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Searching for Dr Death
Harry Underwood, FirstPost.co.uk
The salmon-fishing city of Puerto Montt is a bleak nowheresville in southern Chile. It is here that Efraim Zuroff, the world’s senior Nazi-hunter, is searching for Dr Aribert Heim (right), the biggest name among the few remaining WWII Nazi war criminals still at large.
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has flown to South America convinced that he is closing in on Heim who he believes is somewhere in Patagonia – either in Chile, perhaps in Puerto Montt, where his daughter Waltraud lives, or across the border in Argentina.
Waltraud, 64, claims her Austrian-born father died from cancer in 1993 in Argentina, but no death certificate has ever been produced. Furthermore, neither she nor her two brothers, living in Germany, has ever claimed the £900,000 sitting in a Berlin
bank account in Heim’s name.
Heim, who will be 94 if he is still alive, was a sadistic murderer at Mauthausen concentration camp. His interest in seeing how much pain his patients could survive led to his trying out the most abhorrent methods of torture. Known as 'Dr Death', he is said to have injected petrol into the hearts of inmates. When a healthy Jewish prisoner came to him, he is reported to have cut him open under anaesthetic, castrated him, torn out his kidneys and then decapitated him, keeping his skull as a paperweight.
Heim was detained by American forces at the end of the war but managed to disappear. He was practising as a gynaecologist in the spa town of Baden-Baden when he was tipped off that he was about to be prosecuted and fled in 1962.
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