| Nazi-hunters in Israel and Germany expressed doubts on Thursday about reports
that Aribert Heim, dubbed "Dr Death" for killing concentration camp inmates with lethal injections to the heart,
died in Cairo in 1992.
Officials at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and Germany's Central Office
for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg said
there was neither solid evidence of Heim's death nor
any remains of the man who fled West Germany in 1962.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
told Reuters there was "no doubt" Heim had lived in Egypt -- as German television network ZDF and The New York
Times reported.
"But the question is whether he died in Egypt? We have serious doubts about that," Zuroff said.
Heim, the most notorious surviving
perpetrator of the Nazi killings of 6 million Jews, died
in Cairo in 1992, ZDF said. It said Heim spent nearly
30 years there and converted to Islam in the early 1980s.
"I'm not yet convinced
about these results," Joachim Riedel, the deputy head of the Ludwigsburg investigation agency, told
Reuters. "It's possible that someone is trying give investigators the runaround or throw
us off the track.
"We've experienced
it often enough in the past. I'll believe it when we
have an official forensic examination."
Heim has been accused of killing
hundreds of inmates at the Mauthausen concentration camp
in Austria by injecting gasoline into their hearts and
performing surgery and severing organs without anesthesia,
crimes he documented himself, Zuroff said.
"MAN OF GOOD DEEDS"
People who said they knew
Heim after he converted to Islam and lived in what is
now a shabby hotel near downtown Cairo described him
as a friendly man who kept a low profile.
Abu Ahmed, a hotel worker,
said he had no idea that the man who changed his name
to Tarek Farid Hussein was wanted. "He was a man of good deeds," he said. "He helped needy people."
Tareq Abdel Moneim al-Rifaie,
a 51-year-old dentist whose father was Heim's dentist
in Egypt, said he had met Heim once or twice at his father's
offices in the late 1980s.
"I was definitely
surprised to know he was wanted," he said. "We used to refer to him as the German man," he said, adding Heim used to send them chocolate and cakes from Groppi, a well-known
confectioner and coffeehouse in downtown Cairo.
But he added his family had
the impression Heim "hated Jews, or had problems with them" and sent them a paper he had written arguing that modern Jews were not Semites.
Germany's ZDF, in footage
from a documentary being aired in full on Thursday, showed
Heim's son Ruediger saying his father had died of cancer
of the rectum on August 10, 1992, after spending 30 years
in Cairo under the assumed name.
Zuroff said news of Heim's
death came as the Simon Wiesenthal Center was preparing
to triple its reward for finding him to 1 million euros.
He said the reports lacked concrete evidence.
"What is not clear,
what is missing from the presentation by ZDF and the
New York Times, is the conclusive proof he indeed died
in Egypt in 1992," Zuroff said. "There's no grave, there's no body. We can't do any DNA testing."
Riedel too was skeptical. "The
son's statements are curious. For years he said he did
not know anything about his father's whereabouts," he said.
ZDF said it was believed Heim's
body was buried in a pauper's cemetery near Cairo's old
town.
An Austrian doctor with Adolf
Hitler's infamous SS, Heim is said to have removed organs
from victims without anesthetic. He kept the skull of
a man he decapitated as a paperweight.
Heim was captured by U.S.
forces near the end of World War Two but released in
1947. He worked as a doctor in West Germany until coming
to the attention of war crimes investigators, and fled
in 1962.
msnbc.msn.com
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