Aging Nazi ‘Dr. Death’ hiding in Brazil?

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Israeli authorities contacted Brazilian officials last month seeking help in the manhunt for Aribert Heim, one of the last major Nazi war criminals still at large, reports Folha de Sao Paulo. Heim, a physician who would be in his early 90s, was known as ‘Dr. Death’’ because of his experiments with prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Heim has reportedly lived in South America and Spain in recent decades.

Some reports indicate the former SS doctor is now dead. But Folha says new leads indicate Heim could be lying low in Brazil or neighboring Uruguay. South America was, of course, a favored destination for Nazi fugitives. Adolf Eichmann, efficient bureaucrat of the ‘Final Solution,’’ was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires in 1960 and later executed in Israel. Former SS man Erich Priebke lived quietly in an Argentine ski resort town for years before being sent to Italy in 1995 to face trial for a massacre of civilians. But one of the most notorious of all, Josef Mengele, the infamous ‘Angel of Death’’ of Auschwitz, cheated justice: Mengele died in the surf in Brazil in 1979, apparently having suffered a stroke while wading.

-- Patrick J. McDonnell in Rio de Janeiro