BND from 1985 to 1990, it included about 100 SS men "possibly guilty of war crimes".

As the West locked horns with Moscow, Mr Wiesenthal continued quietly collecting information on Nazis who had escaped both the Nuremberg Trials and members of the British army's Jewish Brigade, which formed a group called the "Nokmim" - the Avengers - which captured and killed hundreds of SS officers.

And as US and European support dwindled, Mr Wiesenthal found a new ally. The
young state of Israel, and its security service Mossad, had no ambivalence about the need to hunt Hitler's henchmen.

It focused particular attention on Latin America, where many senior Nazis were believed to have found refuge in friendly dictatorships, escaping Europe with the help of fabled, fascist-run underground networks, like Odessa and Kamaradenwerk.

In the autumn of 1957, the Israeli Foreign Ministry received word that one of the most wanted men in the world was now living quietly on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aries, under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement.

He was really Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish Office, who was in the vanguard of anti-Semitic persecution throughout the Third Reich, before he was given the task of eliminating Europe's 11 million Jews at the Wannsee conference outside Berlin in 1942. He disappeared without trace after the war.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion approved a Mossad operation that, in May 1960, abducted Mr Eichmann outside his house and flew him to Israel a few days later. He was tried before an Israeli court the following year, and hanged in May 1962, for crimes against the Jewish people and humanity.

The interest surrounding Mr Eichmann encouraged Mr Wiesenthal in his hunt for missing Nazis, and in 1961 he reopened the Jewish Documentation Centre, this time in Vienna.

In 1963, he discovered that a certain Austrian police inspector was actually Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested 14-year-old Anne Frank in Amsterdam and in 1966, 16 SS officers, nine of them uncovered by Mr Wiesenthal, were tried for the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine.

In 1967, Mr Wiesenthal's investigations led him to one of the employees at the Volkswagen car plant outside Sao Paolo, Brazil: it was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland, where more than a million Jews were executed; in 1967, he denounced a housewife living in Queens, New York, as Hermine Braunsteiner, who supervised the killing of hundreds of children at Majdanek.

Mr Wiesenthal also spent years tracking Dr Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's "Angel of Death", who killed thousands of Jews and Gyspies - many of them children - with his macabre medical experiments. Most evidence suggests that Dr Mengele drowned in 1979 in Brazil, where he lived for at least 15 years after spells in Argentina and Paraguay.

Tabloid headlines occasionally proclaimed sightings of the doctor with Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, who fled the Fuhrer's bunker after witnessing his suicide. Experts say Mr Bormann's body was discovered during excavations in Berlin in 1972. He too had taken a cyanide pill to evade capture by the marauding Red Army.

Though most leads have gone cold as the Third Reich generation dies off, some senior Nazis are still out there, Dr Zuroff insists.

"Alois Brunner is alive and living in Damascus, Syria, until we confirm otherwise," he says. "He was Eichmann's lieutenant, and is responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to death camps from Austria, Greece, Slovakia and France."

Another leading Nazi hunter, Serge Klarsfeld, has also tried for years to get Syria to extradite Brunner, who worked for Gehlen's US-backed operation immediately after the war. Mr Klarsfeld had more success in having Gestapo agent Klaus Barbie expelled from Bolivia to stand trial in France, and with his campaign for the prosecution of Maurice Papon, an official in the
puppet Vichy government that ruled wartime France.

From the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, and with colleagues in Argentina and Canada, Dr Zuroff continues Mr Wiesenthal's pursuit of "justice not vengeance".

But lingering prejudice or reluctance to face past crimes hampers his efforts: in Austria, an information line on the hunt for war criminals was inundated with calls - 95 percent of them consisting solely of anti-Semitic abuse; and in the Baltic states, some still see Nazi collaborators as heroes who opposed the Soviet occupation.

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Dr Zuroff says the EU does nothing to encourage its members to find war criminals, and has no equivalent of the US Office of Special Investigations, which is currently investigating more than 100 suspected former Nazis and collaborators.

"We're putting Europe's governments to the test, putting this question on the public agenda," says Dr Zuroff of Operation Last Chance, which offers 10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction. "If states aspire to European values, they must face this issue."

While shadowed by death in the concentration camps, Mr Wiesenthal resolved to make the world face it. In his memoirs, he recalls telling an SS guard of his intention to help the US find Nazi fugitives after the war.

"You would tell the truth to the people in America?" the guard replied.

"That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn't believe you. They'd say you were mad, might even put you into an asylum. How can anyone believe this terrible business - unless he has lived through it?"

Tomorrow: As world leaders gather at Auschwitz for Holocaust Day, Dan McLaughlin looks at the Nazi legacy of hatred and intolerance that continues to inspire latter day extremists in Europe.

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