‘People sometimes call me Mr Holocaust,’ he said, his eyes scanning the growing list of emails popping into his inbox. ‘My brother-in-law phones me on Yom HaShoah and says, “Happy holiday!”’ He laughed. ‘You need a sense of humour in this job.’

Nazi hunter headquarters

Zuroff’s office, where he works with a single assistant, is on the ground floor of an apartment block in a quiet residential area of Jerusalem. Box files of documents – ‘Holocaust distortion’, ‘Holocaust issues’, records of births, crimes, investigations and deaths – line the walls, and spill into a neighbouring storeroom, which Zuroff keeps under lock and key.

Resting against one wall was a large poster – a photograph of the gates of Auschwitz emblazoned with the slogan Spät Aber Nicht Zu Spät (‘Late, but not too late’), dating from the launch in Europe in 2002 of Operation Last Chance, the campaign orchestrated by Zuroff with the objective of tracking down the last surviving war criminals, by offering financial rewards for information leading to their arrest and conviction. 

Hanging behind his desk was a framed front page of the New York Post from May 7, 1945, with its headline ‘Nazis Quit!’ ‘So they were finished’, Zuroff said flatly, ‘but our work was just beginning.’ Seven decades have passed since the Holocaust.

The principal architects of the Nazi industrialised killing machine have long since been convicted, executed or died; for thousands of war criminals who escaped retribution mortality has exacted its own justice. 

But while the opportunities for tracking down and prosecuting those who survive would seem to be rapidly diminishing, the effort to bring them to book has not flagged, and if anything has taken on renewed impetus.

In a landmark ruling in 2009, in the trial of John Demjanjuk, who had served as a guard at the Sobibór extermination camp, a Munich court accepted the prosecution argument that any person who had served in a ‘death camp’ (defined as a concentration camp with the apparatus for mass annihilation, which is to say Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Bełżec, Chełmno , Sobibór and Majdanek) could be charged and convicted of at least ‘accessory to murder’, even if there was no proof that he or she had committed a specific crime against a specific victim ‘motivated by hate’ (which for the previous 50 years had been the basic requirement for prosecution in Germany). 

Trials of the fragile and mentally ill

That ruling opened the door to a spate of new prosecutions. At the beginning of 2016, four people – all of whom had served in Auschwitz – were slated for trial, with six additional investigations in their final stages, every case raising difficult questions of the problems, and the wisdom, of putting on trial people who are now in their 90s, and often in fragile physical and mental health. 

In the week I met Zuroff, Reinhold Hanning, 94, a former SS guard at Auschwitz, was being brought into court each day in a wheelchair in the small German town of Detmold to face charges of 170,000 counts of accessory to murder. (Shortly after our meeting, Hanning was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.) 

Meanwhile, a second trial, of Hubert Zafke, 95, previously an SS medic, who faces at least 3,681 charges of complicity in killings, had been suspended due to ill health. In April, Ernst Tremmel, a 93-year-old former guard at Auschwitz accused of 1,075 counts of accessory to murder, had escaped the reckoning of the courts altogether by dying. 

‘How do I feel about that?’ Zuroff slumped back on his seat. ‘Listen, I’m the only Jew in the world who prays for the good health of Nazis.’ He paused. ‘Meaning those who can be brought to justice, of course.’ Zuroff, who is 67, is a burly man with rimless glasses, dressed in chinos, black sneakers and a check shirt, a kippa pinned to the back of his head.

The man leading the hunt

Born in Brooklyn, he has lived in Israel for 45 years, but lost nothing of his twanging New York accent, or his hard-nosed street smarts. His manner is abrasive, dogmatic, passionate, ironic. He is much given to sighs and expostulations – ‘Ays’ and ‘Oys’. Expletives happily explode from his lips (‘Excuse my Chinese.’)

He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family of Lithuanian origin, Zionists who always considered Israel their true homeland. ‘We were always American Jews, rather than Jewish Americans.’ As a boy he dreamt of becoming a professional basketball player – an unrealistic ambition for an Orthodox Jew, he admitted. His grandfather wanted him to become a rabbi.

In 1970, after graduating in history from the Yeshiva University – a private Jewish college in New York – he moved to Israel, where he threw himself into Holocaust studies, working at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial museum to the victims of the Holocaust. 

In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles, to take up a position at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a museum and study centre named in honour of the Austrian Holocaust survivor who became famous as a Nazi hunter, tracking down war criminals and preparing documentation for their trials.

Wiesenthal was credited with helping to bring to trial some 1,100 Nazi war criminals, among them Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, and Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibór death camps in German-occupied Poland.

He played little part in the operation most associated with his name, the tracking down of Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of all the practical aspects of the implementation of the Final Solution, the Nazis’ plan for the total annihilation of the Jews in Europe, and who was captured by Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) in Buenos Aires in 1960, then executed for crimes against humanity in 1962.

Wiesenthal, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, died in 2005 at the age of 96. Zuroff, who is married with four children and 11 grandchildren (the Holocaust, he said, placed an obligation on Jews fruitfully to multiply) spent two years at the Wiesenthal Center, then worked for the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Department of Justice, which had been newly created to pursue legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators living in America.

Steps for a successful investigation

It was his work at the OSI, researching documents, testimony and information on suspects that led to him establishing an office of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, with the specific brief to continue Wiesenthal’s work in tracking down war criminals and attempting to bring them to justice. 

Nazi hunter… The term suggests something cloak and dagger, a belted trench coat, stake-outs on shadowy streets… ‘Inspector Clouseau, with the magnifying glass.’ Zuroff laughed. ‘It’s not like that.’ Rather, he described his work as ‘one third detective, one third historian and one third political lobbyist. And frustrating. Terribly frustrating.’

There are, he said, five steps to concluding a successful investigation. Unearthing and exposing a suspect. Setting the wheels of legal action in motion. Securing an indictment.

Going to trial, and achieving a conviction. It usually involves a lengthy process of combing through files and documents, enlisting a network of colleagues and supporters around the world. Petitioning (and in some cases bullying – Zuroff has a reputation for tenacity) governments to extradite and prosecute.

In 35 years he has been involved in initiating or helping to investigate some 40 cases that have actually come to trial, although not all of those have resulted in a conviction. In 2009 he published a memoir, Operation Last Chance – a fascinating account of tip-offs, dogged research, frantic plane flights and painstaking lobbying of governments, often ending in a deeply frustrating failure.

What you are left with is a picture of Zuroff as a determined and methodical man who only occasionally allows his feelings to get the better of him. He describes the case of Sándor Képíró, a former Hungarian gendarmerie captain who in 1948 had been found guilty by the Hungarians of his part in the massacre of more than 1,200 Serbs, Jews and Roma in 1942 in the town of Novi Sad.

But Képíró had never served his sentence, instead fleeing to Argentina, where he lived for many years before quietly returning to Hungary, where he was finally tracked down by Zuroff in 2006.

Thoughts of revenge

Zuroff recounts that, as he stood outside the door of the apartment block in Budapest (ironically, opposite a synagogue) where Képíró lived, he mused that nothing could have been easier than to get into his apartment ‘and execute the bastard. In this case, after all, he was not a suspect, but a convicted war criminal with hundreds of dead Jews and Serbs to prove it.’

But thoughts of revenge, he goes on, ‘did not linger and certainly did not convince. The arguments remained the same in this case, as in every other. Killing him would be counterproductive in the long run and ruin our efforts elsewhere.’

The Képíró case provides a vivid illustration of both the triumphs and the frustrations that come with Zuroff’s work. Following intensive lobbying by Zuroff, in February 2011 Hungarian prosecutors formally charged Képíró, who was by then 97 years old, with war crimes; but in July of that year he was acquitted by a Budapest court.

‘It was outrageous, absurd,’ Zuroff told me. ‘Key evidence was unfairly disqualified for political reasons.’ That verdict, and the subsequent collapse of a case in Hungary involving another former gendarme, László Csatary, who died in hospital at the age of 98 before he could be brought to trial, led to László Karsai, the leading Hungarian Holocaust historian and son of a Holocaust survivor, attacking Zuroff’s pursuit of war criminals, arguing that such trials served no useful purpose, ‘historically, educationally, or politically’.

Justice versus revenge

It is a criticism that has dogged Zuroff throughout his career: that he is bent not on justice but on revenge, and that little is achieved by hounding the aged and infirm into court. In the 1980s when, together with the All Parliamentary War Crimes Group, Zuroff began lobbying the British government to pass legislation enabling the prosecution of former Nazis, a leader in The Times argued that it was actually more ‘wise and humane to let matters rest’, while The Daily Telegraph denounced Nazi hunting as ‘a new and frankly distasteful blood sport’.

(The subsequent passage of the War Crimes Act in 1991 has led to only one prosecution of a war criminal in Britain, Anthony Sawoniuk, a former Belarusian policeman, who in 2009 was found guilty of ordering 15 Jewish women to strip naked before machine-gunning them to death. Sawoniuk, who at his trial described himself as ‘the best friend of the Jews’, died in Norwich prison in 2005.)

Zuroff has a well-practised list of answers to his critics (‘I could recite them in my sleep’), which he ticked off one by one. ‘The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers.

'Old age should not afford protection to people who committed such heinous crimes. If a mass murderer reaches the age of 90, it doesn’t turn him into a righteous Gentile. Age, infirmity, it doesn’t matter. It’s the victims who deserve sympathy, not the perpetrators.'

He paused. ‘A few years ago I got a tip about a Hungarian who was a police commander in Slovakia - he played an important role in sending 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. When I found him he was 96 years old and still driving his car...Why ignore him? 

‘Our obligation is to the victims, to find and punish these people who turned innocent men, women and children into victims because they were “enemies of the Reich”. And this effort sends a very important message: that if you commit such crimes, even decades later there will be an effort to bring you to justice.’

He leant forward in his chair. ‘People often say to me, Dr Zuroff, so many years have passed since the events; the people who committed these crimes are probably sorry. They could say, “Back then we were young, we were brainwashed, we believed we were doing our patriotic duty, and we made a mistake.” But I have bad news for you: not a single person in the cases I’ve dealt with ever said sorry, ever expressed any remorse or regret. Not one – and if anything, just the opposite. They’re very proud of what they did, to this day.’

Such trials are also important, he said, in the fight  against Holocaust denial and distortion, and against anti-Semitism in general. In the years immediately after the Second World War, the horrific facts of the Holocaust were little discussed. 

‘The post-war generation of Jews had a psychological problem with the Holocaust,’ Zuroff said. ‘If you went through it you wanted to forget. And the world wanted to look forward, not back; what had happened was just too traumatic. The Holocaust was a total failure of the civilised world.’

'Sometimes the nothingness is more powerful'

Zuroff himself was named after a Holocaust victim, a great-uncle, Rabbi Efraim Zar, who was murdered in Lithuania; but even growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family, his first real awareness of the Holocaust, he said, did not come until 1961, when he was 13, and his mother called out to him one day to come and watch the trial of Adolf Eichmann on television.

‘My mother is a calm, reasonable person – she doesn’t get excited – but she said, “You’ve got to see this; they’ve caught one of the top Nazis and put him on trial.” I had no idea who Eichmann was, but that was really something.’ 

Zuroff has visited four of the six death camps operated by the Nazis: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and Chełmno, all in German-occupied Poland. It was in 1978, on his way to America, where he worked for two years. ‘I went alone. I had to deposit my Israeli passport in Zurich. I didn’t know anybody.

'I went to Treblinka with a driver – Polish, not a Jew. It was horrendous. Treblinka is a place where nothing of the camp is left, and sometimes the nothingness is more powerful than seeing old buildings. Then I went to Auschwitz…

‘After Poland I was supposed to meet my wife in Amsterdam to go on to the USA. In Poland I didn’t cry once. But as we were about to land in Amsterdam I thought to myself, one second, I’m ostensibly out of there, but they did the same thing here in Holland; they didn’t kill the Jews themselves, but they sent them to be murdered in Poland. That’s when it hit me.’

Fears of forgetting

Simon Wiesenthal’s greatest fear, he went on, wasn’t that this criminal or that one wouldn’t be brought to justice; it was that the Holocaust would be completely forgotten.

‘But you see the opposite happened. There’s no comparison to the wealth of information, of all sorts, from scholarly to popular, culture, arts, film – everything. And if I’m part of that revolution, good. In other words, if I can’t nail ’em I can at least make sure they don’t lie about it.’

In recent years, Zuroff maintained, there have been attempts to question or undermine the acceptance of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and the greatest tragedy in human history, and to present an equivalency between the Holocaust and Communist crimes against humanity – what Zuroff calls ‘the double genocide theory’. 

Nowhere is this more so, he said, than in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, where there have been attempts to, as he put it, ‘change the narrative’ in order to minimise the role of local Nazi collaborators in the mass murder of Jews. But such equivalency, Zuroff insists, is false.

‘There are two major differences. One is an ideological difference in the fanatical determination of the Nazis to wipe a people off the face of the earth. And the second point is the industrialised mass murder of the Jews, which has never been replicated, thank God.

'It is absolutely necessary to preserve the truth of the Holocaust as a singular and unique phenomenon. I wish it weren’t so special in a sense, because it would have meant fewer Jews being murdered.’ 

While the Nazis enlisted collaborators in every European country they occupied, it was only in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States that collaborators took an active role in the mass murder of the Jews. More than 95 per cent of the Jews who were living in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia at the outbreak of the war were massacred – a total of 280,000 people.

Over 90 per cent of the victims were not deported to concentration camps, but shot either by Nazi death squads or by their local collaborators.

But in Lithuania there have been only three cases of people being charged with war crimes – and the cases did not even come to court. There have been none in Estonia or Latvia. 

In parts of Eastern Europe and the Baltic those who collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces during the war are lionised by right-wing nationalists as ‘patriots’ and heroes who fought against communism.

Each year Zuroff attends the reunion and march of SS veterans in Latvia’s capital Riga, commemorating the Latvian Legion, the military units who fought alongside the Waffen SS against the Soviets.

‘They were not involved in war crimes as those units. However, among them were people who previously served in the Latvian Security Police and who were actively involved in murdering Jews. There’s an attempt to present them as freedom fighters who paved the way for Latvian independence. 

'Everyone there knows me. The media come over and ask why I’m doing this – are they Nazi war criminals or not? They say I’m a Russian agent. That I work for Putin.’ He laughed. ‘Shit like that.’

Then there’s Croatia, where the right-wing Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) returned to power in January at the head of a coalition government. When the Israeli national football team played a friendly match in Croatia in March, spectators chanted anti-Semitic slogans and, ‘We Croats! Ustaša, Ustaša’ – invoking the name of the fascist party that between 1941 and 1945 ruled the Independent State of Croatia as a puppet state for Nazi Germany, and which was responsible for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Serbs and 20,000 Jews, and deporting a further 10,000 Jews to Auschwitz.

Victory for Zuroff

One of Zuroff’s most successful cases was in helping to track down and provide documentation to aid in the prosecution of Dinko Šakić in 1998. Šakić  had been commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, where he was responsible for the murder of 2,000 people. He was traced to Argentina and extradited to Croatia, where he was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He died in prison, and was buried in his Ustaša uniform. 

That was the first, and only, war-crimes prosecution ever conducted in Croatia. What Zuroff described as ‘the lack of political will’ in the Eastern European and Baltic States means that there is no realistic chance of further prosecutions being brought against war criminals still living in those countries. 

‘Really, the only place where there’s a chance of bringing anyone to a criminal trial is Germany. Austria is hopeless. There hasn’t been a successful prosecution of a Nazi war criminal there in more than 30 years. What, there’s no Nazis in Austria? There’s plenty, of course. As a matter of fact, one who was a guard in Auschwitz died just recently. The Austrians were theoretically looking at it. They’re full of shit, the Austrians.’

He cited the case of Erna Wallisch.

The most expensive advertisement ever taken out to publicise Operation Last Chance was in 2003, in the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung (‘And it hurt me to pay for it - a disgusting right-wing newspaper.’) In addition to a torrent of anti-Semitic and abusive insults on a toll-free telephone line, the advertisement elicited one written reply.

‘It was from a woman, who said I saw your ad in Kronen Zeitung. I want you to know that one of the monsters of the camps is living in Schiftmuujlerstrasse 100, Vienna. Her name is Erna Wallisch....’

Denial and justice

Working with colleagues in Austria, Zuroff set about the complicated process of identification and verification. Wallisch, it transpired, had worked as a guard at both the Ravensbruck and Madjanek concentration camps. She had actually been questioned by investigators in Austria on two occasions, in 1965 and 1972, but without ever being charged.

‘The first time she denied all knowledge of the gas chambers. The second time she admitted having taken people to be gassed. Wunderbar!’ Zuroff gave an ironic laugh. ‘What could be better!’ He set about pressurising the Austrian government to reopen the case against her. But in 2006 the Justice Ministry announced that Wallisch could not be tried in Austria.

‘They said, we can’t prosecute Erna Wallisch, because what she did is classified under Austrian law as "passive complicity in genocide", and there’s a statute of limitations on that. I couldn’t believe my ears. Genocide? We know what that is. Complicity? We know what that is. What on earth is passive complicity in genocide? I was so pissed off! Right away I contacted the Poles.

‘I said you know Madjenak? It’s in Poland, right? Now this woman took people to be gassed in Madjanek. Try and help me, find me some witnesses, survivors. I spoke to the Institute for National Memory in Poland. Nine months later they sent affadavits to Vienna of five witnesses who positively identified Erna Wallisch.

‘You know how they identified her? Because she became pregnant in Madjanek by another camp guard! [One witness described how she had seen Wallisch beat a small child and then toss the body away ‘like a piece of wood.’]

'So the Austrians were forced to reopen the case. I had to go into hospital for an operation. On the day I came out - I was supposed to rest - I get a phone call from the Austrian Embassy. “Dr Zuroff! Have you heard the news?” No, what news? “Erna Wallisch died”.

'Shit! I was furious. I didn’t go home. I came to my office to put out a press-release denouncing the Austrians for taking their sweet time about it, for letting this terrible woman off the hook.’

Wallisch died in February 2004 - four years after the tip-off to Operation Last Chance.

Injury time in the race

Zuroff gave a deep sigh. He admits the race to bring surviving Nazi war criminals to justice is now ‘in injury time’. In Germany, the prosecution of war crimes is usually initiated by the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in the town of Ludwigsburg, and later turned over for completion to local prosecutors in the area where the suspect lives.

In the wake of the John Demjanjuk conviction, the COSJA, he said, initially sought out and found a further 51 people who had served in Auschwitz and 17 from Majdanek. However, those figures were rapidly reduced due to deaths and medical issues.

But in concentrating their investigations into those who served in the Nazi death camps, Zuroff said, the COSJA has yet to prosecute a single person from the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile death squads.

The historian Raul Hilberg estimated that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and auxiliary troops killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. Zuroff had the names of 1,300 out of the 3,000 men and women who served in the Einsatzgruppen in his records, and in 1,069 cases a date of birth. Narrowing the search, he found 80 names – 76 men, four women – who could feasibly be alive.

‘In any other country in the world I could go to the Ministry of the Interior population registry and find out if they are still alive. In Germany you have Datenschutz – data protection. No one has entry to those records. The only thing I could do is send those names to the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Interior, who sent it to Ludwigsburg.

'Two months ago they suddenly notified me that apparently eight out of those 80 people are still alive. So, in other words, there’s also a chance there’ll be cases of Einsatzgruppen being prosecuted.’ He gave a satisfied smile. ‘Which would be fantastic.’

That evening, Zuroff was giving a talk, ‘35 Years of Hunting Nazis: Successes, Failures and Insights’, in the small community of Nes Harim, a moshav (or agricultural collective), 15 miles from Jerusalem. As he drove, Zuroff returned to a theme that obsesses him: the rise of anti-Semitism.

 Arriving in Israel the previous night, I had taken a taxi from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem. The driver had the radio tuned to the news, which to me, a non Hebrew speaker, was unintelligible, save for some instantly recognisable names ‘Livingstone...Corbyn... Livingstone’. But of course the Labour party’s anti-Semitism row had reached Israel.

‘Livingstone,’ Zuroff said feelingly, ‘is full of shit.’ That morning Zuroff had been quoted in the Jerusalem Post, dismissing Livingstone’s claim that Hitler had supported the proposal for a Zionist state as ‘an absurd idea to discredit and delegitimize Israel and Zionism’.

‘If you’re looking at anti-Semitism today,’ he said, ‘and I’m talking about Western Europe – Eastern Europe is a different story – you can’t be against the Jew because he has a different religion, different holidays, because he might speak a different language sometimes; that’s out! Politically unacceptable!

‘So you hate Israel instead. Israel, among the nations, has become the Jew in previous Christian societies. Anti-Semitism is thousands of years old, and it keeps on changing forms, moves to different places. It’s like a disease. There’s no geographic boundary that stops cancer – people all over the world get it. And, in a sense, anti-Semitism is the same.’

To reach Nes Harim, we crossed the Green Line, marking the land taken by Israel after the 1967 war. Across the valley you could see the lights of Bethlehem. The words of the Christmas carol came unbidden to mind: ‘Above thy deep and dreamless sleep/The silent stars go by/Yet in thy dark streets shineth/The everlasting Light.’ 

Bethlehem is in land claimed by the Palestinians for a future state. We passed through a checkpoint, then back across the Green Line. I had never been to Israel before. Under darkness, the lines, the walls, the zones, seemed utterly confusing, pointless. (The next day I would visit the old city of Jerusalem. ‘I wouldn’t go there,’ the manager of my hotel told me, ‘it’s not safe for Jews.’

Cradle of history

I wandered the streets, oblivious as to whether I was in the Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Armenian quarter. From a rooftop I looked across at the golden Dome of the Rock, sacred to Muslims, and below, the Western Wall, sacred to Jews, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives beyond. It felt like the cradle of history – of 3,000 years of faith, hope and conflict. It felt as if you could have tossed a tablecloth in the sky and covered it all.

‘The period before the Six-Day War,’ Zuroff said, ‘when the Arab armies massed on the borders of Israel, I remember sitting in my living room in New York, looking at a map of the Middle East, and there were these three columns – tanks, men and aircraft; and on one side was this short little list that was Israel, and on the other side this long list of the Arab countries. And I said to myself, my God, there’s going to be another Holocaust.’ He fell silent.

I asked, how much does he think Israel’s sense of self – and its security – grow from the Holocaust? ‘Listen,’ – he turned to look at me – ‘a people that were the victims of genocide can’t belittle threats to its security. We’re the only country in the world that hasn’t had a day of peace. Not one! And we have a country not far from us that is trying to destroy us. What are we supposed to say? F— off? Think about it. It’s only natural for it to affect us.’

The talk was attended by perhaps 100 people, many of them teen-agers, listening intently as Zuroff recounted his stories, crowding around him at the end to ask questions. But if the talk was of genocide and the quest for justice, the mood as people walked into the night was upbeat, almost buoyant. 

‘It’s the most amazing thing to me,’ Zuroff said. ‘That, despite  everything, Israelis live a normal life and love living here.’ He shrugged his shoulders and laughed. ‘You know the old Jewish saying? They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.’