Doctor of Death

The only real detective work of the day occurs in his hotel room that afternoon when he sits down with a disgruntled ex-employee of Heim's putative son-in-law, Ivan Diharce. The informant once worked as a truck driver for Diharce's Puerto Montt construction firm, and he tells Zuroff that his former boss owns a house on Chiloé Island that is sometimes visited by a young woman of German descent. The informant relates a friend's account that Diharce has a "very old" relation for whom he buys large quantities of groceries during trips to the island, suggesting that the young woman might work as a caregiver for the missing nonagenarian. Zuroff thanks the man for his time and trouble but comes away from the meeting feeling "a little" underwhelmed. "[The information] is a five, not an eight," he says. "There's no hard evidence that anyone has been living in that house in the last few years, and the young woman is obviously not Heim."

Thursday, July 10
Aribert Heim has been on Zuroff's radar screen since at least 1986. In that year, the legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal personally asked the center that bears his name to put the Butcher of Mauthausen in fourth place on its list of 10 most-wanted war criminals. And though Heim is at the top of that list 22 years later, he is the only suspect in that living rogues' gallery whose address remains unknown. "This is probably the most difficult investigation we've ever dealt with," admits Zuroff, a 59-year-old father of four with thinning gray hair, a jowly chin and piercing blue eyes. "Unfortunately the Heim family is very wealthy, and money buys security."

Zuroff is convinced that Heim is alive, and one of his most compelling reasons has to do with those family riches. A financial irregularity involving one of Heim's two sons in 2004 led German police to uncover a Berlin bank account in the physician's name with a balance of $1.9 million (1.2 million euros). Further probing revealed another $1.27 million worth of stocks and bonds belonging to the fugitive from German justice, and to collect those assets Heim's sons and daughter would only need to submit proof of his death to the appropriate authorities.

None of them has done so to date, and Zuroff has scheduled a midmorning foray to the Puerto Montt residence of Waltraud Böser and Ivan Diharce. We arrive at the modest, one-story house in a driving thunderstorm worthy of the Southern Hemisphere winter. Zuroff sits in a rented minivan outside the house mulling his options for a while, then asks me and a Reuters colleague to knock on the couple's front door and request an interview for our respective media outlets as well as him. A visibly nervous man in a white beard and green ski parka opens the door a crack, tells us that the couple has left for a town 20 minutes up the road from Puerto Montt and takes the business card I proffer. End of visit.

We go back to the hotel for a late-morning news conference with the local media, and once that has ended Zuroff's work in Puerto Montt is done. It becomes clear that this entire exercise has more to do with publicizing the hunt for Heim in general and the reward money in particular than with actual sleuthing. In explaining his modus operandi, Zuroff cites the role of financial incentives in producing vital information that led to the location of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps, in Brazil in 1967 as well as the sadistic forced-labor-camp chief Josef Schwammberger in Argentina in 1987. "We're getting the word out that the money is available because the person who may provide the missing link might not be necessarily a person of high moral character," he says. "We don't expect to find Heim tomorrow, but what we're trying to do here is put into place the tools needed to make that happen."

Friday, July 11
Zuroff and Widder set out early for the Argentine town of Bariloche with a BBC TV documentary crew in tow. I've decided to stay longer in Puerto Montt in hopes that a quiet, in-depth interview of the informant this afternoon might be worth a trip to Chiloé Island.