In search of Dr Death in Chatwin country

The salmon-fishing city of Puerto Montt is a bleak nowheresville in southern Chile. It is here that Efraim Zuroff, the world’s senior Nazi-hunter, is searching for Dr Aribert Heim (right), the biggest name among the few remaining WWII Nazi war criminals still at large.

Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has flown to South America convinced that he is closing in on Heim who he believes is somewhere in Patagonia – either in Chile, perhaps in Puerto Montt, where his daughter Waltraud lives, or across the border in Argentina.

Waltraud, 64, claims her Austrian-born father died from cancer in 1993 in Argentina, but no death certificate has ever been produced. Furthermore, neither she nor her two brothers, living in Germany, has ever claimed the £900,000 sitting in a Berlin bank account in Heim’s name.

Heim, who will be 94 if he is still alive, was a sadistic murderer at Mauthausen concentration camp. His interest in seeing how much pain his patients could survive led to his trying out the most abhorrent methods of torture. Known as 'Dr Death', he is said to have injected petrol into the hearts of inmates. When a healthy Jewish prisoner came to him, he is reported to have cut him open under anaesthetic, castrated him, torn out his kidneys and then decapitated him, keeping his skull as a paperweight.

Heim was detained by American forces at the end of the war but managed to disappear. He was practising as a gynaecologist in the spa town of Baden-Baden when he was tipped off that he was about to be prosecuted and fled in 1962.

Distant and vast, South America was the logical hideout for Nazis escaping justice at Nuremburg. In the late 19th century, hundreds of thousands of German merchants had emigrated to the continent, encouraged by the Kaiser’s imperial ambitions. This meant that those fleeing Europe after WWII could integrate into the existing Aryan clans without attracting attention.
 
One of them was Adolf Eichmann, the so-called architect of the Holocaust, who in 1960 was kidnapped in Buenos Aires by a team of Mossad agents, drugged and flown to Israel. Josef Mengele, the doctor who decided who should live and who die at Auschwitz, moved between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil before dying while swimming off Brazil.
 
The sheep-farming wilderness of Patagonia is also a good place to evade justice. When the travel writer Bruce Chatwin journeyed there, he met an old man who still reminisced about life under Mad King Ludvig of Bavaria. Patagonia has enough remnants of German influence - in surnames Spanish speakers can't properly pronounce; freckly children who stand out from their darker-skinned friends; and Kunstmann, the beer brewed near Puerto Montt – for a quiet old man to escape attention.
 
When General Pinochet came to power in 1973, the chances of discovery became even better for Nazis on the run. Paul Schafer, a medic in Hitler’s army, fled Germany in 1961 and set up Colonia Dignidad, a 'state within a state', in the remote Andean foothills. There, a community of 300 residents recreated life in 1930s Germany, with pigtailed girls, lederhosen and Bavarian folk songs. Schafer banned telephones and insisted men and women were separated. He was arrested on charges of child molestation in 2005. ·