Serbia’s war crimes prosecutors launched proceedings this week against a Hungarian citizen, who had immigrated to Argentina after World War II and returned to Hungary in 1996, on charges that he participated in mass killings of Jews and Serbs during Nazi occupation.
Prosecutors said they lodged a request for an investigation against Sandor Kepiro with the Belgrade war crimes court. The move is the first step toward an indictment and a trial. Prosecutors also urged the court to seek Kepiro’s extradition to Serbia.
The prosecutors’ statement said Kepiro, now 94, is suspected of acts of genocide during World War II. It says that he “in full awareness that of his own free will” he took part in the killings of at least 2,000 Jews and Serbs.
The worst killings took place during the so-called Great Raid of 1942, when about 800 Jews and 400 Serbs were rounded up, shot and drowned in the freezing Danube river in the northern city of Novi Sad, the statement said. The civilians were stripped naked and all their personal belongings were taken away, the statement added.
Last week, leading Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, visited Serbia and urged the authorities to seek extradition of Kepiro and two other WWII suspects.
War crimes prosecutors acknowledged in the statement that the initial probe against Kepiro was carried out with help from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Hungarian authorities have launched an investigation against Kepiro upon requests from the Wiesenthal Centre, but he was never punished for his role in the killings in Serbia.
After World War II was over, Argentina, under the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón — the founder of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s Peronist party — became a haven for Jews but also for Nazi war criminals.
MercoPress
Showing posts with label Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Show all posts
September 26, 2008
July 11, 2008
Nazi war crimes: the hunt for Doctor Death
It is a race against time: can 94-year-old Aribert Heim be brought to justice before he dies? Now, as Cahal Milmo reports, Nazi-hunters believe they may have found him – in ChileIn September 1962, detectives arrived to arrest a wealthy gynaecologist in the West German spa resort of Baden-Baden. Unfortunately, the quality of their information was surpassed by that of their quarry. Aribert Heim, a man whose experiments in a Nazi concentration camp earned him the moniker of "Doctor Death" among inmates, had disappeared hours earlier.
The vanishing trick performed that day by Heim, then a respectable member of society in one of West Germany's most well-heeled cities and the owner of a property portfolio that included an apartment block in Berlin, was the beginning of a 46-year flight from justice for the world's most wanted Nazi war criminal. It has reputedly taken him through Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.
It is a fugitive's journey defined by the ability of Heim, who stands accused of the medicalised murder of hundreds of inmates in the most gruesome circumstances, to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. His repeated evasion of would-be captors including Mossad, the Israeli secret service, dates back to the end of the Second World War when he was inexplicably – and according to Nazi hunters "suspiciously" – released without charge by the American military.
It is also a saga that could be about to come to an end. Yesterday, two representatives of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the body which has helped bring hundreds of Holocaust perpetrators to trial, stepped off a plane in southern Chile armed with information they believe could finally lead to the capture of a 94-year-old man with grey eyes and a distinctive duelling scar who stands accused of some of the most grotesque acts of cruelty in Hitler's Reich.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre in the Israeli capital, told The Independent that he had received "good information", understood to include a potential sighting, to indicate that Heim is alive and hiding in or around the Chilean city of Puerto Montt in the heart of Patagonia, where his daughter, Waltraud, 64, has lived for decades.
Mr Zuroff said: "There is information we have received which gives us good grounds for thinking that Heim is in Chile. We have received very good co-operation from Chilean and Argentinian authorities."
The arrival of Mr Zuroff and his Buenos Aires-based colleague Sergio Widder in Puerto Montt, a dramatically located port on the Pacific Ocean, is indicative of the urgency of capturing Heim and what the Wiesenthal Centre believes are hundreds of Holocaust criminals in their eighties or nineties who remain at large. In 2005, the organisation launched Operation Last Chance, a project to track down and arrest at least 300 suspects with the help of cash rewards and newspaper ads.
Heim, the son of an Austrian policeman who trained as a doctor in Vienna and joined the Nazi party three years before the Anschluss, remains the most cherished target of the Nazi hunters. Mr Zuroff, an American-born historian who succeeded Simon Wiesenthal as director of the centre, said last year: "We have expectations of catching all of them but if we only get Heim, it will be a success."
A reward of £250,000 for Heim's arrest is being offered jointly by the centre and the German and Austrian governments.
It is the barbarity in the name of medicine carried out by Heim, who served as a doctor in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps after joining the Waffen SS, that has secured his position at the top of the list of surviving war criminals issued by Operation Last Chance.
He is accused of conducting his most gruesome experiments during his two-month stay in Mauthausen, close to the Austrian town of Linz, in 1941. Aided by an SS pharmacist, Erich Wasicky, he murdered hundreds of inmates by injecting various liquids, including gasoline, phenol, water and poison, into the hearts of prisoners to see which killed them the fastest. He used a stopwatch to time the results, recording them meticulously in a ledger.
Heim, whose experimentation was compared to that of the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, also carried out amputations on prisoners without anaesthetic to see what level of pain a human could endure before expiring. Organs were removed from conscious patients, including one case where the liver, spleen and bowel were excised.
Mr Zuroff said: "His crimes are fully documented by himself because he kept a log of the operations that he carried out."
Testimony from captive orderlies who witnessed Heim's activities showed that he used body parts from his victims as decorations, once offering the camp commandant a present of seat coverings fashioned from human skin.
Karl Lotter, a political prisoner working at the Mauthausen clinic, described Heim's murder of an 18-year-old Jewish boy who came to have a swollen foot treated. After asking why he was so fit and being told it was because of playing football and swimming, Heim anaesthetised him. He castrated the boy, dissected a kidney and removed the second, then decapitated him. The head was boiled to remove the flesh so Heim could use the skull as a paperweight.
Mr Lotter said: "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr Heim was the most horrible."
After serving the rest of the war in Finland, Heim returned to Germany towards the end of the conflict and was arrested by the US military and questioned by war crimes investigators. His colleague, Wasicky, was tried and sentenced to death with other Mauthausen personnel in 1946 but Heim, whose conduct was known to his captors, was released in December 1947.
An indictment drawn up by German authorities in 1979 stated that Heim's US military file had been altered to remove any mention of Mauthausen, stating he was on a different SS attachment during the relevant dates. The indictment stated: "It is possible that through data-manipulation the short assignment ... to the concentration camp was concealed." Operation Last Chance described the decision not to prosecute Heim as "quite suspicious".
From 1947 until his flight into hiding in 1962, Heim was able to slip into a respectable existence, starting a family and setting up his gynaecology practice in Bad Nauheim, near Frankfurt, and then Baden-Baden, a little further south in the Black Forest. In 1958, he felt secure enough in his position to buy a 42-flat apartment block in Berlin and list it in his own name.
He had enough friends to ensure he was tipped off when the police moved in to arrest him four years later. It was the start of a long game of cat and mouse during which Heim is alleged to have worked as a doctor for the Egyptian police force and lived for many years on the Costa Brava.
Investigators have released pictures of their target, including a photofit to show him as he might look today and emphasising his V-shaped scar to the right of his mouth, reputedly suffered while duelling with swords.
As Heim followed the well-beaten path of fugitive Nazis to South America, investigators in Europe began to uncover clues that he was alive and well despite the insistence of his daughter that her father died in 1993 from cancer. His pursuers insist that money was sent, from an undiscovered Berlin bank account belonging to Heim and holding €1.2m (£900,000), to Spain and that the subsequent failure of his family to claim the money indicates he is alive.
Waltraud and her two half-brothers refuse to discuss him. German surveillance records showed that the mother of Heim's two sons phoned them to remind them of their father's birthday. Rüdiger Heim, one of the sons, who still lives in Baden-Baden, said: "All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my father, and that is absolutely false."
The lack of success has begun to reveal cracks in the once united front of his pursuers. German court officials last month rejected criticism from the Wiesenthal Centre which suggested they were delaying the hunt by refusing to grant a phone tap on the family.
As the focus switched to Patagonia yesterday, Mr Zuroff said: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. 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."
Independent
Labels:
Aribert Heim,
Efraim Zuroff,
Holocaust,
nazi,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre
June 16, 2008
The Sun finds wanted Nazi at footie
Mingling with football fans in a pavement café, an elderly gentleman soaks up the atmosphere of Euro 2008.
Yet Milivoj Asner, out strolling with his wife, is no ordinary supporter welcoming his national side Croatia to his adopted Austrian town. At No 4 on the list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, he instead stands accused of deporting hundreds of Jews, gypsies and Serbs to World War II death camps. And he has been spared extradition only after Austrian officials insisted he was too poorly to face charges in Croatia of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Asner, who lives under an assumed name in Croatia’s European Championships base of Klagenfurt, is the subject of an international arrest warrant and on Interpol’s Most Wanted list.
The Sun tracked down the 95-year-old former police chief and Gestapo agent and secretly filmed him as he strolled confidently for more than a mile, arm-in-arm with second wife Edeltraut. Walking without a stick, he even roamed 8th May Street – named after VE Day. He stopped several times to sit in cafés, chatting to waiters and sipping leisurely drinks alongside excited football fans.
He was ignored by hundreds of armed police patrolling the streets, even though locals KNOW his real identity – and the unspeakable crimes for which he has yet to face justice.
The scenes made a mockery of Austria’s insistence that Asner is too sick to be sent home. Yet ironically, on the day we captured his carefree three-hour outing, the country’s officials restated their decision to protect him from trial.
Last night Holocaust campaigners insisted The Sun’s exposé should shame Austria into finally sending Asner back to Croatia, where prosecutors are ready to haul him before court. The Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which hunts Nazis worldwide, said our probe exposed the country for shielding a suspected war criminal.
Director Dr Efraim Zuroff said: “He is clearly enjoying a life that many hundreds of victims were denied when they were sent off to be murdered. The Sun found him healthy enough to stroll happily round his home town for hours. This is highly significant.
“Austria has long had a reputation as a paradise for war criminals and now they’ve been caught in the act. It is time for them to do what is right and help bring Nazi war criminals to justice. If this man is well enough to walk around town unaided and drink wine in bars, he’s well enough to answer for his past. He’s shown absolutely no remorse. It is our intention to bring this to the attention of the Austrian Minister of Justice Maria Berger and call for his immediate extradition.”
Asner fled his homeland after the war and has been living in Klagenfurt since 2006. He was indicted a year earlier in Croatia for crimes committed when he was a Ustashi police chief under the country’s Second World War fascist puppet regime.
An Interpol arrest warrant was issued with the highest priority and his photo and personal details are listed on its Most Wanted website. Anyone knowing his whereabouts is urged to call police.
The Sun traced Asner, whose first wife faked his death, to his smart third-floor flat near Klagenfurt’s stadium. The home, where he lives under the name Dr Georg Aschner, is opposite the Croatian cultural centre in a district where fellow ex-pats know his true identity.
One worker boasted how “an SS man” lived opposite. She added: “He’s a super old man. His wife is ill, but he still takes a walk most days.”
Despite joining Croatian fans in the streets in the build-up to the team’s matches, Asner stayed indoors to avoid packed streets on the day of their opening game. But one source said: “He’s fiercely patriotic and nationalistic, and there’s no doubt he’ll want Croatia to win. He may be old but his views haven’t changed – he wants them to win at everything.”
Edeltraut confirmed: “He’s a big Croatia football fan and watches all the games.”
Officials originally ruled Asner could not be sent to Croatia because he was an Austrian citizen. In September 2005, they admitted he was NOT. But they stalled again, claiming he was too ill for trial.
Six days ago, the Austrian government wrote to a Jewish group reaffirming its decision not to extradite Asner. It said Ministry of Justice tests had proved “he is not capable enough to be questioned or go before a court”.
But Dr Zuroff, whose group last year launched Operation Last Chance to nail the final surviving Nazis, said: “The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. Time is running out, but Asner must face justice for the sake of all those who died in concentration camps. This is our chance for justice. I believe The Sun’s evidence could help it happen.”
Asner is alleged to have stood by in Pozega during 1941 and ’42 as Ustashi fascists burned the synagogue. Other evidence against him is said to include papers ordering the deportation of Serbs and Jews.
Last night Asner confirmed his identity when asked by The Sun – but insisted he was NOT a war criminal. And he denied taking part in deportations.
Asner said: “It is not true. It’s hilarious. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I was just an officer with the justice department – a lawyer. I never did anything bad against anybody.”
The Sun
Yet Milivoj Asner, out strolling with his wife, is no ordinary supporter welcoming his national side Croatia to his adopted Austrian town. At No 4 on the list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, he instead stands accused of deporting hundreds of Jews, gypsies and Serbs to World War II death camps. And he has been spared extradition only after Austrian officials insisted he was too poorly to face charges in Croatia of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Asner, who lives under an assumed name in Croatia’s European Championships base of Klagenfurt, is the subject of an international arrest warrant and on Interpol’s Most Wanted list.
The Sun tracked down the 95-year-old former police chief and Gestapo agent and secretly filmed him as he strolled confidently for more than a mile, arm-in-arm with second wife Edeltraut. Walking without a stick, he even roamed 8th May Street – named after VE Day. He stopped several times to sit in cafés, chatting to waiters and sipping leisurely drinks alongside excited football fans.
He was ignored by hundreds of armed police patrolling the streets, even though locals KNOW his real identity – and the unspeakable crimes for which he has yet to face justice.
The scenes made a mockery of Austria’s insistence that Asner is too sick to be sent home. Yet ironically, on the day we captured his carefree three-hour outing, the country’s officials restated their decision to protect him from trial.
Last night Holocaust campaigners insisted The Sun’s exposé should shame Austria into finally sending Asner back to Croatia, where prosecutors are ready to haul him before court. The Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which hunts Nazis worldwide, said our probe exposed the country for shielding a suspected war criminal.
Director Dr Efraim Zuroff said: “He is clearly enjoying a life that many hundreds of victims were denied when they were sent off to be murdered. The Sun found him healthy enough to stroll happily round his home town for hours. This is highly significant.
“Austria has long had a reputation as a paradise for war criminals and now they’ve been caught in the act. It is time for them to do what is right and help bring Nazi war criminals to justice. If this man is well enough to walk around town unaided and drink wine in bars, he’s well enough to answer for his past. He’s shown absolutely no remorse. It is our intention to bring this to the attention of the Austrian Minister of Justice Maria Berger and call for his immediate extradition.”
Asner fled his homeland after the war and has been living in Klagenfurt since 2006. He was indicted a year earlier in Croatia for crimes committed when he was a Ustashi police chief under the country’s Second World War fascist puppet regime.
An Interpol arrest warrant was issued with the highest priority and his photo and personal details are listed on its Most Wanted website. Anyone knowing his whereabouts is urged to call police.
The Sun traced Asner, whose first wife faked his death, to his smart third-floor flat near Klagenfurt’s stadium. The home, where he lives under the name Dr Georg Aschner, is opposite the Croatian cultural centre in a district where fellow ex-pats know his true identity.
One worker boasted how “an SS man” lived opposite. She added: “He’s a super old man. His wife is ill, but he still takes a walk most days.”
Despite joining Croatian fans in the streets in the build-up to the team’s matches, Asner stayed indoors to avoid packed streets on the day of their opening game. But one source said: “He’s fiercely patriotic and nationalistic, and there’s no doubt he’ll want Croatia to win. He may be old but his views haven’t changed – he wants them to win at everything.”
Edeltraut confirmed: “He’s a big Croatia football fan and watches all the games.”
Officials originally ruled Asner could not be sent to Croatia because he was an Austrian citizen. In September 2005, they admitted he was NOT. But they stalled again, claiming he was too ill for trial.
Six days ago, the Austrian government wrote to a Jewish group reaffirming its decision not to extradite Asner. It said Ministry of Justice tests had proved “he is not capable enough to be questioned or go before a court”.
But Dr Zuroff, whose group last year launched Operation Last Chance to nail the final surviving Nazis, said: “The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. Time is running out, but Asner must face justice for the sake of all those who died in concentration camps. This is our chance for justice. I believe The Sun’s evidence could help it happen.”
Asner is alleged to have stood by in Pozega during 1941 and ’42 as Ustashi fascists burned the synagogue. Other evidence against him is said to include papers ordering the deportation of Serbs and Jews.
Last night Asner confirmed his identity when asked by The Sun – but insisted he was NOT a war criminal. And he denied taking part in deportations.
Asner said: “It is not true. It’s hilarious. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I was just an officer with the justice department – a lawyer. I never did anything bad against anybody.”
The Sun
May 21, 2008
Nazi 'Dr Death' may be in Chile
The most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought to be alive, Dr Aribert Heim, is likely hiding in southern Chile's Patagonia region, leading Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff said today.
Heim, nicknamed Dr Death for killing hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of petrol or poison direct to the heart, has been on the run for 46 years since evading police in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution.
An Austrian doctor with Adolf Hitler's dreaded police unit, the SS, Heim removed organs from victims without anesthetic. He even kept the skull of one man he decapitated as a paperweight. Heim would be 93, though his family claims he died in 1993.
Mr Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem who has tracked down dozens of fugitive Nazis over nearly three decades, believes he has narrowed his search.
"Chile is one of the more likely possibilities," he said from Jerusalem.
"Part of the reason for the interest in Chile is the presence of his daughter, who lives in Puerto Montt. He may be in Patagonia, but at this point there's nothing definitive," he said, listing Argentina and Brazil as other possibilities.
Puerto Montt, 1058km south of the capital, Santiago, is the gateway to Chile's remote, picturesque Patagonia region of glacial lakes, towering snowcapped peaks and volcanoes that are a magnet for adventure tourism. Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge in Latin America after World War II, many lured to Argentina thanks to the open-door policies of General Juan Domingo Peron, who had fascist sympathies, as well as to Chile and Brazil. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.
Mr Zuroff said Heim has kept on the move in recent years, and sees his capture as the ultimate prize of the world's remaining fugitive Nazis. He thought he had located Heim in Chile in August, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
"He is the most important war criminal most likely to be alive," Mr Zuroff said. "He murdered .... tortured hundreds of inmates, he used body parts for experiments. In that respect you could say he's a symbol of the Nazi's perversion of science, of medicine."
Holocaust survivors remember Heim relishing seeing the fear of death in the eyes of his victims. After administering lethal injections, he would time death with a stopwatch.
At age 93, the time to catch Heim is running out.
"Our fear is that one of the worst criminals of the Holocaust, a person who personally murdered hundreds of innocent people, will have eluded justice," Mr Zuroff said. "This is something that will only encourage future genocide and mass murderers, and something which we find to be a travesty of justice."
News.com
Heim, nicknamed Dr Death for killing hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of petrol or poison direct to the heart, has been on the run for 46 years since evading police in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution.
An Austrian doctor with Adolf Hitler's dreaded police unit, the SS, Heim removed organs from victims without anesthetic. He even kept the skull of one man he decapitated as a paperweight. Heim would be 93, though his family claims he died in 1993.
Mr Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem who has tracked down dozens of fugitive Nazis over nearly three decades, believes he has narrowed his search.
"Chile is one of the more likely possibilities," he said from Jerusalem.
"Part of the reason for the interest in Chile is the presence of his daughter, who lives in Puerto Montt. He may be in Patagonia, but at this point there's nothing definitive," he said, listing Argentina and Brazil as other possibilities.
Puerto Montt, 1058km south of the capital, Santiago, is the gateway to Chile's remote, picturesque Patagonia region of glacial lakes, towering snowcapped peaks and volcanoes that are a magnet for adventure tourism. Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge in Latin America after World War II, many lured to Argentina thanks to the open-door policies of General Juan Domingo Peron, who had fascist sympathies, as well as to Chile and Brazil. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.
Mr Zuroff said Heim has kept on the move in recent years, and sees his capture as the ultimate prize of the world's remaining fugitive Nazis. He thought he had located Heim in Chile in August, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
"He is the most important war criminal most likely to be alive," Mr Zuroff said. "He murdered .... tortured hundreds of inmates, he used body parts for experiments. In that respect you could say he's a symbol of the Nazi's perversion of science, of medicine."
Holocaust survivors remember Heim relishing seeing the fear of death in the eyes of his victims. After administering lethal injections, he would time death with a stopwatch.
At age 93, the time to catch Heim is running out.
"Our fear is that one of the worst criminals of the Holocaust, a person who personally murdered hundreds of innocent people, will have eluded justice," Mr Zuroff said. "This is something that will only encourage future genocide and mass murderers, and something which we find to be a travesty of justice."
News.com
Labels:
Dr Aribert Heim,
Holocaust,
Mauthausen,
nazi,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
SS
May 01, 2008
Wanted: The last Nazis
Click on image for full-sizeAt first glance, the mugshots appear to be a gallery of roguish grandfathers, but the octo- and nonagenarians are the 10 most-wanted fugitives of one of the most heinous regimes the world has ever seen. They are the last remaining Nazis, and the codename of the hunt to find them – Operation Last Chance – says it all
More than 60 years after the Nuremberg trials put the first of Hitler's henchmen in the dock, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre yesterday released its most wanted list of the remaining Nazi war criminals. The battle to bring them to justice is complicated by a mix of political apathy, legal wrangling, legendary powers of evasion and what Nazi-hunters term "misplaced sympathy" for the craggy-faced men in their twilight years.
"They are old, and the natural tendency is to be sympathetic toward people when they reach a certain age, but the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," said Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem-based director of the Wiesenthal Centre. "If we were to put a chronological limit on prosecution, we would basically be saying you can get away with genocide."
The top target is Aribert Heim, now 93. Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen concentration camp probably knew better him as "Doctor Death". The Austrian medic would inject petrol and an array of different poisons straight into the hearts of his so-called patients to see which killed them fastest. He once removed the tattooed flesh of a prisoner and turned it into soft furnishings for his commandant's flat.
An 18-year-old Jewish footballer and swimmer who was sent to Heim with an inflammation of the foot was knocked out, castrated and then decapitated. His head was boiled to remove the flesh and his skull was put on display. "[Heim] needed the head because of its perfect teeth," testified one hospital worker at the camp, according to an arrest warrant uncovered by the Associated Press news agency.
Although the hunt for the fugitives continues, the race is on to bring them to justice before they die. Conscious of the ticking clock, Mr Zuroff will launch a media blitz in South America this summer, airing adverts there for the first time which publicise the $485,000 (£245,000) reward offered for Heim's arrest.
Heim has been on the run since 1962 when, happily married and working as a gynaecologist in the West German town of Baden-Baden, he was tipped off that his arrest was imminent. Proof that he is still alive after all these years may be the €1m (£785,000) sitting in a Berlin bank account, which would probably have been claimed by his family if he were dead. The best guess now is that the doctor is in either in Chile, where his daughter lives, or Argentina – a favoured destination for fleeing Nazis, including the architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and another lover of ghoulish medical experiments, Josef Mengele.
It is only Heim whose whereabouts are unknown. For the other nine suspects, Mr Zuroff rattles off a string of house numbers and street names in cities around the world – from Klagenfurt in Austria to Perth, Australia. In these cases, the biggest problem is a lack of political will. John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian emigré, was extradited from the US to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death for allegedly being the Treblinka camp guard "Ivan the Terrible". But Israel's Supreme Court overturned the ruling and released him. He is now fighting deportation from America.
"Some countries don't have the guts or the courage to prosecute and punish," sighs Mr Zuroff. "Nazi war criminals are not serial killers. They are not likely to murder again and the governments basically know that in a few years they will pass away."
Take Sandor Kepiro, who is No 3 on the list. Now aged 93, he was among Hungarian officers alleged to have carried out a three-day massacre of more than 1,000 mostly Jewish people on the banks of the Danube in Serbia. He was convicted in 1944 but was pardoned and moved to Austria. In 1946, he was convicted again – in absentia – and decided to flee further afield, this time to Argentina.
Half a century later, he slipped secretly back into his homeland after being assured he would not face punishment. But when he was discovered living in Budapest in 2006, there was a public outcry. No decision has been made on whether he will stand trial.
Hungary is one of nine countries to be given a "failing" grade in the Wiesenthal Centre's annual scorecard. Sweden is another; lambasted for its blanket refusal to investigate Nazi-era crimes, because of a statute of limitations which kicks in at 25 years for all acts of murder, including genocide.
Another is Australia; accused of being too slow in processing the extradition of most-wanted Nazi No 7, Charles Zentai.
"For three years, they let this guy play games in court," says Mr Zuroff. "When you are talking about three years for someone who is in his 80s, that is a long time and could, effectively, help him elude justice."
Mr Zentai, now 86 and living in a Perth suburb, is accused of beating an 18-year-old called Peter Balazs to death when he caught him riding a Budapest tram without wearing a yellow star to identify himself as a Jew. Mr Zentai denies the charges and has been fighting extradition since 2005. Last week, he lost a constitutional challenge against state magistrates ruling on his case. His family claims the incriminating witness testimony came from confessions beaten out of soldiers. They say that he stands little chance of a fair trial in Hungary, should extradition go ahead.
Mr Zentai's son, Ernie Steiner, said yesterday: "I know my father was never a Nazi, so why is a Nazi-hunter hunting my father? He was never involved in the Holocaust or the mistreatment of Jews. So this is a complete fabrication."
He dismissed the Most Wanted List as the theatrics of a bounty hunter, saying: "Of course there's a principle of justice but, when you've got the wrong bloke, you are persecuting an innocent man."
One who didn't get away
The case of the "Executioner of Bolzano" has been a triumph for Nazi hunters. Michael Seifert tortured his victims in the north Italian concentration camp using fire, broken bottles, clubs and ice-cold water.
After the war he moved to Canada, working in a Vancouver mill and raising his family. In 2000, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering at least 18 people but it was two years before he was arrested by the Canadian police at Italy's request. He began a long fight against extradition, which ended in failure this February when, at the age of 83, he was finally deported to Rome to serve his sentence.
Independent
Labels:
Hitler,
Nazis,
Nuremberg,
Operation Last Chance,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre
January 08, 2008
The hunt for Doctor Death
As an SS medic, Aribert Heim carried out horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners. He escaped and is thought to be hiding in Argentina - but the net may finally be closing. Rory Carroll and Uki Goñi on the search for the last of the Nazis
It was 1945 and Europe was a crime scene. The most destructive war in history had left a miasma of ruined cities, refugees and occupation armies, but there was worse than that. The Nazi extermination camps had been discovered and little-known placenames were becoming sickeningly famous. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belzec, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sobibór, Treblinka. It was time for a reckoning.
The Nuremberg trials sent Hitler's senior henchmen to the gallows or long stretches in prison. But others escaped. Quietly, with barely a ripple, middle- and low-ranking war criminals slipped the Nuremberg net and subsequent efforts to catch them. They obtained false papers, packed their bags and vanished across the Atlantic to a safe haven: South America.
Legends followed them. There were stories of U-boats packed with Nazi gold docking on the coast of Patagonia. Novels and films imagined a shadowy Fourth Reich of mosquitoes, swastikas and eugenic laboratories in the Amazon jungle and Andean foothills. Some fantastical accounts had the Führer himself in a Panama hat somewhere clipping orchids.
The reality was more prosaic but still sinister. Hundreds, possibly thousands, had escaped through the "ratline" and found sanctuary. As the decades slid by, a handful were caught. Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons", was extradited from Bolivia in 1983. Erich Priebke, a Waffen SS captain, was extradited from Argentina in 1995. The story petered out. The fugitives were no longer just pensioners but octogenarians, nonagenarians and, for the most part, dead. When the 20th century ended so, it seemed, did the hunt for Nazis.
Not quite. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre recently made a bombshell announcement. The hunt was back on. The Jewish human rights group revealed that it was launching one final drive to locate the remaining genocide collaborators hiding in South America: Operation Last Chance. "We don't know how many Nazi war criminals are in those countries but we think it's dozens, if not hundreds," said Efraim Zuroff, the centre's chief Nazi hunter. It was extremely late in the day, he acknowledged, but not too late.
After years of indifference or outright obstruction, the region's governments had decided to help the hunters. Private and public money had been raised to offer rewards for information. And there were leads. Police had names, bank accounts and tip-offs. Wire-taps were yielding tantalising clues. Media campaigns in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil were publicising telephone hotlines and the $10,000 (£5,000) reward for each tip leading to a conviction. Even after six decades the trail seemed warm.
"Given the large number of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who escaped to South America, this has the potential to yield important results," says Zuroff. He is uncompromising about his prey. "The natural tendency is to be sympathetic towards people after they reach a certain age, but these are the last people on earth who deserve sympathy. Their victims deserve that an honest effort be made to find them."
Zuroff does not fit Hollywood's image of a dashing investigator. In his three-piece suit, big spectacles and shiny black shoes, he looks every inch the 59-year-old academic that he is. A New York-born Israeli historian specialising in Holocaust studies, he is the successor to Simon Wiesenthal, a Viennese Jew who survived the camps, moved to the US and tracked Nazis until his death in 2005. Zuroff's tools are reports, databases, tip-offs and publicity. Hardly James Bond, but for a small organisation on a tight budget there are limited ways to scour haystacks for tell-tale glints.
South America is big, a continent almost twice the size of Europe stretching from the Caribbean through the Andes, the Amazon and the pampas and tailing at the icy tip of Tierra del Fuego. Thirteen countries, thousands of cities, 370 million people. If you were a Nazi, where would you lay your hat? Skim the Lonely Planet guidebook and one town leaps off the pages. It resembles a Tyrolean ski resort, the plaza has an "Alpine design", the restaurants serve fondue, venison and chocolate cake, and there is a cable car soaring up "Gothic spires of rock". Welcome to San Carlos de Bariloche.
It appears so perfect as to be a cliche, but this holiday capital in Argentine Patagonia is the suspected bolthole of the most wanted Nazi in South America. Investigators have a hunch that somewhere among the skiiers and student revellers who throng the picturesque streets is a 93-year-old Austrian by the name of Aribert Heim - otherwise known as Doctor Death, or, in Spanish, Doctor Muerte.
"This is the most important manhunt in over 20 years. If we only get Heim it will be a success," says Zuroff. The most sought after Nazi since Josef Mengele has a bounty of $448,000 (£227,000) on his head and the governments of Argentina, Chile and Germany on his tail. "When three countries are bent on finding somebody, he will be found. Where there's a will, there's a way," says Zuroff.
The reason Heim tops the most wanted list makes for grim reading. As an SS doctor at Mauthausen, a concentration camp near the Austrian city of Linz, he earned a reputation for exceptional cruelty. Camp survivors said he injected prisoners in the heart with petrol and poison and timed the deaths. He allegedly performed amputations without anaesthetic, removed the tattooed flesh of a prisoner to make seat coverings for the camp command-ant's flat and boiled the flesh off a head to use the skull as an exhibit.
After the war, the young physician was overlooked by Nuremberg investigators and moved to a spa town near Frankfurt where he found work as a gynaecologist, married and played in the ice hockey team. However, by 1962 Austrian investigators were closing in and Heim fled. Over the years there were alleged sightings in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile and Spain. But now all attention is on Bariloche. Heim has a 64-year-old daughter, Waltraud, who lives just across the border in the Chilean town of Puerto Montt. His one-time lover and Waltraud's mother, Gertrud Böser, visited Chile 18 times between 1979 and 1992. Gertrud is dead and Waltraud declines to discuss her father. Heim's other family, a wife and two sons in Baden-Baden, Germany, say he died of cancer in Argentina in 1993.
If so, that would repeat the anti-climax of the hunt for the other notorious doctor, Mengele. Investigators discovered his bones in a cemetery near São Paulo in 1985. Auschwitz's "Angel of Death", memorably played by Gregory Peck in the film The Boys from Brazil, apparently had a stroke while swimming six years earlier. Might the hunters also be too late for Heim?
A retired Israeli air force colonel, Danny Baz, has published a book claiming he was part of a squad that tracked down and killed him in California in 1982 and dumped the body in the Pacific. Zuroff dismisses that as fantasy and says the evidence strongly indicates that Heim was alive. In 2001, his lawyer sought a refund from German tax authorities on the grounds that his client was living abroad. Heim's wife and sons were secretive and uncommunicative and had not tried to claim a Berlin bank account in his name containing €1m (£750,000). Surveillance records showed that the mother phoned her sons on his birthday to remind them of the date.
"We are very serious about capturing Heim," says Hans-Jürgen Schrade, a captain from the State Office of Criminal Police in Stuttgart, which is handling the case. Schrade, who visited Chile and Argentina in April, is convinced that Heim is somewhere near Bariloche and close to his daughter's town: Puerto Montt is only two hours away from the Argentine border. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had received "potentially very important information" along the same lines, says Zuroff, without elaborating.
If Doctor Death is captured in the resort town, it will suggest a certain Nazi herd mentality. It was here that Erich Priebke, an SS officer who participated in the massacre of 335 prisoners on the outskirts of Rome in 1944, was confronted by a US television network in 1994 and from here that he was subsequently extradited to Italy. Currently serving a life sentence under house arrest in Rome, the 94-year-old is a poster-boy for master-race longevity. He scoots to court on the back of his lawyer's Vespa, takes calls on his cell phone and flogs his autobiography on his own internet page.
There is believed to be a smattering of fugitives in Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, but by far the most popular destination was Argentina. A government panel reported in 1999 that at least 180 Nazis facing criminal charges in Europe had moved to Argentina. That excluded rank-and-file Nazis not facing individual charges. There is no mystery about why so many ended up here: they were invited. The government of Juan Perón established "ratlines" to spirit war criminals and collaborators into Argentina. With the cold war breaking out, America, Britain and the Soviet Union poached Nazi scientists, so this is a subject without moral high ground, but Perón's welcome extended to men with few talents beyond mass murder.
There were several reasons. When posted as a military attaché to Italy in 1939-41, the ambitious Argentine developed a taste for Mussolini's firebrand fascism. He forged a relationship with SS agents who gave him intelligence on South American countries in return for Argentine cover. They cooked up an aborted plan to install a puppet regime in Bolivia. The professional soldier in Perón considered the Nuremberg trials an insult to military honour. As a nationalist president he wanted scientists, jet-plane designers and nuclear experts for his arms industry. On his immigration papers, Eichmann stated his profession as "technician". Mengele claimed to be a "mechanic".
Declassified documents in Argentina, America and Europe show how Buenos Aires teamed up with Vatican officials, notably the Argentine cardinal Antonio Caggiano and the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, to rescue beleaguered Nazis and collaborators from post-war Europe. Imagining itself to be fighting communism, the network issued false documents to slip Hitler's helpers to Italy and on to passenger ships departing from Genoa.
One of the first to arrive in Buenos Aires was Pierre Daye, a Belgian collaborator who had been sentenced to death. Unusually, he flew, but the sentiments in his memoirs were doubtless shared by others: "It was with a sense of deliverance, of escape, a veritable joy in the heart, that I boarded the plane that would carry me to South America." As the four-engine Douglas neared sanctuary, he grew giddy. "They may be looking for me in that troubled Europe. But they cannot reach me. I fly far from a world gone mad, towards peace. It's all over. I have escaped. I fly through the blue."
At the same time that Evita was wowing crowds outside the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, her husband was importing Nazis in bulk. Perón authorised Daye to set up the Society in Argentina for the Reception of Europeans in a grand church-owned building. An Argentine-German SS captain, Carlos Fuldner, established a company called Capri that did contract work for Argentina's state water utility and offered a sinecure for the likes of Eichmann.
There may not have been submarines laden with gold nor jungle laboratories making blue-eyed Indians but there was indeed a shadowy network of genocidal murderers in Argentina. It is a stain on the revered founder of Perónism that has been belatedly and grudgingly recognised. In 2005 the government repealed "directive 11", a secret order that prohibited Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering Argentina in the 1940s. Younger Argentines have been willing to explore this dark side of their history, but for many older Argentines it is too painful. Denial and obstruction endure. Though more helpful to Nazi hunters than before, the government is widely believed to be withholding immigration records that could expose details of the ratline.
That reluctance and the mindset it betrays appears to impel Zuroff's hunt more than the prospect of putting Nazis behind bars. Operation Last Chance was first launched in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 2002. Five years later, the results seem paltry: three arrest warrants, two extradition requests and five cases that may or may not lead to trials. Now that it has moved to South America and been renamed Operación Ultima Oportunidad, what are its chances?
"The scheme [in the Baltics] has not been as successful as we hoped in the practical sense of achieving convictions," says Zuroff. But it was not just about justice; it was about "the struggle for historical truth". Six decades after a horrified world watched newsreels of walking skeletons and pits of emaciated flesh, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was concerned that memory was fading and being distorted. The outright denial of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an extreme case. In Europe it took the form of pinning blame for round-ups, massacres and camps solely on the Germans and denying the often enthusiastic local complicity. In much of the Baltics and eastern Europe that complicity remains taboo, says Zuroff. Hunting Nazis, in other words, is not just about bringing them to justice. It is about fashioning them into tools, educative instruments, to turn back the clock and remind a forgetful world about that sickening feeling in 1945.
That may seem an excessive load to pile on to Aribert Heim, a 93-year-old who has been running for most of his life and apparently wants to spend his twilight years near his daughter. In Mauthausen, he was a 27-year-old junior doctor surrounded by moral chaos. Now he could be a great-grandfather. The wanted poster showing him as he may appear today is hardly sympathetic, but it cannot mask the pathos of somebody so old being prey. If Heim is caught taking fondue at the Alpine plaza overlooking the lake, he will not finish his meal. He will be taken away in handcuffs and almost certainly die in an Argentine or German jail cell.
"The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," says Zuroff. "Killers don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain age." For the hunter, those images from Mauthausen, the poison injections, the stopwatch to time the deaths, the tattoo seat covers, the skull - they tumble into the present. They are always present.
Guardian
It was 1945 and Europe was a crime scene. The most destructive war in history had left a miasma of ruined cities, refugees and occupation armies, but there was worse than that. The Nazi extermination camps had been discovered and little-known placenames were becoming sickeningly famous. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belzec, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sobibór, Treblinka. It was time for a reckoning.
The Nuremberg trials sent Hitler's senior henchmen to the gallows or long stretches in prison. But others escaped. Quietly, with barely a ripple, middle- and low-ranking war criminals slipped the Nuremberg net and subsequent efforts to catch them. They obtained false papers, packed their bags and vanished across the Atlantic to a safe haven: South America.
Legends followed them. There were stories of U-boats packed with Nazi gold docking on the coast of Patagonia. Novels and films imagined a shadowy Fourth Reich of mosquitoes, swastikas and eugenic laboratories in the Amazon jungle and Andean foothills. Some fantastical accounts had the Führer himself in a Panama hat somewhere clipping orchids.
The reality was more prosaic but still sinister. Hundreds, possibly thousands, had escaped through the "ratline" and found sanctuary. As the decades slid by, a handful were caught. Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons", was extradited from Bolivia in 1983. Erich Priebke, a Waffen SS captain, was extradited from Argentina in 1995. The story petered out. The fugitives were no longer just pensioners but octogenarians, nonagenarians and, for the most part, dead. When the 20th century ended so, it seemed, did the hunt for Nazis.
Not quite. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre recently made a bombshell announcement. The hunt was back on. The Jewish human rights group revealed that it was launching one final drive to locate the remaining genocide collaborators hiding in South America: Operation Last Chance. "We don't know how many Nazi war criminals are in those countries but we think it's dozens, if not hundreds," said Efraim Zuroff, the centre's chief Nazi hunter. It was extremely late in the day, he acknowledged, but not too late.
After years of indifference or outright obstruction, the region's governments had decided to help the hunters. Private and public money had been raised to offer rewards for information. And there were leads. Police had names, bank accounts and tip-offs. Wire-taps were yielding tantalising clues. Media campaigns in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil were publicising telephone hotlines and the $10,000 (£5,000) reward for each tip leading to a conviction. Even after six decades the trail seemed warm.
"Given the large number of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who escaped to South America, this has the potential to yield important results," says Zuroff. He is uncompromising about his prey. "The natural tendency is to be sympathetic towards people after they reach a certain age, but these are the last people on earth who deserve sympathy. Their victims deserve that an honest effort be made to find them."
Zuroff does not fit Hollywood's image of a dashing investigator. In his three-piece suit, big spectacles and shiny black shoes, he looks every inch the 59-year-old academic that he is. A New York-born Israeli historian specialising in Holocaust studies, he is the successor to Simon Wiesenthal, a Viennese Jew who survived the camps, moved to the US and tracked Nazis until his death in 2005. Zuroff's tools are reports, databases, tip-offs and publicity. Hardly James Bond, but for a small organisation on a tight budget there are limited ways to scour haystacks for tell-tale glints.
South America is big, a continent almost twice the size of Europe stretching from the Caribbean through the Andes, the Amazon and the pampas and tailing at the icy tip of Tierra del Fuego. Thirteen countries, thousands of cities, 370 million people. If you were a Nazi, where would you lay your hat? Skim the Lonely Planet guidebook and one town leaps off the pages. It resembles a Tyrolean ski resort, the plaza has an "Alpine design", the restaurants serve fondue, venison and chocolate cake, and there is a cable car soaring up "Gothic spires of rock". Welcome to San Carlos de Bariloche.
It appears so perfect as to be a cliche, but this holiday capital in Argentine Patagonia is the suspected bolthole of the most wanted Nazi in South America. Investigators have a hunch that somewhere among the skiiers and student revellers who throng the picturesque streets is a 93-year-old Austrian by the name of Aribert Heim - otherwise known as Doctor Death, or, in Spanish, Doctor Muerte.
"This is the most important manhunt in over 20 years. If we only get Heim it will be a success," says Zuroff. The most sought after Nazi since Josef Mengele has a bounty of $448,000 (£227,000) on his head and the governments of Argentina, Chile and Germany on his tail. "When three countries are bent on finding somebody, he will be found. Where there's a will, there's a way," says Zuroff.
The reason Heim tops the most wanted list makes for grim reading. As an SS doctor at Mauthausen, a concentration camp near the Austrian city of Linz, he earned a reputation for exceptional cruelty. Camp survivors said he injected prisoners in the heart with petrol and poison and timed the deaths. He allegedly performed amputations without anaesthetic, removed the tattooed flesh of a prisoner to make seat coverings for the camp command-ant's flat and boiled the flesh off a head to use the skull as an exhibit.
After the war, the young physician was overlooked by Nuremberg investigators and moved to a spa town near Frankfurt where he found work as a gynaecologist, married and played in the ice hockey team. However, by 1962 Austrian investigators were closing in and Heim fled. Over the years there were alleged sightings in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile and Spain. But now all attention is on Bariloche. Heim has a 64-year-old daughter, Waltraud, who lives just across the border in the Chilean town of Puerto Montt. His one-time lover and Waltraud's mother, Gertrud Böser, visited Chile 18 times between 1979 and 1992. Gertrud is dead and Waltraud declines to discuss her father. Heim's other family, a wife and two sons in Baden-Baden, Germany, say he died of cancer in Argentina in 1993.
If so, that would repeat the anti-climax of the hunt for the other notorious doctor, Mengele. Investigators discovered his bones in a cemetery near São Paulo in 1985. Auschwitz's "Angel of Death", memorably played by Gregory Peck in the film The Boys from Brazil, apparently had a stroke while swimming six years earlier. Might the hunters also be too late for Heim?
A retired Israeli air force colonel, Danny Baz, has published a book claiming he was part of a squad that tracked down and killed him in California in 1982 and dumped the body in the Pacific. Zuroff dismisses that as fantasy and says the evidence strongly indicates that Heim was alive. In 2001, his lawyer sought a refund from German tax authorities on the grounds that his client was living abroad. Heim's wife and sons were secretive and uncommunicative and had not tried to claim a Berlin bank account in his name containing €1m (£750,000). Surveillance records showed that the mother phoned her sons on his birthday to remind them of the date.
"We are very serious about capturing Heim," says Hans-Jürgen Schrade, a captain from the State Office of Criminal Police in Stuttgart, which is handling the case. Schrade, who visited Chile and Argentina in April, is convinced that Heim is somewhere near Bariloche and close to his daughter's town: Puerto Montt is only two hours away from the Argentine border. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had received "potentially very important information" along the same lines, says Zuroff, without elaborating.
If Doctor Death is captured in the resort town, it will suggest a certain Nazi herd mentality. It was here that Erich Priebke, an SS officer who participated in the massacre of 335 prisoners on the outskirts of Rome in 1944, was confronted by a US television network in 1994 and from here that he was subsequently extradited to Italy. Currently serving a life sentence under house arrest in Rome, the 94-year-old is a poster-boy for master-race longevity. He scoots to court on the back of his lawyer's Vespa, takes calls on his cell phone and flogs his autobiography on his own internet page.
There is believed to be a smattering of fugitives in Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, but by far the most popular destination was Argentina. A government panel reported in 1999 that at least 180 Nazis facing criminal charges in Europe had moved to Argentina. That excluded rank-and-file Nazis not facing individual charges. There is no mystery about why so many ended up here: they were invited. The government of Juan Perón established "ratlines" to spirit war criminals and collaborators into Argentina. With the cold war breaking out, America, Britain and the Soviet Union poached Nazi scientists, so this is a subject without moral high ground, but Perón's welcome extended to men with few talents beyond mass murder.
There were several reasons. When posted as a military attaché to Italy in 1939-41, the ambitious Argentine developed a taste for Mussolini's firebrand fascism. He forged a relationship with SS agents who gave him intelligence on South American countries in return for Argentine cover. They cooked up an aborted plan to install a puppet regime in Bolivia. The professional soldier in Perón considered the Nuremberg trials an insult to military honour. As a nationalist president he wanted scientists, jet-plane designers and nuclear experts for his arms industry. On his immigration papers, Eichmann stated his profession as "technician". Mengele claimed to be a "mechanic".
Declassified documents in Argentina, America and Europe show how Buenos Aires teamed up with Vatican officials, notably the Argentine cardinal Antonio Caggiano and the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, to rescue beleaguered Nazis and collaborators from post-war Europe. Imagining itself to be fighting communism, the network issued false documents to slip Hitler's helpers to Italy and on to passenger ships departing from Genoa.
One of the first to arrive in Buenos Aires was Pierre Daye, a Belgian collaborator who had been sentenced to death. Unusually, he flew, but the sentiments in his memoirs were doubtless shared by others: "It was with a sense of deliverance, of escape, a veritable joy in the heart, that I boarded the plane that would carry me to South America." As the four-engine Douglas neared sanctuary, he grew giddy. "They may be looking for me in that troubled Europe. But they cannot reach me. I fly far from a world gone mad, towards peace. It's all over. I have escaped. I fly through the blue."
At the same time that Evita was wowing crowds outside the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, her husband was importing Nazis in bulk. Perón authorised Daye to set up the Society in Argentina for the Reception of Europeans in a grand church-owned building. An Argentine-German SS captain, Carlos Fuldner, established a company called Capri that did contract work for Argentina's state water utility and offered a sinecure for the likes of Eichmann.
There may not have been submarines laden with gold nor jungle laboratories making blue-eyed Indians but there was indeed a shadowy network of genocidal murderers in Argentina. It is a stain on the revered founder of Perónism that has been belatedly and grudgingly recognised. In 2005 the government repealed "directive 11", a secret order that prohibited Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering Argentina in the 1940s. Younger Argentines have been willing to explore this dark side of their history, but for many older Argentines it is too painful. Denial and obstruction endure. Though more helpful to Nazi hunters than before, the government is widely believed to be withholding immigration records that could expose details of the ratline.
That reluctance and the mindset it betrays appears to impel Zuroff's hunt more than the prospect of putting Nazis behind bars. Operation Last Chance was first launched in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 2002. Five years later, the results seem paltry: three arrest warrants, two extradition requests and five cases that may or may not lead to trials. Now that it has moved to South America and been renamed Operación Ultima Oportunidad, what are its chances?
"The scheme [in the Baltics] has not been as successful as we hoped in the practical sense of achieving convictions," says Zuroff. But it was not just about justice; it was about "the struggle for historical truth". Six decades after a horrified world watched newsreels of walking skeletons and pits of emaciated flesh, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was concerned that memory was fading and being distorted. The outright denial of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an extreme case. In Europe it took the form of pinning blame for round-ups, massacres and camps solely on the Germans and denying the often enthusiastic local complicity. In much of the Baltics and eastern Europe that complicity remains taboo, says Zuroff. Hunting Nazis, in other words, is not just about bringing them to justice. It is about fashioning them into tools, educative instruments, to turn back the clock and remind a forgetful world about that sickening feeling in 1945.
That may seem an excessive load to pile on to Aribert Heim, a 93-year-old who has been running for most of his life and apparently wants to spend his twilight years near his daughter. In Mauthausen, he was a 27-year-old junior doctor surrounded by moral chaos. Now he could be a great-grandfather. The wanted poster showing him as he may appear today is hardly sympathetic, but it cannot mask the pathos of somebody so old being prey. If Heim is caught taking fondue at the Alpine plaza overlooking the lake, he will not finish his meal. He will be taken away in handcuffs and almost certainly die in an Argentine or German jail cell.
"The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," says Zuroff. "Killers don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain age." For the hunter, those images from Mauthausen, the poison injections, the stopwatch to time the deaths, the tattoo seat covers, the skull - they tumble into the present. They are always present.
Guardian
Labels:
Aribert Heim,
Auschwitz,
Belzec,
Birkenau,
Buchenwald,
Mauthausen,
Nuremberg,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
Sobibór,
Treblinka
November 29, 2007
Is there any hope that the last surviving Nazis can be brought to justice?
Why are we asking this now?
Because the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group which has brought hundreds of Nazi war criminals to justice since the end of the Second World War, has just launched a campaign called "Operation Last Chance". It is being run by Efraim Zuroff, the new head of the Wiesenthal Centre who points out that as the Second World War ended over 60 years ago, the remaining Nazi war criminals still alive are now so old that they may die before being brought to justice. He says the world has a "last chance" to catch them and bring them before the courts. The campaign will involve a media campaign and the offer of financial rewards for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the suspects.
How many people are we talking about?
Hundreds – ranging from Nazi concentration camp guards who beat their prisoners, to a handful of big-time Nazis who were responsible for mass murder and brutal torture. In Eastern Europe there are an estimated 488 Nazi war crimes suspects. Between 150 and 300 fled to South America and some Middle Eastern countries after the war, though no one knows how many are alive.
Who are the chief targets?
The last remaining major Nazi war criminals are Austrian-born Dr Aribert Heim, who is wanted for the murder of hundreds of Jewish prisoners at the Nazis' Mauthausen concentration camp where he worked as a doctor in 1941, and Alois Brunner, a close aide of the convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who invented a mobile gas chamber used on thousands of Jewish prisoners. Heim ranks alongside infamous Auschwitz death camp doctor Josef Mengele as one of the Nazis' worst individual war criminals. A court trying him in his absence in 1979 said he "wallowed in the fear of death suffered by his victms" while performing lethal operations on them without anaesthetics.
Where are they?
Brunner, now 93, was recently spotted and photographed in Syria where he lives under an assumed name. Repeated attempts to extradite him have failed. Heim's lawyer, Fritz Steinacker, may know his whereabouts, but claims that revealing such information would breach Germany's client-lawyer secrecy legislation. There have been several alleged sightings of Heim in Egypt, Spain, Germany and South America. He has been on the run since the 1960s when Germany issued his arrest warrant.
Why did the arrest warrant take so long?
Like many war criminals, Heim managed initially to cover up his wartime activities. He worked for years as a gynaecologist and later as an army doctor after the war. He married and lived undetected near Frankfurt, where he played in the local ice-hockey team. The Austrians opened an investigation in 1957; the Germans followed in the early 1960s. Nazi colleagues are believed to have tipped off Heim just before police arrived to arrest him. He drove away in his Mercedes and has evaded capture ever since. Two years ago, German state prosecutors announced that he was at the top of their list of wanted Nazi war criminals.
Where are the Nazis hiding?
Eastern Europe is one area which is believed to be home to Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre launched a Nazi-hunting operation there in 2002 and came up with the names of 488 Nazi war-crimes suspects. Ninety nine cases have been submitted to local prosecutors. However, only three arrest warrants and two requests for extradition have resulted from that campaign, though scores of cases are still under investigation. Alois Brunner is still being afforded sanctuary in Syria. South America, where Operation Last Chance was launched earlier this week, has been a favourite haven for Nazi war criminals. In Argentina in the 1960s, President Juan Peron's government organised missions to rescue Nazi war criminals from post-war Europe after branding the Nuremberg war crimes trials as "infamy". Scores of unrepentant Nazis were given top jobs under assumed names as technicians in the Argentinian armed forces. Right-wing military dictatorships in Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay have been other havens. In the Middle East, anti-Israeli circles have given sanctuary to Nazis.
Are any still in Europe or the US?
Yes. Even 60 years after the Second World War, war criminals are found to be living in Europe and the US. Organisations like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre say that there is a new readiness to track down Nazis in South America because many countries there are now full-blooded democracies. However, the organisation complained only last year that countries such as Austria, Germany and Poland had an abysmal record of bringing suspected war criminals to justice. In Germany, ex-Nazis wanted for war crimes committed outside the country do not have to be extradited under existing laws.
What have efforts to find Nazis achieved?
Apart from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which were conducted by the Allies immediately after the Second World War, there have been some spectacular catches of Nazi war criminals. One of the biggest involved the capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Nazi Holocaust. He organised the transport of millions of European Jews to the death camps, but fled to Argentina after the war. However, in 1960 he was kidnapped by Israeli secret agents and taken to Israel where he was put on trial, convicted of war crimes and executed in 1962. Other big catches include Klaus Barbie, a Nazi Gestapo chief nicknamed the "Butcher of Lyon" who was tracked down in South America and stood trial in France in 1987. Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where only 40 out of over a million prisoners survived, was extradited from Brazil and sentenced to life imprisonment in the then West Germany in 1970.
And the failures?
Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz concentration camp doctor who performed brutal medical experiments on inmates, died in Brazil in 1979 after spending most of his post-war years living with impunity in Argentina. Eduard Roschmann, the so-called Nazi "Butcher of Riga" who was blamed for the death of 40,000 Jews in Latvia, died in Paraguay in 1977. He never faced a trial.
Will Operation Last Chance result in more Nazis being put on trial?
Yes...
* If enough people come forward with information which leads to their arrest – and South America's democracies show willing
* If the financial rewards for doing so are big enough
* If the major criminals still out there – such as Heim and Brunner – are still alive if – and when – they are eventually caught
No...
* Countries such as Syria continue to harbour suspected criminals
* Often in recent years, many Nazi war crimes suspects are judged to be too old and infirm to stand trial
* Operation Last Chance could have already missed the boat if it turns out that the majority of Nazi war criminals are already dead
Independent
Because the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights group which has brought hundreds of Nazi war criminals to justice since the end of the Second World War, has just launched a campaign called "Operation Last Chance". It is being run by Efraim Zuroff, the new head of the Wiesenthal Centre who points out that as the Second World War ended over 60 years ago, the remaining Nazi war criminals still alive are now so old that they may die before being brought to justice. He says the world has a "last chance" to catch them and bring them before the courts. The campaign will involve a media campaign and the offer of financial rewards for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the suspects.
How many people are we talking about?
Hundreds – ranging from Nazi concentration camp guards who beat their prisoners, to a handful of big-time Nazis who were responsible for mass murder and brutal torture. In Eastern Europe there are an estimated 488 Nazi war crimes suspects. Between 150 and 300 fled to South America and some Middle Eastern countries after the war, though no one knows how many are alive.
Who are the chief targets?
The last remaining major Nazi war criminals are Austrian-born Dr Aribert Heim, who is wanted for the murder of hundreds of Jewish prisoners at the Nazis' Mauthausen concentration camp where he worked as a doctor in 1941, and Alois Brunner, a close aide of the convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who invented a mobile gas chamber used on thousands of Jewish prisoners. Heim ranks alongside infamous Auschwitz death camp doctor Josef Mengele as one of the Nazis' worst individual war criminals. A court trying him in his absence in 1979 said he "wallowed in the fear of death suffered by his victms" while performing lethal operations on them without anaesthetics.
Where are they?
Brunner, now 93, was recently spotted and photographed in Syria where he lives under an assumed name. Repeated attempts to extradite him have failed. Heim's lawyer, Fritz Steinacker, may know his whereabouts, but claims that revealing such information would breach Germany's client-lawyer secrecy legislation. There have been several alleged sightings of Heim in Egypt, Spain, Germany and South America. He has been on the run since the 1960s when Germany issued his arrest warrant.
Why did the arrest warrant take so long?
Like many war criminals, Heim managed initially to cover up his wartime activities. He worked for years as a gynaecologist and later as an army doctor after the war. He married and lived undetected near Frankfurt, where he played in the local ice-hockey team. The Austrians opened an investigation in 1957; the Germans followed in the early 1960s. Nazi colleagues are believed to have tipped off Heim just before police arrived to arrest him. He drove away in his Mercedes and has evaded capture ever since. Two years ago, German state prosecutors announced that he was at the top of their list of wanted Nazi war criminals.
Where are the Nazis hiding?
Eastern Europe is one area which is believed to be home to Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre launched a Nazi-hunting operation there in 2002 and came up with the names of 488 Nazi war-crimes suspects. Ninety nine cases have been submitted to local prosecutors. However, only three arrest warrants and two requests for extradition have resulted from that campaign, though scores of cases are still under investigation. Alois Brunner is still being afforded sanctuary in Syria. South America, where Operation Last Chance was launched earlier this week, has been a favourite haven for Nazi war criminals. In Argentina in the 1960s, President Juan Peron's government organised missions to rescue Nazi war criminals from post-war Europe after branding the Nuremberg war crimes trials as "infamy". Scores of unrepentant Nazis were given top jobs under assumed names as technicians in the Argentinian armed forces. Right-wing military dictatorships in Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay have been other havens. In the Middle East, anti-Israeli circles have given sanctuary to Nazis.
Are any still in Europe or the US?
Yes. Even 60 years after the Second World War, war criminals are found to be living in Europe and the US. Organisations like the Simon Wiesenthal Centre say that there is a new readiness to track down Nazis in South America because many countries there are now full-blooded democracies. However, the organisation complained only last year that countries such as Austria, Germany and Poland had an abysmal record of bringing suspected war criminals to justice. In Germany, ex-Nazis wanted for war crimes committed outside the country do not have to be extradited under existing laws.
What have efforts to find Nazis achieved?
Apart from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which were conducted by the Allies immediately after the Second World War, there have been some spectacular catches of Nazi war criminals. One of the biggest involved the capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Nazi Holocaust. He organised the transport of millions of European Jews to the death camps, but fled to Argentina after the war. However, in 1960 he was kidnapped by Israeli secret agents and taken to Israel where he was put on trial, convicted of war crimes and executed in 1962. Other big catches include Klaus Barbie, a Nazi Gestapo chief nicknamed the "Butcher of Lyon" who was tracked down in South America and stood trial in France in 1987. Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, where only 40 out of over a million prisoners survived, was extradited from Brazil and sentenced to life imprisonment in the then West Germany in 1970.
And the failures?
Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz concentration camp doctor who performed brutal medical experiments on inmates, died in Brazil in 1979 after spending most of his post-war years living with impunity in Argentina. Eduard Roschmann, the so-called Nazi "Butcher of Riga" who was blamed for the death of 40,000 Jews in Latvia, died in Paraguay in 1977. He never faced a trial.
Will Operation Last Chance result in more Nazis being put on trial?
Yes...
* If enough people come forward with information which leads to their arrest – and South America's democracies show willing
* If the financial rewards for doing so are big enough
* If the major criminals still out there – such as Heim and Brunner – are still alive if – and when – they are eventually caught
No...
* Countries such as Syria continue to harbour suspected criminals
* Often in recent years, many Nazi war crimes suspects are judged to be too old and infirm to stand trial
* Operation Last Chance could have already missed the boat if it turns out that the majority of Nazi war criminals are already dead
Independent
November 05, 2007
'Last Nazi Hunter' still has work to do
They call him the Last Nazi Hunter.
For the past 27 years, Efraim Zuroff has travelled around the world, tracking down those who believed they had long since gotten away with murder. His mission: to expose and help prosecute those who participated in the killing and persecution of Jews and others during the Second World War. His numbers: About 3,000 suspects tracked down.
"The overwhelming majority of the Nazi war criminals in the world today are not hiding. They're living under their own names. And they think at this point in time, no one had found them yet," said Mr. Zuroff, the director of Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem branch. Mr. Wiesenthal, who died two years ago, was a survivor of the Nazi death camps who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large.
For Mr. Zuroff, 59, there is still work to do. He's still searching for the remaining war criminals, many of whom emigrated to western democracies or South America. But he acknowledges the era of pursuing Nazi war criminals will soon come to a close.
"That's clear. Because the people are dying. The original mission, the efforts to bring those criminals to justice, will end in a few years," he said. But it's not over yet, he insists. "People without a conscience live longer. Much less stress."
Mr. Zuroff, who described his work as "one-third detective work, one-third historical research and one-third political lobbying," will speak about his experiences Thursday at the University of Ottawa, as part of Holocaust Education Week.
His greatest coup was exposing and mounting a campaign to prosecute Dinko Sakic, a commander at the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac, where tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The war criminal was found living in Argentina. In 1998, the 77-year-old was extradited to Croatia and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Worldwide, there have been 69 convictions in the last six years. Three were in Canada, with the bulk in the United States, at 34. A report by Mr. Zuroff gave Canada an 'F' for investigating or prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Since 1994, Canada has initiated 21 cases and obtained eight denaturalizations against defendants living in Canada, the report said. None of them have been deported.
Two defendants have left the country voluntarily, while six died during the legal proceedings. Three won their cases.
"Lawyers for these defendants have been able to tie down the courts for years, and prevent their clients from getting kicked out. It's simply outrageous," he said.
Ottawa Citizen
For the past 27 years, Efraim Zuroff has travelled around the world, tracking down those who believed they had long since gotten away with murder. His mission: to expose and help prosecute those who participated in the killing and persecution of Jews and others during the Second World War. His numbers: About 3,000 suspects tracked down.
"The overwhelming majority of the Nazi war criminals in the world today are not hiding. They're living under their own names. And they think at this point in time, no one had found them yet," said Mr. Zuroff, the director of Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem branch. Mr. Wiesenthal, who died two years ago, was a survivor of the Nazi death camps who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large.
For Mr. Zuroff, 59, there is still work to do. He's still searching for the remaining war criminals, many of whom emigrated to western democracies or South America. But he acknowledges the era of pursuing Nazi war criminals will soon come to a close.
"That's clear. Because the people are dying. The original mission, the efforts to bring those criminals to justice, will end in a few years," he said. But it's not over yet, he insists. "People without a conscience live longer. Much less stress."
Mr. Zuroff, who described his work as "one-third detective work, one-third historical research and one-third political lobbying," will speak about his experiences Thursday at the University of Ottawa, as part of Holocaust Education Week.
His greatest coup was exposing and mounting a campaign to prosecute Dinko Sakic, a commander at the Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac, where tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The war criminal was found living in Argentina. In 1998, the 77-year-old was extradited to Croatia and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Worldwide, there have been 69 convictions in the last six years. Three were in Canada, with the bulk in the United States, at 34. A report by Mr. Zuroff gave Canada an 'F' for investigating or prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Since 1994, Canada has initiated 21 cases and obtained eight denaturalizations against defendants living in Canada, the report said. None of them have been deported.
Two defendants have left the country voluntarily, while six died during the legal proceedings. Three won their cases.
"Lawyers for these defendants have been able to tie down the courts for years, and prevent their clients from getting kicked out. It's simply outrageous," he said.
Ottawa Citizen
Labels:
Dinko Sakic,
Efraim,
Holocaust,
Jasenovac,
nazi,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
Zuroff
June 13, 2007
Release of Nazi war criminal angers Romans
A court ruling that a 93-year-old Nazi war criminal can leave house arrest every day to work has angered Italians and Jewish groups.
Former SS Captain Erich Priebke was jailed for life by a military court for the massacre of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves near Rome during the Second World War. The killings were in reprisal for a partisan attack on Germans. He was extradited to Italy in 1995 from Argentina, where he fled after the war.
Mr. Priebke is allowed to serve his time under house arrest for health reasons, in a Rome flat lent by a lawyer who campaigned for his freedom. A military court ruled he can also work at the office of the lawyer, who told reporters that Priebke would begin work next Monday using his knowledge of German, Spanish, English and French to do translations and work as a clerk.
The ruling lets him go to the office "every day, freely" and "go out to satisfy, at nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable necessities of life" — meaning he can pop out for lunch.
Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni reacted by expressing his solidarity with "all the victims of Nazi fascist barbarianism, their families and the Jewish community".
"Rome cannot forget," he said.
Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the ruling "insults the family and friends of those murdered by Mr. Priebke and his cohorts" and was "based on a totally false assumption that, as an elderly person, Mr. Priebke deserves a measure of sympathy".
The president of Rome's ancient Jewish community, Leone Paserman, questioned why military tribunals believed Mr. Priebke was too old to be kept in a prison, but not too old to work.
"They should abolish life sentences if not even those who have committed crimes against humanity have to serve them," he said.
Politicians from the ruling centre-left alliance called for the city of Rome to stage a protest. Lawyer Paolo Giachini, who has given Mr. Priebke a home and now a job, defended the decision to grant him privileges, saying to Reuters: "All prisoners are equal and they deserve to be treated equally. We live in a state of law".
But in Rome's historic Jewish Ghetto, home to many of the Ardeatine Caves victims, banners appeared saying "Priebke Assassin" and "We don't forgive our killers."
Marco di Porto, whose grandfather died in the massacre, said real justice for Mr. Priebke "would be to treat him like his colleagues who were condemned in the Nuremberg trial in 1947."
Mr. Priebke admitted he participated in the massacre but said he was obeying orders on pain of death. In Argentina, he lived for half a century as a schoolmaster in the Andean town Bariloche.
Globe and Mail
Former SS Captain Erich Priebke was jailed for life by a military court for the massacre of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves near Rome during the Second World War. The killings were in reprisal for a partisan attack on Germans. He was extradited to Italy in 1995 from Argentina, where he fled after the war.
Mr. Priebke is allowed to serve his time under house arrest for health reasons, in a Rome flat lent by a lawyer who campaigned for his freedom. A military court ruled he can also work at the office of the lawyer, who told reporters that Priebke would begin work next Monday using his knowledge of German, Spanish, English and French to do translations and work as a clerk.
The ruling lets him go to the office "every day, freely" and "go out to satisfy, at nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable necessities of life" — meaning he can pop out for lunch.
Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni reacted by expressing his solidarity with "all the victims of Nazi fascist barbarianism, their families and the Jewish community".
"Rome cannot forget," he said.
Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the ruling "insults the family and friends of those murdered by Mr. Priebke and his cohorts" and was "based on a totally false assumption that, as an elderly person, Mr. Priebke deserves a measure of sympathy".
The president of Rome's ancient Jewish community, Leone Paserman, questioned why military tribunals believed Mr. Priebke was too old to be kept in a prison, but not too old to work.
"They should abolish life sentences if not even those who have committed crimes against humanity have to serve them," he said.
Politicians from the ruling centre-left alliance called for the city of Rome to stage a protest. Lawyer Paolo Giachini, who has given Mr. Priebke a home and now a job, defended the decision to grant him privileges, saying to Reuters: "All prisoners are equal and they deserve to be treated equally. We live in a state of law".
But in Rome's historic Jewish Ghetto, home to many of the Ardeatine Caves victims, banners appeared saying "Priebke Assassin" and "We don't forgive our killers."
Marco di Porto, whose grandfather died in the massacre, said real justice for Mr. Priebke "would be to treat him like his colleagues who were condemned in the Nuremberg trial in 1947."
Mr. Priebke admitted he participated in the massacre but said he was obeying orders on pain of death. In Argentina, he lived for half a century as a schoolmaster in the Andean town Bariloche.
Globe and Mail
Labels:
Erich Priebke,
fascist,
nazi,
Rome,
Simon Wiesenthal Centre,
SS,
WWII
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