A global effort to track down Lithuanian war criminals who helped the Nazis murder tens of thousands of Jews during World War II will end its first phase this week.
Efraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, delivered the names of 186 suspects here Tuesday to the embassies of West Germany and Australia, the countries where they may be living.
Additional names will be presented to the U.S. authorities in Washington later this week.
That will complete the research half of the project, undertaken by the Wiesenthal Center six months ago to establish the whereabouts of the suspects. Earlier lists were submitted to the United States, Canada, Britain, West Germany and Australia.
Altogether, they contain the names of 1,284 suspects, most of them Lithuanians, but a few of them Poles. According to the Wiesenthal Center, only 13 percent were previously known.
It is estimated that about one-third of the perpetrators from areas presently part of the Soviet Union escaped to Western countries.
Those escapees are believed responsible for the murders of over 200,000 Jews and the destruction of 171 Jewish communities in Lithuania, Zuroff said.
The data substantiating the lists was compiled from the testimony of approximately 200 survivors of prewar Lithuanian Jewry. It was collected between 1945 and 1949 by Leib Kunichowsky, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto. The list was only recently turned over to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem.
The list submitted to West Germany on Tuesday contains 131 names, of which 39 constitute “good material for prosecution,” Zuroff said.
According to Zuroff, that means the suspects are known to be alive and residing in West Germany.
The Australian list consists of 55 names, of which 19 are “good material,” according to Zuroff.
The organization of Lithuanian Jews in Israel demanded only this week that Lithuania emulate East Germany by admitting the role Lithuanians played in the Holocaust.
So far, the Baltic country has had nothing to say on that subject, though it is soliciting worldwide support of its proclamation of independence from the Soviet Union.
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