Doctor of Death

The informant has known Ivan Diharce since boyhood, when they were growing up together on the island, and he suggests I contact two of Ivan's siblings who live in the area. Speaking to me on background, the first sibling once worked at a Puerto Montt pharmacy that Heim's daughter opened in the early 1990s. But the Diharce family member has been estranged from both Waltraud and Ivan since 1994 and can shed little light on the Nazi fugitive's links to Waltraud. Only once did the topic of Waltraud's father ever come up, says the sibling, and the pharmacist claimed her dad was a Russian who abandoned her mother early on and refused to acknowledge his paternity when Waltraud tracked him down in her adulthood. (German police dispute this and assert that the 66-year-old Waltraud is Heim's daughter out of wedlock.)

Upon my return to Puerto Montt that evening, I ring Ivan's listed phone number to see if the couple has returned from their travels. The man who answers says he is Diharce, but when I identify myself he says he has no time to speak with me right now and hangs up.

Saturday, July 12
Sibling No. 2 is Ivan's older brother, Juan, who lives in Puerto Montt, and he agrees to see me in the afternoon. When I ring him at the appointed time, Juan says he has to attend a 3 p.m. funeral and will swing by my hotel later in the day. He never turns up.

Sunday, July 13
I board a bus bound for Bariloche in the morning and pull into the world-famous ski resort six and a half hours later. The picturesque town gained its own place in the annals of Nazi war criminals when investigators exposed Erich Priebke, a former German Army captain who resided in Bariloche for decades and is now serving a life sentence for his role in the 1944 massacre of more than 300 Italian civilians. Zuroff and Widder meet with members of Bariloche's small Jewish community and find time for a relaxing cruise on Lake Nahuel Huapi. "Even Nazi hunters need some recreation and leisure," a good-humored Zuroff later tells the town's mayor, Marcelo Cascón.
 
Monday, July 14
Another day, another press conference. This one draws the biggest turnout to date. A pleased Zuroff notes that Waltraud Böser has made about 50 trips to foreign countries in the past 20 years, and many of those excursions brought her to Bariloche. That bolsters his conviction that Heim is lying low somewhere in the corridor between the resort town and Puerto Montt. "We are in a better position today than we were before we left for Chile," declares Simon Wiesenthal's professional and spiritual heir. "We are close to possibly very important information that probably will lead to his capture, it might happen in September or October, and it will most likely be the result of something that happened on this trip."

Zuroff's comments leave me a tad nonplussed. In the past seven days, I have seen no smoking-gun evidence that Aribert Heim is living in Patagonia. Zuroff tells reporters at one point that Heim's lawyer in Germany has requested documents in the last six months that no attorney would need for a deceased client, but when I ask him to specify those documents, the Wiesenthal Center official demurs. Heim is believed to have used the pseudonym Gausmann at one point during his flight, but we have yet to see any evidence that he rented or purchased property in that name. I have no doubt that the Wiesenthal Center is privy to information it cannot release at this time. But I still find myself wondering if Zuroff will catch his quarry before the grim reaper takes Heim away to his final resting place--or whether the Nazi hunter will have to settle for just disrupting Heim's final years.

© 2008