BERLIN - The Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized German judicial authorities in
Baden-Baden on Friday, accusing them of obstructing the
hunt for former Nazi SS doctor Aribert Heim.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Jewish human rights organization, said
the judge in charge of the case had disallowed German
police requests on several occasions for telephone taps
of Heim's relatives and an old friend who had been in
contact with the fugitive.
"We only recently
learned of the extent of the obstructionism," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Israel, saying such taps in other
cases were "routinely approved."
The spokesman for the Baden-Baden
state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds
of counts of murder in 1979, did not immediately return
phone calls for comment.
In the case of the old friend
from school, the judge decided that the information about
his contact with Heim was too old to warrant a telephone
tap, according to documents supplied by the Wiesenthal
Center.
The friend, a fellow doctor
living in Vienna, Austria, told authorities in 1998 that
he had received a letter from Heim in the early 1980s.
Taps have been approved in
other cases in the Heim investigation.
Zuroff said his office sent
out a statement Friday , the day before what would be
Heim's 94th birthday , to highlight the problems faced
in tracking down the Nazi doctor.
"We hope to bring
to the attention of the authorities that there are legal
obstacles which are preventing the proper investigation
of the case, and preventing steps which we feel would
contribute significantly to finding doctor Heim," he said.
Heim was known for his sadism
as a doctor at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration camp.
He was able to flee before authorities came to arrest
him in the southern town of Baden-Baden in 1962, however,
and his whereabouts today is unknown.
Heim tops the Wiesenthal Center's
list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.
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