German police are seeking an Egyptian clearance to study on-the-spot evidence in Cairo that Aribert Heim, the world's most wanted Nazi war criminal, died in hiding in the city in 1992, dpa reported.
Baden Wuerttemberg state police said Monday they would ask to see a dusty briefcase of Heim's personal papers kept by the owners of the former Kasr al-Medina hotel in Cairo.
They expected an Egyptian clearance by the end of this week at the latest, a state police spokesman said in Stuttgart.
Germany's ZDF television and the New York Times last week reported a joint investigation. They found numerous and consistent accounts by witnesses saying that the doctor moved to Cairo about 1964, used his middle name, Ferdinand Heim, and died at 78 of bowel cancer.
Nazi-hunters say they remain concerned that the story is a deliberate falsehood to cover Heim's tracks, but Stuttgart police who are responsible for the case say they have other evidence that tends to corroborate the ZDF account.
As an SS doctor, Heim, nicknamed Dr Death, conducted gruesome and lethal experiments on inmates of Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in 1941. He fought in battles later in the war.
The Stuttgart police are mainly interested in Heim's papers, in German and English, including medical documentation and anti-Jewish essays and letters which he wrote in Cairo.
Heim, who had been an ice hockey player in Austria's national team before the Second World War, was a gynaecologist in Germany till 1962.
ZDF last week showed the municipal paupers' grave where Heim's body was most likely deposited: a row of brick kilns with black steel doors where bodies are placed until they rot, then pushed aside to make room for more bodies.
ZDF said it was unlikely 17 years later that any DNA material from Heim could be found in the crypts.