Posted on July 21, 2013 brandeiscenter.com
There Should Be No Age Limit on Prosecution of "Most Wanted" War Criminals
by Harold Brackman

When the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977, Dean Rabbi Marvin Hier promised Simon Wiesenthal that bringing Holocaust perpetrators to justice would be the number one priority. The famed Nazi hunter died in 2005, but there was no expiration date on that promise to him—nor should that be except for the death or incapacity of the last criminal.

Juxtapose these recent international stories, from the U.S. and Europe, involving war crimes and crimes against humanity ranging up to genocide committed from Auschwitz to Africa:

• Rwanda native Beatrice Munyenyezi, 43 years old, who lived in New Hampshire for fifteen years, is sentenced by U.S. District Judge Steven McAuliffe to 10 years in prison for securing U.S. citizenship by lying about her role as commander of one of the notorious roadblocks where Tutsis were murdered by Hutu militia in the early 1990s.

• Ukrainian immigrant Michael Karkoc, 94 years old, a Nazi collaborator enjoyed his retirement until the Associated Press revealed him living in Minneapolis.

• Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir remains the target of 2009-2010 arrest warrants, issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague indicting him for multiple counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide in Darfur.

• Hungarian Laszlo Csatary, 98 years old, previously stripped of his Canadian citizenship and deported, finally is facing trial in his native country for helping to deport 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz from a ghetto in occupied Slovakia in 1944, while in Germany Hans Lipschis, 93 years old, a suspected guard at the Auschwitz, has been arrested.

Csatary’s case reflects the success of Operation Last Chance (launched in 2002) and Last Chance II (renewed in 2011), the full court press by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff, a U.S.-born historian now headquartered in Israel, to bring to justice Nazis and Nazi collaborators who are ranked according to three criteria: command responsibility, personally killing victims, or organizing and implementing mass murder. Csatary was a senior officer in the Hungarian police stationed in Slovakia who murdered no one by his own hand, but organized the deaths of thousands.

While the Wiesenthal Center’s operation, headed by Zuroff, has generally worked with government bodies like the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (whose staff has dwindled since the 1980s from 50 to 10), to commence investigations, the Csatary case was largely, from start to finish, a solo effort of the Wiesenthal Center. For his pains, Zuroff was accused of making “false accusations,” in the service of “the Holocaust industry,” by the vice president of Hungary’s ultranationalist Jobbik Party, Novak Elod. Never prosecuted, Zuroff was emphatically vindicated when the foot-dragging Hungarian government reinstated charges against Csatary.

Operation Last Chance II—which received added impetus from the 2011 conviction in Munich in 2011 of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk, the first Nazi war criminal in decades in Germany to be convicted solely on the grounds he was a guard at a death camp—is now in high gear in Berlin and other German cities. Posters feature a black and white photograph of the notorious “Gate of Death” at the Nazis’ Birkenau extermination camp, with the train tracks, leading up to it, emblazoned with the new slogan: “Late, But Not Too Late.” Rewards for information range up to 25,000 euros ($32,600).

While critics question the wisdom of investing scarce resources in the search for a dwindling number of surviving Nazi criminals, Zuroff counters that an estimated 60 surviving individuals actively involved in murder in death camps or mobile killing vans, practically on a daily basis over a prolonged period, are healthy enough to be prosecuted. “I don’t imagine 60 people will be brought to justice but every single one is a victory. It may be two or three or five and there is no reason to forego these. Every prosecution is an important reminder that justice for the victims of the Holocaust can still be done.”

The value of such prosecutions in giving the lie to Holocaust Deniers is also significant.

Finally, as the headline stories above indicated, war crimes and crimes against humanity whose perpetrators are still alive and unpunished are a challenge to human decency everywhere—no matter where or when they were committed.

Without the long struggle of Simon Wiesenthal and—now in his name—Efraim Zuroff to bring to justice Nazi perpetrators and collaborators, we might never have seen the indictment and prosecution of post-Holocaust criminals—from Cambodia to Bosnia to Rwanda and Sudan. In this sense, the unrelenting pursuit of war criminals who still walk the earth is indivisible.

Efraim Zuroff has written two books: “Occupation: Nazi-Hunter; The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust” (1994), and “Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice” (2009).

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