VIENNA: Almost 30 years after Austria’s last Nazi trial ended in acquittal, prosecutors here have begun searching for surviving Austrian SS soldiers and policemen linked to World War II atrocities.

The investigation was prompted by a list of 47 names handed to the government in August by Efraim Zuroff, an Israeli who taken on the mantle of retired Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

The men he named served in SS battalions stationed in Salzburg and Vienna who were sent to France, Italy, Russia and Poland, where thousands of Jews were murdered in the ghetto of Bialystok between 1941 and 1943.

Like Wiesenthal, Zuroff says no country with Nazi war criminals has done less to punish them than Austria and has challenged the state to find the men before they die.

“In Germany people who served in these units were investigated,” said Zuroff, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.

“But in Austria there was not the political will to persecute them, it was was not perceived as possible or a popular thing to do.”

The news magazine Profil has tracked down three of the men on the list.

They found one in hospital recovering from a stroke, and another who had served at Bialystok in an old-age home in Vienna.

Now 83, he is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and says he has no recollection of the war years.

The third was the former commander of SS unit 16 which historians accuse of murdering 2,000 partisans in the mountains of neighbouring northern Italy.

Members of the unit account for a third of the names on Zuroff’s list, but the 85-year-old former commander living in the southern city of Klagenfurt said his men merely carried out orders and there were no massacres.

“War is war. But we played according to military rules and we endured hard times too,” he said, adding that he learnt of the Holocaust after the war when he was captured by the British.

The justice ministry admits that is has been slower to find the men.

“I’m sure people are still alive who were involved in war crimes, but that is not the point. The point is whether you can get evidence against them,” said Matthias Gruenewald of the ministry’s team dealing with Nazi crimes.

Not only suspects but witnesses still alive could be sickly and forgetful, Gruenewald said, and added that a similar search for 100 suspects 10 years ago did not lead to one prosecution.

Forty-four were still alive, but prosecutors found enough evidence to charge only two and both were too ill to stand trial, he said.

Gruenewald said the SS policemen could find reprieve in laws no longer on the statute books because Austria’s penal code compels courts to compare past and present law and judge according to the one most favourable to the accused.—AFP