‘Last Nazi hunter’ stirs audience at Pellissippi

Betsy PickleKarns/Hardin Valley, Our Town Stories

The Holocaust ended more than 75 years ago, but the search for German Nazis and European collaborators who perpetrated the mass murders of at least 6 million Jews – and other “undesirables” such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, communists, disabled persons and homosexuals – continues.

Finding those responsible and bringing them to justice has been the life’s work of Efraim Zuroff, a New York native with dual American-Israeli citizenship. At 75, Zuroff is still relentless in his pursuit and tireless in his efforts to educate young and old about the whole truth of the Holocaust and the importance of remembering its victims.

Zuroff spoke Tuesday night to an audience of about 300 at the Clayton Performing Arts Center at Pellissippi State Community College after a day of sharing with students in Lenoir City. In a tour sponsored by the Tennessee Holocaust Education Commission, Zuroff will continue across the state to Nashville and Memphis.

Efraim Zuroff (photo by Nathan Widener)

Before his presentation at Pellissippi State, Zuroff spoke with KnoxTNToday about his career as a Nazi hunter – both successes and disappointments, the beginnings of his career, why Holocaust deniers have lost their voice and when anti-Semitism will end.

To begin with, Zuroff didn’t plan to become a Nazi hunter.

“I had no inkling something like this would happen,” he said. “It’s something that just evolved. I was always very interested in Jewish history. I was also very active politically on behalf of Israel and Jewish people.”

Zuroff earned his undergraduate degree at Yeshiva University in New York City and his master’s at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He got a job at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem. But realizing that he still had one burning intellectual question – “how on earth the Holocaust could have happened” – he returned to the United States to do research for his doctorate, focusing on the efforts by a group of American Orthodox rabbis and yeshiva students who were trying to save rabbis and yeshiva students in Europe during the Holocaust.

“Toward the end of the war, they expanded their efforts to try and save any Jew who was in danger of death,” he said.

While in Los Angeles, he worked at the Simon Wiesenthal Center as its first academic director and helped establish the archives and library. He also formed connections with the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was trying to prosecute Nazi war criminals. He convinced the office that it needed someone on the ground in Israel because it had the world’s best archives and library on the Holocaust, and he volunteered to take on the job.

“I worked there for six years until I found a way to identify immigration destinations of literally thousands of Nazi war criminals who immigrated to Anglo-Saxon democracies. It was done through what’s called the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross.”

This was before computer databases existed. His task involved looking at about “16 million index cards on 3,600 microfilms.”

Nazis fleeing Germany after the war often registered as refugees at displaced-person camps, he said. Using his knowledge of identified war criminals, he was able to ferret out innumerable others.

“So I quit the Office of Special Investigations, I got Rabbi (Marvin) Hier, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to open an office in Jerusalem, and we started churning out lists of suspected Nazis who had immigrated to Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and New Zealand.

“Up to that point, the only Anglo-Saxon country which had made the decision to take legal action against the Nazis who had immigrated, posing as innocent refugees, was the United States. Canada was investigating, Australia was investigating. The UK and New Zealand ostensibly didn’t know that they had a problem. But they had the same problem.”

The lists of names they assembled and sent to the respective countries “basically helped convince them that they had to take legal action.”

Canada in 1987, Australia in 1989 and the United Kingdom in 1991 “all passed laws to enable prosecution.” The only country that didn’t was New Zealand, ostensibly because the number of Nazis who had immigrated there was a fraction of what the other countries had received.

“They just decided to do nothing,” he said.

Zuroff said the reason they are still able to find war criminals today is that so many people are living longer.

“We helped in a case that concluded four months ago of a person who was an SS guard at Sachsenhausen. He was put on trial in Germany, and he’s 101 years old.”

It also helped that “Germany changed its prosecution policy very dramatically,” he said. “Now you can prosecute anyone who served in a camp with a high mortality rate or any camp with a gas chamber or gas vans based on service alone, which can be proven by documents.

“Normally, the most dramatic question that a witness can be asked is, after he or she tells the story, the prosecutor will say, ‘Can you identify anyone in this courtroom who you remember from that camp?’ But they never even ask the question now because it’s totally irrelevant. The presence in the camps, the service in the camps is proven by the documents, and that’s all they need.”

When convicted of their crimes, the Nazis all have one thing in common.

Efraim Zuroff poses with a poster of one of his book covers.

“In the 42 years that I’m dealing with Nazis – I’ve dealt with dozens and dozens – there’s never been a case of a single one who ever expressed any remorse or regret.”

Zuroff said the number of Holocaust deniers on the world stage diminished after self-styled British historian David Irving sued U.S. historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she identified him as such in a book.

At the trial in London, “he lost and got torn to pieces by superb historians from Oxford and Cambridge, none of them Jews.

“That basically knocked out all of the deniers. At least, at the moment there’s no normative political party or social organization that spreads denial. Where’s denial found? In the Arab world, in the Muslim world. In some cases government sponsors and government finances them, like in Iran.”

With Germany taking the lead on tracking down its own war criminals, Zuroff has been actively working to dig out collaborators in Eastern Europe.

He has visited Tennessee before, speaking with 2,000 students in two shifts in March 2020 in Greeneville.

“There’s no question that they’re aware of the Holocaust – depending on the age, of course. The older they are, the greater the possibility that they’ll be aware of the Holocaust.”

The students he met Tuesday in Lenoir City voiced concerns of a second Holocaust, and Zuroff said that’s a legitimate worry.

“It’s definitely possible, and it could be done much easier than it was done by the Germans over the course of five years. Because now all you need is to get hold of a nuclear device and drop it on Israel …

“Truth of the matter is, there is a country that is working on getting a nuclear device which has openly said they’re going to destroy Israel, which is Iran. So the United States has to stop monkeying with them and take the harshest sanctions imaginable …”

Zuroff doesn’t foresee an end to anti-Semitism in the world we know.

“Forget it. No chance. Anti-Semitism morphs and changes its forms and will apparently only continue unless the Messiah comes. So maybe during the Messianic age there won’t be anti-Semitism.

“But I don’t hear him coming. It’s not clear if and when. Even though all religious Jews – and I’m a religious Jew – pray for his arrival. In other words, our Messiah has not arrived yet.”

Betsy Pickle is a veteran freelance writer and editor.

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