Where Have All the Nazis Gone?

By JORDAN BONFANTE LOS ANGELES

How long can the Nazi manhunt and the promise of retribution go on? How many more war criminals, their faces surgically disguised and their identities long since falsified, can be brought to justice? Those questions reverberated around the world last week after the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously overturned the 1988 conviction of John Demjanjuk. The 73-year-old retired Cleveland autoworker had been sentenced to death for being "Ivan the Terrible," the notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp who operated the gas chambers.

Nazi hunters acknowledged that the decision was a severe setback for their cause. The fact that five Treblinka survivors had possibly misidentified Demjanjuk was bound to devalue the future testimony of aging concentration- camp survivors. The fact that a court in Israel, which has such an emotional stake in the Holocaust, had ruled in a suspected Nazi collaborator's favor was bound to discourage already reluctant countries such as Australia and Canada from continuing to pursue suspected war criminals.

Nevertheless, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human-rights and research organization with headquarters in Los Angeles, vowed to carry on with even more zeal. The center pointed to valuable new investigative avenues afforded them by the collapse of the Soviet regime, which has opened up what one U.S. Justice Department official called "an embarrassment of investigative riches," and by the unification of Germany, where prosecutors can now avail themselves of literally miles of formerly closed East German secret police archives.

Among the "most wanted" -- or at least most immediately wanted -- of the hundreds of war criminals still unaccounted for is the real "Ivan the Terrible," now thought to be a Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko, who would be 82 today. He was last sighted leaving a brothel in Croatia in 1945. Says Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief sleuth in Jerusalem: "The problem is that Yugoslavia ((today)) is a hard place to look for anybody."

Next on the Wiesenthal hit list is Alois Brunner, a lieutenant of Adolf Eichmann's, the executor of Hitler's "final solution." Brunner, now about 80, is thought responsible for the deportation of 128,000 Jews from Austria, France, Greece and Slovakia to the death camps. He has long been believed to be hiding behind the alias Georg Fischer in Syria. The Israeli intelligence service reportedly once sent him a package bomb that cost him four fingers. Unconfirmed reports of his death have surfaced recently.

Prosecutors may have a better chance of convicting Paul Touvier, now 78, a Nazi collaborator during the German Occupation of France who was recently indicted for "crimes against humanity" in connection with the murder of seven Jewish hostages taken by the Gestapo in Lyons in 1944. French authorities are expected to decide in the next six months whether to try Touvier. "After 20 years of stalling in the courts," said Serge Klarsfeld, the renowned Nazi hunter, "Touvier will have to answer for his crimes in a criminal court." Antanas Gecas, 77, a onetime Lithuanian auxiliary-police battalion officer now living -- quite openly -- in Edinburgh, Scotland, is similarly awaiting a decision by the British government about whether to prosecute him for his alleged participation in his battalion's murder of 15,000 Jews in Lithuania and Belorussia.

In the U.S. the Justice Department seeks to strip the citizenship of individuals who served in Nazi death camps. A case in point is Jack Reimer, an otherwise inconspicuous 74-year-old potato-chip deliveryman in Carmel, New York. U.S. authorities now believe that in 1941 and 1942 Jakob Reimer was a Nazi guard at the Trawniki SS training camp in Poland. Investigators claim that under interrogation last year he not only admitted having witnessed other Nazis massacre Jews but also acknowledged that he had opened fire into a ravine filled with the bodies of 50 Jewish men already gunned down by other guards. Upon seeing one move, he fired.

"You finished him off?" an interrogator asked.

"I'm afraid so," replied Reimer, who maintains his innocence of war crimes in the face of denaturalization proceedings.

In Vienna Simon Wiesenthal, 84, the legendary pursuer who has helped uncover scores of Nazis, is not sanguine about chasing down many of the remaining fugitives. But he argues that criminal justice is not the entire purpose of his quest. "These crimes can't really be adequately punished anyway," he says. "I see what I'm doing as a warning to the murderers of tomorrow." A warning to them, he says, "that they will never rest in peace."

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem, James L. Graff/Vienna, Julie Johnson/Washington and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles