| Top Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff urged the German government on Wednesday to examine
how one of the world's most wanted Nazis was able to hide
in Egypt until his apparent death in 1992.
Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said new information that surfaced last
week about SS doctor Aribert Heim - the most wanted Nazi
war criminal on his organization's list - suggested that
German authorities might have let him slip through the
cracks.
Among other things, Zuroff
cited a 1981 application where Heim applied for an extension
to his residency permit in Egypt, using his German passport
number and indicating his German citizenship.
"Officials must
have noticed that Heim was being sought," Zuroff said in a statement.
In the application, however,
Heim went by an alias - Tarek Farid Hussein - and it
is not clear whether German authorities were consulted.
German Foreign Ministry spokesman
Jens Ploetner said the government was looking into the
case.
"This is in relation
to concrete events that go back to the early 1980s," he told a regular news conference. "We take what the Simon Wiesenthal Center says very seriously and we will very
thoroughly examine the questions brought up by the Simon
Wiesenthal Center."
Heim was accused of carrying
out gruesome experiments and murdering hundreds of Jews
at Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria.
New information reported by
The New York Times and German broadcaster ZDF indicated
that the Austrian-born concentration camp doctor lived
in Cairo for decades under an Arab name, learned Arabic
and converted to Islam before his death from intestinal
cancer in 1992.
jpost.com
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