The last Nazi hunter’s new battle: Efraim Zuroff on life after the Simon Wiesenthal Center

In early September, an innocuous Facebook message was posted on the social media stating, “After 38 years as director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and 13 years during which I was responsible for Eastern European Affairs as well, I will be leaving the center at the end of this month (September 2024). Looking for new opportunities to continue to combat Holocaust distortion, and antisemitism.”

If the post was intended to serve as a chance to alert potential employers to new employment opportunities, Efraim Zuroff may have been underselling himself slightly.

Zuroff, often referred to as “the last active Nazi hunter,” has spent over four decades tracking down war criminals and holding them accountable for their roles in the Holocaust. But as Zuroff reaches the twilight of his career, his focus has shifted toward a more insidious problem – Holocaust distortion.

In his own words, “Holocaust distortion is a new form of antisemitism.” Zuroff’s mission to expose this growing issue, particularly in Eastern Europe, reflects the larger fight against historical manipulation and the dangers it poses for future generations.

Zuroff, the man and what drives him

Born in 1948 in New York to an Orthodox family, Zuroff was raised with a strong sense of Jewish identity and responsibility. He earned a PhD in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his academic career set the stage for his life’s work.

In 1978, Zuroff joined the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, named after the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Zuroff has since dedicated his career to continuing Wiesenthal’s legacy, becoming the director of the center’s Israel office and focusing on hunting Nazis across the globe.

Over the years, the last Nazi hunter has played a significant role in bringing some of the most notorious Nazi criminals to justice. However, in conversation with the Magazine, it is clear that it’s his ongoing battle against Holocaust distortion and antisemitism that remains his central focus today.

Zuroff is particularly concerned about the deliberate attempts in Eastern Europe to rewrite history. He points out that many of the countries that transitioned from communism to democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union have created distorted narratives about the Holocaust.

“All these countries acknowledge that the Holocaust took place, but they have created narratives for themselves in which they don’t accept any responsibility for the participation of their own nationals in the mass murder of Jews,” he says.

In countries like Lithuania, Zuroff argues, there is a tendency to minimize or entirely ignore the role local populations played in collaborating with the Nazis.

“A country like Lithuania, they say: ‘The Holocaust was a terrible tragedy, the Nazis came and murdered our Jews.’ But when asked about thousands of Lithuanians who took part, they say it’s only a few misfits,” Zuroff notes. “That is the issue that I want to work on, something that will also be connected to the fight against antisemitism.”

Lithuania has played a major role in Zuroff’s work over the decades and the country holds a unique role in his life. He has described how his grandfather, who was born there, had decided to name his Efraim after his brother who was murdered by Lithuanians in the Holocaust - before Zuroff was even born. “A decision that mystics would no doubt claim greatly influenced my professional life,” Zuroff wrote in the introduction to his book Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust.

The book, co-written with Lithuanian journalist Ruta Vanagaite, takes an in-depth look at the role of ordinary Lithuanians in the Holocaust, their involvement in the murder of Jews, and stealing their property.

For Zuroff, this manipulation of history is not just a form of denial but a dangerous revisionism that allows nations to avoid accountability. “Countries want a convenient history and want to be proud of their history,” he explains.

A stark example is how some Eastern European countries have turned figures who collaborated with the Nazis into national heroes. “Their heroes are people who killed Jews,” Zuroff says, highlighting the hypocrisy in these narratives. “They’ve turned low-life murderers into national heroes.”

For Zuroff, the end of communism in these countries was a chance to look to the future instead of confronting the past. “They wanted to get into NATO and the EU, which is logical,” he told the Magazine. “But in their warped minds, they said they had to make amends with the Jews. How do they do that? They can’t do it by telling the truth because the truth is so horrible that any Jew with any conscience would do everything possible to deny them entrance to NATO and the EU, so they made it this fake narrative.

“They said that they did more than anybody else to save their Jewish neighbors. Where are their Jewish neighbors? They’re still in Lithuania, only six feet under. Two hundred and thirty-four mass graves. They tell the tale.” (According to Yad Vashem, in September 1939, there were some 250,000 Jews living in Lithuania. By the end of World War II, only a few thousand Lithuanian Jews had survived.)

Zuroff quickly points out that this problem of distorting Holocaust history is not confined to Eastern Europe. He blames Israeli leadership for not doing enough to call out these distortions, especially when it comes to relationships with countries in the EU. He cites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach as an example of this failure: “Netanyahu praised the Lithuanians for how they’re commemorating the Holocaust, which is approximately like praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving race relations in the United States.”

The famed Nazi hunter also believes that Israel’s reluctance to confront Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe is tied to geopolitical interests. “We, Israel, are partially responsible for the spread of Holocaust distortion,” he says, adding that Netanyahu sought to create a wedge between Western EU countries, who are critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and Eastern European countries, who are more supportive. “So he won’t fight with them over this issue.”

According to Zuroff, Israel’s failure to hold these countries accountable has given them a “free pass” to continue distorting their histories. “If Israel doesn’t object, the other countries can continue promoting their false narratives,” he laments.

Zuroff also points to the legacy of communism as a contributing factor to the problem. When Eastern European countries were under Soviet control, it was the Soviets who prosecuted many of the Nazi collaborators, sometimes for political reasons.

“They were prosecuting people because they joined the Nazis, and the Nazis were the enemy of the USSR,” Zuroff explains. While some of these trials may have been politically motivated, Zuroff believes that they also revealed uncomfortable truths about local complicity in the Holocaust – truths that many in Eastern Europe still refuse to acknowledge today.

“Part of the problem was that people in Lithuania didn’t give these trials the respect that they might have deserved, because to them it was political,” Zuroff says. He argues that this has contributed to a reluctance in post-communist countries to confront their pasts honestly. Instead, they’ve chosen to rewrite history in a way that exonerates their own populations.

The cases

Zuroff has played a central role in securing justice for numerous other Holocaust victims by leading the efforts to locate and prosecute Nazi war criminals who eluded justice for decades. Operation Last Chance, begun in 2002, was a major mission of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the focus of which was to find and bring to justice the last remaining Nazi war criminals and collaborators still unprosecuted, many of whom had moved to Anglo-Saxon countries and acquired citizenship.

His pursuit of these individuals and his insistence on accountability stands as a marker of Zuroff’s lifelong dedication to Holocaust remembrance and justice.

One of Zuroff’s most significant pursuits was that of Dr. Aribert Heim, a Nazi doctor notorious for conducting gruesome experiments on inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Known as “Dr. Death,” Heim fled Germany after the war and lived for decades under a false identity, managing to evade capture despite international efforts to find him.

Zuroff’s relentless pursuit of Heim kept his case in the public eye. In the early 2000s, Zuroff intensified the search by launching a high-profile campaign offering a $1 million reward for information leading to Heim’s capture. Heim was believed to have been hiding in Latin America, but new information suggested he had fled to Egypt, living under the alias of Tarek Farid Hussein.

Heim’s family later claimed he had died in Cairo in 1992, but his body was never found. Despite the uncertainty surrounding his fate, Zuroff’s determination ensured that the world would not forget Heim’s atrocities even decades after the crimes were committed.

Zuroff’s work also led to the 2011 trial of Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian gendarmerie officer accused of participating in the murder of hundreds of civilians, including Jews, during the Novi Sad massacre in Serbia in 1942. Kepiro was initially convicted in 1944 but fled to Argentina before being tried again.

In 2006, Zuroff helped locate Kepiro in Hungary and pressured the government to bring him to trial. Although Kepiro was eventually acquitted due to a technicality, Zuroff’s efforts were pivotal in reigniting the case and raising awareness about Hungary’s reluctance to confront its role in the Holocaust.

“Even though he was acquitted, the fact that he stood trial was a major achievement,” Zuroff said at the time.

Another significant case pursued by Zuroff was that of Karoly (Charles) Zentai, an alleged Hungarian war criminal accused of participating in the murder of a Jewish teenager in Budapest in 1944. After fleeing to Australia after the war, Zentai lived undisturbed for decades.

In 2005, Zuroff’s investigations led to Australia’s decision to extradite Zentai to Hungary to face trial. Although his extradition was ultimately blocked on technical grounds, Zuroff’s dogged pursuit of Zentai played a major role in exposing him and highlighting the global network of war criminals who had managed to escape justice by relocating to countries like Australia after the war.

One of the most high-profile modern cases was the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, accused of complicity in the murder of over 28,000 Jews. Although Demjanjuk was initially tried in Israel in the 1980s for allegedly being “Ivan the Terrible,” a brutal guard at Treblinka, new evidence emerged years later linking him to Sobibor.

The case ultimately resulted in Demnjanjuk’s conviction in Germany in 2011 for crimes committed at Sobibor. Although he died before his appeals could be heard, the trial marked a significant victory in the quest for justice. It was one of the few times a Nazi war criminal was convicted solely on the basis of his role as a camp guard, setting an important legal precedent. After Germany reformed its prosecution laws to allow individuals to be tried for their involvement in Nazi crimes without needing to prove direct knowledge of or a personal connection to specific victims, Zuroff successfully brought seven additional former Nazi guards to trial.

One case in particular stands out that Zuroff has cited as his major success: the capture and prosecution of Dinko Šakić. Šakić was one of five commandants of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, one of the most notorious camps in Europe, where tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma, and Croatian anti-fascists were murdered.

Zuroff recalls that Šakić was unapologetic about his role in the Holocaust. “He said if they gave him a chance, he would do it again,” Zuroff says. “He even asked to be buried in his Ustaše uniform.” Zuroff helped track Šakić down in Argentina, where he had been living under his real name and even giving interviews to the Croatian press. He was extradited to Croatia, where he was tried and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Šakić’s case is emblematic of the challenges Zuroff faces in his work. Even after his conviction, Šakić remained a symbol for some Croatian nationalists. “The priest who gave the eulogy at his funeral said, ‘It’s true that Dinko Šakić didn’t observe all the Ten Commandments, but he’s a symbol for Croatia.’”

Specific countries

Zuroff’s work has not been limited to tracking down Nazi war criminals. He has also played a key role in helping countries like Canada, Australia, and the UK pass laws that enable the prosecution of these criminals. However, Zuroff is critical of how these countries have handled the cases.

“One of the most important achievements that I had, in Britain, Australia, and Canada, was to help them pass laws to enable the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, but they did such a harmful job.”

Zuroff is particularly scathing in his assessment of Canada’s handling of these cases. He recalls the trial of Imre Finta, a Hungarian gendarmerie captain who was prosecuted in Canada for his role in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Finta’s defense was that he was simply following orders, a defense that had been universally rejected in war crimes trials.

But, to Zuroff’s disbelief, the Canadian courts accepted it, leading to Finta’s acquittal.

“They had a law to prosecute war criminals, and what happened? The first guy who was brought to trial, Imre Finta, had no defense except, ‘I had orders from a higher rank,’” Zuroff exclaimed, still incredulous at the outcome. “And the Canadians accepted it, and then the Ontario Supreme Court accepted it.”

The future

Now, as Zuroff’s career at the Simon Wiesenthal Center comes to a close, he remains focused on the future. He has been invited to take part in an antisemitism project with Ariel University, where there is an initiative to train people to combat Holocaust distortion and antisemitism. He sees this work as crucial, especially given the lack of coordination among organizations fighting antisemitism today.

“There are so many organizations combating antisemitism, and there’s little coordination between any of them. It’s a shame,” he said.

“What happened since Oct. 7 is upside down. The perpetrators have become the victims and the victims have become the perpetrators,” Zuroff lamented. “That’s in perfect sync with what happened in Eastern Europe and the narratives that these countries fashioned.”

For Efraim Zuroff, the fight is far from over. His legacy, built on decades of tireless work, serves as a reminder of the importance of confronting history honestly and holding those responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust accountable – even when the world is eager to move on. Zuroff’s determination ensures that the horrors of the past will not be forgotten and that the truth, however inconvenient, will continue to be told.

As the last Nazi hunter, Zuroff’s work has been monumental in seeking justice for Holocaust victims and preserving the memory of their suffering. But his fight against Holocaust distortion is perhaps his most critical mission yet.

In a world where history is increasingly manipulated for political convenience, Zuroff’s voice stands as a powerful reminder that the truth must always prevail, a lesson as important today as it has been in the decade since the Holocaust.