Top 10 Nazi war crimes suspects

Each year the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Nazi hunter, publishes a list of its most wanted surviving Nazi suspects. They are “wanted” because they have not been punished, even if they have been tried. In some cases it is unclear whether they are still alive. The 2009 version of list includes:

IVAN (JOHN) DEMJANJUK:

Accused in 1977 of being the infamous “Ivan the Terrible”, a Treblinka extermination camp guard, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death, then freed on subsequent evidence. He returned to the United States in 1993 but his citizenship was revoked in 2002 after a court convicted him of working at three other camps. He was extradited to Germany in May 2009 to stand trial in Munich.

HEINRICH BOERE:

Accused of killing three Dutch civilians in 1944 as a member of an SS hit squad that targeted anti-Nazi resistance fighters, Boere confessed after being captured by U.S. forces. Escaping to Germany, he was sentenced to death in absentia in Holland in 1949. After refusing a 1980 Dutch extradition request, a German court indicted him in April 2008. Boere went on trial in Aachen on Oct. 31.

DR SANDOR KEPIRO:

Serbia's war crimes prosecutor in 2008 requested an investigation into the Hungarian suspected of committing genocide against Jews and Serbs in World War II. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1944; that verdict, and his acquittal later the same year came when Hungary was under fascist rule and an ally of Nazi Germany. In 2007, 95-year-old Kepiro was questioned about allegedly relaying orders to his militias who killed four civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1942.

MILIVOJ ASNER:

Alleged to have been a senior security official during the 1941-45 rule of Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, Asner says he ordered wartime deportations of Jews and Serbs to their homelands, not to death camps in Croatia. Asner moved to Austria when a Nazi-tracking group found him living in Croatia in 2005. Austria previously rejected a Croatian extradition request on grounds that Asner's physical and mental condition was fragile.

SOEREN KAM:

The Danish-born former SS member is accused of helping Nazi forces in Denmark and of the 1943 murder of anti-Nazi Danish journalist Carl Henrik Clemmensen in Copenhagen. Kam fled to Germany after the war, obtaining German citizenship in 1956. Following his 2006 arrest, a German court delayed a decision on his extradition to Denmark.

KLAAS CARL FABER:

Accused of serving in the German Security Service in Holland, he was sentenced to death in Holland for murders of prisoners of Westerbork transit camp and Groningen prison in 1944; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1948. He escaped from prison to Germany in 1952. In July 2009 it was reported that Berlin might want to prosecute Faber after all.

KAROLY ZENTAI:

Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest. He is also accused of taking part in "manhunts, persecution, deportation and murder of Jews. He immigrated to Australia in the early 1950s and was arrested by Federal Police in July 2005. An Australia court ruled that he was eligible for extradition to Hungary and the government approved the extradition on Nov. 12.

MIKHAIL GORSHKOW:

Alleged to have been an interrogator for the Gestapo, he is accused of helping kill about 3,000 men, women and children in the Slutsk ghetto in Minsk, Belarus. Estonian-born Gorshkow became a U.S. citizen in 1953 but was denaturalized in 2002 and is under investigation in Estonia.

ALGIMANTAS DAILIDE:

Dailide volunteered for Lithuania's Nazi-backed secret police, the Saugumas, but said he was only a humble clerk. Entering the United States in 1950, he worked as a real estate agent. In March 2006 Lithuania convicted the then 86-year-old of handing over Jews attempting to flee from the Vilnius ghetto. A Lithuanian court sentenced him to five years in jail, but suspended his sentence due to his health.

HARRY MANNIL:

The Caracas-based car sales millionaire and member of Venezuelan high society is accused – but denies – arresting Jews and communists who were later executed by the Nazis. Cleared of the accusations by Estonia, he remains on a U.S. watch list barring him from entering the country.

Two further people accused by Nazi hunters, but thought likely to be dead:

ALOIS BRUNNER:

Right-hand man to the Gestapo's “technician of death” Adolf Eichmann, he helped organize deportations of Jews to death camps and would probably top the Center's list of most-wanted Nazi criminals if it did not think the chances of his still being alive to be slim.

ARIBERT HEIM:

Heim killed hundreds at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of poison and removed organs from victims without anesthetic. He was reported in February to have died in Cairo in 1992, aged 78. However the Center says that without conclusive forensic proof of his death, it is still not possible to close his case.