Interview with Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff

The meaning of heroism and the art of the hunt

Seek justice, defend the oppressed,

Take up the cause of the fatherless.

—Isaiah 1:17

The value of the hero’s journey is defined not merely by the heroism of the hero but by the villainy of the villain. A greater evil makes a greater hero. Call it the Goliath rule. The ancient Greek heros, or “protector,” referred to the offspring of a human and a god. But Homer elevated the concept. In The Mortal Hero: An introduction to Homer’s Iliad, University of California, Davis professor of comparative literature Seth Schein writes:

Homer’s attitude toward heroism can be seen in the very word heros, which elsewhere denotes a figure worshipped in hero cults, but in the Iliad signifies a warrior who lives and dies in the pursuit of honor and glory.

Homeric heroism is not a matter of ancestry but the sum of our decisions. Achilles makes one of his most fateful decisions in Book 9 of the Iliad, where he realizes the choice whether to fight the Trojans is a choice between glory and the good life.

If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies…
true, but the life that’s left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.

Achilles chooses glory, but Homer not only rejects the idea that a hero is a dead man worshipped by Greek hero cults—his hero is a man of action—he also rejects the classic concept of glory itself. When Achilles defeats Prince Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior, it should be the peak of glory. Instead it is a disgrace. He drags Hector’s corpse behind his chariot, defiling it, as Homer turns our eye to the agony this causes Hector’s family. And when Hector’s father King Priam sneaks behind enemy lines into Achilles’ tent to beg for his son’s body, Achilles breaks down and weeps.

The swift-footed hero, physically victorious in war, is now defeated, emotionally, by a feeble old man. It should be a disgrace, but it is one of his most honorable moments. Greek mythology did not share Judeo-Christian values. The gods of Olympus were animals. The sociopathic wrath of Achilles was legendary. Yet despite this, we still find the familiar theme of the noble-hearted hero even in a bloodthirsty killer like Achilles.

Some have argued that the concept of the hero is universal across cultures and time. In the 1936 book The Hero, A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, Lord Raglan developed the concept of the “mythic hero archetype,” listing up to 22 potentially shared traits. In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell took this further, arguing that heroes share the same story too, the hero’s quest or monomyth, and that each stage is also the same: the call to adventure, aid from a donor, path of trials, inner revelation or apotheosis, final victory and lessons to take back home. You can find this pattern in classic literature, Disney movies and even pop songs.

But the concept of the hero has also been critiqued. In his 1841 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle argued heroes and great men chart the course of history. Military leaders, artists and captains of industry (a term he coined). Karl Marx later argued history is instead steered by cultural and economic forces rather than great men, and in his 1896 The Study of Sociology, Herbert Spencer wrote:

The genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.

As we came to understand ourselves as a species, our collective formulation of the hero evolved, not unlike the evolution of the concept of God from benevolent dictator to democratic pacifist. Heroes were once hereditary demigods, then men of action, then men guided by vast societal forces. But as Raglan and Campbell have argued, there have always been certain universals, the reflection of that which is best about us—courage, honor, kindness.

I myself grew up with heroes such as Beowulf, Achilles, Arjuna, Siegfried and the bogatyr Dobrynya Nikitich. But as noted above, heroes are also defined by the evil they confront, which is why there’s a special place in my heart for the American myths of Captain America and Indiana Jones, because these guys fight the ultimate evil—Nazis.

As readers will know from my essay “Kill Nazis but slowly,” I love comic books. I love superhero movies. And so one of my favorite scenes from any superhero movie is from X-Men: First Class, the scene where Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto), played by Michael Fassbender, arrives at a bar in Villa Gesell, Argentina to exact justice on the Nazis who killed his mother in Auschwitz.

Part of what makes such a scene so good is not just that the evil represented is the worst, but that it is real. For this reason, even more than Indiana Jones, I grew up admiring Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr and the Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.

Nazi hunters sometimes work on their own. Others form groups, most famously the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The most famous of all are the late Tuviah Friedman, the late Elliot Welles, Yaron Svoray, Ian Sayer, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld—and Efraim Zuroff. Among their victories:

• Adolf Eichmann, hunted by Wiesenthal, captured by Mossad in Argentina in 1960, tried and executed in Israel in 1962.

• Josef Mengele, “Angel of Death,” hunted by Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds and Mossad until his accidental death in Brazil in 1979.

• Klaus Barbie, “Butcher of Lyon,” extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983.

• Herberts Cukurs, “Butcher of Riga,” killed by Mossad agents in Uruguay in 1965.

• Dinko Šakić, hunted to Argentina by Zuroff, extradited to Croatia in 1998, sentenced to 20 years and died in 2008.

Zuroff is an American-born Israeli historian and currently the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. He obtained his master’s degree in Holocaust studies at Hebrew University, where he also completed his doctorate degree on the U.S. Orthodox Jewish response to the Holocaust. He later became a researcher hunting Nazis for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Zuroff played a key role in the arrest and prosecution of Dinko Šakić, the Croatian Ustaše official who headed the Jasenovac concentration camp. His prosecution in Argentina was the first-ever trial of a Nazi war criminal in a post-Communist country.

He is the author of several books, studies and over 450 articles. His work has been published in multiple scholarly journals as well as The Los Angeles Times, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, The Boston Globe and Haaretz. He is the co-founder of Operation Last Chance, which offers financial rewards for information to help find Nazi war criminals. He has gone to Rwanda to help local authorities bring the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide to justice. He has also been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Zuroff is the real deal. In every sense, a true hero. Courage, honor, kindness. In our conversation, we discussed his background, the fascinating details of how he actually goes about hunting Nazis, the incredible story of how he helped captured and bring to justice Dinko Šakić and much more. Enjoy.

Part One:

Part two: