Nazi Hunters More Than Double Reward to $25,000

Operation Last Chance, a campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hunt down Nazi war criminals, has increased its reward for information from $10,000 to $25,000 weeks after extending its campaign from Europe to South America.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has more than doubled its reward for information leading to the capture of Nazi war criminals from $10,000 to $25,000 under its "Operation Last Chance" campaign to bring the perpetrators to justice before they die of old age.

Efraim Zuroff, the director of the center, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that a Jewish donor from the US had provided the funding in the last two weeks to boost the standard reward offer.

"We've been able to increase the prize now for the regular cases from $10,000 to $25,000," Zuroff said. "The cash offer has proven very successful because without it we wouldn't have got one-hundredth of the attention that we got and it's the media attention that ultimately yields the information."

He said that since Operation Last Chance was set up in 2002, the best information had come from people who didn't want the money. The Center had only ever paid the reward on one occasion, and then only half of it, $5,000.

The increase in the reward comes weeks after the Wiesenthal Center extended its campaign to South America to hunt the criminals and collaborators who escaped there after World War II.

Zuroff said there were "at least dozens" of Nazi war criminals still alive today in South America, mostly in Argentina but also in Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay.