There is new evidence Dr. Aribert Heim, the most wanted Nazi in the world, is
living in Chile or Argentina, the chief Nazi-hunter of
the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said Thursday.
The search for Heim, 94, a former Austrian physician also known as "Dr. Death" who tops the Wiesenthal Center's list of "most wanted Nazis," has spanned nearly half a century since his disappearance in Germany in 1962
ahead of planned prosecution for war crimes.
"We have received
information from two sources that has strong potential
to locate Heim," Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director
said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post
from Chile.
During their South American
trip to locate the top Nazi, Zuroff and the center's
Latin America Director Sergio Widder were separately
accosted by middle aged men in Chile who told them to
leave the country and to stop killing Palestinians, which
they dubbed "the real genocide." The incidents ended without violence.
Attempts to broker a meeting
between the Zuroff and Heim's daughter Waltraud, who
lives in the southern Chilean city of Puerto Montt, and
who is thought to have information about her father have
not been successful, Zuroff said.
His daughter has previously
said that her father died in 1993 in Argentina, but never
provided a certificate of death or accepted her inheritance
from his property.
A €1 million bank account
in his name is active in Berlin, which Heim's children
could have received if they proved he is dead.
A reward of €316,000 is being
offered jointly by the center and the German and Austrian
governments for information leading to Heim's arrest.
In the interview, Zuroff said
he did not expect to nab Heim on his current two-week
visit, which include meetings with government officials
and ad campaigns in Chilean and Argentinian newspapers,
but that he hopes the effort bears fruit in the near
future.
"We are putting
into place the tools to have him handed over in the coming
weeks or months," Zuroff said.
Heim was indicted in Germany
for murdering hundreds of inmates by lethal injection
at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where
he was camp doctor during the Holocaust.
After World War II, he was
held for two and half years by the US military but was
released without being tried.
Heim disappeared in 1962 after
being tipped off that an indictment was imminent.
jpost.com
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