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Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Forty-six years after he disappeared, the Nazi fugitive
known as Dr. Death may be within reach of Chilean police
tracking him down.
A police task force is following leads in southern Chile that Aribert Heim, an
SS officer accused of performing experiments on inmates
at the Mauthausen concentration camp, was spotted at a
restaurant with his daughter, who lives in the town of
Puerto Montt.
``Someone told us that they had
seen the suspect, or someone very similar to the suspect's
description, together with a woman very similar to his
daughter,'' Segundo Leiton, chief of Chile's office of
missing persons, said in an interview in Santiago last
month.
Heim is the most-wanted among
Nazi fugitives because of the heinousness of his alleged
crimes, said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Israel. The Austrian doctor, now 94 years old,
is accused of killing people with injections directly into
the heart, performing operations without anesthetic, and
using body parts as decorations while working at the camp
in 1941.
A reward of 315,000 euros ($400,000)
is being offered by the center, which tracks World War
II Nazi war criminals, and by the Austrian and German governments
for information leading to Heim's arrest and conviction.
The center plans to publicize the offer through an advertising
campaign in Chile.
One Tip Needed
``All we need is one person who
knows where Heim is and is willing to give us the information,''
Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem in
August.
Neo-Nazis harassed him and other
investigators when they went to Puerto Montt in July, Zuroff
said. He met with government authorities in Chile and gave
news conferences at which he described Heim's crimes.
While Chile has a 10-man police
team looking for Heim, he is just one of 5,000 fugitives
that Leiton's office is hunting this year.
``It's not unusual for these cases
to take several years,'' Leiton said. The search for Paul
Schaefer, a medic in the Nazi army and former leader of
a Chilean-German sect called Colonia Dignidad, took almost
eight years.
Puerto Montt residents said the
Heim search was forgotten as soon as the Nazi hunters left
town.
``There was some commentary the
day after it was on the national and local news, but people
didn't treat it like a big deal,'' said Andrea Jhon, a
41-year-old hotel manager. She said she isn't happy about
Puerto Montt being the site where an old man is being chased
for crimes committed long ago.
`Evil Is Done'
``The evil is done and now you
have to turn the page and keep going,'' Jhon said.
The Wiesenthal Center's ad campaign
will try to increase awareness of the crimes Heim committed,
why he is thought to be still alive, and why it's important
for him to be brought to justice, Zuroff said.
Zuroff said he thinks the man
spotted in Chile is Heim. He has been hunting for Heim
across Europe and South America with the Wiesenthal Center's
Operation: Last Chance, a project to find the remaining
Nazi war criminals still at large.
The concentration camp near the
Austrian town of Mauthausen was built to hold criminals,
political dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war, and large
numbers of Hungarian Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum's Web site. Heim got the name Dr. Death
from detainees at the camp.
Flight From Germany
After serving in the war with
Nazi Germany's SS, Heim was captured by U.S. soldiers and
later released. He worked as a gynecologist in Baden-Baden,
West Germany, until 1962, when he fled after receiving
a tip that he would be arrested, according to the Wiesenthal
Center's Web site.
Nazis were welcomed in South America
by military dictatorships in power after WWII, Zuroff said.
``The tradition was to grant asylum
to people seeking political refuge,'' Zuroff said. Otto
Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina, Josef Mengele
died in Brazil, Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia, and
Walter Rauff died in Chile.
If caught, Heim will be extradited
to stand trial in Germany for mass murder, Zuroff said.
bloomberg.com
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