Most wanted Nazis named
More than 60 years after the end of WW2, the hunt for war criminals continues. A Human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has published a list of the ten most wanted Nazi suspects. The whereabouts of some
Lydia Brenners was ten years old when the Nazis entered Yugoslavia in March, 1941. In the months that followed she and her family were rounded up and sent into the Jewish ghetto, and later to concentration camps. The scars from that period still haunt her today.
One of the policemen responsible for murdering more than 1200 Jews from Lydia’s hometown of Novi Sad was Dr Sandor Kepiro. He’s number three on a recent list, naming the most-wanted Nazi war criminals who’ve never been brought to justice.
When Israel was founded back in 1948, one in four people who died fighting for the new state was a holocaust survivor. Today the country is booming but its success is in part due to the blood and sweat of those holocaust survivors. Therefore one would expect Israel to be the world leader in tracking down Nazi war criminals.
Dr Efraim Zuroff calls himself the chief Nazi hunter. He heads the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
“Making the list of the most wanted Nazi war criminals is a way to highlight the crimes of those people who we would like to see brought to justice,” believes Dr Efraim Zuroff, Chief Nazi Hunter.
Most of the men on the list are not on the run. Investigators know where they live.
Topping the list is Dr Aribert Heim, who was indicted by the German government for the murder of hundreds of concentration camp inmates.
Ivan Demjanjuk, who lives today in the United States, is number two. Demjanjuk was nicknamed by the inmates of Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, where he was a guard, “Ivan the Terrible.”
In 1988 he was sentenced to death for murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence.
However, his conviction was later overturned by Israel’s highest court.
Today, the Hague Tribunal and other international courts are trying to bring to trial war criminals from places like Sudan and the Former Yugoslavia, but often with limited success.
