| German authorities have come under renewed pressure to track down surviving Nazi
war criminals after the discovery this week that a notorious
concentration camp doctor lived out his days in Cairo and
died a free man.
Aribert Heim, known as "Doctor Death" for the appalling experiments he performed on concentration camp prisoners,
was revealed this week to have spent his last decades
living as a convert to Islam under the name Tarek Hussein
Farid in a run-down Cairo hotel.
According to his son Ruediger,
Heim died of cancer in August 1992.
Heim's place at the top of
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most wanted list is now
likely to be taken by Alois Brunner, the right-hand man
of Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust.
It is believed Brunner, who
would now be 94, has spent years living in Syria. He
has not been sighted since 2001, but investigators believe
he may still be alive.
"Just a short while
ago I got a call from someone claiming to have sat next
to Brunner in a plane in the Arabic world," said Joachim Riedel, the deputy chief of the central office for solving Nazi
crimes in Ludwigsburg, Germany, which has led investigations
into almost 18,000 cases since it was founded in the
1960s.
According to The Simon Wiesenthal
Centre in Jerusalem, which has brought more than 1,000
Nazi criminals to justice, there are currently 608 ongoing
investigations around the world into the whereabouts
of alleged Nazi criminals, including 305 in Poland, 216
in the USA, 30 in Germany and four in Austria.
Riedel said that of the cases
his department is investigating only around 60 have a
chance of going to court, and of those only a handful
probably will.
Riedel said authorities had
acted far too late in trying to pursue alleged Nazi war
criminals. His office was not founded until 20 years
after the end of the second world war, allowing perpetrators
such as Heim plenty of time to escape, helped by a network
of ex-Nazis and Nazi sympathisers.
Another problem is the dearth
of investigations carried out in the former Soviet Union
countries, largely due to a lack of political will.
Riedel said the work of his
office would continue "until we can be fairly sure there's no one else left for us to pursue.
"We're always coming
across new leads, the best of which can create a whole
chain of events to unfold.
"We're dealing
here with people who have been accused of massacres,
of wiping out whole villages of everyone from new-born
babies to pregnant women and old people. That must be
pursued until the day of judgment."
Other names prominent on the
wanted list include Ivan (otherwise known as John) Demjanjuk,
the former Ukrainian concentration camp guard nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible", who was said to have participated in the deaths of thousands of prisoners at
Treblinka. The 89-year-old lives in the US and is facing
a new trial.
Sandor Kepiro is a former
Hungarian police officer accused of the mass murder of
more than 1,200 civilians in Novi Sad, Serbia, where
hundreds of families were rounded up and killed by machine
gun beside the Danube river. Aged 92, Kepiro lives in
Hungary. Attempts are being made to bring him to trial.
guardian.co.uk
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