Wanted for the deaths of 430,000 Jews. Evaded justice for 67 years. Died a free man.

Samuel Kunz was third on the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals

Like hundreds of other suspected Nazi war criminals before him, the former death-camp guard Samuel Kunz died quietly at his home in the German provincial city of Bonn last week at the ripe old age of 89.

He was never obliged to stand trial although he was thought to have the blood of thousands on his hands. Despite being one of the world's most wanted men, he managed to escape the courtroom where he would have faced charges of mass murder.

Even in today's Germany where a renewed effort is under way to bring war criminals to trial, the wheels of justice turn slowly. Kunz was the third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. As a camp guard at the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland he was suspected of taking part in the murder of more than 430,000 Jews.

However yesterday, it was left to Alfred Brendel, the German state prosecutor, to announce his death. "Samuel Kunz died on 18 November at 5.30 in the afternoon," he said in a statement. "Most probably he died at his home," he added.

Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi hunter admitted that he found it "incredibly frustrating" that Kunz had died before his impending trial which had been due to open early next year. But he noted it was important that he had been indicted at all. "At least a small measure of justice was achieved," he said.

Like many other Nazi war criminals, Kunz was ignored by the German justice system for decades. After the war he managed to live quietly in Bonn. Until his retirement 14 years ago he had worked as a handyman in Germany's Federal Ministry for Building and Urban Development.

That he was charged at all was the result of a significant change in official German attitudes to Nazi war criminals. A little over a decade ago state prosecutors, under pressure from organisations such as the Wiesenthal Centre, launched an attempt to bring the last of them to justice.

One of them was the world's most wanted suspected war criminal, the Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, who is thought to have been a murderous guard at the Sobibor death camp. Now aged 90, Demjanjuk is on trial in Munich where he is charged with taking part in the murder of 27,900 mostly Dutch Jews.

Demjanjuk, who is accused of unspeakable acts, including driving naked Jews into the gas chambers with a whip, had managed to escape justice for decades. He was finally extradited to Germany from the United States in 2009 and his trial began almost exactly a year ago.

The decision to indict Kunz came as a by-product of the Demjanjuk investigation. Prosecutors only began questioning him in January after his name surfaced during preparations for the Demjanjuk trial. Not only did Kunz face a trial of his own, but he had been due to appear next month as a key witness in the Demjanjuk trial.

As a member of an ethnic German family living along River Volga in the USSR before the Second World War, Kunz's wartime record was similar to that of many ethnic Germans. At the beginning of the war he joined the Red Army. But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he was captured and given the choice of working with the Nazis or being interned.

Kunz almost certainly chose to co-operate with the Nazi invaders. He is alleged to have attended a training camp for SS death-camp guards at Trawniki in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thereafter, he was widely suspected of having served as a guard at the Belzec extermination camp which was little more than a murder factory. According to SS records 434,508 Jews were gassed, shot or beaten to death there between January 1942 and July 1943.

The Demjanjuk trial opened a year ago and was scheduled to end in April 2010. The final date for a verdict has now been put forward to March 2011. Some relatives of Holocaust victims have said they fear that Demjanjuk may be dead by then. Kunz, it seems, may not be the only one of the world's last remaining suspected Nazi war criminals to escape justice.

WIESENTHAL CENTRE'S OTHER MOST-WANTED NAZIS

Dr Sandor Kepiro

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Kepiro is being sought for his participation in the massacre of 1,200 citizens in Serbia in 1942. He was convicted in Hungary in 1944, but never punished; Hungary refuses to implement his sentence, but is conducting a new criminal investigation – which has so far taken three years.

Milivoj Asner

A Croatian police chief, and second on the Wiesenthal list, he was involved in persecuting and deporting Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Now living in Austria, where his extradition to Croatia was refused on medical grounds in 2005. Last year doctors said he suffered from dementia, but he has given media interviews, which raise doubts about the diagnosis.

John Demjanjuk

Demjanjuk has faced three decades of court actions over his Nazi history. At the age of 90, he is finally on trial on charges of a role in the death of almost 30,000 Jews as a death camp guard – but the process has repeatedly been delayed because of his ill health. A year after the case opened, it is not expected to conclude before March 2011.

Independent

Rantings of a Nazi monster

Dr. Josef Mengele (second from left, with SS officials at
Auschwitz in '44) wrote his diary while hiding in Argentina

He stared at the deliberate German script in the tattered notebook -- the ravings of one of the most evil minds in history, and the killer of 100 of his family members.

"I don't want to touch it," he said.

The Orthodox Jewish New Yorker first laid eyes on the diary of Dr. Josef Mengele on Thursday at a Connecticut auction house. He bought the 86-page journal last week from the auctioneer after the document failed to attract a bidder at the $60,000 reserve price. The buyer has requested anonymity but agreed to speak to The Post about his reasons for acquiring the Nazi madman's innermost musings.

The buyer's grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, witnessed the "Angel of Death" choose prisoners to go to the gas chambers.

"People were terrified to even look at him," she told her grandson. "The SS soldiers were even scared to look at him."

Mengele, an SS officer and physician at the death camp in Poland, conducted nightmarish human experiments, including amputations, sterilization and surgeries without anesthetics. He was obsessed with twins and oversaw gruesome tests on 3,000 sets.

Mengele started the diary -- handwritten in blue ink in a school notebook bearing the image of children with a horse on the cover -- in 1960 while hiding out in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It does not mention Nazis, Hitler or the death camps. But it is filled with subjects near and dear to the mad doctor's cold heart -- eugenics, the superiority of the German race, the inferiority of women.

Mengele meanders from a discussion of aesthetics in "Dr. Zhivago" to a rant on how the mentally challenged should be sterilized so their "inferior genes" would not be passed on. His primary point is: "the simple and fundamental truth that human beings are not equal."

"Everything will end in a catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that the gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons (this might happen faster than you think)," he writes. He believes that "women's work has to depend on fulfilling a biological quota."

The contents turned the buyer's stomach.

"He shows no regret. No emotion," he said. "If people are looking for closure, they won't find it in this diary."

Mengele eluded punishment, dying in 1979 after a stroke while swimming at the age of 67. His body was exhumed in 1985 in Brazil and his identity confirmed through DNA tests seven years later.

"It's very emotional," said the buyer, who purchased the diary with his parents after reading about it in an Israeli newspaper. "It should have been written in red ink because it was written by a man with blood on his hands."

He said they felt the diary "must be preserved" and kept so "it doesn't fall in the wrong hands or get destroyed." They plan on donating it to a Holocaust museum. Some Holocaust survivor groups question the authenticity of the document and the morality of selling Mengele's handiwork for profit.

The auction house, Alexander Autographs, said it bought the diary from an American collector who observers believe acquired it from Mengele's son, Rolf, 65. Bill Panagopulos, president of the Stamford-based auction house, claimed he verified the diary, matching it with several authenticated war-dated letters and pinpointing the age of the paper, ink and notebook.

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center -- whose namesake unsuccessfully hunted Mengele -- has been in close contact with the New York family that bought the document.

"I think this family did a very courageous thing," Heir said. "What would happen if Jews didn't secure documents? They would end up underground in the hands of an anti-Semite or destroyed. The choice is: Lose it, or retain it for history."

Mind of a madman

Entries from the 1960 diary of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, written while he was in hiding in Argentina:

'As citizens of the Western World, we should abhor the idea of recruiting gifted people from other countries. I also doubt that there’s any need to try because all significant steps of human history happened in Europe, and only Europeans or their descendants achieved them. ’

'Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized when the number of 5 children has been reached.'

New York Post

Nazi hunter vows to bring last Hitler criminals to justice

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, chief investigator of Nazi war criminals for the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, talks to the media about his efforts to bring Nazi war
criminals to justice during a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles

They're now old, feeble, beloved by their children and grandkids - and accused of abetting the murder of millions

Six decades after the Holocaust, the world's leading Nazi hunter vowed Thursday to either bring the last of Hitler's war criminals to justice or pursue them to their graves.

"Contrary to public perception that it's too late, that's certainly not the case," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "We have three to five years until we won't be able to do this anymore."

Zuroff, director of the center's Israeli office, was at the center's Museum of Tolerance to release its annual report on the prosecution of some of the world's most evil men and women. He was also in town to promote his book, "Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice."

The good news: Four of the center's 10 most wanted Nazi war criminals may soon stand trial. They include Ivan Demjanjuk, a former American accused of helping slaughter Jews in several Waffen SS death camps, whose trial in Germany begins Nov. 30. Also about to face justice is Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of helping to kill 1,200 civilians. And Charles Zentai, alleged to have helped kill Jews in Hungary, whose extradition from Australia was approved last week. And Heinrich Boere, an alleged hit man for the SS in Holland, now awaiting trial in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal report listed 706 ongoing investigations of Nazi war criminals in two dozen countries, including 85 new cases between April 2008 through March 2009. During that period, six Nazis were convicted in Italy.

The bad news: Many nations still refuse to prosecute aging Nazis. At the top of the most-wanted list is Alois Brunner, a key SS operative responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to concentration camps. He may be in Syria. He may be dead.

"It's not that hard to actually find these people. It's not even that hard to find the evidence for these people," said Zuroff, who considers himself part detective, part historian and part political lobbyist. "What is incredibly hard is to get countries that are reluctant to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, to do the right thing and to bring them to trial."

Among the countries that got failing grades for not going after Nazis: Australia, Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Syria and the Ukraine. Canada, which has never deported a single Nazi, scored a D.

The United States got top marks for helping bring 37 of the 82 war criminal convictions worldwide, while stripping 75 Nazis of their citizenship and deporting 56.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said others may defend Nazi fugitives as old, feeble and forgetful and not worth prosecution. But they have been able to live fruitful lives, he said, while their victims did not.

"As long as a Nazi war criminal is still alive, they should know that there's someone looking for them," Hier said. "When you hunt a Nazi war criminal, all Nazi war criminals in the world feel vulnerable."

Holocaust survivors and their children agreed. Sol Teichman, his brother Samuel and their father were the only family members to survive the Nazi scourge. After surviving Auschwitz and a death march to Dachau where 6,000 fell, they were among the first Jewish refugees admitted to the U.S.

"We should go after them... they should not be forgiven," said Sol Teichman, 82, of Encino, a native of Czechoslovakia. "I lost 100 members of my immediate family... It's something I cannot forget, nor can I forgive."

"I want to see justice done," added the daughter of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in Camarillo, who asked that her name not be used. "I'd love to see 'em hang from a tree and let me at 'em."

Los Angeles Daily News

Hunt for most-wanted Nazi war criminal ends in Egypt

Son says 'Doctor Death' died in 1992 after search tracks down SS fugitive to Cairo hotel

The hunt for the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Aribert Heim, appeared to have come to an end today with reports suggesting that he died in Cairo almost 17 years ago, after converting to Islam. According to new evidence published today, Heim, known as "Doctor Death" for the atrocities he committed against Jews as a physician at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, spent the last decade of his life living in Egypt after reinventing himself as an apparently kindly old man called Uncle Tarek, who played ping-pong with local children.

While serving with the SS, he was accused of injecting petrol into his victims' hearts, removing organs from healthy patients and decorating his desk with the skulls of prisoners he killed.

Heim was the prime target of Operation: Last Chance, the campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to track down the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust. After 240 leads, which mainly focused on south America, Heim appears to have been tracked down to a hotel in Cairo. His son, Ruediger Heim, has admitted for the first time that his father died of cancer on 10 August 1992, after watching the Barcelona Olympics on TV. He said he was with his father when he died.

An investigation by the New York Times and the German broadcaster ZDF discovered a briefcase belonging to Heim which included his passport, bank details, and newspaper clippings of reports of efforts to track him down and his trial in absentia. It also included letters protesting his innocence and accusing Simon Wiesenthal of inventing Heim's atrocities.

ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely".

According to friends in Egypt, the doctor who had applied himself so vigorously to butchering and torturing his victims in the name of medicine had asked for his own body to be donated to medical research at his death. According to ZDF, his wish was not granted for religious reasons.

Today, the Wiesenthal Centre said that while there was "no doubt" that Heim had lived in Egypt, it had not been established that he had died there.

"What is not clear, what is missing from the presentation by ZDF and the New York Times, is the conclusive proof he indeed died in Egypt in 1992," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the centre, told Reuters. "There's no grave, there's no body. We can't do any DNA testing."

Zuroff also pointed out that Ruediger Heim had previously said that the only contact he had had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were two notes, and that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.

"Ruediger has been lying," Zuroff told the Associated Press. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain amount of scepticism and suspicion and the most important thing is missing: the body."

If it turns out to be true, however, Zuroff said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms of prosecuting people who helped Heim escape justice". Ruediger Heim refused to comment when contacted at his home by the Associated Press.

Born on 28 June 1914, in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany. He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941. He was held by the Americans after the war but released before the true extent of his crimes had become clear. He kept a low profile for the next two decades, even avoiding being photographed in the team picture of the ice hockey club he played for.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted that Heim was living in Baden-Baden and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him, apparently after he had been tipped off. Heim fled through France and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and eventually settling in Egypt, ZDF and the New York Times reported, citing Ruediger Heim.

He lived in Cairo, under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, at the Kasr el Madina hotel for the 10 years leading up to his death, the report said. Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the hotel, said Heim was known as Uncle Tarek, and that he played table tennis with him on the roof of the hotel. He said he bought sweets for children in the neighbourhood. Heim converted to Islam and worshipped at Cairo's famous al-Azhar mosque, the New York Times said.

Ruediger Heim told ZDF that he first visited his father in 1976, organising the trip through his aunt and arranging to meet with him in a hotel.

"He recognised me right away," Heim recalled. "It was a meeting of worlds. I was there for 14 days."

But, he said, he did not talk with his father about the allegations against him, largely because he said he was not fully aware of them himself.

"I didn't ask him: 'How many people did you kill?' because I didn't know. I didn't know any concrete details," he told ZDF. "Later, on other visits, I got to know his life better."

Guardian

Nazi collaborator living peacefully in Germany, avoiding arrest

A Lithuanian citizen convicted of collaborating with the Nazis and persecuting Jews during World War II is living peacefully in a small town in Germany.

As a member of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police, Dailide arrested Jews who were trying to escape the Vilna ghetto and handed them over to the Germans. He lied about his wartime activities on his U.S. immigration application after the war, was stripped of his American citizenship in the 1990s, and was ordered deported in 2003 following an investigation and legal proceedings that lasted more than a decade. Dailide fled arrest and settled here in Kirchberg, Saxony, where he has been living ever since.

Dailide is in ninth place on the the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most recent list of the 10 most wanted Nazis. A Vilnius court convicted him of war crimes in a trial that began in 2005, but he has remained free. Last month a high court in Lithuania ruled that he would not go to prison, partly because of his frail health. However, this Haaretz reporter saw him walking around town last week and carrying home his groceries.

Dailide, 87, lives with his wife in a modest apartment at Torstrasse 13, across the street from the town hall. His name is on the mailbox and intercom at the entrance. Dailide's German-born wife, whom he met in 1945 after escaping Lithuania, has relatives in Kirchberg, a town of 7,000 in what was formerly East Germany.

They live on his wife's German pension of 300 euros a month, and the remaining profits from the sale of their house in the U.S. Dailide's American Social Security privileges were revoked.

Dailide's conviction for war crimes relied on documents and testimony concerning a certain October 1941 night, when Dailide arrested 10 Jews who were attempting to escape from the ghetto, and another occasion on which he arrested two Polish Jews. What happened to those he arrested is not known, but it is safe to assume they were murdered along with 94 percent of Lithuanian Jewry, which numbered 220,000 people before the war.

Dailide's name surfaced in documents found in Lithuania's archives, which were examined after the Baltic state won independence. The Vilnius court rejected Dailide's protestations of innocence, and ruled he had lied in his testimony. Despite that, the court refrained from sentencing him to prison, as is permissible by law. The prosecution appealed this leniency, but the appeal was rejected last month. Jewish organizations say this is typical of Lithuania's refusal to punish Nazi collaborators.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, yesterday called the court's failure to sentence Dailide to prison scandalous, "and attests to the manner in which the Lithuanian government refuses to deal with the past."

Zuroff, who worked steadily to bring Dailide to trial in the U.S. and later in Lithuania, said the case is "a classic example of how a lack of political willingness to contend with the crimes of the past, along with extenuating circumstances stemming from advanced age, are letting Nazi criminals off the hook."

More than a dozen Lithuanian collaborators have been tried, but not one has gone to prison, a fact Zuroff says contributes to rising anti-Semitism in the Baltic country.

'I'm innocent'

Last Wednesday, Dailide opened the door to his apartment and invited this Haaretz correspondent and a local reporter to come in. Dailide's wife, who suffers from Alzheimer's and cancer, was reclining in her bedroom. Taking care of her is one of the reasons Dailide has remained free. He said he uses a tube to feed her.

During our hour-long meeting Dailide exhibited an excellent memory for details, but had trouble concentrating at times. The walls of the darkened apartment are decorated with photos of his family in the U.S. - his two sons live there - and of himself and his wife during the decades they spent in Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida. On the couch were numerous self-help books, a daily newspaper and dictionaries.

Dailide insists he is innocent. The documents used against him are misleading, he contends, based on a colleague's erroneous record in October 1941. In the other case, he had signed an arrest warrant on behalf of a policeman who was illiterate, he said.

He recounted his escape to Germany in 2004, when he was afraid U.S. authorities were going to arrest him. "I took my car, packed a few things and fled the house. I slept in motels and used phone cards to contact my family. A neighbor drove my wife to meet me periodically. A priest from Cleveland contacted a priest in Toronto, who agreed to put me up. I didn't use credit cards, I put our house up for sale, and I managed to cross the border into Canada using my Lithuanian passport. My wife met me in Toronto, and we flew from there to Frankfurt, took a train to Zwickau and arrived in Kirchberg."

Dailide revealed that despite the Lithuanian court's ruling that he undergo a new medical examination following his conviction, he has never been reexamined. "Last year my lawyer in Lithuania received a letter from the court demanding that I come to Lithuania for medical examinations. They noted that the trip would cost about 500 euros. We replied that we do not have the money - and they dispensed with the examination."

All of the information regarding the state of Dailide's health evidently stems from a few check-ups he had at his lawyer's recommendation during the trial in 2005. "Naturally I wanted to be acquitted in the trial, but nobody wants to go to prison in any case," he said.

He claims he suffers from chronic back pain and arthritis, and that he takes medication for high blood pressure.

A spokeswoman for the Lithuanian court said in response: "A medical board that convened for two years ruled that Dailide's state of health does not allow for his incarceration."

She said she would need to check whether the court had refrained from reexamining him. The results of her inquiry had not arrived as of press time.

'Everyone collaborated'

How is it that someone convicted of collaborating with the Nazis can live in Germany?

A German lawyer who specializes in immigration cases explained that the European Union's Nice Treaty gives everyone - even if convicted - the right to choose where to live. The treaty stipulates that Germany can deport an EU citizen only if he or she is causing "significant damage" to the public. Dailide apparently does not meet this criterion.

Dailide's neighbors became familiar with his story six months ago when a local paper ran a photo of the house under the banner "War Criminal in Kirchberg." A store owner in the adjacent building said she was shocked at first, but calmed down after she inquired into the details.

"He didn't shoot anyone, right? So he collaborated, so what? Everyone collaborated in that period," she said.

Haaretz

Pursuing a symbol of Nazi perversion

By Efraim Zuroff

Doesn't the world owe it to all the Nazis' victims to make equal efforts to bring each of their torturers and killers to justice? Recently, I've found myself increasingly preoccupied with that question, following a two-week mission to South America on the trail of the Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Dr. Aribert Heim. Heim committed his most heinous crimes at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where his nickname was "Doctor Death."

To put the question into proper perspective, it is important to note that during practically every press conference I conducted or interview that I gave in South America, I had to address the question of the validity or value of the effort to track down a 94-year-old war criminal. In every venue, I recited the standard mantras: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers"; "a suspect's advanced age is no reason to ignore mass murder"; and "the practical implication of establishing a time limit for prosecuting genocide suspects is that those lucky enough, rich enough or smart enough to elude justice will ultimately be allowed to get away with their crimes." However, I also stressed the concept that every man and woman persecuted by the Nazis deserves that an effort be made to find and hold accountable those who turned them, innocent civilians, into victims.

I noted in my remarks that Simon Wiesenthal himself had always stressed this principle, and in fact I deeply believe in its validity and moral power. But the fact of the matter is that our recent mission to Chile and Argentina clearly underscores the unfortunate fact that not all of the Nazis' victims get equal treatment when it comes to the investment made to bring their killers to justice, and the Heim case is a classic illustration.

For starters, Heim is the only Nazi war criminal in recent history who is being sought by four different police forces - those of Germany, Austria, Chile and Argentina. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Holocaust perpetrator in at least the past three decades, for whose capture a special task force was established by the German police. Also he is the only such criminal for whom a huge reward is being offered: 315,000 euros (135,000 euros from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 130,000 euros from the German government, and 50,000 euros from the Austrian government).

It is true that these relatively excellent and virtually unprecedented conditions stem, to a large extent, from the fact that Heim has been on the run since 1962, when he disappeared from his home in Baden-Baden after being tipped off that the West German police were about to arrest him for his crimes at Mauthausen. So while it is true that the current whereabouts of all the other Holocaust perpetrators on our "most wanted" list (with one exception) are now known, down to their exact address and telephone number, the fact is that none of the police forces in their countries of residence were looking for them at all before they were exposed as Nazi war criminals.

Given the fact that criminals like John Demjanjuk, Sandor Kepiro and Milivoj Asner - Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on the list, respectively - played an active role in the liquidation of at least hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians, one may ask what allows the Heim case to benefit from special status, abundant political good will and relatively munificent financial resources?

The answer to this question became apparent when our team traveled to Puerto Montt, Chile and Bariloche, Argentina - the area where we believe he is currently hiding. Although we had previously publicized the reward for Dr. Heim in Chile and Argentina, it was only when we actually reached Patagonia and had an opportunity to describe his crimes in great detail, that we felt that we were finally getting our message across to the wider public. This achievement was no doubt considerably enhanced by the fact that Heim's daughter is living in Puerto Montt, and it became evident to us in two ways: One was the flow of information that reached us from informants in the area, either via our hotline or in person. The other was the expressions of support, on the one hand, and opposition, on the other, from various local residents.

What became clear was that even if Heim had committed his crimes 67 years ago, their utter cruelty simply could not be ignored. So although I consciously tried not to overdo the descriptions - of the injections of phenol directly into the hearts of inmates, the operations performed without anesthesia, the castrations and use of body parts of those murdered as decorations - the few facts I did relate made quite an impact.

In other words, the key issues that elevated Heim to his current status were the degree of his own personal responsibility for his crimes and their absolutely horrific nature, all compounded by the fact that he was a doctor who had pledged to protect and save his patients, whom he instead mercilessly murdered. In that respect, Heim easily became a symbol of the Nazis' perversion and misuse of medicine - a fact which no doubt increased his "attractiveness" as a target for all of us.

If Mengele was never prosecuted, perhaps Dr. Death's apprehension and punishment could be a partial atonement by those who failed to bring the "Angel of Death" to justice. I certainly have no objection to the efforts and resources being invested in trying to bring Heim to justice. I only wish that a far more serious effort was being to made to ensure that the killers of the other victims will also be held accountable in this world.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Haaretz

Spain court urged to study Nazi guards case

State prosecutors have urged Spain's National Court to investigate four alleged former Nazi concentration camp guards and decide whether to seek their extradition from the United States over the deaths of Spanish citizens in the camps, news reports said Monday.

The Europa Press news agency said the prosecutors office at the court announced it was backing a case petition brought last month by Brussels-based rights organization Equipo Nizkor on behalf of victims' relatives. The suspects are John Demjanjuk - an 88-year-old retired auto worker in Ohio - Anton Tittjung, Josias Kumpf and Johann Leprich.

Equipo Nizkor has said the U.S. has been trying for years to deport all four for lying about their Nazi pasts on their immigration papers, but that no country had been willing to take them.

The prosecutors' petition is a nonbinding recommendation. The court's judges will now decide whether to accept the case for study and consider filing charges. A decision could take months. No one was available at the prosecutors' office for comment late Monday.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, which worked with Equipo Nizkor to prepare the suit, has called the petition hugely important. Demjanjuk, tied up in legal battles over his wartime past for more than three decades, is No. 2 on the center's 'most wanted' list of Nazi war criminals - below only the brutal SS doctor Aribert Heim.

Europa Press quoted unidentified court officials as saying they hoped the case could be expanded to include Heim.

Demjanjuk's son, John. Jr., told The Associated Press last month that his father was innocent of 'the same old desperate charges.'

The suit was presented under Spain's principle of universal jurisdiction. This states that war crimes, crimes against humanity, terrorism, torture and other heinous offenses can be prosecuted in Spain, even if they have been committed abroad. Spanish judges have used the legal principle to go after the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and figures from the Argentine 'dirty war' of the 1970s and 80s, among others, albeit with very limited success.

Equipo Nizkor said the fact that thousands of Spanish citizens died in Nazi camps where the four suspects allegedly worked is another reason for Spain's National Court to charge them. The group's complaint says the suspects served as guards in the concentration camps at Flossenberg and Sachsenhausen in Germany, and Mauthausen in Nazi-occupied Austria.

Guardian

On the trail of the last wanted Nazi

More4 News meets a man wanted for war crimes but living in Germany

You might not expect to find a former Nazi high up on the list of wanted war criminals living quietly in a small town in Germany, not far from one of the Nazis' most notorious concentration camps.

But that's what More4 News found when we set out to investigate those on the list produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre as part of its "Operation Last Chance".

Nazi hunter raps 'fascist' Croatian rock concert

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center on Monday voiced outrage over a Croatian rock concert by a popular ultra-nationalist singer that featured multiple "fascist" invocations.

The Sunday evening Zagreb concert, which was attended by 60,000 people including Croatian members of parliament and the Croatian ministers of science, education and sports, turned into a massive fascist demonstration, the organization's chief Nazi hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff said.

Thousands of people attending the rock concert by the singer "Thompson" shouted the infamous Ustasha regime's salute of "Za dom spremni," while numerous participants came wearing Ustasha uniforms and symbols, the center said in a press release.

"Under the current circumstances, I believe that the time has come to prohibit public concerts by those who write songs of nostalgia for [the] Jasenovac [concentration camp] and inspire the show of Ustasha symbols, which constitute open and blatant incitement against all the minorities in Croatia," Zuroff wrote in a Monday letter to Croatian President Stjepan Mesic. "I believe that only if someone of your stature and outstanding anti-fascist credentials will lead the efforts to combat this ugly wave of revived fascism, can this extremely dangerous new trend be stopped before it engulfs Croatia," he continued.

The Ustasha regime ran a puppet government after the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. During their four years in power, the Ustasha carried out a Serb genocide, exterminating over 500,000 people, expelling 250,000 and forcing another 250,000 to convert to Catholicism. The Ustasha also killed most of Croatia's Jews, 20,000 gypsies and many thousands of their political enemies. After the war, most of the Ustasha leaders escaped to South America and Spain.

During the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there was a certain resurgence of Ustasha symbols coinciding with the ethnic hatred that remained after the wars.

Jerusalem Post

Italian university closes campus to block French professor who denies Nazi gas chambers

An Italian university closed one of its campuses for the day Friday to prevent a planned lecture by a retired French professor who denies gas chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps.

Robert Faurisson, who has been convicted five times in France for denying crimes against humanity, had been expected to speak at a local hotel instead but that conference too was later canceled after scuffles with protesters.

Faurisson had been invited to give a lecture at the University of Teramo, in central Italy, by Claudio Moffa, a professor of Asian and African history and director of a master's program in Middle East studies.

Police in Teramo said both Moffa and Faurisson had to be escorted out of a cafe where they were having a small press conference on Friday after a group of about 100 people staged a lively protest in the street, shouting insults at them.

Moffa was also pushed by a protester, said police official Mimmo De Carolis. When reached by telephone, Moffa said the lecture had been canceled because of the attack but gave no other details.

The University of Teramo had cited security fears surrounding the lecture in announcing the closure of its campus housing the law, political sciences and communications departments. "(There is) a climate of tension which could put in danger the safety of the students," the university said in a statement.

Faurisson has caused outrage in France, arguing for a decade against evidence that Nazi Germany systematically destroyed the Jews. He maintains that no gas chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

The university administration had issued an official warning to Moffa to cancel the invitation, arguing that Faurisson's qualifications were "absolutely inadequate and don't deserve academic legitimation."

Moffa had cited his right to teach freely in defending his invitation to Faurisson.

"I want to specify that I am not a denier, but I think it is fair to allow a free debate and different interpretations of historical events," Moffa wrote on his Web site.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center had urged the university to cancel the event.

"To welcome Faurisson is an embarrassment to Italian academia, offends the families of Italian martyrs who fell in fighting the scourge of fascism ... and encourages a perverse propaganda to incite a new generation to anti-Semitism and racist doctrine," the center said in a statement.

Last year, Faurisson took part in a conference in Iran, which gathered some of the most well-known U.S. and European Holocaust deniers, to debate whether the World War II genocide of Jews took place.

The gathering touched off a firestorm of indignation across the world and particularly in Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to publicly disavow the Nazis' systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.

International Herald Tribune