Wanted for the deaths of 430,000 Jews. Evaded justice for 67 years. Died a free man.

Samuel Kunz was third on the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals

Like hundreds of other suspected Nazi war criminals before him, the former death-camp guard Samuel Kunz died quietly at his home in the German provincial city of Bonn last week at the ripe old age of 89.

He was never obliged to stand trial although he was thought to have the blood of thousands on his hands. Despite being one of the world's most wanted men, he managed to escape the courtroom where he would have faced charges of mass murder.

Even in today's Germany where a renewed effort is under way to bring war criminals to trial, the wheels of justice turn slowly. Kunz was the third on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. As a camp guard at the Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland he was suspected of taking part in the murder of more than 430,000 Jews.

However yesterday, it was left to Alfred Brendel, the German state prosecutor, to announce his death. "Samuel Kunz died on 18 November at 5.30 in the afternoon," he said in a statement. "Most probably he died at his home," he added.

Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi hunter admitted that he found it "incredibly frustrating" that Kunz had died before his impending trial which had been due to open early next year. But he noted it was important that he had been indicted at all. "At least a small measure of justice was achieved," he said.

Like many other Nazi war criminals, Kunz was ignored by the German justice system for decades. After the war he managed to live quietly in Bonn. Until his retirement 14 years ago he had worked as a handyman in Germany's Federal Ministry for Building and Urban Development.

That he was charged at all was the result of a significant change in official German attitudes to Nazi war criminals. A little over a decade ago state prosecutors, under pressure from organisations such as the Wiesenthal Centre, launched an attempt to bring the last of them to justice.

One of them was the world's most wanted suspected war criminal, the Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, who is thought to have been a murderous guard at the Sobibor death camp. Now aged 90, Demjanjuk is on trial in Munich where he is charged with taking part in the murder of 27,900 mostly Dutch Jews.

Demjanjuk, who is accused of unspeakable acts, including driving naked Jews into the gas chambers with a whip, had managed to escape justice for decades. He was finally extradited to Germany from the United States in 2009 and his trial began almost exactly a year ago.

The decision to indict Kunz came as a by-product of the Demjanjuk investigation. Prosecutors only began questioning him in January after his name surfaced during preparations for the Demjanjuk trial. Not only did Kunz face a trial of his own, but he had been due to appear next month as a key witness in the Demjanjuk trial.

As a member of an ethnic German family living along River Volga in the USSR before the Second World War, Kunz's wartime record was similar to that of many ethnic Germans. At the beginning of the war he joined the Red Army. But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, he was captured and given the choice of working with the Nazis or being interned.

Kunz almost certainly chose to co-operate with the Nazi invaders. He is alleged to have attended a training camp for SS death-camp guards at Trawniki in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thereafter, he was widely suspected of having served as a guard at the Belzec extermination camp which was little more than a murder factory. According to SS records 434,508 Jews were gassed, shot or beaten to death there between January 1942 and July 1943.

The Demjanjuk trial opened a year ago and was scheduled to end in April 2010. The final date for a verdict has now been put forward to March 2011. Some relatives of Holocaust victims have said they fear that Demjanjuk may be dead by then. Kunz, it seems, may not be the only one of the world's last remaining suspected Nazi war criminals to escape justice.

WIESENTHAL CENTRE'S OTHER MOST-WANTED NAZIS

Dr Sandor Kepiro

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Kepiro is being sought for his participation in the massacre of 1,200 citizens in Serbia in 1942. He was convicted in Hungary in 1944, but never punished; Hungary refuses to implement his sentence, but is conducting a new criminal investigation – which has so far taken three years.

Milivoj Asner

A Croatian police chief, and second on the Wiesenthal list, he was involved in persecuting and deporting Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Now living in Austria, where his extradition to Croatia was refused on medical grounds in 2005. Last year doctors said he suffered from dementia, but he has given media interviews, which raise doubts about the diagnosis.

John Demjanjuk

Demjanjuk has faced three decades of court actions over his Nazi history. At the age of 90, he is finally on trial on charges of a role in the death of almost 30,000 Jews as a death camp guard – but the process has repeatedly been delayed because of his ill health. A year after the case opened, it is not expected to conclude before March 2011.

Independent

No time limit for Nazi convictions

Heinrich Boere at court in Germany last week

It is part of society's obligation to the victims to make a serious effort to hold Nazi criminals such as Heinrich Boere to account

There no doubt are many people who wonder whether the conviction this past week in Germany of 88-year-old Heinrich Boere for Nazi crimes committed during the second world war serves any useful purpose. They can point to the fact that more than 60 years have passed since he committed his crimes and that he was not a mass murderer, the likes of those who helped run the death camps or served in the infamous Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units. But a closer look at his case will show why his prosecution and conviction in Aachen were, indeed, justified and the life sentence he received so important.

A resident of Maastricht, Netherlands, Boere, the son of a Dutch father and a German mother, volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS shortly after the Nazis occupied Holland. After service on the eastern front he returned home, where he voluntarily joined Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, a unit whose primary function was the murder of members of the Dutch resistance and those opposed to the Nazis. In the course of Operation Silbertanne (silver fir tree), at least 54 individuals were killed, three of whom Boere admitted shooting to death – Fritz Bicknese, Teun de Groot and FW Kusters.

After the war, Boere escaped to Germany for fear of prosecution – and, in fact, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 for the three murders. Holland asked for his extradition from Germany, but he was the beneficiary of the Fuhrererlass, a law promulgated by Hitler granting German citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators. Since Germany refused in principle to extradite its citizens to stand trial in other countries, Boere had no reason to fear the Dutch court. He could, in theory, have been prosecuted in Germany, but for more than five decades that was not the case. In this respect, he was spared by the unofficial local prosecution policy on Nazi war criminals, which usually refrained from prosecuting individuals who were not officers, even if they had personally committed murder.

About two years ago, however, the state attorneys in Dortmund, headed by Ulrich Maas, announced that they would seek to prosecute Boere and they successfully contested a decision that he was not fit for trial. And thus, in November 2009, the Dutch executioner found himself in a German court facing the charges which he had escaped for more than 60 years.

Boere's conviction and life sentence are therefore more than justified, but they are also highly significant for several additional reasons. The first is that the Boere case is a precedent for Germany, where there are other instances of foreign Nazi collaborators who escaped from their countries of origin for fear of prosecution and who have hereto never faced legal action in Germany. The most famous of these cases are those of a Dutchman, Klaas Carl Faber, and a Dane, Søren Kam. The former, like Boere, served in Sonderkommando Feldmeijer and was sentenced to death in Holland in 1947 for the murder of at least 11 individuals. In 1952, he escaped from a Dutch prison to Germany, which has refused all requests for his extradition and has so far failed to bring him to justice. The latter, who is accused of murdering Carl Clemmensen, a Danish anti-Nazi newspaper editor, also escaped to Germany and was treated in the same manner. Thus Boere's conviction will hopefully serve as a precedent which will be applied in additional cases.

Several more personal factors specific to the Boere case add to its significance. The first is that he never expressed true regret for his crimes. On the contrary, at his trial, he said openly that he was very proud to have been accepted as a volunteer for the Waffen-SS and that during the war, at no time did he ever feel he had committed any crimes. His defence of coercion based on "superior orders" was totally rejected by the court. In that respect, it was the son of his victim Teun de Groot (the oldest of 12 children who has the same name as his father), who astutely remarked to reporters that if Boere had truly been sorry for the murders he committed, he should have returned to Holland to face justice and serve his punishment.

The presence in the courtroom in Aachen of children of Boere's victims was also an opportunity to learn first hand of the devastating impact of his crimes on the families of those murdered. And their insistence that he be tried despite his age reinforces the significance of justice, even when long delayed, as part of the obligations of society to the Nazis' victims to make a serious effort to hold Holocaust perpetrators accountable. This elementary truth and the successful result of the proceeding send a powerful message that the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice are still very worthwhile and just as necessary today as they have been in previous generations.

Efraim Zuroff - Comment is free

Nazi suspect, Argentine immigrant tried in Serbia

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

Nazi collaborator living peacefully in Germany, avoiding arrest

A Lithuanian citizen convicted of collaborating with the Nazis and persecuting Jews during World War II is living peacefully in a small town in Germany.

As a member of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police, Dailide arrested Jews who were trying to escape the Vilna ghetto and handed them over to the Germans. He lied about his wartime activities on his U.S. immigration application after the war, was stripped of his American citizenship in the 1990s, and was ordered deported in 2003 following an investigation and legal proceedings that lasted more than a decade. Dailide fled arrest and settled here in Kirchberg, Saxony, where he has been living ever since.

Dailide is in ninth place on the the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most recent list of the 10 most wanted Nazis. A Vilnius court convicted him of war crimes in a trial that began in 2005, but he has remained free. Last month a high court in Lithuania ruled that he would not go to prison, partly because of his frail health. However, this Haaretz reporter saw him walking around town last week and carrying home his groceries.

Dailide, 87, lives with his wife in a modest apartment at Torstrasse 13, across the street from the town hall. His name is on the mailbox and intercom at the entrance. Dailide's German-born wife, whom he met in 1945 after escaping Lithuania, has relatives in Kirchberg, a town of 7,000 in what was formerly East Germany.

They live on his wife's German pension of 300 euros a month, and the remaining profits from the sale of their house in the U.S. Dailide's American Social Security privileges were revoked.

Dailide's conviction for war crimes relied on documents and testimony concerning a certain October 1941 night, when Dailide arrested 10 Jews who were attempting to escape from the ghetto, and another occasion on which he arrested two Polish Jews. What happened to those he arrested is not known, but it is safe to assume they were murdered along with 94 percent of Lithuanian Jewry, which numbered 220,000 people before the war.

Dailide's name surfaced in documents found in Lithuania's archives, which were examined after the Baltic state won independence. The Vilnius court rejected Dailide's protestations of innocence, and ruled he had lied in his testimony. Despite that, the court refrained from sentencing him to prison, as is permissible by law. The prosecution appealed this leniency, but the appeal was rejected last month. Jewish organizations say this is typical of Lithuania's refusal to punish Nazi collaborators.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, yesterday called the court's failure to sentence Dailide to prison scandalous, "and attests to the manner in which the Lithuanian government refuses to deal with the past."

Zuroff, who worked steadily to bring Dailide to trial in the U.S. and later in Lithuania, said the case is "a classic example of how a lack of political willingness to contend with the crimes of the past, along with extenuating circumstances stemming from advanced age, are letting Nazi criminals off the hook."

More than a dozen Lithuanian collaborators have been tried, but not one has gone to prison, a fact Zuroff says contributes to rising anti-Semitism in the Baltic country.

'I'm innocent'

Last Wednesday, Dailide opened the door to his apartment and invited this Haaretz correspondent and a local reporter to come in. Dailide's wife, who suffers from Alzheimer's and cancer, was reclining in her bedroom. Taking care of her is one of the reasons Dailide has remained free. He said he uses a tube to feed her.

During our hour-long meeting Dailide exhibited an excellent memory for details, but had trouble concentrating at times. The walls of the darkened apartment are decorated with photos of his family in the U.S. - his two sons live there - and of himself and his wife during the decades they spent in Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida. On the couch were numerous self-help books, a daily newspaper and dictionaries.

Dailide insists he is innocent. The documents used against him are misleading, he contends, based on a colleague's erroneous record in October 1941. In the other case, he had signed an arrest warrant on behalf of a policeman who was illiterate, he said.

He recounted his escape to Germany in 2004, when he was afraid U.S. authorities were going to arrest him. "I took my car, packed a few things and fled the house. I slept in motels and used phone cards to contact my family. A neighbor drove my wife to meet me periodically. A priest from Cleveland contacted a priest in Toronto, who agreed to put me up. I didn't use credit cards, I put our house up for sale, and I managed to cross the border into Canada using my Lithuanian passport. My wife met me in Toronto, and we flew from there to Frankfurt, took a train to Zwickau and arrived in Kirchberg."

Dailide revealed that despite the Lithuanian court's ruling that he undergo a new medical examination following his conviction, he has never been reexamined. "Last year my lawyer in Lithuania received a letter from the court demanding that I come to Lithuania for medical examinations. They noted that the trip would cost about 500 euros. We replied that we do not have the money - and they dispensed with the examination."

All of the information regarding the state of Dailide's health evidently stems from a few check-ups he had at his lawyer's recommendation during the trial in 2005. "Naturally I wanted to be acquitted in the trial, but nobody wants to go to prison in any case," he said.

He claims he suffers from chronic back pain and arthritis, and that he takes medication for high blood pressure.

A spokeswoman for the Lithuanian court said in response: "A medical board that convened for two years ruled that Dailide's state of health does not allow for his incarceration."

She said she would need to check whether the court had refrained from reexamining him. The results of her inquiry had not arrived as of press time.

'Everyone collaborated'

How is it that someone convicted of collaborating with the Nazis can live in Germany?

A German lawyer who specializes in immigration cases explained that the European Union's Nice Treaty gives everyone - even if convicted - the right to choose where to live. The treaty stipulates that Germany can deport an EU citizen only if he or she is causing "significant damage" to the public. Dailide apparently does not meet this criterion.

Dailide's neighbors became familiar with his story six months ago when a local paper ran a photo of the house under the banner "War Criminal in Kirchberg." A store owner in the adjacent building said she was shocked at first, but calmed down after she inquired into the details.

"He didn't shoot anyone, right? So he collaborated, so what? Everyone collaborated in that period," she said.

Haaretz

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 Chile

In 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

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