Heim struck up friendly acquaintanceships with fellow doctors and even a German pastor, Werner Ernst Linz. The pastor observed how Heim “practiced his medicinal arts in a very responsible manner for the well-being of the soldiers entrusted to him.” Dr. Heim was particularly “self-sacrificing” in treating sexually transmitted diseases, doing everything he could to help his patients, Linz wrote in a letter of recommendation.
Though he traveled widely during the war, Heim ended up right where he had begun, in France. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Austrians had the same duty to serve as their new compatriots. Heim insisted under questioning that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS against his will. His first assignment after earning his medical degree in Vienna at the age of twenty-five had been as a driver during the German invasion of France in 1940. Heim assisted in the resettlement of ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia and worked on earthquake relief in Romania. He had served at the frigid northern reaches of the eastern front in Norway and Finland and been wounded in action.
Just eight days after the first American soldier crossed the Rhine on March 7, 1945, Heim’s unit was captured at Buchholz in western Germany. Heim was fortunate to find himself a prisoner of war on the American side, rather than facing a trip to Siberia courtesy of the Soviets. He was sent to the prisoner-of-war camp in France.
He was not on the CROWCASS list of wanted war criminals, but as a former member of the Waffen-SS he was in the Allied automatic arrest category, and it was not easy to secure release. Arrest and prosecution would have been certain but for an omission. For all the places Heim went over the course of the war, one post was missing from his file—through oversight or intentional removal, it was unclear—a small town in Austria called Mauthausen.
CHAPTER 2
Less than nine months after he was liberated from six years in concentration camps in Germany and Austria, Dr. Arthur A. Becker was in Vienna working as a special investigator for the U.S. Army’s War Crimes Investigating Team 6836. He was a slender, brown-eyed fifty-five-year-old, with noticeable gaps between his teeth, born in the northern German town of Prenzlau. A writer by profession, Becker had studied pharmacology and had been living in Stuttgart when he was arrested. During his incarceration he wore the green triangle of the common criminal, but as he told the American authorities once he was freed, one of his grandfathers was Jewish. He had been arrested for making critical statements about the SS after Kristallnacht.
American war-crimes investigators struggled to build their cases quickly for trials they planned throughout their zones of occupation; they were drastically understaffed. Manpower was shifted first to the Pacific theater, where the United States was still fighting the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, GIs were sent home as quickly as possible. Those soldiers kept to investigate war crimes were “mostly shell-shocked tank officers who were sent to this new unit as a form of recreation and rehabilitation,” one prosecutor recalled. “They sat around with no idea what to do.” The enormity of the task, as well as the language barrier, required the help of locals, and the ranks of former inmates provided enthusiastic volunteers like Becker.
On the morning of Friday, January 18, 1946, Becker had appointments in Vienna to interview other former inmates—a man named Josef Kohl in the morning and one named August Kamhuber in the afternoon—about the killings of Allied military personnel in violation of the Geneva Convention. Like Berlin, the Austrian capital was a divided city at the time, occupied by British, French, American, and Soviet troops, all with their own zones plus a jointly administered international zone in the first district. The investigative team Becker worked for was headquartered in Salzburg, but even the simple task of bringing witnesses from the Soviet sector required a special settlement between the increasingly mistrustful wartime allies. The Russians deemed the movement of witnesses from their zone to be “kidnapping.”
Much of Vienna’s former grandeur was still obscured by wartime damage. Between the bombing raids and the final Red Army offensive to take the city, large swaths of the old first district had been demolished. In all, some eighty thousand homes had been destroyed or damaged. Displaced persons from all over Europe, including camp survivors and former slave laborers, sought refuge, adding to the housing crisis. Gas, electricity, and telephone services were disrupted, and the Viennese received permission from their occupiers to chop down many of the trees lining the city’s once-lovely boulevards to fend off the cold of the hard postwar winter.
The shortages and rationing were nothing out of the ordinary for Josef Kohl, who had grown up poor and often gone hungry as a child. As an adult, he was bald with a tight-lipped, self-conscious smile, possibly to hide his large and slightly crooked teeth. The Austrian Communist looked more like the trained accountant he was than the street fighter he had become. Kohl took to the barricades in 1934 to fight for the Austrian republic against the fascist takeover and was shot in the chest, the bullet passing through his lung. After the Nazis absorbed Austria into the growing Third Reich, the Gestapo arrested Kohl. Following several months in the Gestapo jail at Morzinplatz in downtown Vienna, he was transferred to the infamous Dachau concentration camp on the outskirts of Munich.
One year later, in September 1939, Kohl was transferred again, this time to a year-old camp in Upper Austria. Heinrich Himmler chose the site for economic exploitation so that inmates could be used as slave labor to cut granite from the Wiener Graben stone quarry. The camp was named for the nearby town of Mauthausen. The inmates at the camp were forced, under threat of violence and even summary execution, to carry heavy stones up 186 steep stone steps carved into the hillside. Many simply died from the exertion. The inmates eventually built their own prison, unique in appearance among the concentration camps with its high stone wall and guard towers, giving their camp the look of a medieval castle.
Before the Nazis opened extermination camps in Poland, Mauthausen stood as the only Class III concentration camp in a three-tiered system. That meant that, according to the Nazis’ own rating, it was the harshest in the whole network of camps, even worse than Dachau, Buchenwald, or Auschwitz, designed for “Vernichtung durch Arbeit,” or extermination through work. That year more than half of the nearly sixteen thousand inmates at Mauthausen died or were killed. Kohl remained there for the entire war, almost six years in all, until liberation came in the waning days of the conflict. Now he was free, living again with his wife, Agnes, and working as the head of the branch of Volkssolidarität, or the People’s Solidarity, an organization of former camp inmates.
Becker’s interview with Kohl began at 10:55 a.m., with the witness giving his biographical information, his address on Endergasse in the Hetzendorf neighborhood south of the city center in Vienna, and his account of how he came to be held at Mauthausen. These formalities taken care of, Becker asked, “What do you know about the abuse and murder of English or alternatively Anglo-American prisoners of war?”
“The first English prisoners, who jumped with parachutes into France and there procured civilian clothes for themselves, were brought to Mauthausen in 1940 and there were shot as spies,” Kohl answered. How did Kohl know that they were English? Kohl explained that he spoke English and had talked to the men before they were executed. He went on to describe the mistreatment of the Allied pilots in July 1944, the kicks, the heads slammed against walls, and he named the members of the SS responsible.
Becker wanted to know what Kohl could tell him about the mistreatment and killing of prisoners. “I was a clerk in the sick quarters from April 1940 to June 1941,” Kohl said. “As a result I was present as an eyewitness at the first killings by syringe injections.”
“What sorts of prisoners were killed?” Becker asked.
“First and foremost it was those unfit for work, the weak, and the sick.”
“Are you aware of any other atrocities committed by SS camp doctors?” Becker asked.
“Yes. Camp physician Dr. Heim had the habit of looking in the mouths of inmates to determi
ne whether their teeth were in flawless condition. If this was the case, then he would kill the inmate by injection, cut off the head, and let it cook for hours in the crematorium until the naked skull was bared of all flesh and this skull prepared for him or his friends as decoration for their desks.”
“What else can you say about this Dr. Heim?” Becker asked.
“If he selected an inmate for his experiments, he took care first to question him thoroughly, in particular about the state of his family, whether they were provided for in the event that he was gone. Once he had established that, he performed operations on healthy people. He convinced them through figures of speech that it was just a small, harmless operation and that once they were recovered they would immediately be let go. Then he performed the most difficult, complicated operations such as stomach, liver—even heart operations—on these people that had to lead to their deaths. These people were entirely healthy human beings, and the operations were for experimental purposes,” Kohl concluded.
“Do you know whether Dr. Heim is still alive?” Becker asked.
“I cannot provide any specific information about that,” Kohl said. “It cannot be ruled out that he is in hiding.”
CHAPTER 3
A new sign hung over the entryway at the brick barracks at Dachau, reading, “War Crimes Branch, Judge Advocate Sections, H.Q. Third United States Army.” Where SS power had once been absolute, uniformed American military officers now sat in judgment, a giant Stars and Stripes hanging behind them. On March 29, 1946, American MPs escorted sixty-one defendants from the Mauthausen concentration camp into the courtroom. Originally, it was supposed to be sixty, but one of the most murderous guards from the stone quarry, Hans Spatzenegger, had his name added into the typed indictment by hand.
By the end of the war, the camp headquarters alone employed more than 350 people. Mauthausen and its forty-nine sub-camps strewn across the Austrian countryside combined had nearly ten thousand guards. There were also more than fifty SS doctors. U.S. v. Hans Altfuldisch et al. was the first important trial of Mauthausen personnel. The defendants ranged from Nazi Party leaders to simple guards. One U.S. intelligence officer criticized the inclusion of certain individuals among the sixty-one as “a throw of the dice or a spin of the roulette wheel.”
The men on trial were not chosen at random, but neither were they selected because they had committed the most serious crimes. The lead prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel William Denson, wanted to establish precedents that would make convictions in subsequent trials easier to achieve. He wanted as broad a cross section of camp life as possible. Ultimately, Denson chose defendants who “ranged in age from twenty-one to sixty-two, and included forty-two Germans, twelve Austrians, three Czechs, two Yugoslavians, one Romanian, and one Hungarian,” and who had “served at more than fifteen sub-camps, as well as the Hartheim euthanasia facility.” There was a civilian employee of the SS firm that ran the quarries. A total of eight of those indicted were medical personnel.
On the second day of the trial, the director of the Innsbruck gasworks, Ernst Martin, took the stand. During his time as inmate number 3148 at Mauthausen, Martin seemed a disinterested paper pusher, a model prisoner-clerk. When he was ordered in April 1945 to burn all the documents in the office of the chief physician concerning the prisoners as well as those dealing with SS personnel, he set about incinerating papers, a process that took more than a week. “The material was so large because it concerned approximately 72,000 deaths and you had a single file for each one that we were burning without interruption for eight days,” Martin told the court. “And because it was such a long procedure, there was such a tremendous amount, and it took such a long time, I was able to save and hide these death books.”
Martin was concealing the most incriminating materials in the basement of the prisoners’ sick quarters, in a cupboard filled with old surgical equipment. If the SS had realized what he was doing, they would have executed him on the spot. The books comprised thirteen heavy volumes registering the 71,856 official deaths at the camp. Martin testified that the causes of death were routinely falsified and that many of those killed by lethal injection were not included at all.
He had also preserved the operation book, Prosecution’s Exhibit 15, which recorded the surgical procedures at the camp. Under the surgeries from the fall of 1941, the name Heim was scrawled along the margin of the page. The H was written with a distinctive double loop that looked almost like an infinity symbol tilted at an angle. Officially—for much happened off the books at Mauthausen—Heim had operated 263 times while he was at the camp. All eleven of the Jewish inmates he operated on were listed as having died within a few weeks. But Heim was not seated in the five rows of defendants listening to the testimony against them.
Mauthausen’s former chief physician, Dr. Eduard Krebsbach, was among those who did stand trial. He had admitted to selecting roughly two hundred tuberculosis patients for lethal injections and later, on orders of the camp commandant, choosing another two thousand prisoners for the gas chamber. At his trial, under intense questioning, Dr. Krebsbach maintained that he was only following orders in euthanizing the “hopelessly ill,” referring to the Nazi doctrine that sanctioned such killings. “It is the same with people as it is with animals,” Dr. Krebsbach said. “Animals that come into the world crippled or otherwise nonviable are killed immediately after birth … It is the right of every state to defend itself against asocial elements, and that also includes those unfit to live.”
The most detailed information about the medical murders came from several Czech physicians held as inmates and forced to assist the SS doctors. Dr. Josef Podlaha stated that he had reported almost immediately to the American Counter Intelligence Corps (known as the CIC) on what he called the SS doctors’ “degenerate and perverse practices.” Podlaha also testified about being forced by one of the defendants, Dr. Hans Richter, to help him operate on living people “for different diseases which they were not suffering from, for instance, stomach ulcers, stomach resections, gallbladders, kidneys, and also brain operations,” all so Richter could improve his skills as a surgeon.
Another witness was Josef Kohl, who returned to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he had once been imprisoned, to confront his former captors. Kohl testified against a capo who beat prisoners, pointing him out from among the defendants sitting in the dock. The capo had a piece of paper hanging around his neck with the number 21 printed in black on it. Kohl picked out another guard as number 29 and a functionary from the political department as number 37. But the prosecutor asked Kohl no questions about Dr. Heim, nor was the doctor sitting among the accused, waiting to be identified. There was no sign of the man alleged to have murdered prisoners to take skulls as trophies. Nor had Heim’s name been on the list of around one hundred SS officers, guards, and others provided to the Americans by camp survivors shortly after liberation. The verdicts in the Mauthausen trial were read on May 13, 1946. All sixty-one defendants were convicted, and of them all but three were sentenced to death by hanging. Although Heim was not among them, neither was he forgotten.
Three days later, a little over a hundred miles away across the Austrian border in Salzburg, a new play about the concentration camp, written by one of its inmates, made its debut at the State Theater. For The Road into Life, the playwright, Arthur Becker, drew not only on his own experiences but also on the testimony he gathered as a war-crimes investigator from other survivors, including Josef Kohl. “Officially, there is no murder here,” says one of the characters in the play, Hermann, a capo described as a “small-time crook but otherwise a good person.” Hermann continues, “One dies from pneumonia, weakness, or some other harmless illness, and the crematorium makes sure that no one discovers your cause of death.
“We have a doctor—doctor?—no, a headhunter,” Hermann says. “Do you know how many people, healthy people, with sets of teeth in flawless condition he has killed because their prepared skulls made wonderful desk ornaments for him and
these SS bandits?” The SS Obersturmführer insinuates that Heim will decapitate a new inmate. “Someone should introduce him to the camp doctor. Perhaps he has a use for his skull!” The SS officer yells to an underling, “Speak with Dr. Heim. He should see him, and today.”
CHAPTER 4
The Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz was a tiny office filled with underpaid workers. They scribbled down notes about some of the worst crimes humanity had witnessed onto tiny index cards in the belief that the little pieces of evidence would be assembled over time into a larger picture. Thirty volunteers, most of them fed and sheltered in displaced-persons camps like the one in Bindermichl, collected testimony about Nazi war criminals from their surviving victims. The rent and basic expenses of the office at Goethestrasse 63 came to about $50 a month and were paid by Abraham Silberschein, an affluent Jew and former Polish parliamentarian living in Geneva. But the whole operation would never have existed were it not for the determination and tenacity of the center’s mastermind, Simon Wiesenthal.
In 1947, Wiesenthal was thirty-eight years old, reunited with his wife, Cyla, and living with their baby daughter, born just the year before. Wiesenthal had studied architectural engineering and might have made a good middle-class existence for himself whether there in Austria, in the United States, where some family members urged him to emigrate, or in Palestine, where many survivors were moving in the hopes of founding a Jewish state. After the chaotic life he had experienced even before the camps, it would have been more than understandable for him to want to leave Europe behind. Instead, he had founded the documentation center.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 2
