Nazi hunters’ doubt over ‘death’

via BBC NEWS | Europe | Nazi hunters’ doubt over ‘death’.

ZDF said Aribert Heim died of cancer. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has expressed doubts about a report that Aribert Heim, one of the most-wanted Nazi criminals, died in Egypt in 1992. “There’s no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave,” Efraim Zuroff, the centre’s leading Nazi hunter, told AP agency. On Wednesday, Germany’s ZDF TV reported that Heim died in Cairo, saying it had found his passport and other documents. Heim is accused of killing hundreds of inmates at a concentration camp where he was a doctor during World War II. ‘Too perfect’ On Thursday, Mr Zuroff said the report about Heim’s death raised “more questions than it answers”. “We can’t sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation,” he said. “Keep in mind these people have a vested interest in being declared dead – it’s a perfectly crafted story; that’s the problem, it’s too perfect,” Mr Zuroff told the AP.

siehe auch: KZ-Arzt “Dr. Tod”: Nazi-Kriegsverbrecher Heim seit 1992 tot. Der als “Schlächter von Mauthausen” berüchtigte Nazi-Verbrecher Aribert Heim ist nach Recherchen des ZDF und der “New York Times” seit vielen Jahren tot. Der frühere KZ-Arzt starb am 10. August 1992 in Kairo an Darmkrebs, wie der Mainzer Sender am Mittwochabend berichtete. Heim hielt sich demnach nahezu 30 Jahre in der ägyptischen Hauptstadt vor den Ermittlern versteckt. Der Gesuchte war im Konzentrationslager Mauthausen unter anderem als “Dr. Tod” berüchtigt und soll 1941 als SS-Arzt zahlreiche Häftlinge mit Injektionen ins Herz gefoltert und getötet haben; Hunt underway for remains of Nazi ‘Doctor Death’. Police in Germany and Austria sought to confirm Thursday that Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, alias “Doctor Death”, died in Egypt in 1992, but veteran Nazi hunters were sceptical. German police said they would hunt Heim’s grave, while Austrian police also sought “verification” of his death, according to prosecutors. German investigators had “credible information from the personal entourage” of Heim this week that the man known as the “Butcher of Mauthausen” had died, a police spokesman for Baden Wurttemberg state said. (…) But a senior German prosecutor was cautious. “I won’t believe it until the remains of the body have been identified,” Joachim Riedel, deputy chief of the public prosecutor’s office specialising in Nazi war crimes, told AFP. It was possible that “false trails” were deliberately being laid to suggest Heim was dead, as had happened via “personal channels” in the cases of the equally notorious Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, Riedel said; Uncovering Lost Path of the Most Wanted Nazi. Documents used by officials in the search for Aribert Ferdinand Heim. Even in old age the imposingly tall, athletic German known to locals as Tarek Hussein Farid maintained the discipline to walk some 15 miles each day through the busy streets of Egypt’s capital. He walked to the world-renowned Al Azhar mosque here, where he converted to Islam, and to the ornate J. Groppi Cafe downtown, where he ordered the chocolate cakes he sent to friends and bought the bonbons he gave to their children, who called him Uncle Tarek.