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Aribert Heim

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File:Aribert heim.jpg
Aribert Heim

Aribert Heim (born June 28, 1914) is an Austrian doctor and one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals. As a SS doctor in a concentration camp in Mauthausen (where many Spanish Republicans were sent), he is accused of killing many inmates with sadistic methods, such as direct injections of toxic compounds into the hearts of his victims without painkillers.

Heim was born in Bad Radkersburg, Austria, the son of a policeman and a housewife. He studied medicine and did his doctorate in Vienna before volunteering to join the Waffen-SS in the spring of 1940. In October 1941 he was sent into the KZ Mauthausen where he performed gruesome medical experimentats on prisoners. He was later sent to an SS field hospital in Vienna.

On March 15th 1945, he was captured by US soldiers and sent to a camp for prisoners of war. He was released under dubious circumstances and worked as a doctor at Baden-Baden until his disappearance in 1962. He had been tipped off by an informant that the Austrian police were investigating him for war crimes. Subsequently, he disappeared, but there is still a worldwide arrest warrant for him.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo revealed in October 2005 that Heim had been living in Spain for the last 20 years, helped by the ODESSA network [1]. The German government is offering 150,000 Euros for information leading to his arrest, while the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched Operation Last Chance. In the last five years 300,000 Euros have been withdrawn from his accounts and transferred to Spain and Denmark. An Italian couple of Palafrugell has contact with one of Heim's sons in the Costa Brava region of Spain. The son sometimes secretly goes to Denmark on vacation.

The money transferred from the account raised the suspicions of Israeli officials, who contacted the Criminal Institute in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After the Criminal Institute looked into the account, they concluded that the money was Heim's, which suggested that Aribert Heim was still alive and that his family had lied about his alleged death in South America due to cancer. German investigators together with the Simon Wiesenthal Center discovered Heim's secret bank accounts in Berlin in the early 2000s. They proved to hold €1 million (£680,000) in cash and other assets. Heim has been assumed to be still alive, and this is substantiated by the fact that none of his three children ever claimed any of this money. Tax records prove that, as late as 2001, Heim's lawyer asked the German authorities to refund capital gains taxes levied on him because he was living abroad.

Heim has reportedly hidden out in South America, Spain and the Balkans. Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal's successor at the Wiesenthal Center has initiated an active search for his whereabouts, and in late 2005, Spanish police determined his location as being Palafrugell, Spain. According to "El Mundo", Aribert Heim had been helped by associates of Otto Skorzeny, who had organized one of the biggest ODESSA bases in Franco's Spain. ODESSA was obviously still in place, in one way or another. Press reports in mid-October 2005 suggested that Heim's arrest by Spanish police was "imminent". Within a few days, however, newer reports suggested that he had successfully evaded capture and had relocated to either another part of Spain or to Denmark.

Heim was, after Adolf Eichmann's top assistant, Alois Brunner, the second most wanted Nazi officer. The Simon Wiesenthal Center considers the search for Heim as part of its "Operation Last Chance," a project to assist governments in the location and arrest of suspected Nazi war criminals who are still alive.

The prisoners in Concentration Camp Mauthausen called Heim "Dr. Death." For about 2 months (October to December, 1941), Heim was in the camp near Linz, Austria, where he carried out the same experiments on Jews as the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele had done. "Heim scared his prisoners to death," says a survivor. The SS doctor operated without narcoses and Jewish inmates were poisoned with various insertions directly into the heart in order for the time of death to increase. The doctor wanted to see which poison was the fastest and cheapest way to make people die.

See also

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