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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Most of that was in his questionnaire. But the denazification investigators found information that he had neglected to include on his Fragebogen. Two entries had been left out of his postings. The file prepared by the Berlin Document Center, dated October 14, 1947, said that from April 10 to June 19, 1941, Heim worked as a concentration camp inspector. And from June 19 to July 14 of the same year he was at the concentration camp Buchenwald. The prosecutor found no mention of Mauthausen.

  Heim’s lawyer, Dr. Hans Frank from the Swabian town of Aalen, argued in a brief that his client was a healer, a saver of lives, who through a series of coincidences and no fault of his own ended up in the Waffen-SS. Heim’s relationship with the Nazi Party consisted of a “purely nominal membership, for he was in no way politically active and limited his duties to the payment of his dues,” which were a mere 1.50 reichsmarks a month. His membership was, and the lawyer underlined his next words, “against his will,” that is, “forcible”—here the lawyer inserted a space between each letter for even clearer emphasis—his induction was part of “an attempt to solve the shortage of doctors under which it suffered at the time through forced recruitment.”

  Dr. Frank stressed the contrast between Dr. Heim’s nominal crime of serving in the Waffen-SS and his regular duties saving lives as a troop doctor. The statements in support of Heim demonstrated how he “kept himself clear of any objectionable or criminal behavior with his entire being.” He was free from “political blindness, intolerance, and chauvinistic hate.”

  But the most significant testimonials on his behalf pertained to his behavior during fierce fighting in France in January and February 1945, shortly before he was taken prisoner. The mayor of Offwiller, France, north of Strasbourg, where Heim was stationed at the time, wrote a letter in support of him, saying, “The civilian populace embraced him. During the hostilities he voluntarily placed himself at the disposal of the civilian wounded and administered first aid.”

  His superior officer, Dr. Franz Niedner, supported the story. Writing from detention at Hohenasperg, the former fortress where Heim had also been held, Niedner wrote that “because the populace had remained in these places, Dr. Heim undertook their entire medical care, despite the fact that during the fighting he was deeply engaged in his duties as doctor to the troops, administering first aid to wounded civilians and ensuring their orderly evacuation to the division medical teams in the rear.”

  A French civilian, Friedric Schauly, with whom Dr. Heim was quartered in Offwiller, substantiated the story, adding, “The entire community can confirm it.” Heim took “the greatest care and gave the wounded civilians emergency dressings.” Mr. Schauly told of a farmer who had committed a political offense and after he was injured in an accident came to the aid station for treatment. The police wanted to arrest him, but Dr. Heim ordered him sent back home instead. Were it not for Dr. Heim, Schauly wrote, the farmer “never would have come back.”

  The defense attorney kept the court focused on the commendations by the Americans and the French. He pointed out that those letters demonstrated “what esteem the person concerned enjoyed, even among his enemies.” Still, after six years of war and two and a half years of internment, Heim found it difficult to locate the people who would testify to his many actions “that would document his humane conduct since his acquaintances have been scattered to the four winds.”

  Heim’s hearing on March 20, 1948, began the same day that the Soviet representative Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky walked out on the Allied Control Council in Berlin for good. The slow breakdown of cooperation among the Allies became official. The Cold War had begun in earnest. Both the Americans and the Soviets wanted the Germans on their side. Already, the Allies were using former Nazis to spy against the Russians. In America, the public perception of who was the enemy was shifting from the defeated Nazis to the alarmingly powerful Soviets. The intelligence units in Europe responded accordingly.

  The prosecution of war criminals only alienated the very Germans the Allies needed on their side. Almost a year before Heim’s case came up, the U.S. military government had commanded “the swiftest possible conclusion to the entire denazification proceedings by mandatory decree and has already made clear that it would use direct orders to implement the necessary measures,” the head of the chamber in Neckarsulm wrote in May 1947. The Soviet Military Administration in Germany, known by the acronym SMAD, issued order number 35, ending denazification in the Soviet zone as of March 10, 1948. The Western Allies would not be far behind.

  With all the political pressure favoring a speedy resolution, a doctor who saved the lives of French civilians faced relatively little scrutiny. On one of the three questionnaires Heim filled out, he was asked in question number 13 in which group he believed that he belonged. Dr. Heim answered group 4, Mitläufer, follower or fellow traveler in German. The three-judge panel issued its ruling on March 22, 1948.

  The person concerned has credibly proved that he was forcibly drafted into the Waffen-SS, which through its establishment in the then Ostmark had a shortage of doctors. The person concerned was a doctor and as such promoted at regular intervals. His occupation as a doctor with the Waffen-SS can, due to Art. 39 III, not be imputed as incriminating. The investigations undertaken have resulted in absolutely no facts under Art. 7-9. The person concerned has credibly proved that he took part in no activities directed against humanity and against international law.

  As such, the person concerned belongs to the circle of follower.

  The chamber did not address the conflicts between his file in Berlin and Heim’s own description of his service; indeed, there was not a single comment written on the Berlin Document Center file.

  The Spruchkammer Neckarsulm office closed its doors for good in July 1948, forwarding all outstanding questions, issues, and requests to Heilbronn. A letter went out to the committee members inviting them to a party. This time it did not ask them to bring their own meat rations. The chairman noted that in a year and a half, the Spruchkammer Neckarsulm had processed over thirty-six thousand questionnaires, out of which it prosecuted thirty-four hundred cases, or less than 10 percent. The majority of those were handled, like Heim’s case, without oral arguments. The Spruchkammer Neckarsulm found 1,145 fellow travelers, 485 lesser offenders, and 21 offenders. There were no major offenders to be found in its jurisdiction. The tallies suggest an extremely lenient, forgiving approach to denazification.

  “The chamber hopes and wishes that through your work the necessary requirements for the new creation of a free, democratic state have been accomplished,” the chairman wrote to the members.

  In the meantime, requests for information on Heim were incomplete; the official channels were overwhelmed. The Office of Military Government for Germany in Heilbronn had continued researching Heim’s case at the request of the Spruchkammer investigators. An official noted that Dr. Heim’s involvement with the Nazi movement went back further than it appeared. His SS card said that he had been a member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, from January 1, 1935, until October 1, 1938, the day that he joined the SS. The form was dated February 6, 1948, at the top but marked March 30 at the bottom. It was not stamped as received by the Spruchkammer Neckarsulm until May 13, 1948. By that time, Aribert Heim was already free.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Pardon me for my sincere inquiry,” wrote Karl Kaufmann, a clerk at the Linz Iron and Steelworks, on February 2, 1948, to the Austrian Ice Hockey Association in Vienna. “It deals with a man who during the war belonged to your organization, whose name was Dr. Heim, by profession a physician.”

  Kaufmann’s letter was brief but included a disturbing list of accusations. In it, he described what he called “terrible barbarities” visited upon inmates by Dr. Heim. A former prisoner who worked as an orderly in the camp sick bay, he said he had seen the physician kill “countless people with gasoline to the heart, and all of this he did with a cynical smiling expression.” Heim’s residence “is to date unknown. Is there no member of the asso
ciation who knows where Dr. Heim is located?” He signed the letter: “Karl Kaufmann, former antifascist inmate 1463. Concentration Camp Mauthausen.”

  The hockey association forwarded the letter to the prosecutor’s office in Vienna on February 24, 1948. The association staffer included a note saying that Dr. Heim had been registered with Eissport Klub Engelmann during the period in question. The court in Vienna turned to Heim’s old hockey club in the hopes of locating him. Kaufmann had achieved his goal. The Austrian authorities had begun searching for Heim.

  On March 1, 1948, the trains to the historic health resort of Bad Nauheim were stuffed “as full as sausage casings,” with visitors arriving from miles around to watch SC Riessersee from Bavaria take on the upstart Red Devils of Bad Nauheim. Crowds filled the aisles, some even climbing the trees outside to get a view of the game. The hockey rink officially only had room for four thousand, but estimates of the attendance that day ran as high as fourteen thousand people. The American Military Police had to pull intrepid climbers down from the roof of the stadium for fear it would cave in.

  The Red Devils kept pace in the fast-moving game. The core of the team that held Riessersee to a 2–2 tie was made up of men expelled from the far eastern reaches of Prussia, which was now part of Poland. Their ranks included a new addition, a tough defenseman from Austria. He was a giant of a man, over six feet three, a physical player fans called a hulk and “eisenhart,” hard as iron. Dr. Aribert Heim might have been new to the Red Devils, but he had played against Riessersee before, back when he represented Eissport Klub Engelmann, playing both with and against many of his East Prussian teammates. Now he was skating in the American-built stadium in Bad Nauheim, where the ice was emblazoned with the U.S. coat of arms and the insignia of the XV Corps of the Seventh Army.

  The life of a professional athlete was neither glamorous nor well compensated in those days, and hockey was nowhere near as popular a sport as soccer. The hockey players’ first uniforms were red jerseys swiped from a U.S. Army football team. Herbert Schibukat, one of the team’s stars, was put up in a dank little hotel room when he came to Bad Nauheim. Players sometimes had to trade sticks and even gloves as they made their line changes. But the games were major events.

  The big defenseman, Heim, had a day job, working shifts at the Sanatorium Hahn, in an elegant four-story building with intricate iron balconies at Karlstrasse 27, an easy stroll from the city center. Heim assisted the head physician there, Dr. Luft, while also helping him out with his general practice. Ice hockey fans remembered Heim by the nickname Kleiderschrank, after the tall, wide wardrobes where Germans keep their clothes.

  On the hockey team, Heim developed a reputation not only as a fierce defender but also for some rather odd habits. He always kept himself out of photographs, even team pictures. He frequently inquired about whether anyone was hanging around outside, loitering in front of the door to the dressing room. People didn’t ask many questions in those postwar days. Plenty had pasts they did not want to talk about. “He’s afraid,” teammates whispered to one another, “that he’s going to get nabbed.” And he had every reason to be concerned.

  Karl Kaufmann had continued to pursue his campaign for Heim’s arrest and prosecution. He was angered by the fact that the Austrian police could not simply drive into German territory and arrest the suspect based on his allegations. Matters were complicated by the fact that neither Austria nor Germany was a sovereign nation in 1948. The occupation authorities would have to approve any extradition request. Investigators began to build a case with Kaufmann’s statements. He told them that he “could write a novel about this mass murderer.”

  Kaufmann alleged that Heim took part in regular corporal punishments of inmates with twenty-five to a hundred blows with a cane, but instead of beating them across the buttocks as was normal, Heim aimed “always for the kidneys, so that many died as a result of internal bleeding.” Kaufmann explained that he had spent six years in Mauthausen, three years as an orderly.

  He described Heim as “very tall, he was somewhat smaller than two meters, he must have been 1.98 m and was very sturdy. He had blond, combed-back hair, beautiful teeth, a long face. What was distinctive about him was his unnatural size.” In Europe, where they use the metric system, two meters, or a little under six feet seven, is the benchmark between the merely tall and the gigantic. According to Kaufmann, Heim was six feet six, and “by my estimate, he would be 36 to 38 years old presently. During the war he was a prominent ice hockey player and was constantly going to Vienna from Mauthausen. His name appeared often in the newspapers.”

  Kaufmann also told the judge a little bit about Heim’s background, saying that he came from Styria, northwest of Graz near the town of Leoben, “where his parents had a large farm.” It was unclear where he had gotten that information, which was inaccurate. Heim’s hometown of Radkersburg lay to the south of Graz, and his widowed mother had no such farm.

  Still, in May 1948 the Eissport Klub Engelmann responded to a request from the court in Vienna, confirming that “Dr. Heim was employed by our ice hockey team and enlisted in the year 1939. From this time we have no connection with Herr Dr. Heim.” The letter from the secretariat of the club included one more piece of information that would put investigators onto the doctor’s trail: “We are told that Dr. Heim was seen in Bad Nauheim (American Zone in Germany).”

  CHAPTER 10

  Eleonore Ackermann, daughter of the Oberschopfheim tailor who remade Alfred Aedtner’s uniform, was skeptical of the young veteran at first. On her way home from work she would notice the young man from Silesia in the front yard, kicking the soccer ball with the Haag boy who had been blinded in the war. Alfred, on the other hand, was smitten with the young woman they called Lore.

  She worked in the kitchen at an orphanage in the nearby city of Offenburg. Most of the boys and girls were the illegitimate offspring of German women and French soldiers. Her mother said the job would be a way not only to earn money but also to learn to be a better cook.

  After a time Alfred won her affections and they agreed to marry, but her parents refused to consent. Not without a job, her parents said, a career, a profession. Painting the occasional house did not count. Aedtner had wanted to be a soldier, but occupied Germany had no army. He had no high school diploma and no money. His family was scattered in the Soviet zone and the territory ceded to Poland. He would need a new plan if he wanted to win his bride.

  It was Lore who found the help-wanted advertisement in the local newspaper. The police were hiring. He answered the ad and on January 2, 1948, started work as a gendarme. It was not a glamorous job by any means. Instead of a squad car, he had a bicycle. Instead of hunting murderers, he was writing tickets and quieting down drunks.

  He was posted to Gaggenau, about an hour north of Oberschopfheim on the northern edge of the Black Forest. They married on July 20, 1948, she in a beautiful white gown and veil, Alfred in his green officer’s uniform. They had their own apartment, and Lore was soon pregnant. The young police officer had no inkling of the role that Dr. Aribert Heim and other former Nazis would play in his life.

  By June 15, 1948, Heim had given up his position at the sanatorium in Bad Nauheim. The next winter he began working in nearby Friedberg at the Bürgerhospital there. Starting in November 1948, Heim worked for six months in internal medicine and six months on the surgical ward. “He ran the ward entrusted to him diligently and assisted with all of the large and small surgeries of the abdomen and trauma surgeries,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Kramer, a surgeon and the hospital’s chief doctor, in a letter of recommendation. As for his person, Dr. Kramer found that through his “upstanding and reserved manner he was a pleasant and reliable colleague.”

  The conditions in Friedberg as compared with those in Bad Nauheim showed once again how even a few miles could be the difference between bad luck and good fortune. During the war Friedberg had an important railway juncture between Giessen-Kassel and Frankfurt, making it a prime target for Allied planes.
Black-and-white photographs from the time show railroad tracks twisted up from the ground like chewed cocktail straws. Houses along the city’s Bismarckstrasse were blown up, buildings shorn of their roofs, retaining walls destroyed. Piles of bricks rose half a story high, and beams were scattered like toothpicks by the aerial assault. Even the sugar factory was hit.

  But things had improved in the western occupation zones after the currency reform of 1948, which introduced the deutsche mark. The Americans printed and shipped five hundred tons of bills, worth 5.7 billion deutsche marks, to Germany, where on June 28, 1948, they began to circulate, with a ten-to-one exchange rate to the reichsmark. It was too soon for Germans in the western zones to realize, but the postwar period of agonizing deprivation had largely come to a close. The new currency was an instant success, quickly shutting down the black market. Goods returned to the store shelves practically overnight.

  ——

  In May 1949, Karl Kaufmann finally appeared at the courthouse in Linz with a thorough report, in which he described what he remembered about Heim’s time at the concentration camp. He recalled that the young doctor had begun working at Mauthausen in 1941, at a time when several transports filled with Dutch Jews were arriving at the camp. Three or four times a week after evening roll call Heim would take twenty-six to thirty inmates and dispatch them with injections of gasoline “in the vein or in the heart.” On several Sundays when he was on duty he killed “30 to 35 Jews, all of whom were healthy.”

  Kaufmann said that Dr. Heim had once cut a young Jew from Prague’s stomach open, “while he was completely conscious, from top to bottom.” Heim proceeded to examine the young man’s organs, cutting a section of his liver and removing his spleen. According to Kaufmann, “He made no exceptions, whether the prisoners were Austrian or German or belonged to any other nation.” Jews were killed, young or old, whereas those from other nations were only killed if they “were weak and unable to work.”