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If he is still alive, former SS medical officer Aribert Heim is 93 years old,
but his age will not protect the alleged Nazi war criminal
from justice, vows Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff.
Mr Zuroff is in South America this week for the launch of Operation Last Chance,
a scheme to flush out the remaining Nazi criminals who
took refuge there in the postwar years.
But the investigators are working against time: most of the alleged criminals
are in their late 80s or 90s.
The operation, already under
way in Europe, offers potential informants a reward of
$10,000 for any information that results in the conviction
of a Nazi criminal.
Heim is the number one target
in South America and the total bounty for his capture
is $448,000.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
which has decades of experience tracking down Nazis,
says that if Heim were brought to justice, it would be
the most significant World War II war crimes trial for
three decades.
Cruel methods
The Austrian-born physician
is said to have murdered hundreds of inmates while serving
as a doctor at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria,
where he earned the nickname "Dr Death".
He is accused of killing Jews using exceptionally cruel methods. According to
Holocaust survivors, he performed operations and amputations
without anaesthetic to see how much pain his victims
could endure.
Injecting victims straight into the heart with petrol, water or poison were said
to have been his favoured method at Mauthausen. And when
he was "bored", he apparently timed patients' deaths with a stopwatch.
After World War II, Heim practised
medicine in the German town of Baden-Baden until 1962,
when he was indicted as a war criminal and fled the country.
Over the years there have
been alleged sightings of him in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile
and more recently in Spain.
'Closer than ever'
Mr Zuroff says new information has led him to believe that he is still alive
and living somewhere in South America.
"It would be foolish to make any rash predictions, but I think we are closer than
ever before [to catching him]," Mr Zuroff told the BBC News website from Argentina.
"Recent indications
directed to me - I'd rather not say what they are - point
to the direction [of Latin America]. We have been getting
quite a bit of information, some of it has been worthless
and some of it serious."
Other countries in the region
that have signed up to Operation Last Chance are Chile,
Brazil and Uruguay.
"
We don't know how many Nazi war criminals are in those
countries, but we think it's dozens, if not hundreds.
We have expectations of catching all of them but if we
only get Heim, it will be a success," says
Mr Zuroff.
Heim's family say that he died in the 1990s. But in 2005, European investigators
discovered a bank account in his name, which is reported
to contain $1m. The fact that Heim's family had not claimed
the money led them to believe that he was still alive.
Reward
Mr Zuroff is now in Chile,
where he believes Heim's daughter lives. He is optimistic
that the size of the bounty could prove crucial to his
capture.
"In South America, this is a large sum of money. We have already seen that this
approach can be successful. We saw it in the Schwammberger
case," he says.
The offer of a reward in the late 1980s led investigators to notorious camp commander
Josef Schwammberger who was extradited from Argentina
to end his days in a German prison.
"Maybe this could
even convince Heim's daughter to finally reveal his whereabouts," says Mr Zuroff. "Surely she would prefer that he not be the subject of a headhunt by all sorts
of people who want to get the money."
The man who took over from
chief Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal when he died in 2005,
believes that recent political changes in South America
have greatly improved the climate for unearthing former
war criminals.
In Europe, however, he says
he has encountered a frustrating lack of political will
to bring alleged Nazi war criminals to justice.
The scheme, launched in 2002,
is operating in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Austria,
Belarus, Germany, Hungary and Ukraine.
So far, it has yielded the
names of 488 suspects from 20 countries, the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre says, including Heim. Of that number 99 have been
submitted to local prosecutors.
'Complicity'
"This has led to
three arrest warrants, two extradition requests and five
solid cases, including that of Heim, that we hope will
be brought to trial," says Mr Zuroff.
The strongest case in Europe
is that of 94-year-old Milivoji Asner. According to the
Centre, the notorious police chief of Pozega, Croatia,
played a key role in the persecution and murder of hundreds
of innocent civilians.
Following his exposure by
Operation Last Chance in 2004, he escaped to Klagenfurt
Austria, where he currently lives.
"The scheme has
not been as successful as we hoped in the practical sense
of achieving convictions," says Mr Zuroff.
But, he insists that the operation
was having "enormous impact" on what he describes as a struggle for historical truth in post-communist Europe,
where there is an issue of local complicity in the murder
of Jews.
Heim's wanted poster shows
him as he might look today. He may still have his distinctive
duelling scar running down the right side of his face,
from his mouth to the corner of his ear, or he may have
taken the precaution of appearance-altering surgery.
If he is caught, some may
argue that it is wrong to put an a frail old man on trial
for alleged crimes committed more than half his lifetime
ago.
To this, Mr Zuroff has only
one thing to say: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. Killers
don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain
age. And if we were to set a chronological limit on prosecutions,
it would basically say you could get away with genocide."
bbc.co.uk
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