Bonn / Germany (RNC Agency) 24.05.1997

Germany's record in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice has been "very disappointing," the country's leading Nazi hunter was quoted Saturday as saying. More than 50 years after World War II, investigators are still pursuing initial proceedings against s everal hundred suspects, Willi Dressen, the top official in the agency coordinating efforts to track down Nazi crimes, told the newsweekly Der Spiegel. He estimated that about another 1,000 war criminals who took on false identities after the war are livin g as fugitives. German courts have fewer than 6,500 of 106,000 alleged Nazi war criminals, the magazine said."Given the Nazi's tremendous terror and extermination machine," this is "a very disappointing result," Dressen was quoted as saying. Politicians "r epeatedly interfered with our work," for example with a 1960 decision to put manslaughter charges related to Nazi-era crimes under the statute of limitations, he said. Suspects still sought by German prosecutors include Aribert Heim, accused of killing sev eral hundred inmates at the Mauthausen, Austria, concentration camp with lethal injections into the heart and surgical experiments, the report said. An arrest warrant for Rolf Guenther, an SS officer accused of organizing the deportation of Greek Jews to t he Auschwitz death camp, has been out since 1973, Der Spiegel said. Dressen was named to head the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes after its longtime head, Alfred Streim, died last year. Streim often called for more efforts to bring remain ing Nazi fugitives to justice. One of his greatest successes was the rounding up of SS thugs who ran the death camp in Majdanek, Poland.