Hunt on for Nazi concentration camp doctor

updated 6:08 p.m. ET April 29, 2008

As the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center prepares to publish its list of top fugitive Nazi war criminals Wednesday, the AP investigates the case of the concentration camp doctor who tops the most-wanted list.

BADEN-BADEN, Germany - Former SS doctor Aribert Heim tops a list released Wednesday of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals. He is a man so brutal that witnesses remember him as the worst they saw, though he was only at Mauthausen concentration camp for two months.

Heim would be 93 today, and "we have good reason to believe he is still alive," said Efraim Zuroff by telephone from Jerusalem. Zuroff is the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, which published the list.

Still, despite a $485,000 reward for Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria, he has managed to avoid capture for decades.

He is only one of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals that the center estimates are still at large.

After Heim, on the center's most wanted list are:

• John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps;
• Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia;
• Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies to their death;
• and Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

But the nature of Heim's alleged crimes are what catapulted him to the top of the list.

Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was included in a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen.

Global manhunt
The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.

Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly 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.

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