Nazi Hunters Want German Probe On Heim

Heim was wanted for killing hundreds of concentration camp inmates with lethal injections to the heart.

Nazi hunters called on the Berlin government on Wednesday to investigate what they say were failings by German officials in the search for notorious war criminal Aribert Heim, dubbed "Dr. Death".

Heim was wanted for killing hundreds of concentration camp inmates with lethal injections to the heart but according to a report by German television station ZDF and the New York Times last week, he died in Cairo in 1992, aged 78.

In the potentially embarrassing allegations against Germany, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, demanded that the German Foreign Ministry conduct an investigation of the role of the Embassy in Cairo.

In a statement, he said officials probably knew Heim was in Cairo as early as 1981 when he extended his residence permit.

"The research of ZDF and the New York Times proved that Heim had lived in Egypt for a long time and that it was very probable officials at the German Embassy knew about it," Zuroff said.

At the very latest, when Heim died in 1992, Embassy officials should have known about him, the statement said.

If witnesses in the ZDF and New York Times reports were right, an Embassy witness was called to Heim's death bed to register the death, added the Wiesenthal Center.

Heim's son Ruediger told ZDF in a televised interview his father had died of cancer of the rectum on Aug. 10 1992.

A spokesman for Germany's foreign ministry said it would look into the accusations.

"We are taking what the Simon Wiesenthal Center has said very seriously and we will thoroughly examine the questions raised," said the spokesman when asked about the matter at a regular government news conference.

Heim, missing since evading German police in 1962, had been one of the most wanted perpetrators of Nazi killings of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

An Austrian doctor in Hitler's infamous SS, Heim is said to have removed organs from victims without anaesthetic. He kept the skull of a man he decapitated as a paperweight.

Heim was captured by U.S. forces near the end of World War Two but released in 1947. He worked as a doctor in West Germany until coming to the attention of war crimes investigators, and fled in 1962.