NAZIs in Egypt

CAIRO – Nazi hunters urged Egypt on Friday to come clean about how much it knew about a fugitive dubbed "Dr. Death," who reportedly lived here for decades until he died in 1992. But Egypt has long kept a strict silence about former Nazis reported to have taken refuge on its soil.

The discovery of Aribert Heim's secret life throws light on how the Arab world took in members of the Nazi regime after World War II, said Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The region's role as a haven has gone little examined while researchers focused on the larger, better known influx of Nazis to Latin America.

A number of Nazis are believed to have been welcomed in the 1950s by the Egyptian regime of then-President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who was locked in an intense rivalry with Israel that erupted into wars in 1956 and 1967. Nasser enlisted some Nazis to train Egypt's military or produce anti-Israel propaganda — and Israel feared they were involved in building a rocket program. More>>

• PHOTO: A relative of the building owner shouts at photographers to go away, in front of the former Kasr El Madina Hotel, where Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim reportedly lived under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, according to an investigation by the New York Times newspaper and Germany's ZDF television, in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009. German investigators who have hunted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim for decades said Thursday that new information indicating the former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt in 1992 appears credible and that they will attempt to find his body (AP Photo/Ben Curtis).