Hunt for most-wanted Nazi war criminal ends in Egypt

Son says 'Doctor Death' died in 1992 after search tracks down SS fugitive to Cairo hotel

The hunt for the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Aribert Heim, appeared to have come to an end today with reports suggesting that he died in Cairo almost 17 years ago, after converting to Islam. According to new evidence published today, Heim, known as "Doctor Death" for the atrocities he committed against Jews as a physician at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, spent the last decade of his life living in Egypt after reinventing himself as an apparently kindly old man called Uncle Tarek, who played ping-pong with local children.

While serving with the SS, he was accused of injecting petrol into his victims' hearts, removing organs from healthy patients and decorating his desk with the skulls of prisoners he killed.

Heim was the prime target of Operation: Last Chance, the campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to track down the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust. After 240 leads, which mainly focused on south America, Heim appears to have been tracked down to a hotel in Cairo. His son, Ruediger Heim, has admitted for the first time that his father died of cancer on 10 August 1992, after watching the Barcelona Olympics on TV. He said he was with his father when he died.

An investigation by the New York Times and the German broadcaster ZDF discovered a briefcase belonging to Heim which included his passport, bank details, and newspaper clippings of reports of efforts to track him down and his trial in absentia. It also included letters protesting his innocence and accusing Simon Wiesenthal of inventing Heim's atrocities.

ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely".

According to friends in Egypt, the doctor who had applied himself so vigorously to butchering and torturing his victims in the name of medicine had asked for his own body to be donated to medical research at his death. According to ZDF, his wish was not granted for religious reasons.

Today, the Wiesenthal Centre said that while there was "no doubt" that Heim had lived in Egypt, it had not been established that he had died there.

"What is not clear, what is missing from the presentation by ZDF and the New York Times, is the conclusive proof he indeed died in Egypt in 1992," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the centre, told Reuters. "There's no grave, there's no body. We can't do any DNA testing."

Zuroff also pointed out that Ruediger Heim had previously said that the only contact he had had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were two notes, and that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.

"Ruediger has been lying," Zuroff told the Associated Press. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain amount of scepticism and suspicion and the most important thing is missing: the body."

If it turns out to be true, however, Zuroff said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms of prosecuting people who helped Heim escape justice". Ruediger Heim refused to comment when contacted at his home by the Associated Press.

Born on 28 June 1914, in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany. He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941. He was held by the Americans after the war but released before the true extent of his crimes had become clear. He kept a low profile for the next two decades, even avoiding being photographed in the team picture of the ice hockey club he played for.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted that Heim was living in Baden-Baden and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him, apparently after he had been tipped off. Heim fled through France and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and eventually settling in Egypt, ZDF and the New York Times reported, citing Ruediger Heim.

He lived in Cairo, under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, at the Kasr el Madina hotel for the 10 years leading up to his death, the report said. Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the hotel, said Heim was known as Uncle Tarek, and that he played table tennis with him on the roof of the hotel. He said he bought sweets for children in the neighbourhood. Heim converted to Islam and worshipped at Cairo's famous al-Azhar mosque, the New York Times said.

Ruediger Heim told ZDF that he first visited his father in 1976, organising the trip through his aunt and arranging to meet with him in a hotel.

"He recognised me right away," Heim recalled. "It was a meeting of worlds. I was there for 14 days."

But, he said, he did not talk with his father about the allegations against him, largely because he said he was not fully aware of them himself.

"I didn't ask him: 'How many people did you kill?' because I didn't know. I didn't know any concrete details," he told ZDF. "Later, on other visits, I got to know his life better."

Guardian

Nazi death camp survivor tells pupils of the horrors

Born in a German concentration camp just three days before it was liberated by the Americans, Holocaust survivor Eva Clarke has a remarkable story to tell.

Speaking yesterday at a Holywood grammar school, the 63-year-old held her teenage audience in rapture as she told her family’s story of life – and death – in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria.

Almost all of Eva’s family were killed in concentration camps during World War Two, only a few survived – including her mother Anka who will be 92 this year. She spoke of her mother’s three-and-a-half years as a prisoner in Nazi camps Terezin, Auschwitz and Mauthausen and how she survived to give birth to Eva at the gates of one of the most notorious camps just days before the end of the war.

Starting with the gradual stigmatisation of Jews, she continued, with the aid of photographs and artefacts, to show how her parents were called to a warehouse from which they were taken to Terezin. They were lucky. Young and healthy they were able to work which kept them alive.

But they were separated and when Eva’s mother heard her husband had been moved to Auschwitz she volunteered to go after him, unaware of the horrendous nature of the camp. She never saw him again, but was lucky enough to survive the camp and was sent away to Dresden with a group of women to build V1 bombs.

From there she was sent to Mauthausen, where at just five stone, she gave birth to Eva as she climbed off the coal train at the entrance to the camp. Taken in a cart filled with the sick and infirm up the steep hill to the gates, she managed to give birth to her 3lb daughter.

The story is just one of many poignant and sad moments – from the comments from the Nazi officers and so-called doctors who carried out experiments, to the instances of luck and good fortune which enabled her mother Anka to survive.

And her message certainly got through to the pupils at Sullivan Upper in Holywood, where she spoke to junior and senior pupils.

Eva Clarke is in Northern Ireland on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Trust. She will be speaking at Fermanagh County Museum in Enniskillen today and tomorrow.

Belfast News Letter

Kevin Myers: Why I wish Nazi-hunters well in search for death camp fiend

Inmates were worked to death on a daily basis
in Nazi concentration camps such as Mauthausen

Nazi-hunters from the Simon Weisenthal Centre are, apparently, close to tracking down the war criminal Aribert Heim in South America.

Now, I have mixed feelings about the Simon Weisenthal Centre. Whereas we should all applaud its pursuit of Nazi war criminals, its neglect of Soviet war criminals, whose crimes are comparable with those of the Nazis, most especially in the Baltic states, suggest that it is more interested in Jewish victimhood than Jewish culpability. This is understandable. But it should remind us not to accept the Weisenthal Centre on its own assessment of itself — a truth, of course, which applies to us all.

I certainly wish it well in its pursuit of Heim, in the year of the 70th anniversary of the place in which he murdered so freely.

The concentration camp at Mauthausen — the name is Austrian dialect for a toll-booth, and what a toll it took — was opened in 1938, having been chosen because of the granite quarries nearby. Granite, henceforth, defined Mauthausen; and whereas Auschwitz might be the quintessence of Nazi insanity, Mauthausen was the embodiment of its utter evil, for it was here that people were mass murdered by labour. The Nazis, naturally, even had an official term for it: Vernichtung Durch Arbeit — ‘extermination through work’.

Of all the grotesque barbarities of the Third Reich, one of the most bizarre was the reason for establishing the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. The demoralising effect upon SS executioners of killing women and children, by gunfire, day after day.

But the Vernichtung Durch Arbeit principle showed no such sensitivity towards Mauthausen guards, who were apparently made of sterner than the usual SS Totenkopverbande stuff, and the very heart of their operation was the Staircase of Death.

Mauthausen's granite quarry was well below the level of the connecting road. So hods were strapped on to the backs of prisoners into which 40 kilogram granite blocks were placed. The prisoners, six abreast in unbroken columns, were made to carry their loads up the 186 steps of a steep granite staircase from the quarry to the road, with several hundred men on the staircase simultaneously.

Prisoners who faltered were beaten to death, or shot, as the others bore their loads upwards, in a slow, ghastly rhythm.

Sometimes, an exhausted prisoner, or prisoners would collapse and, falling backward down the 35 degree slope, would cause a gathering avalanche of hod, and granite and human, in which many men might be crushed or killed. That was it, dawn to dusk, the serried ranks of stripe-clad prisoners bearing their unbearable burdens upwards. The one sure escape was death, and only mankind's passionate attachment to life made such a place feasible.

Logic should have told the prisoners they could not survive, and so should turn on their guards. Yet hoping against all the evidence of their senses, they worked on, until the final escape, though exhaustion, despair, or the lash.

Yet Vernichtung Durch Arbeit was not Mauthausen's only means of ending life. SS guards used to organise races for hod-bearing prisoners up the steps. Those who came last were shot. Winners were sometimes then given the choice of pushing a fellow prisoner to his death down the steep side of the quarry, the chirpily named ‘parachutists' wall’ — Fallschirmspringerwand, or being shot themselves.

In all, for various different reasons, some 36,318 Mauthausen inmates met their end with a bullet (who else but the Nazis would keep such records? Who? Well, the Soviets, actually). This figure presumably included the 50 Jews commandant SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Franz Ziereis gave to his son, as a birthday present, for target practice.

Actually Mauthausen was relatively unusual, for it was generously catholic in its appetites. Its toll included 47 allied aircrew who were deliberately worked to death there, as were many German Christians who refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler. Of the 1,000 non-Jewish Poles sent there after the Warsaw Rising, only 100 survived. Yet in this litany of butchery, there is something particularly poignant about the fate of one group of prisoners.

Many thousands of Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after Franco's victory, were still interned in camps there when France fell.

The Germans dispatched them to Mauthausen and, over the next five years, most were systematically worked to death. By January 1945, just 3,000 were still alive.

During the final four months of the war, 2,163 of the remaining Spaniards were murdered. In the heart of this hell was SS doctor Aribert Heim. At war's end, amid the utter chaos of Germany, he was able to escape, and to become a gynaecologist in Baden-Baden, until finally suspicion fell on him in the 1960s. He then — or so it is believed — fled to South America. And though Heim is certainly not the worst of the war criminals who supervised the murder machine of Mauthausen, as one the last surviving examples of the human depravity of the Third Reich, he will do.

Of the 28,000 Jews in the camp when it was liberated by US troops on April 25, 1945, 3,000 soon died. One of the surviving Jews was Simon Weisenthal.

And oh, how many Nazis were to bitterly regret that unintended oversight?

Belfast Telegraph

Pursuing a symbol of Nazi perversion

By Efraim Zuroff

Doesn't the world owe it to all the Nazis' victims to make equal efforts to bring each of their torturers and killers to justice? Recently, I've found myself increasingly preoccupied with that question, following a two-week mission to South America on the trail of the Wiesenthal Center's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Dr. Aribert Heim. Heim committed his most heinous crimes at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where his nickname was "Doctor Death."

To put the question into proper perspective, it is important to note that during practically every press conference I conducted or interview that I gave in South America, I had to address the question of the validity or value of the effort to track down a 94-year-old war criminal. In every venue, I recited the standard mantras: "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers"; "a suspect's advanced age is no reason to ignore mass murder"; and "the practical implication of establishing a time limit for prosecuting genocide suspects is that those lucky enough, rich enough or smart enough to elude justice will ultimately be allowed to get away with their crimes." However, I also stressed the concept that every man and woman persecuted by the Nazis deserves that an effort be made to find and hold accountable those who turned them, innocent civilians, into victims.

I noted in my remarks that Simon Wiesenthal himself had always stressed this principle, and in fact I deeply believe in its validity and moral power. But the fact of the matter is that our recent mission to Chile and Argentina clearly underscores the unfortunate fact that not all of the Nazis' victims get equal treatment when it comes to the investment made to bring their killers to justice, and the Heim case is a classic illustration.

For starters, Heim is the only Nazi war criminal in recent history who is being sought by four different police forces - those of Germany, Austria, Chile and Argentina. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the only Holocaust perpetrator in at least the past three decades, for whose capture a special task force was established by the German police. Also he is the only such criminal for whom a huge reward is being offered: 315,000 euros (135,000 euros from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 130,000 euros from the German government, and 50,000 euros from the Austrian government).

It is true that these relatively excellent and virtually unprecedented conditions stem, to a large extent, from the fact that Heim has been on the run since 1962, when he disappeared from his home in Baden-Baden after being tipped off that the West German police were about to arrest him for his crimes at Mauthausen. So while it is true that the current whereabouts of all the other Holocaust perpetrators on our "most wanted" list (with one exception) are now known, down to their exact address and telephone number, the fact is that none of the police forces in their countries of residence were looking for them at all before they were exposed as Nazi war criminals.

Given the fact that criminals like John Demjanjuk, Sandor Kepiro and Milivoj Asner - Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on the list, respectively - played an active role in the liquidation of at least hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians, one may ask what allows the Heim case to benefit from special status, abundant political good will and relatively munificent financial resources?

The answer to this question became apparent when our team traveled to Puerto Montt, Chile and Bariloche, Argentina - the area where we believe he is currently hiding. Although we had previously publicized the reward for Dr. Heim in Chile and Argentina, it was only when we actually reached Patagonia and had an opportunity to describe his crimes in great detail, that we felt that we were finally getting our message across to the wider public. This achievement was no doubt considerably enhanced by the fact that Heim's daughter is living in Puerto Montt, and it became evident to us in two ways: One was the flow of information that reached us from informants in the area, either via our hotline or in person. The other was the expressions of support, on the one hand, and opposition, on the other, from various local residents.

What became clear was that even if Heim had committed his crimes 67 years ago, their utter cruelty simply could not be ignored. So although I consciously tried not to overdo the descriptions - of the injections of phenol directly into the hearts of inmates, the operations performed without anesthesia, the castrations and use of body parts of those murdered as decorations - the few facts I did relate made quite an impact.

In other words, the key issues that elevated Heim to his current status were the degree of his own personal responsibility for his crimes and their absolutely horrific nature, all compounded by the fact that he was a doctor who had pledged to protect and save his patients, whom he instead mercilessly murdered. In that respect, Heim easily became a symbol of the Nazis' perversion and misuse of medicine - a fact which no doubt increased his "attractiveness" as a target for all of us.

If Mengele was never prosecuted, perhaps Dr. Death's apprehension and punishment could be a partial atonement by those who failed to bring the "Angel of Death" to justice. I certainly have no objection to the efforts and resources being invested in trying to bring Heim to justice. I only wish that a far more serious effort was being to made to ensure that the killers of the other victims will also be held accountable in this world.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Haaretz

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

Schindler's List survivor tells stories of camps, Nazi regime

In 1946, Oskar Schindler (second from the right) poses with a group of Jews he rescued. Among those pictured are: Manci Rosner, Edmund Horowitz, Ludmila Pfefferberg-Page, Halinka Horowitz, and Olek Rosner.

Zev Kedem spent much of his childhood seeing sights. He saw the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, the factory of Oskar Schindler and, eventually, the downfall of the Nazi regime. Looking back over 60 years, Kedem, 73, is amazed that he came out alive.

"The most amazing thought is that the Holocaust overtook me when I was five," Kedem said in a telephone interview on Monday. "That's amazing for a child."

Kedem will speak at CSU today as part of Holocaust Awareness Week. His presentation, titled "Schindler's List: A Survivor Celebrates Life," will take place in the Lory Student Center's North Ballroom at 7 p.m.

In the early years of the Holocaust, Kedem lived with his family in Katowitz, Poland. When Nazi soldiers began rounding up Jews in Poland, he and his family went into hiding. Kedem ended up in a concentration camp. It was while he was in a concentration camp that his name miraculously found a place on Schindler's List. Schindler's List was written up by Oskar Schindler, a German who compiled a list of 1,100 Jews to work in a factory in Brinlitz, Czechoslovakia. Being taken to the factory meant avoiding death in the gas chambers for the Jewish people. For young Zev Kedem, Oskar Schindler was a life-saver.

"I am very grateful to Oskar Schindler to this very day," Kedem said.

Although Schindler's List saved Kedem initially, his journey was far from over. Less than a week after arriving at Schindler's factory, the local commandant charged that no child under the age of thirteen could work in the factory. For Kedem, this meant a trip to the dreaded death camp of Auschwitz in Poland. That day, five boys, including Kedem, and their fathers were transported to Auschwitz. They arrived Nov. 3, 1944.

For Kedem, death seemed imminent, but once again, luck was on his side. The day before he and the other transported prisoners were brought to Auschwitz, Adolf Hitler ordered the gas chambers closed. Decades later, while examining a log of prisoners brought to Auschwitz, Kedem located his prisoner number, B14433. He found that he and his father were among the last ten prisoners brought into Auschwitz before the camp was closed.

"Had we arrived one day earlier you wouldn't be talking to me," Kedem said.

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, Kedem was turned around almost immediately and forced to march across Poland, a miserable, wearisome journey. At one point, one loaf of bread was his means of sustenance for nearly two weeks.

"We didn't know how long we'd be on the road," Kedem said.

Eventually, Kedem and the prisoners were loaded on cattle trucks and taken to a concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria. Kedem was taken to a labor camp where he and other prisoners manufactured ball bearings and other war materials for the German army. Work in the labor camps was dark and dank; the factories in which Kedem worked were hidden in caverns dug inside the mountains of Austria.

After working in the hidden factories for a period of months, Kedem was sent back to Mauthausen. Then, on May 3, 1945, just before the surrender of German forces, Kedem was liberated. His liberation took place just sixteen days before his 13th birthday. Kedem had been a German detainee for nearly six years. Unfortunately, however, liberation did not mean safety or celebration.

"We had been reduced to sub-animal level," Kedem said. "Celebration did not occur."

One of the first prisoners to leave Mauthausen when the gates were opened, Kedem immediately sought a safe place to hide. Germans soldiers were still on the loose and shooting any Jews they encountered.

"You could not depend on anyone," said Kedem, going on to say, "people were like zombies and living skeletons. I was shot at more often after liberation than while in camps."

As he moved from place to place seeking help, Kedem was often turned away. Finally, he was introduced to a U.S. Army unit helping displaced persons. He travelled with the unit for a time, acting as a sort of unofficial mascot. Then, in November 1945, Kedem was transported to England along with 800 other children. He was finally safe.

In England, he was educated at St. Philips and St. James primary schools and went on to graduate from Oxford University. Kedem noted, however, that his preschool education took place in the violent, death-plagued camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

"You're just focused on staying alive," said Kedem of his time in concentration camps. In retrospect, Kedem feels enormously fortunate to have survived.

"Life is wonderful and should be celebrated every day. People take life far too much for granted. Individual freedom is taken too much for granted," Kedem said.

Rocky Mountain Collegian

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