Austria offers $69,000 reward for top two Nazis

VIENNA, July 13 (Reuters) Austria is offering a 50,000 euros (68,850 dollars) reward for information leading to the arrest of the top two Nazi war criminals believed to be alive and at large, the justice minister said today.

The bounty is offered for Aribert Heim, an SS doctor accused of having killed concentration camp inmates with heart injections, and for Alois Brunner, an Adolf Eichmann aide who helped organise deportations of Jews to death camps.

''Austria is often blamed for having done too little (to bring Nazi war criminals to justice),'' Justice Minister Maria Berger said on Austrian state radio ORF. ''I don't want to judge previous governments, I want to do now what we still can do.'' Berger, of the centre-left Social Democrats was appointed six months ago, when Austria's broad coalition government replaced the previous right-wing coalition.

The rewards are the first offered by Austria for Nazi war criminals, which has been accused for decades of dragging its feet over prosecuting Nazis, and for being too lenient when they were brought to court.

Even though Austrians pervaded the ranks of the Nazi Party and the army, the Alpine country for decades portrayed itself as ''Hitler's first victim'' because it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Heim, also known as ''Dr Death'' in the Mauthausen concentration camp, was born in 1914 and is presumed to be living in Spain or Latin America, according Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Germany issued a 130,000 euros reward for him a few years ago.

Brunner was last seen alive in Syria in 2001, where he has enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government for decades, Zuroff said.

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