Santiago - The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has contacted Chilean police to look for the Nazi official Aribert Heim, known as "Doctor Death," in the South American country, the centre's Latin American representative Sergio Widder said Tuesday.

"We are intensifying the search," Widder said.

He told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Santiago that there are indications that the war criminal is alive, although he would be 94 years old.

"One indication is that his family has not cashed in on the inheritance of a 1-million-euro bank account in Berlin," Widder explained. "It would be enough for them to show a death certificate."

However, he added that the chance to find Heim is "a race against time," although "it is worth the last effort."

Widder and Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, are set to travel through southern Chile and Argentina, to find out more about the presence of Heim and his family.

Indeed, Heim's daughter lives in the Chilean city of Puerto Montt, some 1,000 kilometres south of Santiago.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre launched in November the Operation: Last Chance, to track down Nazi criminals in South America.

Heim tops the list of probably living Nazi criminals being sought around the world. He was active in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, near Linz, where he allegedly killed hundreds of people during World War II through injections to the heart or in "operations" without anaesthesia.

He was considered extremely cruel. Witnesses have said that he had a lamp-shade made for the camp commander out of the skin of one of his victims.

Heim, born in Austria in 1914, practiced as a gynaecologist in the German town of Baden-Baden after the war, and has been a fugitive since 1962. There is an international arrest warrant against him. (dpa)