The Simon Wiesenthal Center today welcomed the arrest in Sttutgart, Germany of Auschwitz SS-Death's Head guard Hans (Antanas) Lipschis, number four on the Center's most recent "Most Wanted" list. In a statement issued here today by its chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center noted Lipschis' lengthy service, from October 1941 until January 1945, in the most notorious of Nazi death camps, where approximately 1,300,000 inmates were murdered, among them approximately 1,100,000 Jews.

According to Zuroff:

"The arrest of Lipschis is a welcome first step in what we hope will be a large number of successful legal measures taken by the German judicial authorities against death camp personnel and those who served in the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), which together murdered more than three million Jews during the Holocaust. The arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, who was the first Nazi war criminal convicted in Germany after many decades, without evidence being presented to the court of a specific crime with a specific victim. The importance of that verdict is that it provides a legal basis for the prosecution of many Holocaust peretrators, who spent lengthy periods in carrying out mass murder, but would otherwise have escaped prosecution. In the wake of the Demjanjuk conviction, the Center launched "Operation Last Chance II" which offers rewards of up to 25,000 euros for information leading to the prosecution of such Nazi war criminals."

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).