As another Nazi war criminal is brought to justice, we find the Fuhrer’s final fugitives

If you spotted them shuffling along the street, you’d probably feel nothing but pity.

But these frail, withered old men are wanted for some of the most vile crimes humanity has ever witnessed.

More than six decades after Hitler was defeated, Nazi-hunters still devote their lives to finding his henchmen who escaped justice.

This week, Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, 89, was finally deported from the US to face trial in Germany over 29,000 deaths in 1943 at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.

Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which is leading the hunt for surviving Nazis, said: “Old age should not afford a refuge for merciless killers.”

Experts believe Demjanjuk’s case could be the last Nazi trial in Germany, as time is running out to track down others. But the hunt goes on, and these are 10 of the most wanted still at large.

Karoly Zentai, 88

A Former Hungarian soldier, he is wanted for murdering a boy who failed to wear a yellow star that marked him out as a Jew.

Zentai, who now lives in Perth, Australia, arrested 17-year-old Peter Balaz as he was riding a Budapest train in 1944.

He is accused of dragging the teenager from the train to an army barracks, where he and two other officers allegedly beat the lad to death, then fastened weights to his body and threw it into the Danube.

The others were convicted of Peter’s murder in 1947 and sentenced to life.

Hungarian authorities charged Zentai, but by that time he’d fled the country.

He denies the allegation and maintains he left Budapest the day before the killing.

In 2005, Zentai was arrested by Australian police to await an extradition hearing, but his family argued the frail widower wouldn’t have survived the trip to Hungary.

This week a court ruled Zentai will stay on bail while he waits a decision on his extradition.

Alois Brunner, 97

As right-hand man to Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, Brunner was a key figure in the planning and execution of the Final Solution.

He personally sent 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers.

Brunner, a doctor, killed hundreds of people in concentration camps by injecting carbolic acid, into their hearts.

Born in Austria in 1912, he joined the Nazi Party aged 19 and quickly rose to become head of the Jewish Affairs office in Vienna. When World War II broke out, he sent 47,000 Austrian Jews to the concentration camps.

After organising mass round-ups in Berlin, he transferred to Greece, where he was responsible for deporting all 43,000 Jews in Salonika.

In 1954, Brunner fled to Syria where he assumed the name Georg Fischer and assisted the Syrians in establishing their own secret police.

He was injured by letter bombs in 1961 and 1980. Brunner was last seen in 2001 but until it can be proven he is dead, he remains at the top of the Nazi-hunters’ wanted list.

Aribert Heim, 94

The dreaded Nazi doctor slaughtered hundreds of inmates at the Mauthausen camp by injecting petrol or poison into their hearts.

He became known as Dr Death for performing amputations without anaesthetic, and timing his victims’ demise with a stopwatch.

Survivors claimed he decorated his office with body parts and used the tattooed skin of an inmate as a seat cover. Karl Lotter, a political prisoner working at the

Mauthausen clinic, described how he watched as Heim murdered an 18-year-old boy sent in with a foot inflammation.

He anaesthetised him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, then decapitated him. He boiled the boy’s head to remove the flesh so he could use the skull as a paperweight.

After the war, Heim fled and is still one of the world’s most wanted Nazis, with a £495,000 price on his head.

One TV station claimed he died in 1992. But Nazi-hunters say his family faked the death so they could inherit his £1million fortune.

Soeren Kam, 88

The former SS member is accused of shooting anti-Nazi newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen in Copenhagen in 1943.

Kam, then a member of a Danish branch of the SS, known as the Schalburg Corps, admitted he was among three officers who fired at the journalist – but only after the victim was already dead.

One of his associates, Flemming Helweg-Larsen, was executed for the murder in 1946.

Kam fled Denmark after the war and married a German woman.

mirror.co.uk