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Radio Interview on 6PR with Dr Efraim Zuroff
"Operation: Last Chance" and the Final Efforts to Bring Nazi War Criminals to Justice
Dr Efraim Zuroff: Coordinator, Nazi War Crimes Research, Simon Wiesenthal Centre will be interviewed on 6PR Radio after the 9am News, Monday 20 June.
Listen on 882AM or via your web browser
In 1978 Dr. Efraim Zuroff was invited to be the first director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, where he established the library and archives, and was historical adviser for the Academy award winning documentary ‘Genocide'.
In 1980 he returned to Israel, and since then has discovered some 3,000 suspected Nazi war criminals hiding throughout the world, including Australia, and helped bring many of them to justice.
Dr. Zuroff has published over one hundred and fifty articles. His book, Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice, was published in paperback in March.
Efraim launched Operation Last Chance in 2002, to locate and bring to justice the worst suspects before it was too late. Despite the reluctance of many governments and even death threats, Zuroff's project yielded the names of over 520 new suspects in 24 different countries and led to dozens of murder investigations, as well as several indictments and extradition requests currently pending, including one for Charles Zentai living here in Perth.
The most wanted Nazi on Efraim’s list is an SS butcher known as "Dr. Death" - Aribert Heim, who gets an entire chapter in the book. The search for Heim, has spanned half a century since his 1962 disappearance in Germany ahead of a planned prosecution for his war crimes.
Heim has been described as so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw, though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months.
Karl Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, recalled the first time he watched Heim kill a man.
It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jewish youth had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer. Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display because of its perfect teeth ….
Last month Efraim was acquitted of slandering alleged war criminal Dr. Sandor Kepiro, who is on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted war criminals list. Kepiro returned to Hungary in 1996 after living for decades in Argentina, and in February, Hungarian prosecutors charged Kepiro with war crimes in a 1942 massacre of 1,200 civilians in Serbia during World War II.
In recognition of his efforts as a Nazi-hunter and Holocaust scholar, Efraim was nominated by Serbian President Boris as a candidate for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
Date:
Monday, 20 June 2011 - 9:00am - 10:00am