JERUSALEM — The world’s predominant Nazi-hunting group has taken the United States to task over its failure to prosecute a member of a notorious Nazi unit who lived quietly in Minnesota for decades.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s annual report, released Monday, lowered its ranking of the US’s Nazi-hunting efforts from A to B. It was the first time the US has been ranked so low.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the center’s Israel office, said the ranking was in part because the US took no action against Michael Karkoc.
An Associated Press investigation in 2013 found that Karkoc, a commander of a Nazi SS-led unit accused of atrocities, has been living in Minnesota since shortly after World War II. Zuroff cites the AP story in his report.
A German investigation began after the AP published the story establishing that Karkoc commanded a unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, then lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States a few years after World War II.
This year’s report praised Germany for loosening criteria to make it easier to prosecute former Nazis. For decades prosecutors could only go after those suspected of specific involvement in specific atrocities. Now anyone who served in a death camp or a mobile killing squad during World War II can be prosecuted as an accessory to murder.
Six million Jews were killed by Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust of World War II, wiping out a third of world Jewry.