Approximately fifty thousand to one hundred thousand men and women who held meaningful operational responsibility for the killing of European Jewry between 1939 and 1945 lived out their postwar lives without facing any court. The figures who were tried, identified, denaturalised or extradited, including the figures handled by the various postwar national prosecutorial systems, the Allied military tribunals, the Communist East European authorities, and the small private Nazi-hunting operations, amount in aggregate to approximately five to six thousand. The proportion successfully accounted for, by the most generous reckoning, is therefore in the region of five to ten per cent of the operationally responsible population. The proportion is small. It is also, by the standards of any comparable accounting after any genocide of the twentieth century, the most substantial accounting that has been produced. The wider postwar reckoning was conducted by national governments and by international tribunals. The supplementary work that produced perhaps a fifth of the total was conducted by a small group of private operators, working with limited resources, against the indifference and sometimes the active opposition of the responsible governments, over a fifty-year period. They are the figures grouped on this page under the working description of the Nazi hunters.
The term itself is contested. Some of the figures it covers, particularly Simon Wiesenthal, accepted it. Others, particularly the Klarsfelds, rejected it on the grounds that it suggested an extralegal vigilante operation rather than the documentary and legal work they actually did. The historian Tom Segev has used the working term “documenters” in preference to “hunters” for the central operations. The wider public usage has settled on “hunters”. The term is imperfect. It is the term that the literature uses. The men and women it covers were doing legal and documentary work. They were not, in any operational sense, vigilantes. The work was painstaking, frequently boring, conducted in archives and at desks, and produced its results through the standard channels of national prosecutorial systems. The wider parent page, Nazi Hunters, gives the substantive narrative; this page is the synthesis, drawing together the work of the major figures and assessing what they collectively achieved.
The major operations
The principal sustained Nazi-hunting operations, considered by their contribution to the documented prosecutorial record, were five.
The Wiesenthal Vienna office (1947 to 2007). Run from a single small office at Salztorgasse in central Vienna by Simon Wiesenthal from 1961 (with earlier work at Linz from 1947) until his death in September 2005, and wound down in 2007. The office produced approximately 1,100 successful identifications of perpetrators that were subsequently the subject of prosecutorial action. The methodology centred on a card index of approximately 90,000 individuals built up over fifty-eight years from public sources, survivor reports, archival research, and confidential informants. (See the separate page Simon Wiesenthal.)
The Klarsfeld Paris archive (1965 to 2024 and continuing). Run by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld from Paris from approximately 1965 onwards, with substantial documentary work from the late 1970s. Produced the principal French postwar prosecutions of Klaus Barbie (convicted Lyon 1987), Maurice Papon (convicted Bordeaux 1998), Paul Touvier (convicted Lyon 1994), Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn (convicted Cologne 1980), and the Bolivian extradition of Klaus Barbie in 1983. Beate Klarsfeld died in May 2024. Serge Klarsfeld continues the work into his late eighties. (See the separate page Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.)
The Friedman Haifa institute (1952 to 2011). Run by Tuviah Friedman from a single room at Yiftah Street in Haifa from 1952 until his death in January 2011. Produced approximately 200 to 300 successful identifications, principally of smaller-scale perpetrators. Maintained a substantial public profile through Friedman’s writings and his sustained advocacy for prosecutions in Israel and West Germany. (See the separate page Tuviah Friedman.)
The American Office of Special Investigations (1979 to present). Established under the Holtzman Amendment of 1978 within the United States Department of Justice and run with substantial continuity by Eli Rosenbaum from 1989 until his retirement in 2010, with subsequent leadership by Eli Rosenbaum’s successors. Produced approximately 107 successful denaturalisations and deportations of individuals who had served in operational roles in the killing or in collaborating regimes, drawn from a pool that the office estimated at approximately 10,000 such individuals admitted to the United States in the immediate postwar years. The largest single national programme of its kind. The Office of Special Investigations was renamed in 2010 as the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, with a wider remit that includes more recent atrocity cases.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre (1977 to present). Established by Rabbi Marvin Hier in Los Angeles in 1977 as a Jewish educational institution; the Centre’s Israel office under Efraim Zuroff has run, since approximately 1986, the principal sustained continuing private Nazi-hunting operation. The Zuroff operation has been particularly important in the late prosecutions in Germany after the Demjanjuk principle of 2011, providing documentary research support to the German prosecutorial authorities. The Centre’s annual most-wanted list, published since 2002, has tracked the surviving senior figures of the killing apparatus. The list has been almost entirely retired by the deaths of its subjects.
The smaller operations
The five major sustained operations were supplemented by a substantial number of smaller operations conducted by individuals, by national Jewish organisations, by Holocaust memorial institutions, and by individual prosecutors who had taken on cases on their own initiative. The principal smaller operations included:
The work of the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer in Frankfurt, who ran the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965 (the largest single postwar West German prosecution) and was the operationally decisive figure in the location of Adolf Eichmann in 1957 to 1958. Bauer died in 1968 in disputed circumstances; the Frankfurt prosecutorial work continued under his successors.
The work of the Israeli police officer Avner Less, who conducted the Eichmann interrogation in 1960 to 1961 (see the separate page Office 06 and the Capture of Eichmann), and who subsequently published the interrogation transcripts in 1982.
The work of the American journalist Howard Blum, whose 1977 book Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America established the public American attention to the question that produced the Holtzman Amendment of 1978 and the establishment of the Office of Special Investigations in 1979.
The work of the Argentine investigative journalist Uki Goñi, whose 2002 book The Real Odessa produced the most thorough single account of the Argentine reception of war criminals, drawing on Argentine government archives that had been declassified in the late 1990s under the Menem and de la Rúa administrations.
The work of various national Jewish communal organisations that maintained continuing documentary projects, including the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem (founded 1953), the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris (founded 1943), the Jewish Documentation Centre in Buenos Aires (founded 1950), the Wiener Library in London (founded 1933 as a private Jewish information service in Amsterdam, transferred to London in 1939), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (founded 1980, public from 1993). These organisations did not generally conduct active Nazi-hunting operations but provided the documentary infrastructure on which the active hunters drew.
The methodology
The shared methodology of the major operations had three principal elements.
The first was the systematic collection and cross-referencing of documentary sources. The major operations all maintained substantial card-index, file-card, or computerised databases of individuals, locations, units, and operations. The databases were built from public sources (newspapers, official publications, professional directories, telephone directories), from survivor and witness statements, from archival research at the principal European war-crimes archives, and from confidential informants. The databases were the operational base from which subsequent identifications and prosecutions emerged.
The second was the location of specific individuals through the cross-referencing of database entries against current public records. The methodology Wiesenthal developed in the 1950s and 1960s was the foundational methodology: the systematic comparison of wartime SS personnel rosters against postwar West German, Austrian, and Latin American public records (telephone directories, professional registrations, business announcements, social pages, obituaries) for matches on names, dates of birth, and other identifying information. The methodology was operationally low-tech but was substantively effective. It produced most of the major identifications of the Wiesenthal era. The Klarsfelds developed a more legally-orientated version of the same methodology in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on the production of admissible documentary evidence rather than on the location of the individuals as such.
The third was the prosecution-support work that turned the located individuals into legal cases. The major operations all developed working relationships with the relevant national prosecutorial authorities and provided the located individuals’ files to those authorities for action. The Wiesenthal office worked principally with the West German, Austrian, and Israeli prosecutorial authorities; the Klarsfeld archive worked principally with the French and West German authorities; the Office of Special Investigations was itself a prosecutorial authority and conducted its own cases under American immigration law; the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Zuroff operation has worked principally with the German prosecutorial authorities since the Demjanjuk principle of 2011.
The ethical questions
The Nazi-hunting operations have been the subject of sustained ethical and legal debate over the postwar period. The principal questions have been four.
The first has been the question of identification accuracy. The major operations have produced approximately ninety-five per cent accurate identifications across the documented record, but the remaining five per cent has included some high-profile errors. The most consequential single error was the misidentification of John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka by Wiesenthal and the Israeli prosecutorial authorities, an error that produced an Israeli capital conviction in 1988 that had to be overturned on appeal in 1993. The wider lesson is that survivor identification of perpetrators after fifty years is an unreliable evidentiary basis for prosecution and that documentary evidence must be the principal foundation.
The second has been the question of due process for the defendants. The Klarsfelds’ attempted abduction of Kurt Lischka in 1971 was a clear violation of West German law that the Klarsfelds defended on the grounds of West German prosecutorial inaction. The Mossad’s seizure of Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 was a clear violation of Argentine sovereignty that produced a United Nations Security Council resolution. The wider question is whether the unwillingness of the responsible governments to take action against the located individuals justifies extralegal action by private parties. The historical assessment has generally been that the Lischka abduction attempt was not justified, that the Eichmann seizure was justified by the absence of any alternative, and that the lesser interventions of the Klarsfelds and the Wiesenthal office were generally justified by the prosecutorial inaction they were responding to.
The third has been the question of the political instrumentalisation of the work. The Eastern European Communist regimes used Nazi-hunting work for political purposes in the late 1940s and 1950s, including in some cases against domestic political opponents who had been only nominally associated with wartime collaborator movements. The Israeli government used the Eichmann trial in 1961 for substantial Israeli domestic political purposes, including the consolidation of the Ben-Gurion government’s position. The American Office of Special Investigations has been criticised on occasion for selective prosecution. The wider question is whether the work can be conducted in a strictly apolitical manner. The historical assessment has been that, while political instrumentalisation has been real, the documentary record produced by the work has generally been accurate and has stood up to subsequent scholarly review.
The fourth has been the question of the late prosecutions and the proportionality of the sentences. The convictions of Demjanjuk in 2011, Gröning in 2015, Hanning in 2016, Dey in 2020, and Furchner in 2022 produced sentences that were, in operational terms, derisory: most defendants died before serving their sentences. The wider question is whether the late prosecutions served any meaningful purpose given the proportionality issue. The historical assessment, including the assessment given by the late prosecutors themselves and by the Israeli and German Jewish communities that supported the prosecutions, has been that the principle established by the late prosecutions, that participation in genocide is not absolved by the passage of time, was sufficient justification for the work even given the proportionality issue. The acknowledgment, not the punishment, was the point.
The end of the era
The era of active Nazi-hunting is over. The last of the senior surviving figures of the killing apparatus, Aribert Heim, was definitively confirmed dead in 2009 (although his death had occurred in 1992). The last of the substantial postwar prosecutions, the Furchner case at Itzehoe, was concluded in December 2022. The remaining surviving operational personnel are too few, too old, and too ill for further proceedings. The major sustained operations have largely been wound down or transitioned to historical research. The Wiesenthal Vienna office closed in 2007. The Friedman Haifa institute closed shortly after Friedman’s death in 2011. The Office of Special Investigations was renamed and broadened its remit in 2010. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Zuroff operation continues but is now focused principally on educational and memorial work.
What the era produced, in aggregate, is the documented record of approximately five to six thousand prosecuted perpetrators out of an operationally responsible population of approximately fifty thousand to one hundred thousand. The proportion is small. The work of the major Nazi-hunting operations contributed approximately a fifth of the total, perhaps a thousand to twelve hundred cases. The contribution was substantial against the alternative of the operations not having been conducted at all. The contribution was small against the underlying problem.
The work was, on the documented record, largely the work of a small number of individuals who had taken on the question on their own initiative, in most cases as private citizens, in conditions of considerable difficulty. The figures named on the linked pages, Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, and the operational team that ran Office 06 and the Eichmann case, were the principal figures. They worked over approximately sixty years between them. They produced what they could. The wider postwar reckoning was inadequate to what had been done. The fact that any reckoning was conducted at all owes more to these figures than to the responsible governments. The figures are now mostly dead. The work after them will be the work of historians and educators rather than of prosecutors. The era is over. The record stands.
See also
- Simon Wiesenthal
- Serge and Beate Klarsfeld
- Adolf Eichmann
- John Demjanjuk
- The Office 06 and the Capture of Eichmann
- Klaus Barbie
Sources
- Andrew Nagorski, The Nazi Hunters, Simon and Schuster, 2016
- Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Doubleday, 2010
- Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Piatkus, 2018
- Eli M. Rosenbaum, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, St. Martin’s Press, 1993
- Efraim Zuroff, Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
- Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, Oxford University Press, 2018
- Lawrence Douglas, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, Princeton University Press, 2016
- Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Granta, 2002