It is a race against time: can 94-year-old Aribert Heim be brought to justice
before he dies? Now, as Cahal Milmo reports, Nazi-hunters
believe they may have found him – in Chile
In September 1962, detectives arrived to arrest a wealthy gynaecologist in the
West German spa resort of Baden-Baden. Unfortunately,
the quality of their information was surpassed by that
of their quarry. Aribert Heim, a man whose experiments
in a Nazi concentration camp earned him the moniker of "Doctor Death" among inmates, had disappeared hours earlier.
The vanishing trick performed that day by Heim, then
a respectable member of society in one of West Germany's
most well-heeled cities and the owner of a property
portfolio that included an apartment block in Berlin,
was the beginning of a 46-year flight from justice
for the world's most wanted Nazi war criminal. It has
reputedly taken him through Egypt, Uruguay, Spain,
Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
It is a fugitive's journey
defined by the ability of Heim, who stands accused of
the medicalised murder of hundreds of inmates in the
most gruesome circumstances, to stay one step ahead of
his pursuers. His repeated evasion of would-be captors
including Mossad, the Israeli secret service, dates back
to the end of the Second World War when he was inexplicably
– and according to Nazi hunters "suspiciously" – released without charge by the American military.
It is also a saga that could
be about to come to an end. Yesterday, two representatives
of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
the body which has helped bring hundreds of Holocaust
perpetrators to trial, stepped off a plane in southern
Chile armed with information they believe could finally
lead to the capture of a 94-year-old man with grey eyes
and a distinctive duelling scar who stands accused of
some of the most grotesque acts of cruelty in Hitler's
Reich.
Efraim Zuroff, director of
the centre in the Israeli capital, told The Independent
that he had received "good information", understood to include a potential sighting, to indicate that Heim is alive
and hiding in or around the Chilean city of Puerto Montt
in the heart of Patagonia, where his daughter, Waltraud,
64, has lived for decades.
Mr Zuroff said: "There
is information we have received which gives us good grounds
for thinking that Heim is in Chile. We have received
very good co-operation from Chilean and Argentinian authorities."
The arrival of Mr Zuroff and
his Buenos Aires-based colleague Sergio Widder in Puerto
Montt, a dramatically located port on the Pacific Ocean,
is indicative of the urgency of capturing Heim and what
the Wiesenthal Centre believes are hundreds of Holocaust
criminals in their eighties or nineties who remain at
large. In 2005, the organisation launched Operation Last
Chance, a project to track down and arrest at least 300
suspects with the help of cash rewards and newspaper
ads.
Heim, the son of an Austrian
policeman who trained as a doctor in Vienna and joined
the Nazi party three years before the Anschluss, remains
the most cherished target of the Nazi hunters. Mr Zuroff,
an American-born historian who succeeded Simon Wiesenthal
as director of the centre, said last year: "We have expectations of catching all of them but if we only get Heim, it will
be a success."
A reward of £250,000 for Heim's
arrest is being offered jointly by the centre and the
German and Austrian governments.
It is the barbarity in the
name of medicine carried out by Heim, who served as a
doctor in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen
camps after joining the Waffen SS, that has secured his
position at the top of the list of surviving war criminals
issued by Operation Last Chance.
He is accused of conducting
his most gruesome experiments during his two-month stay
in Mauthausen, close to the Austrian town of Linz, in
1941. Aided by an SS pharmacist, Erich Wasicky, he murdered
hundreds of inmates by injecting various liquids, including
gasoline, phenol, water and poison, into the hearts of
prisoners to see which killed them the fastest. He used
a stopwatch to time the results, recording them meticulously
in a ledger.
Heim, whose experimentation
was compared to that of the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele,
also carried out amputations on prisoners without anaesthetic
to see what level of pain a human could endure before
expiring. Organs were removed from conscious patients,
including one case where the liver, spleen and bowel
were excised.
Mr Zuroff said: "His
crimes are fully documented by himself because he kept
a log of the operations that he carried out."
Testimony from captive orderlies
who witnessed Heim's activities showed that he used body
parts from his victims as decorations, once offering
the camp commandant a present of seat coverings fashioned
from human skin.
Karl Lotter, a political prisoner
working at the Mauthausen clinic, described Heim's murder
of an 18-year-old Jewish boy who came to have a swollen
foot treated. After asking why he was so fit and being
told it was because of playing football and swimming,
Heim anaesthetised him. He castrated the boy, dissected
a kidney and removed the second, then decapitated him.
The head was boiled to remove the flesh so Heim could
use the skull as a paperweight.
Mr Lotter said: "Of
all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr Heim was the most
horrible."
After serving the rest of
the war in Finland, Heim returned to Germany towards
the end of the conflict and was arrested by the US military
and questioned by war crimes investigators. His colleague,
Wasicky, was tried and sentenced to death with other
Mauthausen personnel in 1946 but Heim, whose conduct
was known to his captors, was released in December 1947.
An indictment drawn up by
German authorities in 1979 stated that Heim's US military
file had been altered to remove any mention of Mauthausen,
stating he was on a different SS attachment during the
relevant dates. The indictment stated: "It is possible that through data-manipulation the short assignment ... to the
concentration camp was concealed." Operation Last Chance described the decision not to prosecute Heim as "quite suspicious".
From 1947 until his flight
into hiding in 1962, Heim was able to slip into a respectable
existence, starting a family and setting up his gynaecology
practice in Bad Nauheim, near Frankfurt, and then Baden-Baden,
a little further south in the Black Forest. In 1958,
he felt secure enough in his position to buy a 42-flat
apartment block in Berlin and list it in his own name.
He had enough friends to ensure
he was tipped off when the police moved in to arrest
him four years later. It was the start of a long game
of cat and mouse during which Heim is alleged to have
worked as a doctor for the Egyptian police force and
lived for many years on the Costa Brava.
Investigators have released
pictures of their target, including a photofit to show
him as he might look today and emphasising his V-shaped
scar to the right of his mouth, reputedly suffered while
duelling with swords.
As Heim followed the well-beaten
path of fugitive Nazis to South America, investigators
in Europe began to uncover clues that he was alive and
well despite the insistence of his daughter that her
father died in 1993 from cancer. His pursuers insist
that money was sent, from an undiscovered Berlin bank
account belonging to Heim and holding €1.2m (£900,000),
to Spain and that the subsequent failure of his family
to claim the money indicates he is alive.
Waltraud and her two half-brothers
refuse to discuss him. German surveillance records showed
that the mother of Heim's two sons phoned them to remind
them of their father's birthday. Rüdiger Heim, one of
the sons, who still lives in Baden-Baden, said: "All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father,
and that is absolutely false."
The lack of success has begun
to reveal cracks in the once united front of his pursuers.
German court officials last month rejected criticism
from the Wiesenthal Centre which suggested they were
delaying the hunt by refusing to grant a phone tap on
the family.
As the focus switched to Patagonia
yesterday, Mr Zuroff said: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. Killers
don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain
age. And if we were to set a chronological limit on prosecutions,
it would basically say you could get away with genocide."
independent.co.uk
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