Nazi war criminal dubbed 'doctor death' traced in Spain
A Nazi war criminal known as “doctor death” for his experiments that killed hundreds of prisoners during World War II has been found in Spain, an Israeli website reported today, but Spanish police said they had not yet found the man.
The German weekly Der Spiegel also reported that Spanish investigators believe the fugitive, Aribert Heim, could be located in Spain.
Police in Spain said they had not found Heim during searches after receiving indications he was located in the north-eastern province of Girona.
“We haven’t detained anyone with that name,” said Joan Lopez, a police spokesman in Girona. “All we know is that he may have been in the area of Palafrugell recently.”
The website, Haaretz, said that Heim, 91, will soon be arrested by Spanish police. Heim had been at large since he was charged by German authorities in 1962 with killing hundreds of concentration inmates in Germany and Austria with lethal injections.
A spokesman with the Nazi watchdog Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Stephen Clem, told Haaretz that the centre has evidence that Heim is still alive. Heim has since the end of the war evaded capture in Germany, Argentina, Denmark, Brazil and Spain.
Heim has amassed a fortune of more than $2m (€1.7m) in a Berlin bank, Clem told Haaretz.
During the war, Heim earned his nickname of “doctor death” for performing especially sadistic experiments on inmates at the Buchanwald and Mauthausen camps. The research included surgery without anaesthesia and injecting prisoners with gasoline, poison and lethal drugs to see how much their bodies could take before dying, Haaretz said.
Spanish investigators believe a relative of Heim has transferred about US 363,000 (£205,000) to an acquaintance in Spain over the past five years and are looking into the possibility that at least some of it it may have been used to support Heim, Der Spiegel reported.
The magazine said Spain was suspected as his possible hiding place as long ago as the mid-1980s, and there have been increasing indications over recent weeks that he may have until recently lived somewhere near Denia on the Mediterranean coast.
