LONDON — The decision of a German court to close the file on a notorious Nazi fugitive known as Dr. Death is a reminder that time is running out to bring war criminals from World War II to justice.

As my colleague Nicholas Kulish reports, a regional court in Baden-Baden said on Friday that it had abandoned a criminal investigation into Aribert Ferdinand Heim after concluding he died in Cairo in 1992.

The Austrian-born Waffen-SS concentration camp doctor, who fled Germany in the 1960s and eluded capture for decades, would be 98 if he were still alive.

Almost 70 years after the end of World War II, how many surviving Nazi criminals are still on the run, and is there any further hope of hunting down members of a dwindling band of geriatrics?

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the most prominent Nazi-hunter, believes there is.

Efraim Zuroff, who coordinates the Center’s research on Nazi war criminals worldwide and is quoted by Nick on the Heim case, said in April:

“Despite the somewhat prevalent assumption that it is too late to bring Nazi murderers to justice, the figures clearly prove otherwise, and we are trying to ensure that at least several of these criminals will to be brought to trial during the coming years.”

However, the name of the Center’s program for tracking down remaining suspects — Operation Last Chance — tells its own story.

The Center’s last full report noted that in the 10 years to March 31, 2011, 89 legal decisions had been won against Nazi war criminals and their collaborators in seven countries.

Dr. Zuroff said in the Center’s preliminary report for 2012 that it was not the age of the suspects that was the biggest obstacle to prosecution but rather, in many cases, a lack of political will.

In the United States, which has a good record of pursuing suspects, two members of the House of Representatives proposed legislation that would ban weapons sales to any country that harbored wanted Nazis or modern-day war criminals.

The sponsors of the bill named no names. However, the Simon Wiesenthal Center highlighted obstacles in post-Communist Eastern Europe.

“The campaign led by the Baltic countries to distort the history of the Holocaust and obtain official recognition that the crimes of the Communists are equal to those of the Nazis is another major obstacle to the prosecution of those responsible for the crimes of the Shoa [Holocaust],” it said in its preliminary 2012 report.

Jewish groups in Australia last month criticized a ruling by the country’s High Court not to extradite Karoly “Charles” Zentai to his native Hungary for the alleged wartime murder of a Jewish teenager.

The spur for continued prosecutions is not only to obtain justice for surviving victims of Nazi crimes but to serve as a reminder for younger generations of the full horrors of World War II.

Scott Johnson wrote in an IHT Rendezvous article in July of questions being raised in Europe about whether history — and in particular the history of the Holocaust and World War II more broadly — was being quietly erased.

As the Nazi-hunters contemplate what must surely be the final years of their pursuit, their enterprise received a belated boost last year when a German court convicted Ivan Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center noted that it was the first time in German legal history that a Nazi war criminal was convicted without any evidence of a specific crime with a specific victim.

It therefore, theoretically, paved the way for the prosecution of anyone who had served in a death camp or mobile killing unit.

The verdict prompted the Center to launch Operation Last Chance II, offering rewards of up to €25,000, or $32,500, for information leading to the prosecution and punishment of such war criminals.

Where does all this leave the equally dwindling band of survivors of Nazi crimes?

Israel’s Ynet News reported mixed reactions in July to the announcement that 97-year-old Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, wanted for his alleged involvement in the deaths of 15,700 Jews, had been captured in Budapest.

“Why does God give these people such long lives?” asked Pension Gesner, a Holocaust survivor. “It’s too late because he has already lived his life.”

rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com