BERLIN
(AP) — The Simon Wiesenthal Center filed a lawsuit Wednesday
asking Berlin prosecutors to open an investigation to try
and determine if the family or attorneys of the world's most-wanted
Nazi war criminal, SS doctor Aribert Heim, have been lying
about whether he was dead or alive.
The suit comes after Heim's son, Ruediger Heim, claimed in a February television
interview that his father had died in 1992 in Cairo,
where he had been living under an alias.
But Efraim Zuroff, the top
Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said Heim's
attorney recently claimed in an ongoing tax case in a
Berlin court that there was still regular contact with
the doctor, who would be 94-years-old if he is still
alive.
"If that is the
case, then someone is lying — either this guy committed
perjury on behalf of his client, Dr. Aribert Heim, or
Ruediger Heim," Zuroff told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
The Wiesenthal Center cited
a copy of a 2001 ruling that it had obtained in which
the judges wrote that "according to the testimony of the attorney of Dr. Heim ... the holder of Heim's
power of attorney Dr. (Fritz) Steinacker has regular
contact with Dr. Heim, who is abroad."
But the attorney who argued
the case, Berlin's Michael Hoepfner, said he had never
made such a claim in the court, and that Steinacker had
told him that he had not heard from Heim for decades.
"I only argued
before the court that if one is not declared dead, then
he legally has to be considered alive," Hoepfner told the AP.
Reached at his office in Frankfurt,
Steinacker said he was granted power-of-attorney over
Heim's estate in May 1962, and has represented him in
tax cases. But Steinacker said that he has never asserted
to have been in contact with Heim for nearly four decades.
"That is entirely
false," Steinacker said. "I have no contact with Mr. Heim."
Michael Grunwald, spokesman
for the Berlin prosecutor's office, said that he could
not yet confirm his office had received the Wiesenthal
Center's suit, and that it could take some time to evaluate
whether there was enough evidence to open an investigation.
Heim was a doctor at the Mauthausen
concentration camp in Austria in October and November
1941. Witnesses have said he was involved in gruesome
experiments, such as injecting various solutions into
Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the
fastest.
In early February, the German
television station ZDF and The New York Times reported
that they had found documents in a Cairo hotel, where
Heim allegedly lived out the final years of his life
before dying of intestinal cancer, indicating that the
notorious doctor had died in the city in 1992.
The papers — personal musings,
official documents and other items that allegedly belonged
to Heim — have been turned over to the Baden Wuerttemberg
state police office that has led the manhunt for the
former Nazi for decades. They are currently being examined
by experts trying to determine their authenticity in
a process that could still take "quite a while" longer, spokesman Horst Haug said.
At the time ZDF reported on
the documents, the television station quoted Ruediger
Heim, as confirming the pseudonym Tarek Hussein Farid
as his father's assumed name and the documents as belonging
to him. Heim said he visited his father regularly in
Cairo and had taken care of him after an operation related
to his cancer in 1990.
ZDF reported that Heim was
buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves
are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely."
Haug's office has asked permission
to send investigators to look for the body, but he said
Wednesday they were still awaiting an answer from Egyptian
authorities.
The tax case centers around
about euro1 million in a Berlin bank account that belongs
to Heim, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
Each year up until 1998, Heim
was taxed on the interest made by the money, but then
German finance authorities returned the funds to his
account because he had been declared as living permanently
abroad, Hoepfner said.
In 1999, the tax authorities
questioned the repayments, saying they needed proof that
Heim was not living in Germany. The account is overseen
by a state-appointed administrator, which contracted
Hoepfner to argue the case, which has been in court at
least a half dozen times as recently as this week, Hoepfner
said.
It was not clear when it might
be resolved.
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