BADEN-BADEN, Germany (AP) — Karl Lotter,
a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration
camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched
SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man.
It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation.
Heim asked him about himself and why he was he so fit. The
young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.
Then, instead of treating the prisoner's
foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him,
took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said.
The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so
that Heim could keep it on display.
"He needed the head because
of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later
that was included in an Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest
uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."
But Heim managed to avoid prosecution,
his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his
time at Mauthausen, and today he is the most wanted Nazi
war criminal on a list of hundreds who the Simon Wiesenthal
Center estimates are still free.
Heim would be 93 today and "We
have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi hunter. He spoke
in a telephone interview from Jerusalem ahead of the center's
plans to release a list of the most-sought fugitives on Wednesday,
and to open a media campaign in South America this summer
highlighting the $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted
by the center along with Germany and Austria.
According to an advance copy of the
list obtained by the AP, the most wanted, after Heim, are:
John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which
says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps;
Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the
wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj
Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria
and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of
Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren Kam,
a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination
of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was
blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient
evidence for murder charges.
The hunt for Heim has taken investigators
from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the
world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring
Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from
Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and
Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the
Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia
on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.
Thousands of German war criminals
were prosecuted in West Germany after World War II. In the
1970s Western democracies began a hunt in earnest for Eastern
European collaborators who had fled West claiming to be refugees
from communism, and the end of the Cold War gave access to
a trove of communist files in the 1990s.
"All of a sudden there
was pressure on countries like Latvia and Estonia to put
these people on trial," Zuroff said. "So two times in the past 30 years we've been given a tremendous infusion of new
energy and new possibilities."
The Wiesenthal Center's previous annual
survey counted 1,019 investigations under way worldwide.
The number is lower this year and inexact because not all
countries responded, but new investigations were up from
63 to 202, Zuroff said.
Still, a lack of political will in
many countries, and what Zuroff called the "misplaced-sympathy syndrome" — reluctance to pursue aging suspects — has meant that few people have been
brought to trial and convicted.
Lotter, the witness to Heim's atrocity,
was in Mauthausen because he fought with the communists in
the Spanish Civil War. His statement from the 1950 arrest
warrant was viewed by the AP at the National Archives in
College Park, Md.
Now that the necessary evidence is
in place, numerous witness statements have been taken and
Heim has been indicted, all that's left is to find him.
Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg,
Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three
years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS and
was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz,
Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.
While there, witnesses told investigators,
he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such
gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into
Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the fastest.
But while Wasicky was brought to trial
by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to
death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders,
Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.
Heim's file in the Berlin Document
Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was
apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen,
according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the
AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration
camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.
This "cannot be correct," the
indictment says. "It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same
time to the (concentration camp) was concealed."
There is no indication who might have
been responsible.
The U.S. Army Intelligence file on
Heim could shed light on his wartime and postwar activities,
and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to the U.S.
National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such
that staff have so far only been able to access about half
of them, and these don't include the file requested by the
AP.
Heim was relatively well-known, however,
having been a national hockey player in Austria before the
war, and there were plenty of witnesses from his time at
Mauthausen.
Austrian authorities sent the 1950
arrest warrant to American authorities in Germany who initially
agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians, in a Dec.
21, 1950 letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace
him.
What happened next is unclear, but
in 1958 Heim apparently felt comfortable enough to buy a
42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it in his own
name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase
documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby
resort town of Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic
— also under his own name, Heister said.
In 1961 German authorities were alerted
and began an investigation, but when they finally went to
arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him — he apparently
had been tipped off.
Heim continued to live off the rents
collected from the Berlin apartments until 1979 when the
building was confiscated by German authorities.
Proof that he is alive may lie in
the fact that no one has claimed his estate. Heim has two
sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but whose
current whereabouts are unknown.
In Frankfurt, Heim's lawyer said he
still officially represents the fugitive, but has not heard
from him for 20 years and has "no clue" to his whereabouts.
Asked in a telephone interview if
Heim was dead, Fritz Steinacker said only: "I don't know."
Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would
not comment when telephoned at his Baden-Baden villa.
"All I can say is that
it has been implied that I am in contact with my father,
and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation, and I can't enter into that."
Associated Press investigative researcher
Randy Herschaft contributed to this report from New York
and Washington, D.C.
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