Nazi Hunters Pick Up the Trail Online

By NewsFactor Network | February 9, 2007

Bill Gray was working as a student intern at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem when he decided to use the Internet to find fugitive Nazis. Within a few hours he found five, all living in the USA.

“To think of the horrible crimes that these people committed,” said Gray, 24, a Harvard student from Munster, Ind. “And to think that they were living in the United States for so long, so happily.”

The Nazis whom Gray found were already known to the Justice Department. Some had been deemed too ill to prosecute, and Justice is taking a second look at the others, the center said.

Gray’s use of Internet-based search engines and databases such as voting records comes at an important time. The Wiesenthal Center is making an intense push, known as “Operation: Last Chance,” to find fugitives of the Holocaust and bring them to justice before they die.

The center, renowned for finding scores of ex-Nazis, is also seeking collaborators, camp guards and leaders of paramilitary groups who helped round up and kill Jews and others during the Holocaust.

The effort has rolled across Europe and collected hundreds of allegations and names from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Austria, Hungary and Germany. This year the program will expand to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

The suspects are all older than 80, so any time saved by using the Internet is critical.

“It helps make my job easier,” says the world’s chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office. “It helps me get up-to-date whereabouts on the current suspects.”

That’s what happened when Zuroff gave Gray, then a new volunteer, a list of people he had been searching for. Zuroff had compiled the list by cross-checking World War II-era U.S. refugee records with names of suspected war criminals. But Zuroff could find nothing…

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