In first, annual Nazi-hunting report downgrades US
Simon Wiesenthal Center criticizes failure to act against SS commander who lived in Minnesota; commends Germany
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on Google
The world’s predominant Nazi-hunting group is taking the United States to task over its failure to prosecute a member of a notorious Nazi killing unit who lived quietly in Minnesota for decades.
In its annual report, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Monday that it had lowered its ranking of the US’s Nazi-hunting efforts from A to B. It was the first time the US has been ranked so low.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the center’s Israel office, said the ranking was in part because the US took no action against Michael Karkoc. An Associated Press investigation exposed the retired carpenter as a commander in an SS-led Ukrainian unit.
A German investigation began after the AP published the story establishing that Karkoc commanded a unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, then lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States a few years after World War II.
This year’s report praised Germany for loosening criteria to make it easier to prosecute former Nazis. For decades, prosecutors could only go after those suspected of specific involvement in specific atrocities. Now anyone who served in a death camp or a mobile killing squad during WWII can be prosecuted as accessories to murder.
Six million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust of World War II, wiping out one-third of world Jewry.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.
The Times of Israel Community.