A German television station has reported that one of the most wanted Nazi criminals,
Aribert Heim, died in 1992 after living under a pseudonym
in Egypt.
The BBC profiles the doctor who was accused of carrying out atrocities during
World War II.
Aribert Heim's crimes were so severe that he earned the
nickname 'Dr Death'.
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.
He earned his chilling sobriquet
for his sadism as a doctor at the Nazi's Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria.
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.
The subsequent search over
the following decades for the former SS medical officer
took investigators from Germany all around the world.
Tips came from Uruguay, Spain,
Switzerland, Brazil and Chile.
Nazi-hunters were recently
confident that Heim was 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.
Now German's ZDF television
has reported that Heim had been living under a pseudonym
in Egypt's capital, Cairo, had converted to Islam and
actually died in 1992.
Bizarre experiments
The Austrian-born physician
was 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 his nickname.
He was 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.
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.
Unclaimed cash
Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's top Nazi-hunter, travelled in July to the Chilean
town of Puerto Montt, 657 miles (1,058 km) south of the
capital Santiago, where he said Heim's elderly daughter
lives.
This was because he believed
the former Nazi to be living in the area.
Heim was number one on the
Center's Most Wanted List of Nazi war criminals.
Heim's daughter said that
her father died in 1993 in Argentina, but a death certificate
was never produced.
Neither she nor her two brothers,
who live in Germany, claimed the estimated $1.5m (900,000
euros; £750,000) that sat in a European bank account
in Heim's name.
Members of the Heim family
have previously said their father should be declared
dead.
If the reports of Heim's death
turn out to be true, however, Dr Zuroff said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms
of prosecuting people who helped Aribert Heim escape
justice".
He pointed out that Heim's
son Ruediger has previously said that the only contact
he had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were
two notes that appeared in his family's mailbox, and
that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.
Dr Zuroff says he wants closer
examination of the evidence before he finally calls off
the hunt for the infamous doctor.
"The most important
thing is missing: the body," he said.
"There's no grave,
there's no corpse, there's no DNA tests."
bbc.co.uk
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