The two senior citizens born in Eastern Europe - Milivoj Asner, 91, from Croatia, and Charles Zentai, 83, a native of Hungary - have a lot in common, although they very well may not know anything about one another. Both men were officers in the security forces of the pro-Nazi regimes that ruled their countries during World War II. Asner was a police officer in Croatia, and Zentai an officer in a transport unit of the Hungarian army.

After the war, both emigrated to the West, and have lived quiet lives for nearly 60 years, Asner in Austria and Zentai in Australia. Until now, late in life, when their unsavory pasts have come back to haunt them. Zentai and Asner are now wanted men suspected of murder, whose photographs - and evidence of their exploits during the war - are being publicized in the media.

It is safe to say that Asner and Zentai might have lived out their lives in peace were it not for the obduracy of Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel. Zuroff has in recent months received new information that implicates the two senior citizens in the murders of Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust. The information, submitted to legal authorities in the relevant countries, came into Zuroff's hands as part of "Operation Last Chance" that he initiated, which offers a monetary award to residents of Eastern and Central European countries in exchange for information leading to the conviction of Nazi war criminals.

Speaking in the Bundestag in Berlin yesterday, Zuroff declared the opening of the campaign in Germany. To date, after two years of activity in eight countries, he has paid out the award in only one case, in which a conviction has not yet been made, but he remains optimistic. After all, in his estimate there are more Nazi war criminals living in Germany than in any other country in the world.

Zuroff does not deny that the name given to the campaign refers to the future of his own engagement in it no less than to the criminals themselves. After some 20 years of intensive Nazi-hunting, he says, the business will be over in another two or three years. This is what Simon Wiesenthal calls "the biological solution." But many others believe that the business should have ended long ago, the first of whom is Wiesenthal himself, who in April 2003 declared that his life's work had been completed. "If there are still a few criminals whom I didn't look for, now they are too old to stand trial," Wiesenthal, then 95 years old, told a reporter from the Austrian magazine "Format."

Zuroff says that as far as he is concerned, age is not a consideration. "Asner, for instance, is in outstanding condition. I tell anyone who asks me why I deal with these old men, that if I were chasing after the person who murdered my grandfather the question wouldn't even be asked. So each one of the murderers that I chase after murdered somebody's grandfather."

Zuroff recently watched the film "Walk on Water," directed by Eytan Fox, in which the Mossad agent who is sent to liquidate a Nazi criminal discovers at the critical moment that he is incapable of disconnecting the old man from the respirator to which he is hooked up.

"That is the Israeli smart aleck, who needs to show the whole world that even though he is Jewish and Israeli, he still has to be original and give it up," Zuroff said this week about the film. Asked how he would have acted in such a situation, Zuroff first blurts out: "I would have murdered him without a second thought," but immediately retracts the statement: "A headline of `Vengeful Jew Murders 90-Year-Old' doesn't do anything for the objective that I want to promote. I believe in the justice system as the most important tool in terms of ethics, education and public relations. I would make do with exposing him. Revenge is the dream of children of the Holocaust, and I wasn't a child of the Holocaust or close to it."

Zuroff was born in the U.S. in 1948 to an American Jewish family that was not directly affected by the Holocaust. In 1970 he moved to Israel and studied history. His interest in Nazi war criminals began in 1978, after a chance meeting with Simon Wiesenthal at the screening of a film about Nazi war criminals.

He returned to Israel in 1980 and began working as an investigator of Nazi war criminals for the U.S. Office for Special Investigations. Since 1989 he has worked within the framework of the Wiesenthal Center tracking down dozens of criminals around the world. Each year he issues a report in which he hands out grades to various countries on how they deal with the search for Nazi criminals living in their jurisdiction.

Zuroff is willing to admit to only one mistake he made throughout his years of activity, regarding Ivan Demjanjuk, although with this reservation: "I am certain he was a Nazi criminal, but apparently he was not `Ivan the Terrible,' as I thought."

The prize produced threats

After the retirement of Wiesenthal and Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi-hunter working out of France, Zuroff is the last Nazi-hunter in the world. Even within the Wiesenthal Center he works alone, without partners. The heads of the center in California prefer to invest the funds they raise from donors in areas that have a more certain future than Nazi-hunting, such as the "Museum of Tolerance" now going up in Jerusalem at a cost of $200 million. They allow Zuroff to use the name of the institution for the needs of his inquiries, but they do not fund them.

In order to underwrite Operation Last Chance, Zuroff recruited Aryeh Rubin, a friend from their days at Yeshiva University. Rubin is a retired businessman from Florida who devotes most of his time to Jewish education, and since the early 90s has accompanied Zuroff on his Nazi-hunting missions in exotic destinations like Iceland and Costa Rica.

"We always believed," says Zuroff, "that aside from the criminals that we are aware of, there are people that we don't yet know about. So Rubin came up with the idea of offering money in exchange for the information."

The two men decided to offer 10,000 dollars or euros (the amount varies from country to country) in exchange for information leading to a conviction. "Anyone who gives information is usually not doing so for the money," says Zuroff. "The real object of the prizes was to spark media interest in the campaign." Although the campaign has provoked interest, organizations like the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt refused to cooperate, arguing that a monetary award would cause people to act for illegitimate motives.

The campaign began in 2002 in Estonia, and since that time has expanded to Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Romania. In Austria, he says, "Ninety-five percent of the phone calls we got were anti-Semitic. It was alarming. People identified themselves by name and were not afraid to leave messages like `We found you the two biggest Nazi criminals, Bush and Sharon. Send the money.'" In Croatia as well, the monetary prize generated threats. "There was an anonymous organization that announced that if one hair was touched on Asner's head, they would murder Jews."

The level of cooperation with the local Jewish community differs. "It varies between full cooperation, such as in Lithuania and Romania, to boycotting or disregard as in Germany, or even repudiation and public criticism as in Estonia and Latvia," says Zuroff. The different reactions, he believes, are unrelated to the strength of the Jewish community but to the personality of the heads of the community.

The information about Asner was received from a Jewish student who researched the history of the Croatian Jewish community, and found that Asner was reported dead after his name mysteriously found its way onto a list of Holocaust victims in Croatia. Last July Zuroff showed the file of evidence to the president of Croatia, who ordered an investigation. However Asner, who in recent years had moved back to Croatia, fled to Austria. Since then legal proceedings have been pursued to extradite him to Croatia.

The information about Charles Zentai came from an individual whose brother, a Hungarian Jew named Peter Balozs, was murdered during the war, evidently by Zentai and his friends because he was not wearing a yellow patch. A search through international data bases found that Zentai had emigrated to Australia in 1951. Zuroff turned to friends in the Australian media who succeeded in locating Zentai and interviewed him. He denied any connection to the acts attributed to him, but the Australian police decided to investigate.

Zuroff would like to extend the operation to Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, but is not certain he will be able to raise the necessary financing. He is not seeking aid from Israel, he says, because "I already know the system enough years, and I know that there is no one to talk with about such a thing. In general, I think that the Jewish people should ask itself why this subject was so unimportant to it. What personally riles me is that the State of Israel is more interested in restoring assets, which in my opinion is a much more problematic subject. I am one of those people who say that the Jewish people wasted its moral credit on this struggle to return the money."

Condemning the orange patch
Zuroff does not spare the Israeli establishment criticism on current affairs related to the Holocaust. In an interview with The New York Times last week, he accused Israeli banks of "hypocrisy and indifference" for the attitude they have shown regarding the accounts of Holocaust victims, arguing that they were no better than other banks around the world.

In recent years, he has wrangled with ultra-Orthodox public figures on the matter of the Holocaust, after charging in his doctoral dissertation that the ultra-Orthodox rescue organizations only worked to save their own people and demonstrated apathy to the fate of other Jews.

The fact that he lives in the settlement of Efrat did not stop Zuroff from sharply condemning the initiators of the orange star among the settlers. "In doing such a deed, the demonstrators link themselves to the worst haters of Israel," he said last month in a press release.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/532487.html