ARGENTINA: An ex-Nazi criminal known as "Doctor Death" is the Number One target of a new project to capture Holocaust perpetrators in South America

An ex-Nazi criminal known as "Doctor Death" is the Number One target of a new project to capture Holocaust perpetrators in South America. A reward scheme was launched in South America on Tuesday (November 27) in the hope of finding and prosecuting ex-Nazi war criminals before they die. Operation Last Chance -- a project headed by prominent Jewish rights group The Simon Wiesenthal Center -- attempts to locate Nazis in hiding. It offers financial awards for all information which leads to their capture and prosecution. Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, Efraim Zuroff, said that although many of those they are looking for may be very old and unable to stand trial, the world still has a duty to hunt them down. "I am sure that if someone, God forbid, murdered your grandmother and we found that murderer sixty years later, it wouldn't very much matter to you that that person was 70, 80 or 90, you would justifiably want that person to pay for the crime," Zuroff said. Rewards starting at 10,000 euros will be offered in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, and information is especially wanted for one man. Aribert Heim is accused of playing deadly medical experiments on dozens of the prisoners at the Austrian Mauthausen concentration camp. When he was bored, he apparently timed patients' deaths with a stopwatch after injecting their hearts with poison, amongst other grotesque crimes. "According to the witnesses, either in one or even maybe two cases, he cooked the heads of two of his victims and put it on his desk in his office," said Stefen Klemp, a researcher for The Simon Wiesenthal Center. Heim would now be over 93 years old, but is still thought to be alive. According to the Center, a large inheritance is waiting to be claimed by his children in Germany, but only if they can prove that he is dead -- and so far no one has touched the account. He is thought to be living in Chile, where his daughter lives, or possibly in neighboring Argentina. Zuroff said his capture would lead to the biggest Holocaust trial in 30 years, and a reward of 310,000 euros is being offered for him alone, to be paid in part by the governments of Austria and Germany. "I would go so far as to say, if the only result of Operation Last Chance is that Aribert Heim is brought to justice, that in itself would be worth it," Zuroff said. Operation Last Chance has already uncovered the names of 480 suspects in 20 countries. Ninety-nine of those cases have been referred to state prosecutors. The project started in the Baltic states in 2002, but now the Center says fresh evidence continually points to South America -- where large numbers of Nazis were helped to resettle following World War II. A team of Israeli agents kidnapped Holocaust planner Adolph Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and took him to Israel where he was tried and later hung. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" from the Auschwitz concentration camp, escaped to Argentina and also lived in Paraguay before he died in Brazil in 1979.

ITN Source | November 28, 2007

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