Group hopes to find prominent Nazi in South America

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By Lucas Bergman

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - A rights group is offering a $448,000 (216,000 pounds) bounty for Aribert Heim, a Nazi war criminal who disappeared after the Second World War and who may still be hiding in Argentina or Chile.

The reward, which includes money pledged by Germany and Austria, is part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s "Operation: Last Chance," which began in Europe in 2002 and is now being expanded to South America.

Dozens of war criminals fled to this region after the war ended, some with the aid of Argentine authorities.

The war criminals being sought, and the witnesses who could testify against them, are very elderly, thus the name of the project.

Heim, an Austrian doctor who worked in three Nazi concentration camps and is accused of killing Jews using cruel methods, would be 93 years old today if he is still alive.

Heim is the second-most-wanted criminal on the Wiesenthal Center’s list after Alois Brunner, who was in charge of transporting 128,500 Jews to the camps.

The project also offers $10,000 for information about other Nazis hiding in the region, but Heim is a major focus.

"I would go so far as to say, if the only result of Operation Last Chance is that Albert Heim is brought to justice, that in itself would be worth it", Efraim Zuroff, director of .....continued below

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Nazi hunters believe Heim has hidden out in Uruguay, Chile and elsewhere in the region, as well as Spain. They think he is still alive because there is still a large bank account believed to belong to him.

The center’s Last Chance project started in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in July 2002 and has turned up 488 suspected Nazi criminals in 20 countries.

Among Nazis found previously in Argentina is Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s.

Forced labour camps commander Josef Schwammberger was found in Argentina in 1987, where he had lived under his own name for 39 years. He was extradited to Germany, tried and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2004.

Erich Priebke, one of the participants in the massacre at the Ardeatine caves in Rome in 1994, lived in Argentina for decades. In 2004 he exposed himself by giving a media interview and was later extradited to Italy and put on trial.

(Reporting by Lucas Bergman, translating by Cesar Illiano, editing by Fiona Ortiz and Philip Barbara)