Doctor of Death

The protagonists sound like the leads in a Hollywood thriller. There's the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, a bloodthirsty concentration-camp doctor whose whereabouts have been unknown since he vanished 46 years ago. And there's the Brooklyn-bred Jew who has dedicated his life to the global quest for World War II-era mass murderers. The Nazi-hunter, now Jerusalem based, believes that Dr. Death is hunkered down near his illegitimate daughter's home in the remote South American region of Patagonia, so he journeys halfway across the planet to southern Chile and Argentina with a $493,000 (315,000 euros) reward in pursuit of his quarry.

But this is a real-life drama. The suspect is Dr. Aribert Heim, a onetime professional hockey player from Austria who joined the Nazi Party in 1935 and was assigned to three concentration camps during the war. Heim--who kept records of the slayings he committed in a logbook recovered from the Mauthausen camp in Austria--personally murdered hundreds of camp inmates, often by injecting gasoline into their hearts. His office paperweight was the skull of a young Jewish victim with a perfect set of teeth.

The investigator is Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based human-rights organization that promotes tolerance and works against anti-Semitism and terrorism. Zuroff has made dozens of trips to foreign countries during the 24 years he has invested in tracking down some of Adolf Hitler's most zealous henchmen. This mission is code-named Operation Last Chance--and with good reason: if he's still alive, Heim would be 94 years old, and time is running out on the crusade to bring him to justice. I flew down to the Chilean capital of Santiago last week to join Zuroff and his Argentine colleague Sergio Widder to get an insider's look at their search for Aribert Heim. What we found:

Wednesday, July 9
Our first destination inside Chile is Puerto Montt, a city of 200,000 that is the epicenter of the country's booming salmon-export industry. It is also home to a sizable number of Chileans of German descent, and two monuments in the heart of the lakeside city's downtown pay tribute to the first group of immigrants who landed on these shores in 1852. Heim's love-child daughter, Waltraud Böser, moved to Puerto Montt in the 1980s after marrying a pilot, Ivan Diharce, from the nearby island of Chiloé. And if her father is indeed living in or near the town, then the Nazi doctor seems to have chosen a fairly congenial environment to hide in. A number of storefront windows bear the words MAN SPRICHT DEUTSCH, and several restaurants specialize in German cuisine. Among these is Rhenania, where a black-and-white photo covering a wall near the entrance is a real eye-opener: it shows the founder of the café, Heinz Rödenbeek, posing in a Wehrmacht officer's dress uniform with a small swastika over the right breast. His primly coiffed wife, Hedwig Otten, is gazing into the distance. Joseph Goebbels would have been hard-pressed to come up with a more Aryan poster couple than Herr Rödenbeek and his frau.

That still doesn't prepare me for the reception awaiting the Wiesenthal Center delegation in Puerto Montt. As the yarmulke-wearing Zuroff mounts the steps of the hotel, a bearded man in a windbreaker adorned with the postwar German flag starts shouting "Get out of my country, there are no Nazis here" in English and Spanish. Zuroff has a brief but heated exchange with the man, David Mardones, a prominent member of a regional political party, who accuses the Israeli government of committing genocide against the Palestinians. The episode leaves Zuroff a bit rattled. Speaking later on his cell phone in the hotel, he informs a caller that he is "in southern Chile, Nazi country, there are many Germans here," and he later describes the confrontation with Mardones as "an appetizer" of what may lie in store for him and Widder in the coming days.

If the shadowy Dr. Heim is lurking somewhere in Puerto Montt and environs, he would have had ample opportunity to flee the area before Zuroff's arrival. A press conference held in Santiago on Tuesday to announce the launch of the investigation is the top story in this morning's issue of the local tabloid, and a color photo of Zuroff is splashed across its front page.