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Aribert Heim's crimes rank among the worst of the Holocaust, and after a hunt
that has spanned almost half a century, Nazi-hunters believe
they are closing in on him.
The search for the 94-year-old former SS medical officer has taken investigators
from Germany all around the world. Besides his home country
of Austria and Germany, where he lived after the war,
tips have come from Uruguay, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil
and Chile.
Nazi-hunters are now confident that Heim - who was known for his sadism as a
doctor at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration camp in
Austria - is seeing out his twilight years near his daughter
in southern Chile, or across the border in Argentine
Patagonia, the region between the Andes and the south
Atlantic.
Acting on information about Heim's whereabouts that he describes as "so significant that it has a high potential", Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's top Nazi-hunter, has travelled
to the Chilean town of Puerto Montt, 657 miles (1,058
km) south of the capital Santiago, where he says Heim's
64-year-old daughter lives.
He refuses to divulge the
nature of the recent information.
Heim's daughter has said that
her father died in 1993 in Argentina, but a death certificate
has never been produced. Neither she nor her two brothers,
who live in Germany, have claimed the estimated $1.5m
(900,000 euros; £750,000) that sits in a European bank
account in Heim's name.
Bounty
On his way to board the flight
to southern Chile, Professor Zuroff - who has been hunting
Nazi war criminals and their collaborators for nearly
three decades - told the BBC News website that he believes
he is closing in on Heim.
He was in the country back in November, when the centre
launched Operation Last Chance, its final attempt to
find Nazi war criminals in South America.
A reward of 315,000 euros, or almost $500,000, is being offered jointly by the
centre and the German and Austrian governments for information
that will lead to Heim's arrest and prosecution by the
German government.
Mr Zuroff is optimistic that
the size of the bounty could prove crucial to his capture.
He is now launching a newspaper campaign advertising
the bounty in Chile and Argentina.
"By going closer
to the area where we believe he may well be hiding, we
are trying to increase the chances of finding someone
with the critical information regarding his whereabouts," he said.
"In the past, money
has exposed Nazi war criminals, such as Schwammberger
in Argentina. This was a great success and we hope to
add another one very soon."
The offer of a reward in the
late 1980s led investigators to notorious camp commander
Josef Schwammberger who was extradited from Argentina
to end his days in a German prison.
Germany extradition
Mr Zuroff says he doesn't
expect to find Heim immediately.
"We're putting in place certain initiatives which could reveal his hiding place
within a couple of weeks," he says.
"He would then be extradited to Germany to stand trial assuming that his health
permits. Everyone is fairly confident that it would go
smoothly and quickly.
"Germany has created
a special task force to find Heim. He would be tried
there and it would be the most important Nazi war crimes
trial in the past 30 years."
The Austrian-born physician
has been indicted by Germany on charges that he murdered
hundreds of inmates while serving as a doctor at Mauthausen
concentration camp in Austria, where he earned the nickname "Dr Death".
He is accused of killing Jews
using exceptionally cruel methods. According to Holocaust
survivors, he performed operations and amputations without
anaesthetic to see how much pain his victims could endure.
Injecting victims straight
into the heart with petrol, water or poison was said
to have been his favoured method at Mauthausen. And when
he was "bored", he apparently timed patients' deaths with a stopwatch.
After World War II, Heim practised
medicine in the German town of Baden-Baden until 1962,
when he was indicted as a war criminal and fled the country.
'Passage of time'
One testimony from a camp
survivor accuses him of cutting off the head of a murdered
Jewish prisoner and boiling off the flesh to enable the
skull to be used as an exhibit.
Stories like this abound. One claims that the doctor removed tattooed skin from
one victim and turned it into a seat cover.
Born 28 June, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party
in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS.
If Heim is still alive, he
would have just turned 94. Some may argue that it is
wrong to put an a frail old man on trial for alleged
crimes committed more than half his lifetime ago.
But Mr Zuroff is uncompromising: "The
passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the
perpetrators," he said in a previous interview with the BBC.
"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."
The centre believes there
are dozens of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators
in Latin America. The reward for information leading
to their arrest has just been increased from $10,000
to $15,000.
But the investigators are
working against time: most of the alleged criminals are
in their late 80s or 90s.
They say that if they only
get Heim, Operation Last Chance would have been a success.
In the next few days, Mr Zuroff
will travel across the Andes to San Carlos de Bariloche
in Argentina.
Nestled in Argentina's snow-capped
Andes, overlooking a vast lake, this scenic ski town
has long been a favourite resort for wealthy tourists.
It was also known over the years as a haven for Nazis
who fled Germany after World War II.
Former SS captain Erich Priebke,
was discovered there in the early 1990s. He had been
living there for almost half a century.
For the hunter, Mr Zuroff,
this will be his last trip to South America on the trail
of the war criminals. He acknowledges that the last push
might fail completely. But, for the moment, he is optimistic
that he is closer to his prey than ever.
bbc.co.uk
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