Dr Death, Aribert Heim, now 94 years old.
(Photo from Jerusalem Post)
Aribert Heim's crimes rank among the worst of the Holocaust, and after a hunt that has spanned almost half a century, Nazi-hunters believe they are closing in on him.
Israel's chief Nazi hunter [Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, will spend two days in Chilean Patagonia before crossing to Argentina] ...to step up the hunt for the Nazi fugitive Aribert Heim[, who] tortured and killed prisoners in Mauthausen concentration camp in World War II, but fled Germany in 1962 before authorities were able to arrest him.
Chilean and Argentinean newspapers have published pictures of Heim in 1950, 1959 and how he might look now. These are also displayed on posters advertising the search.
"In the last few days we've received information from two different sources, both relating to Chile, which we think have very good potential," the director of Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Mr Zuroff, said.
"The reason we are going [to Patagonia]... is of course the fact that Heim's daughter lives in Puerto Montt, and we think there is a strong likelihood that he might be in that area or in the area between Puerto Montt and Bariloche [Argentina]."
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, along with the German and Austrian governments, has offered $495,000 (315,000 euros; £250,000) for information leading to Heim's arrest.
Although he would now be 94, they believe Heim is still alive because his family has yet to claim around $1.6m sitting in a German bank account in his name, says the BBC's Gideon Long in Santiago.
In order to make the claim, his family would have to prove he is dead.
The search for Heim is part of Operation Last Chance, a final bid to bring Nazi war criminals to justice more than 60 years after the end of WWII.
Body parts
Heim kept meticulous notes of his activities at Mauthausen.
He performed operations and amputations without anaesthetic to see how much pain his victims could endure. Injecting victims straight into the heart with petrol, water or poison were his favoured method at Mauthausen.
"His crimes are fully documented by himself, because he kept a log of the operations that he carried out," Mr Zuroff said. "He tortured many inmates before he killed them at Mauthausen, and he used body parts of the people he killed as decorations."
One testimony from a camp survivor accuses him of cutting off the head of a murdered Jewish prisoner and boiling off the flesh to enable the skull to be used as an exhibit. Stories like this abound. One claims that the doctor removed tattooed skin from one victim and turned it into a seat cover.
Born 28 June, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany. He later joined the Waffen SS. After the war, Heim was detained by US forces, but later disappeared. He practised medicine in the German town of Baden-Baden until 1962, when he fled the country after being tipped off that the authorities were about to prosecute him.
'Passage of time'
If Heim is still alive, he would have just turned 94. Some may argue that it is wrong to put an a frail old man on trial for alleged crimes committed more than half his lifetime ago.
But Mr Zuroff is uncompromising: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," he said in a previous interview with the BBC.
"Killers don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain age. And if we were to set a chronological limit on prosecutions, it would basically say you could get away with genocide."
1 comment:
Why did the U.S. release Heim from custody after he was imprisoned?
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