BERLIN – The Simon Wiesenthal Center is appealing a Berlin
prosecutors' office decision to drop an investigation into
whether the family or attorneys of Nazi war criminal Aribert
Heim lied about whether he was dead, the agency's top Nazi-hunter
said Wednesday.
The SS concentration camp doctor's son, Ruediger Heim, claimed in a February
television interview that his father died in 1992 in Cairo.
But in 2001 Heim's attorneys told a court that they were
still in regular contact with him.
The Wiesenthal Center in March asked
prosecutors in Berlin to investigate the discrepancy, but
in a June 5 letter to Efraim Zuroff, director of the center
in Jerusalem, the office said the case had been shelved.
The prosecutors' office said the court remarks from Heim's
attorneys were not witness statements, so there was no perjury
case to be pursued, and that there were "many statements" over the past decades - including unconfirmed sightings - that indicate Heim
could be alive.
The Wiesenthal Center filed an appeal
Tuesday to Berlin's attorney general, asking for the decision
to be reconsidered, Zuroff told The AP in a telephone interview
from Jerusalem.
"We think the decision
is really ludicrous, frankly," he said. "This is an opportunity to provide some clarity on whether or not Heim actually
died in Cairo, or if he was still alive in 2001."
Heim, who will be 95 this month if
he is still alive, was the Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted
Nazi war criminal for years before being placed into a special
category by Zuroff in April after the reports of his possible
death surfaced.
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.
The process of trying to determine
their authenticity is still ongoing, spokesman Ulrich Heffner
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."
Heffner's office has been trying to
get permission to come to Egypt to look for the body themselves,
and also to help determine the authenticity of the documents,
but have not yet heard back from Egyptian authorities.
The 2001 statement by Heim's attorneys
came in a tax case centered around some euro1 million in
a Berlin bank account that belongs to Heim.
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. In 1999,
the tax authorities questioned the repayments, saying they
needed proof that Heim was not living in Germany.
In a 2001 ruling, 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."
The attorney who argued the case,
Berlin's Michael Hoepfner, has said he never made such a
claim in the court, while Steinacker told the AP that he
had not had been in contact with Heim for nearly four decades.
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