SPANISH police have adopted an appropriately grisly nickname for Aribert Heim, the 91-year-old former concentration camp doctor who has evaded capture for more than half a century. They call him “El Banderillo”, after the bullfighter whose task is to stick long, coloured spears into the back of the dying bull.
In Mauthausen camp, Heim injected Jewish prisoners with poisons and watched them die. He is the most wanted Nazi known to be alive. Over the years he has been reported to be living in Germany , Argentina , Denmark and, most credibly, in Spain , where he is thought to have vanished into the large population of elderly European expatriates. But in the past few days Spanish police have narrowed the search to the town of Palafrugell on the Costa Brava .
The sadistic El Banderillo, the police and Nazi-hunters say, may finally have been cornered.
In recent weeks, the reward for his capture has been increased to £100,000, police have issued a computer-enhanced photograph showing how he might look today and investigators have begun scouring old people's homes on the east coast.
Spanish and German police have followed a trail of suspicious bank transactions and are investigating a pair of artists in Palafrugell suspected of having links to Heim or his family, El Mundo newspaper reported this week.
Stefan Klemm, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the organisation founded by the Nazi-hunter who died last month, said: “We have concrete indications that Heim is still alive. He has a fortune of about €1 million (£685,000) in a Berlin bank and when he dies it should go to his heirs. The fact that it has not been claimed by heirs makes it clear that he is still alive.”
Even as the net closes around Heim, the case has raised questions. At what point does the world call off the hunt for a handful of evil old men? If he is captured, will the ageing Heim ever stand trial? And, above all, how does such a distinctive individual — more than 6ft (1.8m) tall, with size 12 shoes and a scar on his right cheek running from ear to mouth — evade capture for so long? Heim's is a cautionary tale of brutality, incompetence and wilful official amnesia.
He was born in Radkerburg, in southeast Austria , in June 1914, and was an early and enthusiastic recruit to Hitler's Waffen SS. Although he never completed his medical studies at Vienna University , Heim became a doctor at concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, where he conducted “experiments” on Jewish prisoners that amounted to sustained torture.
Heim's cruelty was imaginative, unrestrained and murderous: patients were operated on without anaesthetic to see how much pain they could endure, others were injected with lethal drugs or petrol, their deaths timed with a stopwatch by the implacable doctor. Hundreds died in indescribable pain in a campaign of sadism second only to that of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death”.
Efraim Zuroff, Wiesenthal's successor, said: “Heim is a symbol of the perversion of medicine.”
At the end of the war, Heim was working as a battalion doctor. After being held briefly by US forces, he was released without charge. In 1949 he married another doctor, raised a family and settled in the spa town of Bad Neuheim , where he started a practice specialising in women's ailments. If anyone suspected that the tall, scarred doctor and star of the local ice-hockey team had a dreadful past, no one cared to ask.
In the 1950s, however, as the fog of deliberate forgetting started to clear and witnesses came forward, investigators began to take a closer interest. State prosecutors in Germany were on the point of issuing an arrest warrant for Heim in 1962 when he vanished — tipped off, it seems, by Odessa , the shadowy organisation of Nazi sympathisers and former SS officers believed to provide fugitives with money and new identities.
There has been no confirmed sighting of Heim since. His wife divorced him in 1967, insisting that she had been entirely ignorant of his past. His family claimed that he had died in South America .
Yet a steady trickle of clues showed that Heim was alive, and thriving. As recently as 2001, a German lawyer applied for a capital gains tax rebate on Heim's behalf, because he was living abroad. The lawyer, citing client confidentiality, has refused to divulge his whereabouts.
The breakthrough came when police started to follow the money. According to Der Spiegel , German police uncovered a savings account in Heim's name in Berlin , where he was reported to own an apartment building. It was also discovered that regular money orders were being transferred to Spain , with more than 100 such payments between 2000 and 2003.
Investigators began to focus on the Costa Brava . Long a magnet for well-heeled, elderly expatriates, the area would have provided an ideal bolthole for an ageing fugitive: warm, private and anonymous. Spain also had a reputation for tolerating dubious émigrés. General Franco provided shelter to Nazis and Nazi collaborators after the war. Auke Pattist, a Dutch collaborator, remains alive, and Léon Degrelle, a Belgian collaborator, died in March 1994. Other Nazis went on to South America from Spain , with the help of local bureaucrats.
El Mundo reported this week that German police had traced a transfer of €300,000 from a German account to an Italian painter and his French wife living in Palafrugell. Police are also said to have established a Heim link in Denmark , where one of his sons installed a telephone line. The possible connection with the couple emerged when police spotted that a parking fine in Copenhagen had been incurred at the same time as a series of bank transfers in the name of Heim, according to El Mundo .
Soon after the money was wired from Berlin , the couple, who have not been charged, are said to have sent a package to an address in the nearby Costa Brava town of Roses . The special fugitive section of the Spanish police has since been combing the region around Roses and Palafrugell in search of an elderly, well-off German with private nursing care.
Heim may already have fled, according to investigators, possibly by yacht to Marbella on the Costa del Sol , once home to SS colonels Wolfgang Juggler and Otto Bremer. Police are confident, however, that he cannot evade capture for long. A source close to the investigation said: “He's old, he's moving about, and he's going to need money — that makes him much easier to trace than one old man in an old folk's home.”
Mr Zuroff recently described Spain 's Nazi-hunting record as “pathetic”. Trapping Heim would send a message to the world, he said, adding: “Now it is the time to make up for years of apathy and inaction.”
The only Nazi of comparably monstrous status who may still be at large is Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's “final solution”. Brunner was thought to be living in Damascus under Syrian protection but investigators say that they have no firm evidence that he is still alive.
For the Wiesenthal Centre and other Nazi-hunters, the capture of Heim would be a huge symbolic breakthrough. Wiesenthal was working on the Heim case when he died on September 20 and, just as time ran out for the Nazi-hunter, so the centre that carries his name is operating with renewed urgency. Heim is the most wanted individual in a campaign entitled Operation Last Chance.
“The truth is we have maybe five or six years left to get these former Nazis before they are all dead,” Mr Zuroff has said.
Spanish police remain convinced that El Banderillo, gored and possibly trapped, remains alive. Slowly, they say, they are moving in for the final act of a long and bloody drama.
THE THIRD REICH'S EXPERIMENTS IN EVIL
Dr Heinrich Berning
Conducted famine experiments on Soviet prisoners, observing loss of libido, swelling of the lower abdomen, dizziness and headaches
Dr Carl Clauberg
In charge of Block Ten at Auschwitz , he worked on techniques of castration and sterilisation, finding that X-rays were effective
Dr Arnold Dohmen
At Buchenwald concentration camp, he infected 11 Jewish children with hepatitis and punctured their livers
Dr Josef Mengele
The Auschwitz “Angel of Death” theorised that humans had pedigrees, like dogs. Performed vivisection, injected chemicals into eyeballs and studied twins
Dr Karl Gebhardt
Inflicted wounds on women at Ravensbrück and injected sulphanilamide into the wounds, with fatal results
Dr Sigmund Rascher
Examined the brains of Jews at high altitude, having split open the victims' skulls while they were conscious
Dr Carl Vaernet
Experimented with ways to cure homosexuality by injecting synthetic hormones into men's groins
Dr Erich Wagner
Selected people with tattoos and made furniture out of human skin and bones
TIMES ONLINE, 15.10.05
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