SIMON WIESENTHAL, the Nazi hunter, who died in Vienna yesterday aged 96, was lauded across the world as a tenacious fighter who kept alive the cause of justice for victims of the Holocaust.

A survivor who lost scores of relatives in the Nazi death camps, Mr Wiesenthal helped to bring more than 1,100 Nazi criminals to justice — including Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of Hitler's “Final Solution,” who was tracked down by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. Six million Jews were murdered by Hitler's Nazis in the Second World War.

“He was the conscience of the world,” Aver Shalev, the director of Israel's Holocaust Memorial, said in Jerusalem. “The Jewish people and all of humanity owe a lot to him because he acted systematically and very strongly . . . He will be remembered as a symbol for the Jewish and human conscience, the need to protect moral values.”

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said: “Simon Wiesenthal will forever be rightly credited with ensuring justice was done for some of the worst crimes in history. He was tireless in his efforts and he gave the Jewish communities in the UK and around the world a lifetime of service, and future generations will forever be indebted to him.” Mr Wiesenthal was awarded an honorary knighthood in 2004.

The pursuit of the dwindling band of criminals from the Second World War has already been taken over by a new generation. Mr Wiesenthal's spiritual successor is Efraim Zuroff, 56, a historian who heads the Jewish branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Mr Wiesenthal was haunted by the men who got away — the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and the camp doctor Josef Mengele, who are now dead — but Mr Zuroff's two top targets are very much alive.

Alois Brunner, who deported thousands of Jews to death camps, lives in a guarded apartment in Damascus, and investigators are hot on the trail of Aribert Heim, a 91-year-old doctor suspected of having tortured and killed hundreds of prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Mr Zuroff eschews the archaic methods of his mentor. On the walls of Mr Wiesenthal's Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna was a map with dozens of pins recording the last sightings of fugitive criminals, and gritty photographs of men in Nazi uniforms. Large metal cabinets housed thousands of cross-references to concentration camp guards.

But Mr Wiesenthal's web of informants — spies, former camp inmates and even a few former Nazis — has shrunk. Witnesses are dying or losing their memory, and the suspects themselves are usually infirm. Prosecutions have become very difficult to secure.

Mr Zuroff's brainchild is Operation Last Chance, which gained Mr Wiesenthal's stamp of approval. Together with a philanthropist from the Miami-based Targum Shlishi Foundation, he has found a way of speeding up the investigation and prosecution of Nazi suspects in Eastern Europe.

Since the launch of the operation in 2002, it has spread to nine countries and has yielded the names of 380 suspects, of which 79 have been submitted to local prosecutors.

One tactic is to establish historical truth in the hope of loosening tongues. “The battle for historical accuracy is taking place mainly in post-communist Europe where significant sectors of the local population assisted the Nazis,” Mr Zuroff says. “For the first time they can honestly confront the complicity of their own populations in the Shoah. They are currently writing their textbooks anew.”

Another tactic is to offer large bounties for anyone who denounces Nazi murderers and helps to have them prosecuted.

The chief problem is the confusion of history. Since Nazi sympathisers in Eastern Europe were punished by the Soviet authorities, they are now regarded in independent states such as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia as victims of communism and as true patriots. There is thus no popular support for unmasking them.

It seems that public diplomacy is now the best approach for flushing out war criminals. “We begin with press conferences in each capital at which we present our plan and announce the financial reward,” Mr Zuroff says. A hotline is set up, sometimes in the office of the local Jewish community. Afterwards advertisements are published to encourage denunciations.

Times Online, 21.09.05