Efraim Zuroff

Efraim Zuroff in 2007

Efraim Zuroff (born August 5, 1948) is an American-born Israeli historian and Nazi hunter who has played a key role in bringing indicted Nazi and fascist war criminals to trial. Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, is the coordinator of Nazi war crimes research worldwide for the Wiesenthal Center and the author of its annual "Status Report" on the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals which includes a list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.

Quotes

• The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich. In the same spirit the decision to honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler's henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy.
  • Simon Wiesenthal Center Slams Decisions by Ukrainian Parliament to Equate Nazism and Communism and to Recognize Local Nazi Collaborators as "Freedom Fighters" (2015)

• Holodomor is definitely not a genocide. [...] Stalin decided he wanted to eliminate the kulaks – the private farmers – and get them all into collective farms, and totally change the nature of agriculture in Ukraine. [...] Ukrainians were the largest number of victims, but it wasn’t directed against them, it wasn’t a plan to eliminate the Ukrainian people. [...] There were Jews who died from the hunger, as did Belarusians and Russians – Stalin used force to get people into his system, but was not trying to exterminate the Ukrainians. That is absurd. The largest number of victims were Ukrainians, but it was not genocide. One of the biggest problems we are facing now is something called the ‘double genocide theory,’ something prevalent throughout eastern Europe, where governments are trying to say that Communist crimes amounted to genocide. [...] It was not ethnically oriented, it was economically and politically oriented – these were crimes against a particular class of people, like the kulaks – or against political opponents.
  • Zuroff: Israel should not recognize Holodomor as genocide, The Jesuralem Post, 22 January 2019

• We didn’t say a word to Poroshenko about antisemitism on the day they put a plaque up for Petliura.
  • Zuroff: Israel should not recognize Holodomor as genocide, The Jesuralem Post, 22 January 2019

• There has not been a single conviction in Ukraine against a person who committee antisemitism. This is ridiculous.
  • Zuroff: Israel should not recognize Holodomor as genocide, The Jesuralem Post, 22 January 2019