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One of the two most wanted Nazi war criminals still at large, former death camp
doctor Aribert Heim, was in fact hunted down and assassinated
in 1982, a book to be published next week claims.
Author Danny Baz, a former Israeli air force colonel, provides no proof for his
assertion in the book, written in French and entitled "Ni oubli, ni pardon. Au coeur de la traque du dernier nazi" ("Not forgotten or forgiven -- on the trail of the last Nazi.")
The head of the Israeli branch
of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre called the
claims "completely implausible" and a leading French Nazi-hunter described the book as "total fantasy" on Saturday.
According to Baz, he was involved
in the hunt by a secret American group called The Owl,
which he said found Heim in Canada and took him to the
island of Santa Catalina, off the California coast near
Los Angeles, where he was "tried and executed."
Heim, who would now be 93, was
a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria,
where he carried out deadly medical experiments on prisoners.
He fled Germany in 1962 after
police began investigating him and has been reported living
in various parts of the world, including Latin America
and Europe, as recently as two years ago.
Heim is second on the list of
wanted war criminals issued by the Simon Weisenthal foundation
after Alois Brunner, chief aide to Adolf Eichmann, organiser
of the "final solution", who is thought to be in Syria.
Both Austria and Germany have
offered rewards for information leading to his capture.
In the preface to his book, written
in the form of a novel, Baz says The Owl was formed by
an unidentified Mauthausen survivor who made a fortune
in Alaskan oil and funded it in installments of six million
dollars each, echoing the six million Jews who died in
the Nazi Holocaust.
He says the group received secret
help from senior officials in the US Central Intelligence
Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Israeli
intelligence in hunting down and eliminating around 10
Nazi war criminals.
"This book is an absolutely
true account" of events, according to Baz. "However, certain episodes have been omitted for reasons of confidentiality."
Ephraim Zuroff of the Israeli
branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre told AFP: "It is completely implausible, not least because we have found a letter dated
from 1986 which has been authenticated as being from Heim."
"Danny Baz has been
making the same claims in the Israeli press for the past
five years, sticking to his story that his group executed
25 Nazis in the Americas, without furnishing the names
of a single one of these war criminals or offering the
slightest evidence to back up what he says," he added.
"To the best of my
knowledge and that of the German police, who are still
looking for Heim, he is still alive and hiding in either
Spain or South America."
A spokesman at the Austrian justice
ministry, which put a 50,000 euro (70,000 dollar) price
on Heim's head as recently as July, expressed surprise
at the book's claims.
"We wouldn't have offered
this reward if we had thought he was already dead," Thomas Geiblinger told AFP.
Paris-based Nazi hunter Serge
Klarsfeld told AFP that personally he thought both Heim
and Brunner were already dead, but of natural causes, calling
the offers of rewards "last-gasp efforts" to determine the fate of the two men.
"It's total fantasy," he
said of Baz's book, adding that he had never heard of The
Owl.
"If this organisation
existed, you would think I might have heard speak of it," he said.
africasia.com
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