For nearly half a century, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has searched for Aribert Heim, a former SS member known as "Dr. Death." Heim is accused of torturing and murdering hundreds of Jewish prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The organization now claims to have strong evidence suggesting that Heim is alive and residing in either southern Chile or Argentina. Heim would be 94 years of age today.
"In the last few days, we've received information from two different sources, both relating to Chile, which we think have very good potential," Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told News.bbc.co.uk. "The reason we are going [to Patagonia]... is of course the fact that Heim's daughter lives in Puerto Montt, and we think there is a strong likelihood that he might be in that area or in the area between Puerto Montt and Bariloche [Argentina]."
According to Dr. Zuroff, Heim allegedly committed some of the worst crimes of the Holocaust. For this reason, he is at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Most Wanted Nazi Criminals list.
Aribert Heim was born on June 28, 1914, in Bad Radkersburg, Austria-Hungary. According to public records, his father was a policeman, whereas his mother was a housewife. Little is known about his early years; however, Heim later became a professional hockey player. It remains unclear when or for how long he played hockey.
At the age of 21, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935. During that time, Heim also began to study medicine in Vienna. He continued his studies until 1940, when he joined the Waffen-SS, a group of select soldiers who committed themselves to Nazi ideology and the decimation of the Jewish people.
Heim's ruthlessness reportedly peaked in October 1940, when he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp to perform medical experiments on Nazi captives. It was there that Heim received the nickname "Dr. Death" because of the manner in which he tortured and murdered hundreds of Jewish prisoners.
According to an account later related by Karl Lotter, a political prisoner who survived the concentration camp, Heim murdered an 18-year-old Jewish man who was being treated at the clinic for foot inflammation. Lotter reported that Heim was more interested in the teenager's fit physical condition. After questioning the man about his life, Heim anesthetized him and cut him open. He then removed the man's kidneys and castrated him before removing his head, which Heim then de-fleshed and used as a paper weight.
"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter stated during a 1950 court proceeding. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible."
Another witness allegedly reported that Heim once removed the tattooed skin of one of his victims and fashioned it into a seat cover.
In 1941, Heim transferred to Ebensee, a camp near Linz, in Austria. There, he continued to conduct experiments, some of which included the injection of water, gasoline, and poisons directly into his victim's heart. Heim allegedly carried a stopwatch with him and used it to time how long his human subjects would live during the experiments.
Heim left Ebensee in February 1942 and went to work at a hospital in the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord in Northern Finland. He remained there for several months, but his activities during this time period remain unclear. However, on March 15, 1945, Heim was captured by the United States Army and held as a prisoner of war. Although Heim almost certainly would have gone to trial and been sentenced to death, his file in the Berlin Document Center was altered, with all mentions of Mauthausen removed. It remains unclear who tampered with the files, but Heim was consequently released from custody.
