Aribert Heim tops the list of 10 suspects, to be published by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and obtained in advance by The Associated Press news agency.

Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen, and now he is the most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal among hundreds who the Simon Wiesenthal Centre estimates are still free.

Austrian-born Heim would be 93 on Wednesday and “we have good reason to believe he is still alive”, said Efraim Zuroff, the centre’s top Nazi hunter.

The centre plans to release the most-wanted list and to open a media campaign in South America this summer, highlighting the £243,000 reward for Heim’s arrest posted by the centre along with Germany and Austria.

According to the advance copy of the list, the most wanted, after Heim, are:

John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the US, which says he was a guard at several death and forced labour camps;

Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings of more than 1,000 civilians in Serbia;

Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and gypsies to their deaths;

Soeren Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.