Investigators have begun scouring southern Chile for an SS officer known as “Doctor Death” in what could be the last great Nazi hunt.

Aribert Heim, a concentration camp doctor who killed hundreds of inmates by injecting petrol or poison into their hearts, is considered the world's most-wanted surviving Nazi. He is believed to be living in hiding in Patagonia at the age of 94.

Nazi hunters from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre have gone to Chile to pursue fresh leads about the ageing Nazi as part of what they call “Operation Last Chance”.

A team is visiting the Chilean town of Puerto Montt, where Heim's daughter, Waltraud, lives, and plans to travel across the border to the Argentine ski resort of San Carlos de Bariloche.

Times Archive, 1946: Nazi leaders to be hanged

The end came with grave serenity. Within a brief hour the International Military Tribunal, speaking in the name of the civilized world, had passed sentence on the convicted leaders of Nazi Germany

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“In the last few days we've received information from two different sources, both relating to Chile, which we think have very good potential,” Efraim Zuroff, the historian who succeeded the late Simon Wiesenthal as the centre's top Nazi hunter, said.

The group plans to place advertisements in local newspapers to publicise a reward of 315,000 euros (£250,000) for Heim's capture.

Heim was born in Austria and joined the Waffen SS. He was assigned to the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, in October and November 1941.

He performed grotesque experiments such as amputating organs without anaesthetic and injecting various solutions into prisoners' hearts, using a stopwatch to see which killed them fastest.

Karl Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner who worked at the hospital at Mauthausen, testified that a fit 18-year-old Jewish man was sent to Heim for treatment of a foot inflammation. Instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anaesthetised him, cut him open, castrated him, removed one kidney and dismembered the other. The victim's head was cut off and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

After the Second World War Heim was held for two and a half years by the United States military but released without being tried. He moved to Frankfurt where he married, played in an ice hockey team and worked as a gynaecologist.

In 1958 he bought a 42-unit apartment building in Berlin under his own name, listing a home address in Mannheim. He then opened a clinic in the nearby resort town of Baden-Baden, again using his own name.

He disappeared in 1962 after apparently being told that German authorities planned to arrest him. Investigators say that Heim continued to live off rents from the Berlin apartment block until it was confiscated in 1979.

Waltraud's mother, Gertrud Buser, who is now dead, visited Chile 18 times between 1979 and 1992. His other family, a wife and two sons in Baden-Baden, insist that he died of cancer in Argentina in 1993.

Heim's children have never provided a death certificate that would allow them to inherit his 1.2 million euro bank account.

As recently as 2001, his lawyer claimed a refund from German tax authorities on the grounds that his client was living abroad.

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