Nazi hunters pick up the trail online

Bill Gray was working as a student intern at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem when he decided to use the Internet to find fugitive Nazis.

Within a few hours he found five, all living in the USA.

"To think of the horrible crimes that these people committed," said Gray, 24, a Harvard student from Munster, Ind. "And to think that they were living in the United States for so long, so happily."

The Nazis whom Gray found were already known to the Justice Department. Some had been deemed too ill to prosecute, and Justice is taking a second look at the others, the center said.

Gray's use of Internet-based search engines and databases such as voting records comes at an important time. The Wiesenthal Center is making an intense push, known as "Operation: Last Chance," to find fugitives of the Holocaust and bring them to justice before they die. The center, renowned for finding scores of ex-Nazis, is also seeking collaborators, camp guards and leaders of paramilitary groups who helped round up and kill Jews and others during the Holocaust.

The effort has rolled across Europe and collected hundreds of allegations and names from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Austria, Hungary and Germany. This year the program will expand to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

The suspects are all older than 80, so any time saved by using the Internet is critical.

"It helps make my job easier," says the world's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office. "It helps me get up-to-date whereabouts on the current suspects."

That's what happened when Zuroff gave Gray, then a new volunteer, a list of people he had been searching for. Zuroff had compiled the list by cross-checking World War II-era U.S. refugee records with names of suspected war criminals. But Zuroff could find nothing on what happened to the people.

Gray had become familiar with search tools such as LexisNexis, Westlaw and Net Detective as a research assistant for Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and as an intern for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago. He thought: Why not try using them for this?

Gray took the names and birthdates and went to work. In his quest for a Lithuanian Nazi, he first searched death records. Nothing. He looked in property records and professional licensing data. Still nothing.

Within an hour, however, he found the woman's name in U.S. voting records. Those records included a list of addresses.

Gray got a "pretty decent picture" of what the suspected Nazi did during her time in the United States, which began in the 1940s.

"Her husband had a good job. They appeared to live a very comfortable lifestyle," he said.

The woman's name was not released because she is only a suspect. She has been reported to the Justice Department and may face charges on allegations by the center that she was involved in the extermination of Jews, the center said.

Of the other suspects, Gray found that some had died, one was missing, and four were in the USA.

Dershowitz says the Internet may revolutionize the search for perpetrators of the Holocaust. "The days of hiding are basically over," he says.

Finding ex-Nazis is just the start, however. Zuroff says what happens with the evidence and documentation they collect depends on what country receives it.

"If it's in America, we know it's in good hands," he says.

The questions that surround people identified as suspects are seen in the case of Sandor Kepiro, an officer in a Hungarian police unit that rounded up and machine-gunned more than 1,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Novi Sad, a Yugoslav area occupied by Hungary in 1942. Kepiro was convicted in the massacre but freed by Hungary's fascist regime shortly after his trial in 1944. He fled to Argentina. In 1946, the communist government of Hungary tried him again in absentia and sentenced him to 14 years. He returned to Budapest in 1996 and has denied taking an active part in the executions.

Due to Operation: Last Chance, authorities are now deciding whether he should be re-arrested.

Zuroff says that over the years he has tracked down more than 2,000 people suspected of Holocaust crimes. He hopes that the new methods will help locate a notorious fugitive: Aribert Heim.

Heim was a doctor at the Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps who was suspected of killing hundreds of inmates. He slipped from U.S. detention and was practicing gynecology in Germany until 1962 when state prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest and he disappeared. A reward of more than $250,000 has been offered for Heim, who Zuroff believes is hiding in South America.

Gray says it should not matter that the suspects are old. Gray had two Jewish great-grandfathers who each lost siblings in the Holocaust.

"If they're healthy, I think that these bastards have to pay for what they've done," he says.

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