The accused often seemed relieved, “liberated,” Aedtner said, following their testimony. “At that point we had a few Jewish statements in hand, from Jewish witnesses who more or less said from the photograph, that’s Stark and he was involved like the others, but nothing specific. Then [Stark] described all the individual things, such as how he participated in the gassings.”
After seven years at the central office in Ludwigsburg, Aedtner was sent to Stuttgart to work at state police headquarters. While the central office identified active cases, it was the job of the individual state authorities to arrest and prosecute the suspects. Even in a normal week there was a great deal of travel in his job, including going to Tel Aviv to take depositions from Holocaust survivors. The constant tales of death and suffering inflicted by his fellow Germans, not only by the Nazis, but also by regular soldiers like him, began to take its toll.
CHAPTER 21
There were plenty of foreigners in the Moroccan city of Tangier, holdovers from the time the Mediterranean port was administered by international powers. Dr. Aribert Heim, who had arrived via Spain, did not stand out. Tangier was still a popular tourist destination, where after a day at the beach a vacationer could sip a mint julep at the El Minzah hotel bar, said to be one of the inspirations for Rick’s Café in Casablanca.
Heim’s sister and his mother-in-law, Käthe Bechtold, traveled there together from Germany in 1963 using indirect flights in case they were followed and spending a night in a Madrid hotel before arriving in Morocco. Heim was living in a private room in extremely spartan conditions. Herta believed that if it were entirely up to her brother, he would have stayed and faced the charges against him, but his mother-in-law argued that Heim had a duty to spare his wife and their two young sons the trauma of his trial and possible imprisonment. The Baden-Baden jail was not far from his sons’ school. If he chose to flee, she agreed to help him. Herta was surprised to see the wealthy older lady bent over a basin washing her son-in-law’s laundry by hand. The two women helped Heim take the necessary financial steps to turn an impromptu flight into a longer arrangement until the mood in Germany had changed or the statute of limitations on the crimes Heim was accused of had expired.
In the meantime, Tangier was proving unsuitable as a semipermanent home. He found the city welcoming enough but worried about the potential danger posed by its sizable Jewish population. It turned out that Heim had unwittingly moved to the old Jewish quarter. Once his affairs were in order, he would have to move again.
As far as the police were concerned, there was no telling where Heim might be. All sorts of rumors circulated about groups that were said to have helped Nazis on the run. In the popular imagination they had solidified under the name Odessa—the Organization of Former SS Members. The group’s escape arm, known as Die Spinne, or the Spider, was rumored to have been run from Spain by Hitler’s top commando, Otto Skorzeny. A hulking, scar-faced SS man, Skorzeny was known for a daring raid to rescue Hitler’s ally Benito Mussolini from captivity as well as for a plot to assassinate Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Word that Aribert Heim was hiding in Egypt persisted. Both the maid and the cleaning lady at the Heim villa told the police that the doctor had moved to Egypt. Ms. Kammerer recalled that Ms. Rieben, who rented a wing of the villa for many years, confirmed the story. Mrs. Possekel heard the same thing at the local grocery store. But when questioned by police, Ms. Rieben admitted she had never seen letters postmarked from Egypt. “The widespread rumors in Baden-Baden that Dr. Heim is located in Egypt were given attention, however they were not followed up,” a local detective named Heitz said, “Such talk has long circulated and does not represent something new.”
The activities of the German military experts in Egypt did not go unnoticed. The cover of Der Spiegel in May 1963 showed a rocket launching skyward in the desert northwest of Cairo. The article was titled “German Rockets for Nasser.” Inside, a map showed how the shorter-range el-Safir, which means “ambassador” in Arabic, could reach Israel, and the el-Kahir, or “conqueror,” was almost powerful enough to reach Beirut.
“Where thousands of years ago a nameless army of slaves built pyramids to the glory of the first pharaoh, roughly 500 highly paid German armorers manufacture the weapons of the new pharaoh of the colored world: jet aircrafts and rockets for Gamal Abd el-Nasser,” the magazine wrote, describing a world of “professors who carry pistols, engineers whose telephone numbers are listed in no phone books, and skilled technicians who each morning must show their gray-green photo identity cards from the Egyptian Ministry of War to the khaki patrols with machine guns checking them, to enter the secret armament center of the United Arab Republic.
“If the German weapons makers successfully complete their work,” the magazine concluded, Nasser would “have at his command every means necessary for a war of annihilation against Israel.” Golda Meir, then Israel’s foreign minister, warned in the Knesset, “The German government cannot sit idly by as 18 years after the fall of Hitler’s regime, which exterminated millions of Jews, members of this people are responsible for actions that serve the destruction of the state of Israel.”
In Cairo, the Germans were concentrated in the upscale districts of Helwan and Maadi. They could enjoy German fare at the Löwenbräu restaurant or see American, French, and Italian films at the Rivoli Cinema. “It was a golden era,” recalled one German woman who lived in Cairo at the time and said there was “little or no difference” from home in the lifestyle or the treatment of women. In cosmopolitan Cairo, women dressed in skirts and few wore head scarves. In the capital there were trattorias and bars where Greek waiters served alcohol to young military officers.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 significantly altered Egypt’s security calculations. Following Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal, Egypt found itself under attack by Britain, France, and Israel. They were forced to end hostilities in response to condemnation from around the world, and in particular the opposition of both the United States and the Soviet Union. That did not put an end to the enmity provoked by the fighting.
In the wake of the crisis the British canceled delivery of fighter jets to Egypt, and the Soviets failed to deliver spare parts for the out-of-date MiG-15 fighters the Egyptians already had. Nasser deemed it necessary to build his own domestic weapons industry and relied heavily on German expertise. “Aircraft plant in North Africa seeks skilled workers of all kinds,” read the advertisements in German newspapers. The work was done for two Switzerland-based front companies, Meco, short for Mechanical Corporation, and MTP-AG, for machines, turbines, and pumps. The two had been set up by Hassan Sayed Kamil, a jeweler, engineer, and arms dealer married to Helene, Duchess of Mecklenburg.
The Israelis decided that diplomatic pressure was insufficient. The Mossad began a series of covert actions to undermine the rocket program. On July 7, 1962, Hassan Sayed Kamil’s charter flight crashed for unknown reasons, killing his wife, the duchess. In September, a German businessman supplying materials for Nasser’s rocket program disappeared, and an anonymous note was found saying that he was dead. Two Israeli agents were arrested in Switzerland after they were caught on tape threatening the children of a former scientist from Peenemünde, the rocket facility that developed the German V-2 rocket, who was working in Egypt.
The Israelis struck inside Egypt as well. At the end of November, the weapons factory in Helwan received several packages from Hamburg containing explosives. Five Egyptian workers were killed, and a German secretary, Hannelore Wende, was permanently disfigured by a letter bomb. Another explosive was sent to a doctor in the neighborhood of Maadi, a Cairo suburb filled with old villas. Dr. Carl Debouche’s only connection to the rocket program seemed to be treating the wives of the scientists and attending their social functions, but he was better known in Europe and Israel as “the Butcher” Hans Eisele. The bomb failed to reach its target, exploding instead in the hand of the postman who was trying to deliver it, costing the man an eye in the process.
> Though there was no evidence that Heim and Eisele knew each other, the two SS doctors had both served briefly at Buchenwald during the same period in June 1941. Heim likely would have been familiar with Eisele’s case, which made headlines in the newspapers in southern Germany. It was a telling fact that Egyptian authorities had refused to extradite him.
The following year Heim moved from Morocco to Egypt, landing at the brand-new Cairo International Airport. A World War II airfield turned over to the civil-aviation authority, the airport had opened in 1963. It was a crowning moment for the dynamic revolutionary leader Nasser, who had become an icon throughout the Arab world a decade earlier and was watching his plans for the nation come to fruition. It was an exciting, optimistic moment to be in Egypt for Heim as well.
CHAPTER 22
Heim’s sister Herta and her daughter Birgit’s visits to the nearby town of Walldorf now followed a regular routine. Mrs. Barth would chat with her friend Mrs. Weil, and Birgit would visit with the four Weil children. Mr. Weil had inherited a bicycle shop, and the six of them lived in a small stone bungalow. The two families owned a piece of property together, so there was always business to discuss and Herta tended to depart carrying an unmarked manila envelope. It was not something that anyone noticed. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a housewife and her teenage daughter visiting family friends.
One afternoon in 1964, just two years after her brother’s disappearance, Herta was in a greater rush than usual to see the Weils. Birgit now insisted on sitting up front in the Mercedes “like in the American films.” Her father always said that it bothered him that the older car did not have seat belts, but that might just have been his latest excuse to try to upgrade to a new model. Mother and daughter pulled up to the T intersection at the B44 highway. Herta was about to make a turn across traffic when she spotted a truck coming toward her from the left. What she could not see was that another car was passing the truck, going the wrong way in her lane. By the time Herta became aware of it, she had already started to cross the intersection.
Birgit could see the collision as it was happening and remembered thinking it was “as if the motor of our car was leaping into the front of the other car.” There was a loud bang, and she was thrown into the windshield, leaving a spiderweb of cracks where her head struck the glass. When the vehicles came to rest and everyone stumbled out, they could see that the front of Herta’s car was smashed in. Birgit was bleeding, not profusely, but enough to cause some concern.
Herta rushed to the gas station at the corner and called their physician, Dr. Niemöller, who was also a family friend. The doctor hurried over and removed several shards of glass from Birgit’s head and then drove them home, leaving the scene of the accident without waiting for the police. Mr. Barth answered the door, finding his daughter with a bandage on her forehead and his wife still shaking.
“Your wife had a small accident,” the doctor told him.
“Ach, and my car’s fucked up?” he asked. This was not the reaction his wife was expecting.
“I will never drive a car of yours again,” Herta said coldly.
“Mom, Papa can see that we’re okay,” Birgit said. “We walked in. We weren’t carried in. We weren’t on stretchers. We weren’t in intensive care.” She knew just how angry her mother was. Birgit was told to go upstairs to the maid’s room. It struck the teenager even at the time as odd that she was not sent to her own room.
Birgit could still hear her parents talking and heard her mother say that the police should not be allowed to talk to her. “She stays upstairs.” The police came and went without questioning Birgit. Mrs. Barth did not speak to her husband for a good month thereafter. She also stopped driving. Once Birgit had her license, it was her job to chauffeur her mother on errands, whether to the Weils’ or the office of the lawyer in Frankfurt representing her uncle Ferdi.
It was as though the family had become spies. They took whispering walks in the garden to talk in case there were listening devices in the house. They picked up letters from the Weils the same day that they arrived. After reading them, Herta made a few cryptic notes and burned them. The trips to Switzerland to wire Aribert Heim money were nerve-racking, even after years of practice. Many well-to-do Germans spirited money into the legendary secrecy of Swiss bank accounts. But crossing the border with thousands of deutsche marks hidden in the lining of her purse made Herta nervous. Even a routine check might reveal who her brother was, and with it the purpose of her trip.
Her visits to Aribert were infrequent, requiring as they did the kind of zigzag pattern that she had used when she met him in Tangier. Now Herta boarded a flight to Paris, then flew to Beirut. From the Lebanese capital she journeyed to the new Cairo International Airport. Just as her fugitive brother appeared to greet her, Herta bumped into a man who lived no more than four streets away from her in Buchschlag. She saw that he recognized her.
After all their efforts to fool the police, they would be undone by an improbable coincidence. But the man never said a word to her nor, as far as she could tell, to anyone else. Herta considered the man’s own reputation as a notorious philanderer and concluded he was extending her the same courtesy he wanted for himself.
Still, all was not right. At one point her husband’s security clearance was not renewed for his next building project, jeopardizing the family’s income, which they spent about as fast as he brought it in. The Barths feared it was because her brother Aribert was a wanted man. Underneath the family’s stylish, affluent veneer ran a steady undercurrent of anxiety.
The family could often tell when the phone was tapped. The sound was different, and if the conversation wandered from any investigative interest, a click was audible. Once, when they were out of town, their maid, a kind but mentally challenged girl from Austria, was questioned. Every knock at the door was the source of apprehension. Salesmen, repairmen, all visitors, were suspected of snooping and spying for the police. But Herta remained convinced that her brother was innocent of any war crimes. She told her daughter that if she had not believed in him, she would not have helped him. Yet she was beginning to feel the strain of supporting his life underground.
Not long after the car accident, Herta received another visit from the police. The two officers, Chief Inspector Beihl and Inspector Schäffner, appeared unannounced at 9:30 one morning. The maid had told them that madam was unavailable. They came back about an hour later, and her son from her first marriage, Joachim, answered the door. He left them in the parlor to wait for his mother. Chief Inspector Beihl could barely make it through the end of his opening statement when she interrupted.
“What does that have to do with me? Do we have guilt by association here?” The police started to ask where her brother was hiding but were again sharply interrupted. “No questions, no more answers, please go!” At that point the two state officers left the house. “At least you’ve comported yourselves decently, but there have already been others here,” she said, adding, “I’d like once and for all to no longer be confronted with these things. We have no guilt by association. I’d like to finally have my peace.”
CHAPTER 23
One weekend around the time that Alfred Aedtner’s son, Harald, had finished his mandatory military service in the late 1960s, the detective brought him to the office. The young man was more interested in working at the gas station and earning money to buy his own car than in history lessons, but since he did not get to see that much of his father, Harald was happy to spend the day with him. He knew that his father pursued former Nazis for war crimes, but his teachers had barely taught the subject in school. As a result, Harald did not understand what the Nazis had done.
His father took him to Ludwigsburg, a garrison town where the Duke of Württemberg began construction on a magnificent baroque palace in 1704. The central office on Schorndorfer Strasse was just a short drive away from the palace. The Nazi hunters had moved into a century-old former women’s prison, where in 1938 Ludwigsburg’s Jewish residents
were held. It was before the era of computers, and the prosecutors and police officers had to keep an enormous catalog of index cards, naming perpetrators, witnesses, military units, and locations of atrocities. They also had evidence, which Aedtner decided to use for educational purposes.
He set up a projector and loaded the first reel of film. Father and son sat together in the dark as scenes from before Harald’s birth played out in front of them. Frightened civilians were forced to strip down in front of a mass grave. They stood at the edge and soldiers fired at their backs, sending their bodies plummeting into the pit. As these inhuman events were projected, Aedtner explained everything. It was not something they would discuss again. It was understood that Germans of Aedtner’s generation did not talk about their feelings. But afterward, when Harald would go to the bar with his father, he noticed that the policeman never discussed his work there either.
Aedtner was traveling so much his wife started asking where he hadn’t been instead of where he had. Often he didn’t come home even on the weekend. But both his son and his wife knew just how much his job took out of him. “He worked like a madman,” his wife said. “It wore him down,” she added, using the German word mitgenommen, literally “took him with it,” which in a sense it had. The barbs hurt, the taunts of “traitor.”
“These people have to be brought to account. I hate them like the plague,” his son recalled Aedtner spontaneously declaring one day, after reading an article about the Nazis in the newspaper. He only said it once, but it stuck with Harald. His father never talked about where this antipathy had come from, what had happened that made him dedicate his life to catching a group of criminals that most of his countrymen would have rather pretended didn’t exist.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 10
