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SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) -- The Simon Wiesenthal Center has strong evidence that
a former SS member known as "Dr. Death" is in southern Chile or Argentina, a top Nazi hunter for the human rights organization
said Tuesday.
Efraim Zuroff, the center's director in Israel, will fly Wednesday to the southern
Chilean city of Puerto Montt, where SS doctor Aribert
Heim's daughter has lived for years.
Zuroff and center Latin America director Sergio Widder will then travel to Bariloche
across the Andes in Argentina on Friday.
Searchers think he's alive,
Zuroff said, because a bank account with $1.6 million
and other investments in Heim's name in Berlin have not
been claimed by Heim's children. To do that, they would
have to produce proof that Heim was dead.
Zuroff said the center has
received information "that has strong potential" to help efforts to find Heim.
Heim, who would be 94, tops
the center's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.
A reward of $495,000 is being offered jointly by the
center and the German and Austrian governments for information
leading to his capture.
Heim, known as "Dr.
Death," was indicted in Germany on charges he murdered hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen
concentration camp, where he was camp doctor.
"His crimes are
fully documented by himself, because he kept a log of
the operations that he carried out," Zuroff said. "He tortured many inmates before he killed them at Mauthausen, and he used body
parts of the people he killed as decorations."
After World War II, Heim was
held for two and a half years by the United States military
but was released without being tried.
He disappeared in 1962, when
he was tipped off that the indictment by German authorities
was imminent, according to Zuroff.
The Chilean government is
helping in the investigation, Zuroff said, adding that
he and Widder had a good meeting with Arturo Herrera,
director of Chile's police.
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