The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Wednesday it was considering extending its drive to catch World War II criminals to several countries across Europe in a final race against time.
The Jerusalem-based group already pays $10,000 for information leading to successful legal action in "Operation Last Chance" in the three Baltic states.

" We are considering Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, Austria," director Efraim Zuroff told Reuters at a campaign update in Riga. "But we are not 100 percent sure we will make it. The window of opportunity is only 3-5 years," he said, referring to a race against time as both war crimes perpetrators and survivors grow old and die.
Zuroff added he would like to see Russia included in the campaign. "Russia is totally unrepentant," Zuroff said.

The campaign has sparked much criticism across the ex-Soviet Baltic countries, image-conscious in their drive toward mainstream Europe after breaking with Moscow in 1991. All three have won invitations to join the EU and NATO (news - web sites) in 2004.

Zuroff said: "In 12 years of independence not a single person has been brought to trial and something had to be done."

Close to 95 percent of the pre-war Jewish population in the Baltics was killed after Nazi Germany invaded Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1941.

Zuroff said the campaign had so far yielded more than 150 suspects in Lithuania and 37 in Latvia. He declined to say how many names he had on his list for Estonia before a news conference in Tallinn on Thursday.

" I cannot imagine there would be more than 10 trials in total, but even three to four would be a tremendous achievement," he said.

" Operation Last Chance" until now paid informants only in the event of a successful trial, but Zuroff said the rules would be eased so that anyone giving information leading to an investigation would get $1,000, then another $1,500 for an indictment and the final $7,500 in the event of a conviction.