Poster campaign to round up last Nazi war criminals

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has launched a poster campaign in several German cities appealing for help in tracking down the last surviving Nazi war criminals.

About 2,000 posters depicting the entrance gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp were put up in the cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, asking the public to come forward with information that may lead to the arrest of Nazis seven decades after the end of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Efraim Zuroff, the US- based Jewish centre’s top Nazi hunter, told reporters in Berlin: “The passage of time in no way diminishes the crimes.”

The Wiesenthal Center is asking for tips to be called into a hotline in Germany with as much information as possible.

Emblazoned in German on the poster is: “Late, but not too late. Millions of innocents were murdered by Nazi war criminals. Some of the perpetrators are free and alive! Help us take them to court.”

A reward of €5,000 will be paid for the information on the indictment of a suspect, another €5,000 on conviction, and €100 per day spent in prison — up to 150 days — for a total of €25,000, Zuroff said.

Zuroff, director of the centre’s Israel office, estimated there are still about 60 people alive in Germany who are fit to stand trial for the crimes they allegedly committed.

The drive is part of the centre’s “Operation Last Chance II” initiative.

It comes more than two years after German prosecutors said the successful conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk had set a precedent that allowed them to reopen hundreds of investigations and prosecute former death camp guards as accessories to murder, even if they could not prove the defendants personally killed anyone.

Demjanjuk was found guilty in May 2011 of thousands of counts of accessory to murder after a Munich court found he served as a death camp guard. He denied he was a guard and died while the case was under appeal.