[imagesouce: PA Images]

Nowadays, the rise of neo-Nazism and far-right nationalism in Germany is a major concern.

It’s a concern around the world, too, with the events in Charlottesville back in 2017 a stark reminder of how white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis are becoming emboldened to emerge from the shadows.

I’m sure 72-year-old Efraim Zuroff would love to see neo-Nazis punished, but he’s more concerned with putting actual Nazis behind bars, and has made it his life’s work.

Zuroff is widely known as ‘the last Nazi hunter’, and over the past 40 years, he has submitted the names of more than 3 000 suspected Nazi war criminals to 20 different countries.

His work has seen legal action taken in 40 separate cases, reports the Telegraph, but time is running out:

Nine years ago, Zuroff relaunched Operation Last Chance, a campaign to find the remaining Nazi war criminals. He works in Jerusalem with just an office manager and a part-time researcher. The organisation is mostly funded by private donations.

And with the hunt for living Nazis ‘in injury time’ – an 18-year-old in 1939 would be 99 now – Zuroff employs social media to track his prey. Proud of his 8,000-plus Twitter followers, he uses modern methods to solve historical crimes.

Zuroff was born in Brooklyn, but moved to Israel in order to study a PhD in Holocaust history, and has headed up the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for the past 34 years.

Wiesenthal was a survivor of Nazi death camps, who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust, and was a legendary ‘Nazi hunter’ in his own right.

For his work, Zuroff was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize back in 2009, but his greatest satisfaction comes from seeing war criminals put behind bars:

He is dogged in his quest to bring war criminals to justice, even if this is just through exposure of their crimes. ‘I’m the only Jew in the world who prays for the good health of Nazis,’ he says.

Frustratingly for Zuroff, he is unable to initiate prosecution himself, and can only hand over names and information to authorities in the relevant countries.

Prosecutors are known to drag their heels, if they bother at all, which explains why legal action has only been taken in 40 cases.

Zuroff says his greatest victory was the prosecution of Dinko Sakić, the one-time commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, which was responsible for the murder of an estimated 2 000 people:

He was found living in Argentina and prosecuted in 1998. When he received his 20-year sentence, Sakić [below centre] laughed maniacally.

Zuroff was there to see the fruits of his work. ‘This was the most gratifying moment of my career. Then, after the verdict was announced, a man came up to me. “I want to say one word,” he said. “Hvala [thank you].”’

It turned out this man was the brother of a Jewish Montenegrin doctor, who was randomly shot by Sakić during a camp roll call. ‘It was incredibly moving. When I am frustrated or upset, I take this moment with me.’

When Sakić was sentenced, he said, “I would do it again; let’s finish the job.”

Zuroff’s greatest regret was not nailing Aribert Heim, who was accused of performing operations on prisoners in an Austrian concentration camp without anaesthesia, injecting petrol into the hearts of Jewish people, and removing organs from healthy inmates.

For decades, Zuroff hunted Heim down without success, and it’s believed that he died in Egypt in 1992, using an assumed identity.

When asked about retirement, Zuroff made it clear that he’s not interested in calling it a day:

“Look, there will be no press conference when the last Nazi dies,’ he says. ‘What am I going to do: sit under a coconut tree and sip a pina colada?”

That doesn’t seem like his vibe at all.

You can read the full profile on Zuroff here.

For a snapshot of how difficult it can be to secure a conviction against an alleged war criminal, Netflix’s The Devil Next Door is a very interesting, and also gutwrenching, watch:

[source:telegraph]