Israel: The death of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal may symbolise the approaching end of international efforts to bring executioners of the Holocaust to justice 60 years on.
Although the Israeli institute named after Wiesenthal continues to campaign for Nazi fugitives to be tracked down and prosecuted, many experts say advanced age could dispose of what few of them remain before the courts can.
"The hunt for Nazis is no longer relevant. There are no important Nazis alive any more, essentially. Any left would be too old to be of interest," Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and former Israeli justice minister, said in a radio interview.
Micha Brumlik, director of the Frankfurt-based Fritz Bauer Institute, put the number of surviving war criminals at between 400 and 500, adding that many of them live in Latin America and the Baltic states.
"The majority of these men are well over 90. I doubt whether they are still fit to stand trial," Brumlik said.
One problem is forensic. Those ex-Nazis alive today would have been junior officers or conscripts in the German military or its European allies during the second World War, making, in many cases, for a limited direct complicity in the Nazi genocide.
"The masterminds are no longer with us, leaving suspects who would have been in their 20s or teens during the Holocaust," said Gad Shimron, a veteran of Israel's Mossad intelligence service who has written about the hunt for former Nazis.
"In such cases, gathering hard evidence, or even identifying the fugitive in question, is extremely difficult," he said.
Mr Shimron cited as an example the trial in Israel of John Demjanjuk, who was accused by the United States in 1977 of being the sadistic Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible".
Subsequently extradited to Israel, Demjanjuk was tried and sentenced to death. But later evidence from the former Soviet Union undermined witness testimony from death camp survivors, and Israel's supreme court freed him in 1993.
Demjanjuk returned to the US where in June a judge ruled he could be deported anew after ruling he had served as an armed guard in three concentration camps. Demjanjuk has denied being a guard, saying he served in the Soviet army but spent most of the war as a prisoner of Germany.
Despite the increasing difficulties imposed by the passage of time, investigations continue against more than 1,250 suspected Nazis in 16 countries, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel said in a September situation report.
It said five convictions were obtained in the year ending on March 31st, all in the US.
There were 32 convictions worldwide in the four years before that, the centre said.
Prosecutors with Germany's Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes said yesterday they no longer had any notable Nazi fugitives listed as remaining in the country, but that two apparently survived abroad.
They identified the two as Aribert Heim, a concentration camp doctor believed to be in Spain, and Alois Brunner, the deputy to Adolf Eichmann, thought to have taken refuge in Syria.