Operation Last Chance: One Man’s Quest To Bring Nazi Criminals To Justice, by Efraim Zuroff

It is clear, in reading this book, that there are some serious issues when it comes to vigilante efforts to deal with aging ex-Nazis. Even if one is a wholehearted supporter of the author’s approach in seeking to bring former Nazis to justice for their crimes against Judaism, there is a sense of melancholy about this book that the author himself acknowledges. With ex-Nazis aging and dying, the time is soon approaching (if it is not already here) that there aren’t ani more ex-Nazis to bring to earthly justice, all of them facing the heavenly justice that they long sought to deny. While the author expresses frustration with the legal systems of countries that protect the rights of the accused, there are some genuine issues that one has to deal with when it comes to the people that the author accuses of being the most noted Nazis who survived up to his time. In one case, we cannot be sure that the person is even alive. In other cases, there are multiple people with the same names, and it is important not to prosecute the innocent because of superficial similarities. While it is clear that many of the people the author talks about are guilty and show plenty of signs of mens rea, including the desire to pretend to be frail when it comes to being on trial but are fit enough to celebrate soccer tournaments, that is not necessarily the case with everyone.

Still, while there are some reservations I have about the author’s approach, there are also some difficulties I have with the approach of other countries to the problem of denazification. I also have problems with the author’s belief that Nazis were so much worse than Communists (I happen to hate both fascism and Marxism myself, though I hold to vastly narrower definition of fascism than is commonly used in contemporary political discourse). When one looks at the sort of nations that have the biggest issues when it comes to their lack of interest in dealing with former Nazis, there is the reality that many lower level Nazis were able to move to the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and other countries and move right into anti-Communist politics where their political commitment was an advantage in such Cold War efforts. Particularly troublesome, at least to me, is the way that Austria has proven to be so hostile to dealing with the worst former Nazis, largely because Austria has (largely falsely) framed itself as Hitler’s first victim rather than a key accomplice of Hitler’s efforts. Whether or not one appreciates this book will largely depend on the extent to which one has a commitment to Nazi hunting efforts, even when it comes to hunting those who have long escaped accountability and justice to a hopefully slightly earlier grave.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 200 pages long with twenty chapters. The book begins with acknowledgements. After this comes a discussion of Milivoj Asner, a suspected Nazi whose appears at Euro 2008 in Austria caused some international drama (1). The author then peels back to talk about his own first encounters with the Holocaust (2) and his own discussion that he did not forget the victims of that horror (3). The author then looks at the office of Special Investigations and cases involving Lithuanian Jew-killers (4). There is a discussion of the bonuses of the search for Dr. Mengele (5) as well as Nazis in Australia (6), Great Britain (7), and Canada (8). The author looks at the results of the fall of Communism on Nazi hunting (9) before specifically turning his attention to look at the special problems of dealing with Jew killers in Lithuania (10), Latvia (11), Estonia (12) and Croatia (13). This leads into the author’s discussion of a historic trial of Dinko Sakic for his World War II activities (14). The author then looks at the difficult beginnings of anti-Nazi efforts in Austria (15) along with the search for the She-Devil of Majdanek (16), after which there is a chapter devoted to Charles Zentai (17), and another devoted to Dr. Heim (18), as well as Kepiro, a suspected Nazi who lives across the street from a synagogue. The book then ends with a conclusion (20), as well as notes and an index.