There aren't many left, maybe less than a handful but the men who hunt these criminals are not giving up until all have been accounted for.
The hunt for Doctor DeathJanuary 22, 2008His crimes were among the worst of the Holocaust, and his pursuers are mounting one last effort to capture him, write Rory Carroll and Uki Goni.
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 place names were becoming sickeningly famous: Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belzec, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sobibor, 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, 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: 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 the Andean foothills.
The reality was more prosaic but still sinister. Hundreds, possibly thousands, had escaped through the "ratline" and found sanctuary. As the decades passed, 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 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 account details and tip-offs. Wire-taps were yielding tantalising clues. Media campaigns in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil were publicising telephone hotlines and the $US10,000 ($11,500) 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," Zuroff says. 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 United States and tracked Nazis until his death in 2005.
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 skiers 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," Zuroff says. The most sought-after Nazi since Josef Mengele has a bounty of $US448,000 on his head and the governments of Argentina, Chile and Germany on his tail.
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 commandant'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 Buser, 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 Sao Paulo in 1985. Auschwitz's "Angel of Death", memorably played by Gregory Peck in the film The Boys From Brazil, had 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 is 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 €1 million ($1.66 million). Surveillance records showed that the mother phoned her sons on his birthday to remind them of the date.
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 scoots to court on the back of his lawyer's Vespa, takes calls on his mobile 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. There is no mystery about why so many ended up there: they were invited. The government of Juan Peron established ratlines to spirit war criminals and collaborators into Argentina. There were several reasons. When posted as a military attache to Italy in 1939-41, the ambitious Argentinian 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 Peron 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 Argentinian cardinal Antonio Caggiano and the French cardinal Eugene Tisserant, to rescue beleaguered Nazis and collaborators from postwar Europe. Imagining itself to be fighting communism, the network issued false documents to slip Hitler's helpers into Italy and on to passenger ships departing from Genoa.
It is a stain on the revered founder of Peronism that has been belatedly and grudgingly recognised. In 2005 the Argentine Government repealed "directive 11", a secret order that prohibited Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering Argentina in the 1940s. Younger Argentinians have been willing to explore this dark side of their history, but for many older Argentinians 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.
Heim, who has been running for most of his life, apparently wants to spend his twilight years near his daughter.
"The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," Zuroff says. "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 - tumble into the present. They are always present.
Guardian News & Mediahttp://www.smh.com.au/news/wor.....ullpage#contentSwap1
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