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A doctor who is
accused of organising the mass murder of at least 1,200 tops an updated
list of the ten most wanted war criminal suspects wanted by an international
Nazi hunting group.
"Operation Last Chance" was launched eight years ago by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the international
Jewish rights group, to put pressure on governments to bring remaining
suspected Nazi war criminals to justice before they die.
As the world marked the annual Holocaust memorial day on Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre on Monday praised Germany for bringing accused Nazi war criminals
John Demanjuk and Heinrich Boere to trial over the past year, but
said a "lack of political will" continues to be the major obstacle to punishing others, particularly in post-communist
Eastern Europe.
. Dr Sandor Kepiro, 95, lives freely in Hungary, accordingt to
the group, but in wartime served in Serbia, where he took part
in a massacre in Novi Sad in 1942.
Scores were shot along the Danube and dumped into the freezing water. Kepiro
was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1944, but was set free by
Hungary’s fascist regime and fled to Argentina. Two years later,
Hungary’s communist government convicted him of war crimes in absentia,
but the Simon Wiesenthal Centre claims he returned to Hungary in
1996.
2. Milijov Asner, 96, a Croatian police chief who
allegedly collaborated with the Nazis. He is accused of sending hundreds
of Jews, gipsies and Serbs to death camps. By 1942, the entire Jewish
community in Asner’s town, Pozega, was wiped out.
After the war, Asner moved to Austria, where he was
granted citizenship. Some five decades later, he returned to Pozega,
where he was discovered by a young historian. Asner promptly returned
to Austria.
In 2005, Croatia requested extradition, but Austria
denied the request on the basis of Asner’s citizenship. When it was
discovered that he had lost his citizenship, Austria denied extradition
on medical grounds.
3. Samuel Kunz, 89, lives in Germany and is accused
of having served in the extermination camp of Belzec in occupied
Poland, where 500,000 Jews were gassed. Kunz is alleged to have participated
in the murders of 434,000 people during his time there as a guard.
4 Adolf Storms, an former SS officer, is accused of
killing 58 Jews in March 1945 in the village of Deutsche Schuetzen
in Austria.
Now 90, he allegedly forced victims to kneel beside
an open pit before they were shot and tumbled into the mass grave.
Charged in Duisburg, Germany, with the crime, the Wiesenthal Centre
wants the process speeded up as ill health threatens to claim Storms’
life before he has answered for his actions in court.
5 Klaas Carl Faber, 88, is a Dutch national who served
in the German Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi SS intelligence service,
in the Netherlands.
He was sentenced to death in Holland for murders of
prisoners at the Westerbork transit camp; the staging post for Jews
en-route to extermination centres in occupied Poland.
6. Karoly (Charles) Zentai, 98, a Hungarian-born resident
of Australia, is fighting extradition to Budapest to face charges
of the massacre of Jews there in 1944.
7 Soren Kam, 98, is accused of being responsible for
the death of a Danish journalist and the round up of Danish Jews
after her stole their registration books in Copenhagen. .
While in Germany, Kam has regularly attended veterans’
rallies of SS men. He has also been closely associated with Heinrich
Himmler’s daughter Gudrun Burwitz and her network Stille Hilfe -
“Silent Help” - set up to support arrested, condemned or fugitive
former SS men.
8 Peter Egner, 98, is suspected of being a member
of the mobile killing units operating in occupied Belgrade. The Simon
Wiesenthal Centre believes he is connected to the deaths of 17,444
Jews, gypsies and communists. Serbia wants him tried there. He is
currently fighting deportation from America, where he has lived since
the 1950s.
9 Algimantas Dalide, 98, was extradited from America
to Lithuania for his alleged part in the rounding up of the country’s
Jews for murder during the Second World War. But he was spared prison
on account of his age and health.
10 Michail Gorschkow, 96, a former Gestapo official
in Estonia during the war, is accused of participating in the murders
of 3,000 Jews in Russia.
He moved to America after the war, but left before
being stripped of his citizenship in 2002. Since then, Estonia has
been investigating his wartime activities without saying where he
is.
In Germany this year Heinrich Boere, an 88-year-old
Dutchman who murdered resistance men in The Netherlands in wartime
was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany. Currently underway
in Germany is the trial of another former list entrant, John Demjanjuk,
89, who is accused of aiding in the murders of 27,900 Jews at the
Sobibor death camp in Poland.
telegraph.co.uk
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