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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  In his report, Kaufmann recommended two other witnesses to Heim’s murders, a man named Sommer living in Upper Austria and a master locksmith named Karl Lotter. Rupert Sommer appeared before the court in Münichholz bei Steyr on June 24, 1949. His statement was very short, but he declared that Kaufmann’s report was correct down to the last detail, haargenau in German. “I and Kaufmann were in the same room, therefore we have the same experiences.

  “I myself was treated well by the accused,” he explained. “But he was vicious to the Jews. With a smiling expression he said with his arms crossed to a Jew: ‘You too must die. Is your wife beautiful?’ ” He described how, on the other hand, Heim treated Aryan prisoners better, including punishing an Aryan capo with a slap for mistreating a fellow Aryan inmate. Like Kaufmann, Sommer referred investigators to other witnesses.

  Karl Lotter was interviewed at the court in Mürzzuschlag about the man he described as “an absolute mass murderer, who with a cold-blooded look on his face killed dozens of people. How many people he killed I can’t say because he also went to the barracks. He had a special hatred for the Jews. He killed the Jews in masses.” It was mostly, according to Lotter, Czech and Dutch Jews who were killed with injections after anesthesia. Heim worked with “a Viennese pharmacist” to try out different solutions and test their effects, even “standing beside them with a stopwatch, and determined which solutions were the best and worked the fastest and were the cheapest to use.”

  The emphasis remained not just on cataloging his crimes but on finding Heim. “To my knowledge,” Lotter recalled, “Heim is Viennese and a famous ice hockey player. In the winter of 1941/42 he played for the Vienna all-star team.” Lotter described the athlete as having a “conspicuous appearance,” due to his height and his large feet. Lotter was of the opinion that Heim had also committed murders at the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, sometimes called Oranienburg. He overheard him threatening an inmate he had known there that he would “handle things like in Oranienburg, and you know what I mean.”

  Lotter said he personally witnessed Heim commit seven murders but had seen “entire mountains of corpses” from the injection procedures. “Above all, it was terrible because he had cordial conversations with the people, and then killed them through injections to the heart,” Lotter said. As for how he knew that Heim was a hockey player, Lotter said he was certain because he had seen the articles about his games with the Viennese hockey team.

  Lotter pointed out another witness, Josef Kohl, who more than two years after his first testimony once again told the authorities his story about Heim. All of the doctors had to give the lethal injections, Kohl said, but Heim did so “in a particularly sadistic manner.” Like Lotter, Kohl described how Heim began conversations with the victims, in a seemingly humane approach, asking about their family situations, how individual family members were doing. Then the discussion would turn to whether the family was taken care of, if something should happen to them. “This appeared to be … the moment when his sadistic lust was stilled … [and] he gave the inmate the injection that brought his death.”

  There were inconsistencies. Lotter told investigators that Heim was at Mauthausen for around six months. Kohl put the SS doctor there for a much longer stay, from September 1940 to June 1942. Sommer thought that he was there in 1942, maybe even 1943. The focus in the questioning revolved less around the precise timing than the gruesome details. Kohl said he personally saw how Heim operated on two healthy young Dutch Jews, one of whom died when the doctor cut out his heart, the other of whom he dispatched with an injection. Their skulls, he said, ended up on Heim’s desk.

  The Austrian Interior Ministry now had a clearer idea of Dr. Heim’s location. The public safety division of the state ministry in Hesse informed the Austrians in a letter dated February 23, 1949, that Heim was living in Bad Nauheim, working as an assistant doctor at the hospital in Friedberg. They even had a correct date of birth: June 28, 1914.

  It is unclear how Heim might have learned that the police were closing in, though his elder sister, Hilda, worked for the court in Graz and might have had access to inquiries into his case and been able to warn him. The one thing that is certain is that he was gone before the authorities could catch up with him.

  The suddenness of Dr. Heim’s departure was recorded in the official history of the Red Devils hockey team. “By night and fog the doctor gave up his position at the Friedberg hospital and vanished as well from the spa town. The prosecutors were at his heels.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Up to the point when she met Aribert Heim, Friedl Bechtold had led a charmed life. She grew up across the Neckar River from the stone remains of Heidelberg’s great castle, a hulking ruin that inspired the writers of the German Romantic school that flowered there in the nineteenth century. She was raised in a stately three-story house, a confection of imitation German Renaissance motifs, with gables and an oriel window and even a little dome with a pointed tower on top. Her mother ran a boarding school for girls, an international mix of daughters of the wealthy and the well-heeled.

  The Bechtolds sent their daughter to a college preparatory school—known as a Gymnasium in Germany. Friedl was precocious, finishing high school a year early. When she entered Heidelberg University, she took a required first-aid course that convinced her that she wanted to become a doctor. She finished her dissertation at twenty-three, on fractures of the upper femur, the same year the war ended. The Bechtolds had been spared the worst of it. Friedl was an only child; there were no sons to die at the front. Her father, a World War I veteran, was appointed mayor and supply commander for a French town. He was later relieved of duty, suspected of insufficient loyalty to the Nazis, and thus avoided internment in a POW camp.

  After the war Mr. Bechtold had to ride a bicycle or catch a ride to the country to trade with the farmers, whose foodstuffs were far more important than all the little luxuries, the cuckoo clocks and jewelry, filling grand homes like theirs in the foodless cities. He managed to trade a camera with an American officer for coffee and cigarettes. When Friedl rode home on her bicycle from the Ludolf Krehl Clinic in the Bergheim neighborhood of Heidelberg where she worked, her Red Cross band on her arm, the American GIs driving by in their jeeps would shout, “Hello, Blondie!”

  She found them quite “reputable” on the whole, but she was not looking to marry a young American. Still, it was a very difficult time for a woman of her age who wanted to marry and have a family. Half the men of her generation had been killed. In parts of Germany there were three times as many women between the ages of twenty and thirty as there were men. Prospects for even an educated young lady from a good family were bleak.

  One day in 1948, on her way home from the clinic in Heidelberg, Friedl caught the eye of a tall, striking man. They realized they were looking at each other, and both laughed, then struck up a conversation. She found him congenial as well as handsome. What was most important to her about the young man, who turned out to be a doctor as well, was that he had what she saw as “a natural charm, no patter.”

  Germans sometimes find Austrians to be charmeurs, smooth but a little too slick. But the seriousness that Heim had inherited from his father, the gendarme, was anything but frivolous. They were only together for a few minutes, but the man made an impression. Although she did not tell him who she was or where she lived, he told her, “I’ll be in touch again at the clinic.”

  She was just leaving town on vacation and assumed that by the time she returned, he would have lost interest. But Heim was waiting to see her on her return. “The funny thing was,” she said, that they were “medical doctor and medical doctor, you know? At some point it just feels like fate.” He called at the clinic, and they agreed to meet again.

  Although the young doctor was not perfect—he couldn’t dance very well—it was soon clear that their relationship was serious. Heim became the first young man that Friedl brought home and formally introduced to her parents. He made a good impression on them too.
<
br />   There were a few whispers. Her family’s property holdings had been damaged in the war but were still significant. Some questioned whether the handsome young Austrian had “hooked a goldfish,” as one family member put it. “The way she got to know him, she fell for him immediately,” the relative recounted. “Then again, the way he was, with his manner, you probably would have fallen for him too.”

  He lived in an apartment building on Dürerstrasse in Mannheim but would often take the train down to see her in Heidelberg. As they got to know each other, one subject they didn’t talk about much was Heim’s military service. She knew that he was in the Waffen-SS but thought little of it. Several boys in her class had been too. Besides, he was a physician. It didn’t matter much what uniform you wore when you were saving lives, did it?

  Unaware of Aribert’s Nazi past, Friedl focused on her wedding. Ever practical, she eschewed the traditional white gown and instead wore a simple suit. There had been no engagement party either. No members of his family made it to the wedding from Austria. Times were difficult, he explained, and none of them had a car. Still, while the event might not have been fancy, the look in her eyes on their wedding day, July 30, 1949, was one of joy, anticipation, and excitement.

  The day ended, however, on an unfortunate note, with the new Mrs. Heim in bed, suffering from what she thought was food poisoning but what was actually the onset of hepatitis B. Friedl gave blood in the clinic where she worked as regularly as possible. They could always use a little more. In those days they only boiled the needles to sterilize them, which was not enough to kill some of the more pernicious viruses, and she contracted hepatitis. The pains in her liver began on her wedding night. Dr. Heim moved in with her parents and commuted to work so he could help take care of her.

  On March 28, 1950, with Friedl Heim newly pregnant, the Austrian government put out a warrant for the arrest of “Dr. Heribert Heim,” accusing him of murder, torture, abuse, and “crimes against dignity and humanity” at Mauthausen. The warrant concluded: “If the crime caused the death of the person concerned, it is punishable by death.” Investigators had the correct date of birth, June 28, 1914, but not only were they searching for Heribert rather than Aribert; they had an incorrect birthplace as well. They were searching for a man from a place called Ingstfeld rather than Radkersburg.

  In May the American military approved the extradition of Heim to Austria. American investigators traveled to Friedberg and Bad Nauheim to make inquiries but with no success. A year after he skated in front of sellout crowds, no one seemed to have heard of him. There was no trace of him at the local residents’ registration office. The investigators inquired at Dr. Luft’s sanatorium in Bad Nauheim but got nowhere. There was no record that he had worked there, they were told. The Bürgerhospital in neighboring Friedberg said the same.

  In fact, there were references to Dr. Heim in the hospital files. At least one secretary in personnel was aware that he had moved to Mannheim. Heim had been hired and paid directly by the chief physician, Dr. Kramer. Other members of the staff were shocked by his unexpected disappearance. None of this came out a year later when the Americans made their inquiries. Whether it was an oversight or a favor for a colleague, it is impossible to say, but the locals in Friedberg and Bad Nauheim provided no assistance.

  The Americans could only tell the Austrians that they had failed to find him. In a letter dated December 21, 1950, the office of the general counsel of the high commissioner for Germany wrote to his Austrian counterpart, “You are advised that Heim cannot be located in the United States Zone of Germany. We are therefore returning the file and closing this matter administratively, pending the receipt of information [regarding] Heim’s whereabouts.”

  CHAPTER 12

  After years of documenting Nazi war crimes and recording testimonials from survivors, Simon Wiesenthal had begun to wonder if it wasn’t time for him to close his office in Linz. He had caught around two hundred former Nazis by 1952, but the task had gotten more and more difficult. The displaced persons who provided the ranks of his witnesses and the bulk of his leads had slowly moved on. The United States, under pressure from the Soviets, had begun cooperating with some of the more unsavory remnants of the Nazi regime.

  Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of intelligence in Lyon, for instance, went to work in April 1947 as an informant for the CIC, the army intelligence group tasked with tracking down war criminals. The United States wanted Barbie to help penetrate Soviet networks and allowed him to live with his wife and their two children, safe from prosecution, even though he was wanted for murder in France and named on the CROWCASS list of war criminals. Barbie had been cruelly effective during the war, capturing key figures in the French Resistance and using brutal methods to make them talk.

  “It is felt that his value as an informant infinitely outweighs any use he may have in prison,” wrote the CIC agent Robert S. Taylor in May 1947. When the French learned that Barbie was in the American zone, they began clamoring for his extradition. Since this might have proved embarrassing, especially because the Americans had been spying on their French counterparts, instead the CIC decided to make the person, and therefore the problem, disappear.

  The 430th CIC Detachment in Austria had its own system for helping informants leave Europe, something known as a rat line. A Croatian priest in Italy, Krunoslav Draganovic, could provide Red Cross passports and visas to countries in South America for between $1,000 and $1,400. An American headed the eligibility office of the International Refugee Organization in Rome, easing the way when it came to official documents and permits. Barbie was given a new identity under the name Klaus Altmann, including a Red Cross passport and a visa to Bolivia. He set sail on March 23, 1951.

  But Father Draganovic was not working exclusively with the United States. He had sympathized with the Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, during the war and helped his compatriots to escape. Some of the worst Nazi criminals managed to flee through the rat lines. Wiesenthal’s obsession, Adolf Eichmann, had escaped to Austria and over the Alps into Italy, where he received a Red Cross passport under the name Ricardo Klement. As Klement, he left Genoa bound for Buenos Aires in July 1950. On the far side of the Atlantic he felt safe enough to bring his wife and children to join him. Auschwitz’s notorious Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, followed a similar path. Mengele had kept his head down, working at a farm in a Bavarian village from the time he left a POW camp in 1945 until 1949, when he too left for Argentina.

  It was a fateful year for Germany. Talks had broken down completely between the Western Allies and the Soviets. Finally, Germany was broken into two states, the German Democratic Republic in the east and the Federal Republic of Germany in the west. In his first government address in September 1949, the newly elected chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, spoke for much of the nation when he declared, “Through the denazification much misfortune and much misery has been wreaked.” He promised to pursue the worst war criminals but implicitly forgave the rest. “Those truly guilty of the crimes committed during the National Socialist period and in war should be punished with all severity,” Adenauer said.

  The term “truly guilty” implicitly limited the circle of perpetrators worthy of prosecution. The pressure to discontinue the hunt for Nazi perpetrators continued to mount. That same year a group of lawyers founded the Heidelberger Juristenkreis, a lobbying and legal aid group for detainees and convicted war criminals. Among the prominent members was Hans Laternser, a Nuremberg defense attorney who specialized in such trials in the postwar era. Even in the Soviet sector realpolitik calculations and desire to win over the Germans under their control brought the Russian search for Nazi war criminals to a halt. After convicting some seventy thousand prisoners of war, the Soviets declared an end to their own Nazi trials on September 14, 1950.

  For a silent majority in Germany there was not so much support for Nazi sentiments as a desire to move on. Although many Germans were in favor of holding the most senior Nazi leadership
accountable, they also believed the thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers still held captive in Siberia needed to come home. Leading politicians argued that the remaining detainees in the hands of the Americans, British, and French should also be released. In the recently founded Federal Republic of Germany, the rank-and-file soldiers needed to be given a second chance.

  Even those already found guilty had their defenders. Adenauer promised that his government would pursue amnesty for those convicted by the Allies. In the face of intense lobbying from the church and politicians, the U.S. Army Modification Board lightened sentences. For concentration camp survivors like Wiesenthal, the tens of thousands of war criminals who lived without fear of prosecution were even harder to swallow than those who at least had been forced to flee.

  Dr. Hans Eisele, for instance, had conducted painful, sometimes deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates and killed many of the survivors. According to an American colonel who worked on his case, Dr. Eisele had grown into a sadist, the transformation reflected in the nicknames the prisoners gave him, initially “the Angel,” later “the Butcher.” Twice Eisele was sentenced to death for his crimes, once in December 1945 and again in April 1947. In both instances his sentence had been commuted. On February 26, 1952, he was released from Landsberg Prison. The son of a church painter who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and worked at Buchenwald and Dachau, he was allowed to practice medicine in Munich and live there openly with his wife and three children.

  Tuviah Friedman, Wiesenthal’s fellow Nazi hunter in Austria, had decided by 1950 that he had had enough. Vienna was still inhospitable to Jews, and the authorities in postwar Europe were not interested in pursuing his leads. In 1953, Israel opened its Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, which was also a documentation and research center. Friedman moved to Israel to work there and later built his own Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes. Like Wiesenthal, he was obsessed with catching Adolf Eichmann and offered a $10,000 reward for the SS officer, even though he did not have the money to pay for a successful tip. Friedman helped broker an agreement to sell Wiesenthal’s records to the Yad Vashem center in 1954.