He has spent decades hunting down some of the most evil men on the planet, but is it time for Efraim Zuroff to stop digging up the past?

Efraim Zuroff describes himself as “one-third detective, one-third historian and one-third political lobbyist”. To the rest of the world he is the last Nazi hunter, the man who has spent almost three decades bringing notorious war criminals to justice.

A specialist in Holocaust history and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, he tracked down Edinburgh-based Anton Gecas, who died in Scotland as Lithuanian prosecutors attempted to extradite him to face trial. Gecas was accused of killing more than 30,000 civilians, mostly Jewish, during the Second World War. The centre, named after a Holocaust survivor who tracked Nazis for decades, is the world’s largest Jewish civil rights organisation.

Zuroff arrives in Scotland this weekend, a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day, to discuss Operation Last Chance, the campaign he launched in 2002 to find and prosecute Nazi war criminals, pursuing them into the final years of their lives. He will also be talking about the book of the same name which he has written about his quest for justice.

Though easy to talk to – relaxed, warm, self-deprecating – Zuroff, 61, has received death threats. In many countries, particularly the Baltic states, he reckons he is “the most unpopular Jew in the world” and there is, he says matter of factly, a price on his head in Croatia. He’s unfazed, though. “I don’t live in those places,” he says. “I don’t think the danger is imminent. It’s the price you pay – and I think the emotional price is much higher than the physical one.

“Since my grandchildren came along, I have found the whole thing harder to deal with. When I hear about crimes involving children, it is difficult. Maybe my armour is starting to crack. But I am a positive person, with a good sense of humour, which is essential.”

On his visit to Scotland, Zuroff is looking forward to spending time with family members in Newton Mearns on the outskirts of Glasgow. “There is a very special spot in my heart for Scotland,” he says, smiling. “Not just because I have relatives living in Glasgow, descendants of my grandfather’s brother, but because if it had not been for Scottish journalists and Scottish Television I would never have been able to persuade the British Government to take action against the Nazi war criminals who had fled to the UK.”

In 1986 Zuroff submitted a list of 17 suspected Nazi war criminals living in Britain to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, with a request that the UK authorities investigate the allegations and, if necessary, “create the required legal apparatus to deal with them”. Almost four months passed without a response from the Government. When it did come, it was clear the only issue they were prepared to investigate was whether any of the suspects had violated local immigration law. One of these was Gecas.

He was wanted for his part in the execution of 34,000 Jews, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war while serving with the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Battalion. Sixteen witnesses identified Gecas as playing a crucial role in 11 massacres in Lithuania and Belarus during the Second World War. Far from just obeying orders, the evidence showed Gecas volunteered to lead shooting parties and on at least five occasions was seen shooting Jews himself.

He came to Scotland in 1947, worked for the National Coal Board as an engineer then ran a guest house in Edinburgh. Although the then justice minister, Jim Wallace, authorised extradition proceedings, Gecas was deemed too ill to face trial and died in Edinburgh in 2001, aged 85.

It was a campaign by STV journalists Bob Tomlinson and Ross Wilson which succeeded in convincing Westminster to take legal action against Holocaust perpetrators.

“We were met with resistance, but Britain is by no means unique in that,” says Zuroff, shaking his head. “People think it is hard finding Nazi war criminals, but what is harder is bringing them to justice, because of a lack of political will.

“I think that is improving in some places – in Germany for example. But in others? I find it hard to believe the reluctance to prosecute will change soon. Many governments know they only have to wait a few years and they will have the biological solution. My targets are invariably old. With the passing of time, they will all die.

“When a serial killer is on the loose, the police do everything they can to catch him because they are frightened he will kill again, and yet people who murdered far more than any serial killer can even dream of, go unprosecuted. To me, that is a kind of moral pollution, a betrayal of the victims.”

And that, ultimately, is what drives Efraim Zuroff. It is not a fanatical, personal obsession, or a desire for recognition – it is about remembering the victims of the Holocaust.

Zuroff was born in New York in August 1948. His father, Abraham, was a rabbi and the principal of Yeshiva University’s High School For Boys in Brooklyn, while his mother, Esther, was the director of student services at Stern College for Women, the female affiliate of Yeshiva University.

After emigrating to the US, Zuroff’s grandfather, Samuel Sar, helped create YU, the flagship educational institution of modern Jewish Orthodoxy in America, and held high positions there for 43 years.

Despite the achievements of his forbears, there was no single defining moment, says Zuroff, that determined his career path. “It just evolved,” he explains. “The Holocaust was not even a subject for discussion when I was growing up. We didn’t study it at school.

“I come from a committed Jewish family, I received an excellent education in Jewish history, and I was growing up during a time of tremendous social and political activism in the US – I suppose all of these things together propelled me into doing what I do.”

He stops briefly to gather his thoughts, then continues. “I was named after my grandfather’s youngest brother, Efraim Zar, who was murdered with his wife Beyla and their two sons Hirsh and Eliyahu in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Some say that determined my destiny, but I am less inclined to see it that way. I don’t look for a mystical reason. I was simply the right person in the right place at the right time.”

He breaks off with a laugh. “In fact, my only fantasy growing up was to become the first Orthodox Jew in the NBA [National Basketball Association]. I loved basketball, loved all sports. But I wasn’t good enough, so that dream never came true.”

Zuroff’s wife Elisheva teaches maths at Hebrew University in Israel. She has never been actively involved in her husband’s work. “I think that is a good thing,” says Zuroff. “The atmosphere in our house, had we both been doing this, would have been too heavy. There would have been too much emotional strain on our children, and we never wanted that.”

The couple have two sons, Itamar and Elchanan, and two daughters, Avigayil and Ayelet, ranging in age from 26 to 36. “They know what I do,” explains Zuroff. “Two of them studied the Holocaust, and they have visited the concentration camps – not with me, but with their schools – but they are all busy doing good things. I never expected, nor particularly wanted, them to follow me. They all have their own lives to lead.”

Operation Last Chance, which offers financial rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Nazi war criminals, has earned Zuroff the title of Last Nazi Hunter, a label he is relaxed about. “It helps me to explain to people what I do, who I am,” he says. “I consider it a compliment.”

As for motivation, Zuroff has it in spades. “When I am particularly frustrated, when I think, ‘Screw it, I can’t take any more,’ I think of the millions of innocent men, women and children turned into victims by the Nazis, and I know I can’t stop,” he says. “I have to keep going as long as I can.”

He admits, though, that Operation Last Chance is nearing its end. “I am already over 60,” he says. “I have tried hard to have a normal life outside of my work – I have four children and six grandchildren, and hopefully more to come.”

He recounts the day one of his granddaughters was born. “It was the same day Austria announced they were adding ¤50,000 to the reward for the capture of Aribert Heim, the concentration camp doctor at Mauthausen in Austria who tortured adults and children. I’d been chasing the Austrian government for this for a year and a half. My granddaughter was beautiful – this little cute baby with red hair – and yet I was more focused on the ¤50,000. As I say, I have tried to switch off, but I have not always been successful.”

In the closing chapters of his book, Zuroff writes: “I have never allowed the Nazis I was chasing to ruin my life. I have felt nothing but contempt or disdain for my targets.

“They have never interested me as individuals, and I have never dreamed of them at night. They have interested me from a strictly legal point of view. They have committed appalling crimes and yet they have hereto escaped human justice – and I have never been willing to accept this.” Today he says, “I think about it coming to an end all the time. But then I have just received reports of three new, serious suspects. When the hunt for Nazi war criminals is over, our focus must be on preventing efforts to deny the Holocaust.

“Our focus, in the last year or so, has begun to shift in that direction – as we get further away in time from the events of the Holocaust, attempts to distort will only increase, and in some post-communist countries there is a dangerous campaign to equate Nazi and communist crimes. The fight goes on. It’s just a different fight.”

The question he is asked most is: why pursue these men and women so long after the end of the Holocaust? Zuroff recites the mantra he has given to them all. “The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the murderers,” he says. “If I was bringing people to justice just after the end of the war, no-one would bat an eyelid.

“The practical implication of an age limit on prosecution is that if a person is rich enough, lucky enough and/or smart enough to escape justice until they reach that age, they will never be held accountable for their crimes, and that is a terrible travesty of justice. And every victim of the Nazis deserves that a serious effort be made to find and punish the people who turned them into victims.”

He breaks off. “Listen, this is not about putting someone on trial who has acute dementia. But with advances in modern medicine, many people, despite their advancing age, are healthy enough to face prosecution for what they have done.”

As he prepares for his trip to Scotland, during which he will visit Holocaust Memorial Day events in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Zuroff is reminded of another Scottish connection. In 2006 the former Herald Magazine journalist Michael Tierney helped him track down Sandor Kepiro, one of the Hungarian officers who had organised the large-scale massacre of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Novi Sad in 1942. “So you see, the Scottish connection is very strong,” Zuroff says, smiling. “It is true, though, wherever I have gone, that one of the most rewarding things about doing this job is the people.

“I have met so many who helped me not for financial benefit, or recognition, but because it was the right thing to do. That restores my faith in humanity.”

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place on January 27. Visit www.hmd.org.uk. Operation Last Chance by Efraim Zuroff is published by Palgrave Macmillan, priced £16.99.

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