BOYNTON BEACH — Even now, in the winter of their dismal lives, the criminal faithful of the Third Reich should know they are hunted. They may be frail, reinvented as seemingly gentle citizens, but as long as Nazi hunters like Efraim Zuroff roam the earth, they should not consider themselves in the clear.

Zuroff, the Holocaust historian who heads the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is the world's most influential Nazi hunter. The fact that his mission is still vigorous and vital more than 60 years after the end of World War II speaks to more than historical amnesia.

"Many countries in the world would prefer that these Nazi war criminals not be brought to justice, that they take their crimes with them to their graves," Zuroff told an audience this afternoon at Temple Torah in Boynton Beach.

For a man born after the end of WWII, Zuroff is an especially tenacious detective of the myriad crimes of the Holocaust. When he descended upon suburban Perth, Australia, to track down a former Hungarian army officer wanted in the 1944 beating death of a Jewish teenage boy he had caught on a Budapest streetcar without the mandatory yellow star, he found a much-loved grandfather, a man described as church-going by his pastor and gentle by his children.

But Zuroff was not swayed by the scenario. In his more than 30 years as a Holocaust investigator, the New York-born historian says he keeps his focus on the details of the crimes, not the perpetrators. By doing this, he stays true to one of his central reasons for taking on the chase.

"We have an obligation to the victims of the Nazis," he says.

That obligation led to the capture of the Perth grandfather, 88-year-old Charles Zentai. More than five years after his whereabouts were detected, he sits in a Perth jail awaiting possible extradition to Hungary for a murder trial.

That arrest came after Zuroff launched "Operation: Last Chance," an all-out campaign to identify little known Nazi criminals. Established with the help of the Miami-based Targum Shlishi Foundation, the campaign offers financial rewards for information leading to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. It's a last-ditch effort that acknowledges the Nazi hunter's most formidable enemy: Time.

Zuroff acknowledges that he is racing the clock in bringing the surviving Nazi criminals to justice.

"I'm not a fan of the Nazis, but I pray for the health of these people so they can be brought to justice," said Zuroff, whose book Operation Last Chance (Palgrave MacMillan) was released last week. "The passage of time in no way diminishes their crime."

The passage of time may have brought his targets new lives, new identities, benign covers and gray hair, but it has not brought the one thing that might suggest a true evolution of spirit: an apology.

"Not one of them has expressed regret or a word of contrition," he said. "Nada. Zero. Nothing."

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