Nazi riddle of concentration camp doctor's death

Published on Thursday 5 February 2009 21:59

GERMAN investigators who hunted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim for decades said yesterday that new information indicating the former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt in 1992 appeared credible and they would attempt to find his body.

The Baden-Wrttemberg state police unit that investigates Nazi-era crimes is preparing a request that Egyptian authorities allow it to pursue the case in Cairo, the unit's spokesman, Horst Haug, said.

But the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said it had "serious doubts" about reports that Heim, dubbed "Dr Death" for killing concentration camp inmates with lethal injections to the heart, was dead.

Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel office of the centre which hunts Nazi war criminals, said "there is no doubt" Heim had lived in Egypt.

"But the question is whether he died in Egypt. We have serious doubts about that," Mr Zuroff said of the report, which was carried by the German television station ZDF.

"There's no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave – we can't sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation."