The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim

by Kulish, Nicholas

  ALSO BY NICHOLAS KULISH

  Last One In

  ALSO BY SOUAD MEKHENNET

  Die Kinder des Dschihad: Die neue Generation des islamistischen Terrors in Europa (with Michael Hanfeld and Claudia Sautter)

  Islam (with Michael Hanfeld)

  Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Eric White Jacket photograph © AP Photo/HO/LKA Baden-Wuerttemberg

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kulish, Nicholas.

  The eternal Nazi : from Mauthausen to Cairo, the relentless pursuit of SS doctor Aribert Heim / Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  1. Heim, Aribert, 1914–1992. 2. War criminals—Germany—Biography. 3. Physicians—Germany—Biography. 4. Mauthausen (Concentration camp) 5. Human experimentation in medicine—Germany—History—20th century. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities. 7. Fugitives from justice—Germany. 8. Fugitives from justice—Egypt. I. Mekhennet, Souad. II. Title.

  DD247.H3543K85 2014

  943.086092—dc23

  [B] 2013034604

  ISBN 978-0-385-53243-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-53244-0 (eBook)

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Authors

  Illustration Insert

  PROLOGUE

  The black-and-white photograph is crossed with lines from two days of folding and unfolding. It has turned gray around the edges from the perspiration on the hands of the vendors who looked at it. Dozens grasped the picture, pulled it closer to examine the face of the middle-aged European man staring into the camera with a hint of a smile. The photograph so far has earned mostly puzzled looks and the same probing question. “Why,” they ask, pointing at the enlargement of an old passport picture, “why are you looking for him?”

  No one on the streets of Cairo recognized him, but Egyptians love a good story almost as much as they love a good joke. They have long exported their soap operas around the Middle East and beyond because they know a good adventure, romance, or mystery when they see one. Maybe, they say, it is a search for a lost father or more likely someone who has failed to pay a debt. Perhaps it is even trouble with the law. This is Cairo in 2008, and there are plainclothes security officers on most every block.

  The picture came with a tip, to look for a hotel in the neighborhood of al-Azhar, but at a dozen small hotels managers and clerks give the same answer. “We don’t know him.” Finally, one man, after a question or two, has an idea. “There is a place that used to be a hotel that sometimes put up foreigners. It’s on Port Said Street, not far from the overpass.”

  The neighborhood is named after al-Azhar mosque, built in the tenth century and one of the preeminent centers of Islamic learning in the world. With its five minarets the mosque may reflect the glories of heaven, but the air on Port Said Street is acrid from burning garbage and the tangy scent of meat hung a little too long in front of butcher shops. A postwar block of concrete rises nine stories, a dull tan color except for green or blue shutters dotting it here and there, failing entirely to cheer up its appearance. Though no longer in business, the Kasr el-Madina Hotel still announces itself with large letters, but one arm of the K in “Kasr” has broken off, as has half of the H in “Hotel.”

  Two men in the dark former lobby are deep in conversation, but they stop to answer the stranger’s question. One of them, Abu Ahmad, says he knows the owners of the hotel. “I have been here for many years and used to help out in the hotel from time to time,” he says. He takes the black-and-white portrait. “I know this man,” he says. Tears start to fill his eyes. “This is the foreigner who used to live upstairs. This is Mr. Tarek,” he says. “Tarek Hussein Farid.”

  Abu Ahmad gladly tells what he knows of the foreigner’s story but insists that Mahmoud Doma, the son of the hotel’s former proprietor, knows far more. After a quick series of calls he has Doma’s number. “Hello?” a deep voice answers the phone. “I am Mahmoud, yes. What do you want?” he asks. When he hears the name Tarek Hussein Farid, he says, “Amu,” Arabic for uncle.

  A few days later, the incessant noise of Cairo traffic infiltrates a women’s clothing shop run by the Doma family. Mahmoud Doma’s brother opens up an old attaché case. The leather of the briefcase is coated with dust. The clasps are rusted almost completely shut. It is stuffed full of documents, some important records and others just the magazine clippings of an avid reader. There are letters in German, English, and French written in blue ink on yellowish paper. There are applications for residency in Egypt and transfer slips from the National Bank of Egypt. There is also a copy of a last will and testament dividing property between two sons.

  Many of the news clips are about Hitler and Nazism, as well as a great deal on Israel. Near the bottom of the case are several copies of a photograph showing rows and rows of white crosses outside a concentration camp. Impassioned handwritten pages describe and then refute accusations of the most brutal crimes committed at the camp, claims of execution, vivisection, and decapitation. Several names are mentioned again and again: Kaufmann, Sommer, Lotter, Kohl, and Simon Wiesenthal, who gained fame in the 1960s for his pursuit of Nazi war criminals.

  A Ferdinand Heim or an Aribert Ferdinand Heim has signed much of the correspondence. It is this name, Aribert Ferdinand
Heim, that resonates in much of the world as Tarek Hussein Farid does not. Aribert Heim is not just the name of a convert to Islam living out his days quietly in an inexpensive hotel, playing games with children, reading books, and taking long walks around the city. Heim was a physician with Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS, a concentration camp doctor, and an accused murderer. He is a phantom, a man sought by investigators for war crimes since 1946.

  At the close of the war, investigators barely knew who Aribert Heim was. At most he was considered a small fish, not one of the architects of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann or a leading practitioner of deadly Nazi pseudoscience like Josef Mengele, just one of tens of thousands who worked in the concentration camps and death camps overseen by the SS. Yet somehow over the course of decades, as those men went to the gallows, repented, or died undiscovered, Heim grew in stature, at last becoming the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminal.

  Heim was an Olympic-caliber athlete, a former member of Austria’s national ice hockey team. He was a physician, one of the legions of SS doctors who perverted the science of healing into the science of death. In one of the only two photographs investigators had of Heim, the handsome doctor was wearing a tuxedo. His last known residence was the sparkling casino town of Baden-Baden, where he lived in a magnificent white villa. Law enforcement discovered that he had left behind a fortune worth more than $1 million in a bank account in Berlin.

  In 2007 a retired colonel of the Israel Defense Forces, Danny Baz, claimed to have been a member of a secret cell of Nazi hunters known as the Owl that tracked down the elusive Heim, who, he claimed, was the leader of a shadowy, powerful organization of former SS officers. After a firefight in upstate New York, Baz said, he recovered a waterproof briefcase containing guns, banknotes, diamonds, and fake passports. “In the inner compartment, a splendid Luger; the grip is made of ivory and the middle, encrusted with gold and silver, is engraved with a swastika with, underneath it, the name of the gun’s owner: Aribert Heim.”

  This tall tale of Nazi hunting was eventually proved untrue. But stories like these helped make Heim into a powerful symbol whose pursuit was a matter of principle, a debt to six million victims, object of the rallying cry “They’re still out there.” Germany is often lauded as unique among countries for the way it has dealt with its violent past. Its dedication to accepting responsibility for past wrongs, paying compensation, and prosecuting war criminals up to the present day has been held up as an example to other nations from Japan to Turkey to Rwanda. The pursuit of Nazi war criminals helped lay the groundwork for the ongoing experiment of the International Criminal Court.

  Yet Germany’s path was neither linear nor inevitable. In the postwar years the search for war criminals was left to the occupying Allied forces, whom the local public accused of implementing an arbitrary and punitive form of victors’ justice. Then the Allies’ focus shifted from the punishment of Germans to the escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Americans, more focused on the next conflict than the last, employed former Nazis to spy on the Soviets.

  If the Americans were willing to ignore the past, the Germans were happy to oblige. During the period of rapid rebuilding in the 1950s known as the economic miracle, most Germans simply wanted to forget what had happened under the Nazi regime. The burden of grappling with the country’s history fell on the shoulders of a small number of men and women: police officers, prosecutors, and politicians with a conscience and a sense of duty to the victims. For years their pursuit of justice earned them not plaudits but insults. They were taunted as traitors. Criminal cases were ignored, sidetracked, and even sabotaged by former Nazis in high positions in law enforcement and the courts and all the way up to the chancellery in Bonn.

  Even decades later, after the mood in Germany shifted toward penitence for the crimes of the Holocaust, society often diffused responsibility into a broad collective guilt rather than individual culpability. Nazi Germany had committed heinous acts, the thinking went, but fathers, sons, brothers, and friends were only following orders. So many murderers went unpunished that any prosecution could seem arbitrary, especially when it was directed decades after the war against seemingly model citizens. In the popular imagination, groups of former Nazis such as the infamous Odessa financed life on the run for comrades-in-arms. Instead of shadowy organizations, it was the support of family and friends that made it possible for people like Heim to elude justice for so long.

  The last papers found in the briefcase are in the painstaking handwriting of children. There are drawings of tanks and soldiers, promises of kisses, and announcements of good grades. In one letter, a boy named Rü describes his recent bicycle accident. It is written on a stained piece of graph paper, folded many more times than the copy of the photograph of his father that led to the discovery of the briefcase. He was riding with a friend when their bicycles collided, sending Rü sprawling to the ground, cut and bleeding. “The scars have once again healed well. But during these incidents one notices indeed how much we miss you,” he writes to his father. The family thinks about him daily and hopes to see him soon.

  “And then at last we will have peace,” writes his son. “So we will not despair but instead just wait a bit.”

  CHAPTER 1

  They called it zero hour. Six years of conflict culminated with incendiary bombing raids, artillery shelling, tanks rolling through the countryside. Cities were reduced to rubble. The death and destruction Nazi Germany had visited upon the rest of Europe came home to the Reich with a vengeance. The Allies had won, but the Continent was near chaos. Europe was full of desperate souls on the move. There were caravans of displaced persons clogging the roads in every direction: forced laborers returning to Poland; prisoners of war returning to France and Britain; nearly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere, seeking refuge in Germany and Austria. Most haunting by far were the survivors of the concentration camps, who emerged from their imprisonment like walking skeletons. Soon the world realized that the crimes committed in the name of Nazi Germany went far beyond ordinary violations of the rules of war.

  The Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, prepared a comprehensive list of suspected war criminals. It was known as the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, or CROWCASS. The first version of the list contained 70,000 names. By some estimates 160,000 people should have been included. The question facing the Allies was how to find and punish even those 70,000 perpetrators in the chaos of the months after Nazi capitulation. The Americans alone had to deal with some 7.7 million German military personnel in custody, including regular Wehrmacht soldiers; members of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, which had played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power; high members of government who had enacted deadly policies; and members of Hitler’s dreaded vanguard, the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS. Separating them proved difficult.

  One clue as to who was who came from a mandatory blood-type tattoo under the left arm of all SS members. Captured soldiers were lined up and inspected for the telltale mark. But the method was not always effective. Two of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, were not detected. Seventeen people named Josef Mengele served in the German armed forces, and when captured, the Auschwitz doctor gave his last name as Memling, a famous Bavarian painter. He did not have the SS tattoo and claimed to be a regular doctor with the Wehrmacht. He ultimately fled custody, as did Eichmann. Neither was forced to stand in the dock for the postwar trials that began in Nuremberg.

  The pursuit of war criminals was just one of the Allies’ responsibilities and not necessarily the most urgent. Germany was reeling from a total defeat rather than a negotiated surrender. People were starving, crops needed harvesting, and millions of POWs without jobs were released within months. The U.S. Third Army had released more than half a million prisoners by June 8; the Twelfth Army group freed an average of 30,000 pri
soners a day. Meanwhile, the British sent home some 300,000 Germans as part of Operation Barleycorn, specifically so that they could save the harvest. That number grew to more than a million by August 1945 so that former soldiers could also work in mining and transport. There were untold tons of rubble to clear, bridges to rebuild, unexploded bombs to remove. The telecommunication network, postal service, highways, railways, and even local public transport systems had to be rebuilt.

  On June 29, 1945, the Allied Supreme Headquarters issued Disbandment Directive No. 5, which authorized a general discharge of German prisoners not in “automatic arrest categories” such as SS members and war criminals. Captured soldiers were simply looked over by a doctor and given a questionnaire to fill out. Interviews were brief. If a soldier was discharged, he received half a loaf of black bread and roughly a pound of lard as rations for the journey home. With such speed and great numbers it was unavoidable that some war criminals would be among those set free.

  One of the men kept in custody was Hauptsturmführer Aribert Ferdinand Heim, an Austrian doctor with the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the SS that had grown into a parallel German army. Though a prisoner, he continued to serve as a doctor, treating wounded Germans at the 8279th General Hospital, near Carentan, France, about twenty miles away from Normandy’s Omaha Beach. The hospital was actually a giant tent complex, previously an American field hospital before the United States handed it over to the Germans. When the Red Cross visited in May 1945, there were 1,417 wounded or sick soldiers there. The Red Cross inspector found the conditions to be “excellent” and said that German soldiers had even volunteered that the treatment there was better than it had been on the German side in the last few years of the war.

  The tents could be hot during the day and frigid at night, but there were operating rooms, X-ray machines, and a laboratory. The facility was well stocked with surgical equipment and medicine, according to the Red Cross observer. In essence, the German doctors themselves ran the hospital, with four American officers overseeing their work. “On a professional level,” the Red Cross assessor wrote, “the cooperation between the American and the German doctors is good.” That included Heim. His American superiors were impressed with his skill and dependability. In a recommendation, the American captain Edward S. Jones wrote that Heim’s work in the surgical section “had been excellent and essential for the care of the POW patients.”