Dr. Efraim Zuroff:
Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center - Israel Office
Coordinator, Nazi War Crimes Research, SWC
Born in New York, Efraim moved to Israel in 1970 after
completing his undergraduate degree in history (with
honors) at Yeshiva University. He obtained a M.A. degree
in Holocaust studies at the Institute of Contemporary
Jewry of the Hebrew University, where he also completed
his Ph.D., which chronicles the response of Orthodox
Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust and focuses
on the rescue attempts launched by the Vaad ha-Hatzala
rescue committee. In 2000 Yeshiva University Press and
KTAV Publishing House published his study of the history
of the Vaad ha-Hatzala, which was awarded an Egit Grant
for Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Literature by the
Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) and also
received the 1999-2000 Samuel Belkin Literary Award for
the best book published by a Yeshiva University alumnus
in the field of Jewish studies.
In 1978 he was invited to be the first director of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, where he played
a leading role in establishing the Center's library and
archives and was historical advisor for the Academy
award-winning documentary Genocide.
For the past twenty-nine years, he has played an
increasingly important role in the worldwide efforts to
find and help bring to justice Nazi war criminals. He
began his career as a Nazi-hunter in 1980 when he was
hired by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations to be their sole researcher in Israel.
During his six years in that capacity, his efforts
assisted in the preparation of cases against numerous
Nazi war criminals living in the United States.
In 1986 his research uncovered the postwar escape of
hundreds of Nazi war criminals to Australia, Canada,
Great Britain and other countries, and he rejoined the
Wiesenthal Center to coordinate its international
efforts to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice.
These efforts have influenced the passage of special
laws in Canada (1987), Australia (1989) and Great
Britain (1991), which enable the prosecution in those
countries of Nazi war criminals.
Since the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the fall
of Communism, Zuroff has played a major role in the
efforts to convince Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and
other post-Communist societies to confront the
widespread complicity of their nationals in the crimes
of the Holocaust and to prosecute local Nazi
collaborators. His public advocacy on these issues has
been instrumental in the submission by Lithuania and
Latvia of indictments (Lileikis, Gimzauskas, Dailide)
and/or extradition requests (Kalejs, Gecas) against
local Holocaust perpetrators. In 1991 he exposed the
rehabilitation of Nazi war criminals in Lithuania and
led the campaign to stop this process. Zuroff was
appointed by the then Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon
Peres to serve on the joint Israeli-Lithuanian
commission of inquiry established to deal with this
issue, which led to the cancellation to date of
approximately two hundred rehabilitations granted to
individuals who had participated in the murder of Jews
during the Holocaust. In 2000 he exposed the
rehabilitations granted by the Latvian government to
Nazi war criminals and has led the efforts to cancel
these pardons, two of which have been rescinded.
In the summer of 2002, together with Aryeh Rubin,
founder of the Targum Shlishi Foundation, he launched
"Operation: Last Chance," which offers financial rewards
for information which will facilitate the conviction and
punishment of Nazi war criminals. So far, the project
has been initiated in thirteen countries (Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Austria, Croatia,
Hungary, Germany, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Uruguay)
and has yielded the names of 530 hereto unknown
suspects, one hundred of which have been
submitted to local prosecutors. Additional information
on this unique project is available at:
www.operationlastchance.org
During the past six years, Zuroff has directed a
research project to identify Nazi war criminals who are
receiving special disability pensions from the German
government, which passed special legislation to enable
their cancellation in 1998. To date, the pensions of 105
individuals who "violated the norms of humanity" have
been cancelled, several hundred additional cases are
currently under active investigation and thousands of
other cases are awaiting review by the German Ministry
of Social Services.
Zuroff played an important role in the exposure, arrest,
extradition and prosecution of Dinko Sakic, the former
commandant of the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac
(nicknamed the "Auschwitz of the Balkans"). In early
October 1999, Sakic who lived for more than fifty years
in Argentina, was sentenced in Zagreb to twenty years'
imprisonment for his crimes in the first-ever trial of a
Nazi war criminal in a post-Communist country.
In 2006, his exposure in Budapest of convicted but
unpunished Hungarian Nazi war criminal Dr. Sandor Kepiro,
who was among the officers responsible for the mass
murder of at least 1,300
civilians in the city of Novi Sad, led to the
current criminal investigation against him and focused
attention on the highly-significant role played by
Hungarian collaborators in Holocaust crimes.
In his first book, Occupation: Nazi-Hunter; The
Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust
(KTAV: Hoboken, 1994), Zuroff chronicles the belated
efforts to prosecute Nazi war criminals in western
democracies and explains the rationale for such efforts
several decades after the crimes. A German-language
edition was published by Ahriman Verlag in 1996. His
second book Operation: Last Chance: One Man's Quest to
Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice (Macmillan: New York,
2009) summarizes almost three decades of Nazi-hunting
and focuses on the renewed efforts spearheaded by Zuroff
to hold Holocaust perpetrators accountable, in the wake
of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fall of
Communism in Eastern Europe, as well as on the results
achieved by "Operation: Last Chance."
A French-language edition was published under the
title
Chasseur de Nazis(Paris: Michel-Lafon) in late 2008.
His activities as a Nazi-hunter were the subject of four
television documentaries. The first, entitled "The
Nazi-Hunter," was produced by ZDF(German Channel 2) in
1999; the second, entitled "The Last Nazi-Hunter" was
produced by SWR(German Channel 1-regional station) in
2004; the third "The Final Hunt for the Nazis" by France
Trois(Channel 3)
was broadcast in December 2005; and the fourth
"The Search for Doctor Death," was produced by BBC in
2009.
In 1995 and 1996, Zuroff was invited to Rwanda to assist
the local authorities in their efforts to bring to
justice the perpetrators of the genocide which took
place in that country in spring 1994, and he has served
as an official advisor to the Rwandan government.
In recent years, Zuroff has lectured extensively to
audiences all over the world regarding the efforts to
bring Nazi war criminals to justice. During the years
1992-1999, he served in the Education Corps of the
Israeli Defense Forces (reserves) and lectured to
thousands of soldiers about his work as a Nazi-hunter.
Over the years Zuroff has published more than two
hundred and fifty articles, reports, and reviews on
various topics relating to the Holocaust and other
issues of concern in the Jewish world. His publications
have appeared in scholarly journals such as Yad Vashem
Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Simon
Wiesenthal Center Annual, Jewish Political Studies
Review, American Jewish History, and the Journal of
Ecumenical Studies, as well as in the Los Angeles Times,
Boston Globe, Jerusalem Post, The Independent, Tikkun,
Jerusalem Report, Ma'ariv, Ha-Aretz, Yediot Achronot,
Eretz Acheret, Jewish Chronicle, SHALOM, and other
publications and have been translated into fifteen
languages. The Simon Wiesenthal Center's
"Annual Status Report on the Worldwide
Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals,"
which Zuroff initiated in 2001, and which he has written
every year since, is considered the authoritative source
on the subject.
In recognition of his efforts as a Nazi-hunter and
Holocaust scholar, he was nominated by Serbian President
Boris Tadic and the members of parliament of the
Democratic Party of Serbia as a candidate for the 2008
Nobel Peace Prize. In January 2009, he was awarded
honorary citizenship of Novi Sad, the second largest
city in Serbia.