WARSAW (Reuters) - A final push to bring to justice those who carried out the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews has met resistance from central Europeans not ready to face up to crimes from 60 years ago, a Jewish group said.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre said on Monday its "Operation Last Chance" campaign to catch the few war criminals still alive has received the names of 364 suspects and submitted 79 to prosecutors' offices since its launch in 2002.

The group's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said many central European politicians were reluctant to pursue Nazi criminals, for fear of challenging the notion their countrymen were the victims, not perpetrators, of war crimes.

"We could have been much more successful," Zuroff said. "(But) it's politically unpopular to show just how much the local population participated in murder."

The Center's scheme offers up to 10,000 euros ($12,970) for information leading to arrests or convictions of people who perpetrated the Holocaust.

Zuroff, whose Nazi-hunting campaign spans from Germany to the Balkans and former Soviet countries, said he encountered most difficulties in the Baltic states, Romania and Austria.

"They rather talk about how much they suffered under the Soviet regime, but fail to punish the murderers of World War Two," he said of the Baltic states, where part of the population backed the Nazis in hope of regaining independence from Moscow.

As part of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's "final solution," some 6 million Jews were killed across Europe, many of them in concentration camps set up by Germans in occupied Poland. ($1=.7712 Euro)

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