SANTIAGO, May 19 (Reuters) - The most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought
to be alive, Dr. Aribert Heim, is likely hiding in southern
Chile's Patagonia region, leading Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff
said on Monday.
Heim, nicknamed "Dr Death" for killing hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria
with injections of gasoline or poison direct to the heart,
has been on the run for 46 years since evading police
in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution.
An Austrian doctor with Adolf
Hitler's dreaded police unit the SS, Heim removed organs
from victims without anesthetic. He even kept the skull
of one man he decapitated as a paperweight.
Heim would be 93, though his
family claims that he died in 1993.
Zuroff, director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem who has tracked down dozens
of fugitive Nazis over nearly three decades, believes
he has narrowed his search.
"Chile is one of
the more likely possibilities," he told Reuters in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
"Part of the reason
for the interest in Chile is the presence of his daughter,
who lives in Puerto Montt. He may be in Patagonia, but
at this point there's nothing definitive," he added, listing Argentina and Brazil as other possibilities.
Puerto Montt, 657 miles (1,058
km) south of the capital Santiago, is the gateway to
Chile's remote, picturesque Patagonia region of glacial
lakes, towering snowcapped peaks and volcanoes that are
a magnet for adventure tourism.
Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge
in Latin America after World War Two, many lured to Argentina
thanks to the open-door policies of General Juan Domingo
Peron, who had fascist sympathies, as well as to Chile
and Brazil.
ESCAPE TO ARGENTINA
Josef Mengele, the "Angel
of Death" at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died
in Brazil in 1979.
Zuroff believes Heim has kept
on the move in recent years, and sees his capture as
the ultimate prize of the world's remaining fugitive
Nazis. He thought he had located Heim in Chile in August,
but it turned out to be a false alarm.
"He is the most
important war criminal most likely to be alive," Zuroff said. "He murdered .... tortured hundreds of inmates, he used body parts for experiments.
In that respect you could say he's a symbol of the Nazi's
perversion of science, of medicine."
Holocaust survivors remember
Heim relishing seeing the fear of death in the eyes of
his victims. After administering lethal injections, he
would time death with a stopwatch.
At age 93, the time to catch
Heim is running out.
"Our fear is that
one of the worst criminals of the Holocaust, a person
who personally murdered hundreds of innocent people,
will have eluded justice," Zuroff said.
"This is something
that will only encourage future genocide and mass murderers,
and something which we find to be a travesty of justice." alertnet.org
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