Spanish police last week located the hiding place of Aribert Heim, also known as "Dr. Death," one of the most-wanted Nazi war criminals still living. Spanish police sources said yesterday that apprehending the 91-year-old war criminal, who operated at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald in Germany, was only a matter of time.

The sources said that the discovery of Heim's hiding place was made possible through information received from Germany and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC). Heim heads the list of wanted criminals the center published as part of its "Operation: Last Chance," which encouraged the public to divulge information about Nazi war criminals before they die.

The pursuit of Heim was also the last campaign in which Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was engaged before his death last month.

Heim was born in Austria in 1914 and, as a youth, became an enthusiastic recruit of the Waffen SS. Although he did not complete his medical studies at the University of Berlin, he became a camp doctor at the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps, where he conducted "medical experiments" on Jewish prisoners, earning his reputation as one of the most cruel SS officers. His patients underwent surgery without anesthesia to test their endurance to pain; others were injected with poison, lethal drugs and benzene, while Heim observed them and timed their deaths with a watch.

Hundreds of prisoners were murdered in this fashion.

After World War II, Heim was arrested by the U.S. Army, but was subsequently released. He settled in the town of Bad Nauheim, where he married and ran a gynecological clinic. He disappeared in 1962, after German prosecutors planned to request his arrest. Since then, he has hidden in Argentina, Denmark and, most recently, in Spain, apparently making use of the Odessa network of SS veterans, which supplied financial aid and false documentation to escaped Nazi criminals, usually in South America.

In 1967, Heim's wife divorced him, claiming he had concealed his past from her. His family said he had died of natural causes that same year in South America. However, in 2001, German police stumbled across his tracks when money from a bank account under his name was transferred to Denmark and Spain. In addition, an accountant requested tax reductions from German authorities, claiming that the account owner lived abroad. The money trail led the police and the media to the town of Palafrugell in Costa Brava, the Spanish Riviera, where Heim is apparently hiding.

The director of the SWC's Jerusalem branch, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, said that Heim was named as number two on the center's list of most wanted Nazis, after Alois Brunner, who is thought to have found refuge in Damascus. Zuroff said that the SWC had been in constant contact with the special German police team of investigators that was set up following the discovery of Heim's active bank account 15 months ago.

Six weeks ago, a report by an Israeli citizen, who met a man in Ibiza with similar physical characteristics to Heim, was passed on to the German police. "The man told us about an elderly man with a German accent who noticed him when he spoke with a friend in Hebrew in a shop. The old man made a remark about it to the shopkeeper and entered his car. The Israeli, who was disturbed by the old man's behavior, noted the license number, and we gave it to the Germans. The description matched Heim's unusual physical characteristics - 1.90 meters tall, with a prominent scar. Not long ago, we received an answer that the information had been valuable for the investigation. The car, incidentally, was found to have been stolen," Zuroff said.

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m, 15.10.05