LOS ANGELES (WJC) — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has said it had identified dozens of former members of Nazi mobile death squads who might still be alive. The Los Angeles-based organization gave the German government a list of 80 names for investigation.
The Wiesenthal Center’s top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, told the ‘Associated Press’ on Wednesday that he recently provided the German justice and interior ministries with a list of 76 men and four women who served in the so-called Einsatzgruppen, which were made up of primarily SS and police personnel and tasked with rounding up and shooting Jews before the death camp system was up and running.
They are believed to have murdered more than a million Soviet Jews and tens of thousands of others by the spring of 1943.
“In the death camps the actual act of murder was carried out by a very small number of people — the people who put the gas into the gas chambers — but the actual act of murder in the Einsatzgruppen was carried out individually,” Zuroff told AP. “Almost every person in the Einsatzgruppen was a murderer, a hands-on murderer.”
Zuroff narrowed down the list of possible suspects by choosing the youngest from a list of some 1,100 with dates of birth known to his organization, from the estimated 3,000 members of the death squads. All 80 would be very old if still alive, born between 1920 and 1924, he said.
Because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, the Wiesenthal Center has been unable to confirm where the suspects live, but Zuroff said that task, and determining if they’re still alive, should be relatively easy for police or prosecutors.
Germany’s Interior Ministry made no immediate comment but the Justice Ministry said it had passed the details of the letter to the special federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi-era crimes. The head of that office, Kurt Schrimm, told the AP he had not yet received the information.
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Preceding provided by the World Jewish Congress