During
the last week in January 2005, two significant but ostensibly contradictory
events regarding the Holocaust took place in Berlin. On January 26,
the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched “Operation: Last Chance,” which
offers financial rewards of up to 10,000 euros for information leading
to the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war criminals, at a press
conference at the Bundestag and on the next day Germany marked the
sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
death camp in an official state ceremony in the same building. If
six decades have already elapsed since the end of the systematic
implementation of the Final Solution at the most notorious of the
Nazi camps, is it still possible to hold any of the Holocaust perpetrators
accountable? Current statistics on the prosecution of Nazi war criminals
worldwide and the results of “Operation: Last Chance” in
the eight countries in which it was launched prior to Germany clearly
provide an affirmative answer.
“Operation: Last Chance” was conceived by Aryeh Rubin,
the founder and president of the Targum Shlishi Foundation of Miami,
Florida, who over the past fifteen years has actively supported and
assisted the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s efforts to bring Nazi
war criminals to justice. With time running out on these endeavors,
however, he believed that a more proactive approach, which included
financial rewards, should be attempted and guaranteed a generous
contribution to undertake the project as a joint program of Targum
Shlishi and the Wiesenthal Center, whose Jerusalem Office was entrusted
with its implementation and coordination.
“Operation: Last Chance” was officially launched in
July 2002 in Lithuania (July 8), Estonia (July 10) and Latvia (July
11). There were several reasons for starting the project in the Baltics.
One was the extensive role played by the local population in the
murders and the extremely high victimology rate in all three countries.
(Over 95% of the Jews who were living under the Nazi occupation in
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were murdered.) The fact that practically
all the Jews killed were murdered near their homes (rather than in
the death camps in Poland) increased the likelihood of being able
to obtain information regarding the identity of the killers. In addition,
we assumed that the relatively large number of local Nazi war criminals
who had been convicted by the Soviets after World War II and had
already served their sentences and had returned to their countries
of origin might be willing to reveal the identities of their fellow
perpetrators in return for the financial reward. While this possibility
certainly raised a daunting moral dilemma, the fact remains that
in numerous instances of mass murder, only perpetrators could possibly
identify the killers and they were our only hope of being able to
bring some of the guilty to justice.
The project was launched at press conferences held in each of the
capitals, which were followed by ads in the local media, which purposely
focused on the atrocities committed by the local population. Thus,
for example, the illustration used in the ads in Lithuania was of
the murder of Jews by Lithuanians in the Lietukis garage in Kovno,
a well-known atrocity in which more than fifty Jews were murdered
by a gang of Lithuanians wielding crowbars and who shoved fire hoses
into the mouths of some of their victims and turned on the water
until their stomachs burst. The murders were witnessed by a crowd
of men, women, and children who cheered as each Jew succumbed, and
after all the Jews had been killed, sang the Lithuanian national
anthem.
The caption of the ad published in the national media noted, “Lithuanian
Jewry did not disappear. They were brutally murdered at Ponar (Vilnius),
Fort IX (Kaunas), Kuzai Forest (Siauliai) and over one hundred places
of mass murder.” Besides announcing the reward of $10,000,
it listed the phone numbers of the local Jewish community, the local
special prosecutor for crimes committed by totalitarian regimes (Nazi
and Communist), as well as the contact numbers of the Israel office
of the SWC.
In Lithuania, we benefited from the help provided by the local Jewish
community, headed by Dr. Shimon Alperovich, which agreed to serve
as our local partner and to record the incoming information. The
issue of local partners ultimately turned out to be more complicated
than originally anticipated. One would imagine, that local Jewish
communities would be more than happy to support the project and provide
the necessary technical assistance, but that was not the case. In
fact, several communities, such as Estonia and Germany, refused outright
to cooperate, whereas the Latvian Jewish community was publicly critical
of the project even though they had initially agreed to cooperate.
A good part of the opposition by these communities undoubtedly stemmed
from a fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet while this concern was
shared by all the communities, there were those such as Lithuania
and Romania (headed by the late Prof. Cajal and Julian Sorin) which
chose to provide excellent public support and cooperation, whereas
others rushed to join the local critics. In retrospect, the responses
of the local Jewish communities were not necessarily a function of
their size (Romania has approximately 9,000 Jews and Lithuania 5,000,
whereas Germany has over 100,000 Jews and Latvia has 12,000), but
rather of the courage of their leaders and their commitment to bringing
the murderers to justice. The latter factor was often influenced
by whether these leaders’ relatives had been murdered in that
country during the Shoa.
During its initial year of operation, “Operation: Last Chance” received
the names of well over 200 suspects, mostly from Lithuania. Encouraged
by this success, the project was expanded in September 2003 to Poland,
Romania, and Austria. Our principle in this regard was to focus exclusively
on those countries in which the local population and/or its government
(Romania for example) played an active role in the murder of its
Jewish community and/or other Jews. While this fact was quite well
known in the Baltics, the situation in the next three countries was
more complex. The Poles, for example, were severely victimized by
the Nazis (three million Poles, including a significant percentage
of the Polish intelligentsia, were murdered) and were not given an
integral role in the implementation of the Final Solution in Poland.
Yet numerous Poles did play a role in the murder of Jews, a fact
which many Poles refused to acknowledge, preferring to foster their
country’s image as a victim of the Nazis.
In Romania, the government’s role in the mass murder of Jews
in Romania and in the territories it annexed as well as in the Ukraine
was largely covered up, a fact reinforced by statements by President
Iliescu and others that “the Holocaust did not take place in
Romania.” Even though Iliescu subsequently retracted this statement,
little effort was invested in educating the Romanian public about
the crimes of its wartime government headed by Marshal Antonescu,
who in certain circles is still considered a national hero. In fact,
since Romania became a democracy not a single Holocaust perpetrator
had been investigated, let alone prosecuted, and rehabilitations
had been granted to several Romanian Nazi war criminals.
As far as Austria is concerned, its record on bringing Nazi war
criminals to justice has been utterly abysmal, with not a single
conviction recorded during the past three decades. This is not that
surprising, however, in view of the fact that until about fifteen
years ago, Austria touted itself as “Hitler’s first victim,” rather
than as Germany’s zealous partner in crime. (Many of the leading
Holocaust perpetrators, such as Adolf Eichman, Franz Stangl, Artur
Seyss-Inquart, and Odilo Globocnik were Austrians.)
In the wake of this expansion of “Operation: Last Chance,” we
encountered our first legal challenge based on data protection. Questions
apparently posed by right-wing nationalist elements prompted inquiries
by the Polish Office for Data Protection which questioned the legality
of the project and whether the transfer of information regarding
Polish citizens to another country (in this case Israel) without
their knowledge, was not a violation of Polish law. We later encountered
a similar challenge in Hungary.
Another worrisome phenomenon, which we encountered at this state,
was a plethora of anti-Semitic phone calls to our hotline in Austria.
Out of approximately one hundred calls, more than ninety were of
persons who called to express unequivocally anti-Semitic (and often
anti-American) views. Typical of such calls were those who identified
Bush and Sharon as “the real war criminals” and demanded
the financial reward. Others sent copies of the ad we published in
the Austrian mass circulation daily Kronen Zeitung under the caption “Der
Morder sind unter uns” (The murderers are among us) along with
similar comments to our office in Jerusalem. A recurring theme of
these calls, letters, and emails was when will the Jews stop milking
us due to the past?
While we received anti-Semitic responses in practically every country,
it was only in Austria that their number was so large and in direct
disproportion to the number of serious leads received. Elsewhere,
we received not only hundreds of names of suspects (see accompanying
table) but also expressions of support and information of historical
value. In many cases the people who submitted the information stated
that they did not want any reward, but felt an obligation to inform
us. One such example was the following story received from Lithuania
about the fate of the Jewish community of Panemunelis (in Yiddish
Panemunok), a shtetl with about one hundred Jews, about whose murder
during the Shoa no details were hereto known.
The informant related that as a young boy, in August 1941, he saw
a wagon with ten Jews aboard, five from the Olkin family and five
from the Jaffe family, along with four armed Lithuanians whom he
named headed in the direction of the nearby town of Rokiskis. Thirty
minutes later he heard shots ring out from the nearly Karolishkis
Forest and some time after that he saw the same wagon return to the
shtetl with only the four armed Lithuanians aboard and with a large
pile of clothes in the wagon. According to the informant, who began
his letter by stating that he did not want any reward, two of the
four Lithuanians in question were no longer alive. Unfortunately,
as it turned out, all four had already died by the time we received
this information. Nonetheless, the information received shed hereto-unknown
historical light on the cruel fate of this Jewish community.
In the summer of 2004, “Operation: Last Chance” was
expanded to Croatia and Hungary. The launch of the project in the
former was unique for three reasons, two of which were excellent,
while the third was terrible. The first was that President Mesic
himself granted us a meeting on the day of the launch to express
his support. The second was the receipt of a complete dossier on
former Slavonska Pozega police chief Milivoj Asner, including anti-Jewish
and anti-Serb directives he had personally signed into law which
clearly proved his complicity in Holocaust crimes. The third were
death threats against Croatian Jews (whose community leaders chose
to ignore our request for assistance), and the offer of rewards for
the murder of the Croatian Justice Minister ($75,000), our local
partner (Dr. Zorin Pusic of the Civic Committee for Human Rights – $50,000)
and myself ($25,000).
In Hungary we were challenged on legal grounds, as noted above,
and the project aroused an intense internal polemic regarding its
validity in which the critics were led by a well-known Holocaust
historian of Jewish origin. Here too extremely incriminating evidence
was submitted, in this case by the brother of a young Jew murdered
in Budapest in 1944 by a Hungarian Army officer named Karoly Zentai,
who escaped to Australia in 1950 and had never been tried for his
crimes. To date he and Asner are the most likely to be brought to
trial from among the suspects whose names were received in the framework
of “Operation: Last Chance.”
With Germany just started, as these lines are being written in early
February 2005, we are hopeful that the project will register its
most successful results in the country which was the seat of Nazi
power and whose nationals played such an important role in the implementation
of the Final Solution. Contrary perhaps to common thinking, many
Nazi war criminals have been convicted during the past several years
and we are cautiously optimistic that “Operation: Last Chance” will
help increase that ever-so-significant figure.
Having said that, it is now quite clear that any assessment of the
project cannot be limited to its concrete judicial results. Besides
attempting to facilitate the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war
criminals, “Operation: Last Chance” has played an integral
and important role in the struggle for historical truth in post-Communist
Europe, where new national narratives (and textbooks) are being written
about World War II and the Holocaust and the issue of local complicity
in the murder of the Jews remains disputed and painful. Under these
circumstances, “Operation: Last Chance” has a significant
role not only in ensuring historical accuracy but also in helping
combat contemporary anti-Semitism and paving the way for better relations
between Jews and non-Jews in Europe.
|