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The world’s most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Dr. Aribert Heim, may be hiding out
in Chilean Patagonia, Jerusalem-based Efraim Zuroff of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) told the Patagonia Times
Tuesday. The SWC is an international Jewish human rights
organization with offices in the United States, Argentina,
France and Israel.
“We’ve been working on this relatively hard over the last three and a half years.
Some of the hints we’ve received were in the direction
of Chile. Probably the best hint to date was in Chile,
but unfortunately it was not Heim. But our working assumption
now is that he’s now somewhere in between Puerto Montt
and Bariloche,” said Zuroff.
Heim, known by the sinister
moniker “Dr. Death,” is an Austrian-born physician who
volunteered for the Waffen-SS in 1940. A year later he
was sent to northern Austria’s infamous Mauthausen concentration
camp, where he reportedly killed hundreds of prisoners,
often injecting toxins directly into their hearts. Like
Auschwitz’ Josef Mengele, dubbed “The Angel of Death,”
Heim is believed to have performed cruel experiments
on some of his victims.
In testimony delivered in
1950, a former Mauthasuen prisoner named Karl Lotter
described an incident involving Heim and a Jewish teenager
sent to the Nazi doctor because of a foot inflammation.
Instead of treating the injury, according to Lotter,
Heim anesthetized the young man, cut him open, removed
one of his kidneys, dissected another, castrated him
and later had the victim beheaded. Heim reportedly kept
the teenager’s skull in order to display its “perfect
teeth.”
U.S. soldiers captured Heim
in 1945 and sent him to a prison camp. But he was later
released after his file was allegedly altered to cover
up his connection to Mauthausen. In 1962, to avoid prosecution,
Heim went into hiding. Over the next several decades
he is thought to have traveled between Europe and South
America.
Heim’s family claims he died
of cancer in 1993 in Argentina. A former Israeli Air
Force commander named Dany Baz tells a different story
in his 2007 memoir “Not Forgotten or Forgiven: On the
Trail of the Last Nazi.” Baz, a supposed former member
of a secret Israeli death squad known as The Owl, wrote
that in 1982 he and his colleagues kidnapped Heim from
Canada and then executed the former Nazi official in
California.
The SWC, nevertheless, is
convinced Heim is still alive and kicking. “There’s a
bank account in Berlin with 1.2 million Euros (US$1.8
million) that his kids could get simply by proving that
he’s dead. But they’ve never taken the money. That’s
one indication,” said Efraim Zuroff. “We’re working together
with different police (departments) very closely, and
with a special task force on Heim, and the working assumption
is that he’s still alive.”
In 2002 the SWC launched an
effort dubbed Operation Last Chance, offering hefty rewards
for information leading to the arrests of the few remaining
Nazi war criminals thought still thought to be at large.
In late 2005 the hunt for Heim led to Spain. Clues now
suggest Heim – who would be 93 at this point – may be
in southern Chile, near Puerto Montt, where his daughter
Waltraud has lived since the 1970s.
“We have contacted with the
Chilean authorities,” said Zurorff. “When I was in Santiago
in December I met with the head of the police unit that
deals with this and the German police also have a good
connection with the Chilean police. So they’re up to
date more or less”
Efforts to locate Heim apparently
do not involve the German Embassy in Chile. A source
there said the Embassy has “nothing to do” with the search
and clarified that information about the Nazi’s alleged
presence in Patagonia is no more than “rumor” at this
point.
The hunt for Heim has, however,
attracted the attention the Chilean Senate’s Human Rights
Commission. Socialist Party (PS) Sen. Jaime Naranjo,
who heads the Commission, insists that Chile has a “moral
debt” given its history of allowing former Nazis entrance
into the country.
“Our country has a moral debt
with those who suffered from the holocaust, since in
1963, in one of the darkest days in our history, the
Supreme Court refused Israel’s request to extradite Nazi
war criminal Walter Rauff, the creator of a system to
exterminate people using gas trucks,” Naranjo noted in
a press release last November. “(Rauff) lived here tranquilly
until 1984, which is an embarrassment and an affront
to his millions of victims and their families.”
Just last month the SWC moved
Heim to the top spot on its most-wanted list. Rounding
out the top five Nazi war criminals on the list are Ivan
Demjanjuk, Dr. Sandor Kepiro, Milivoj Ašner and Soeren
Kam.
“(Heim’s) arrest would be
a fantastic achievement because he is the most important
Nazi war criminal still likely to be alive,” said Zuroff.
“His trial would be the most important trial of a Nazi
war criminal in the last 30 years. He’s a symbol of the
perversion of medicine by the Nazis. (Josef) Mengele
was never caught as you know, so his trial would be like
a mini… he’s like a mini Mengele so to speak.”
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