CHILE:Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff flew to southern Chile yesterday in a bid to find the most wanted second World War criminal thought to be alive, and he urged Aribert Heim, known as "Dr Death", to turn himself in.
A doctor with the SS, Heim removed organs from victims without anaesthetic and killed hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria with injections of poison or gasoline straight to the heart.
Heim has been on the run for 46 years since evading police in Germany in 1962 prior to a planned prosecution. His family says he died in 1993. He would be 94 if he is alive.
Mr Zuroff, who heads the hunt for Nazis by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, believes Heim is probably in Chilean or Argentine Patagonia, the region between the Andes and south Atlantic. His daughter lives in Patagonia.
Hundreds of Nazis sought refuge in Latin America after the second World War, many lured to Argentina thanks to the open-door policies of Gen Juan Domingo Peron, as well as to Chile and Brazil.
The Wiesenthal Center is offering a €315,000 reward for Heim's capture as part of its so-called Operation Last Chance, and is planning an advertising blitz to try to elicit tips.
"He's a horrible war criminal who murdered hundreds of people. Someone like that doesnt deserve to live his life in peace," Mr Zuroff said. Among the Nazis who fled to South America, Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, escaped to Argentina and lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.- (Reuters)