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Nazi 'Dr. Death' located in Spain: German magazine

Photo: Aribert Heim. The world's second most wanted Nazi war criminal.

Heim, 91, is suspected of having tortured and killed hundreds of prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp, and has been compared to Josef Mengele, the so-called "angel of death" who was a doctor at Auschwitz. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks suspected Nazi war criminals worldwide, he is "the second most wanted Nazi war criminal after Alois Brunner." The Center launched an operation in Germany in January aimed at identifying and catching Nazi survivors who would now be well into their 80s or older. Brunner was a right-hand man to Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the extermination of the Jews and who was hanged in Israel in 1962.

Photo: Aribert Heim allegedly killed hundreds at Mauthausen.

A Nazi war criminal notorious for sadistic experiments that killed hundreds of prisoners during the Second World War has been tracked to Spain, news reports said Saturday. Spanish police said they had not yet found the man. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel said Spanish investigators believe the 91-year-old suspect, Aribert Heim, has been in Spain recently. During the war, Heim earned the nickname "Dr. Death" for experimenting on prisoners at the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. His research included performing surgery without anesthesia and injecting prisoners with gasoline, poison and lethal drugs to see how much their bodies could take before dying, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said.

Heim has been a fugitive since he was charged by German authorities in 1962 with killing hundreds of prisoners in Germany and Austria with lethal injections. He is thought to have evaded capture in Germany, Argentina, Denmark, Brazil and Spain. Spanish police said they had not found Heim during searches after receiving indications he was living in the northeastern province Girona. "We haven't detained anyone with that name," said Joan Lopez, a police spokesman in Girona. All we know is that he may have been in the area of Palafrugell recently." Efraim Zuroff, Israeli director of the Nazi watchdog Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said the search for Heim intensified a year and a half ago when the German government discovered a bank account in his name and set up a task force to find him. It was not clear if Heim was still in Spain, he said. "There's some speculation that he might have escaped to other countries," Zuroff said. Der Spiegel said Spain was suspected as a possible hiding place for Heim as long ago as the mid-1980s and there had been increasing indications in recent weeks that he might have until recently lived somewhere near Denia on the Mediterranean coast. Although Heim never completed medical training at the University of Vienna, after the war he worked as a doctor in southern Germany until he was indicted. German authorities have offered a $159,000 US reward for his arrest and the Wiesenthal Centre $12,200.