New info indicates 'Dr. Death' in Chile or Argentina

Wiesenthal officials on search for top Nazi accosted in Chile.

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
aribert heim 88 (photo credit: )
aribert heim 88
(photo credit: )
There is new evidence Dr. Aribert Heim, the most wanted Nazi in the world, is living in Chile or Argentina, the chief Nazi-hunter of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said Thursday. The search for Heim, 94, a former Austrian physician also known as "Dr. Death" who tops the Wiesenthal Center's list of "most wanted Nazis," has spanned nearly half a century since his disappearance in Germany in 1962 ahead of planned prosecution for war crimes. "We have received information from two sources that has strong potential to locate Heim," Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post from Chile. During their South American trip to locate the top Nazi, Zuroff and the center's Latin America Director Sergio Widder were separately accosted by middle aged men in Chile who told them to leave the country and to stop killing Palestinians, which they dubbed "the real genocide." The incidents ended without violence. Attempts to broker a meeting between the Zuroff and Heim's daughter Waltraud, who lives in the southern Chilean city of Puerto Montt, and who is thought to have information about her father have not been successful, Zuroff said. His daughter has previously said that her father died in 1993 in Argentina, but never provided a certificate of death or accepted her inheritance from his property. A €1 million bank account in his name is active in Berlin, which Heim's children could have received if they proved he is dead. A reward of €316,000 is being offered jointly by the center and the German and Austrian governments for information leading to Heim's arrest. In the interview, Zuroff said he did not expect to nab Heim on his current two-week visit, which include meetings with government officials and ad campaigns in Chilean and Argentinian newspapers, but that he hopes the effort bears fruit in the near future. "We are putting into place the tools to have him handed over in the coming weeks or months," Zuroff said. Heim was indicted in Germany for murdering hundreds of inmates by lethal injection at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he was camp doctor during the Holocaust. After World War II, he was held for two and half years by the US military but was released without being tried. Heim disappeared in 1962 after being tipped off that an indictment was imminent.