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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  But his son could speculate. His father maintained a friendship with a Jewish goldsmith in Pforzheim. The man had made the watch Harald received for his eighteenth birthday, as well as the rings with the blue lapis lazuli stones that he and his father wore. Perhaps Aedtner was moved by Jewish friendships from his youth? Also, the war had ended with Aedtner’s hometown being annexed by another country, most of his family trapped behind the Iron Curtain. But Harald thought it was more visceral than that. The end of the war was a terrible time, and scared young recruits who ran from the fighting were executed as deserters. When Aedtner had been wounded in action, the man beside him died. There were so many possible explanations.

  Even Aedtner might not have understood his own commitment. It might have been something fundamental about him as a person. His wife recalled how deeply affected he had been when, while still a beat cop, he worked at the site of an automobile accident that had killed a young man. Maybe his dedication to his calling grew out of nothing more than an ingrained opposition to suffering, and he could never get over the extreme, almost limitless suffering that the Nazis had caused. One thing was for sure, his son said, it was not a coincidence that Aedtner worked in the Nazi-hunting unit, despite the abuse and frustrations that came with it. “He wanted that job,” said his son. “He wanted to get them.”

  Harald himself could never shake the images from the films his father showed him. He left the former women’s prison with its archive of war-crimes evidence almost numb with shock. But the scenes on the movie screen answered any remaining questions he might have had about why his father pursued his job and at such personal cost.

  CHAPTER 24

  On the morning of June 7, 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War, Simon Wiesenthal called a press conference in Vienna. “In contrast to Nazi criminals who live freely in other countries, the Nazi criminals who live in the Middle East are engaging themselves deeply in politics and their role was built into the plan for the fight against Israel,” he said.

  Amid the roll call of forty-three names was “SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Heribert Heim, camp doctor from Mauthausen, who performed countless experiments on inmates in this camp that led to deadly outcomes. Wanted in Austria, he has been a police doctor in Egypt since 1954. To conceal himself, he has changed his name many times.” The press conference was intended to link the Arab attack on Israel to the Holocaust. Wiesenthal duly sent his list of war criminals to the central office in Ludwigsburg for them to pursue. Adalbert Rückerl, who the year before had replaced his colleague Erwin Schüle as the head of the central office, explained in a letter to the famous Nazi hunter that they could find only nineteen of the forty-three individuals in their records, and of the nineteen they knew about, five were not connected to Nazi crimes, two were dead, and two were definitely not in Egypt, because they were already in German custody.

  There were other mistakes in the hastily arranged conference. One of the names on his own list struck Wiesenthal as a little odd, that of Leopold Gleim. Wiesenthal checked his SS catalog and decided it must have been “a phonetic mistake” and that it was the quite common name of Klein rather than Gleim. And the aforementioned Heribert Heim had been working as a police doctor in Egypt since 1954, eight years before Aribert Heim left Baden-Baden. Yet the Nazi hunter was correct in that Heim had relocated to Egypt, just as he had been correct when he said that Eichmann was in Argentina. The central office used the same misspelling of Heim’s first name and gave an incorrect place of birth as Ingstfeld. “The person concerned is the former SS doctor in the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Oranienburg,” Rückerl from the central office reported. “His exact location is unknown.”

  In 1969, Wiesenthal wrote a letter to the State Institute for War Documentation in Holland trying to find a photograph of Heim. By that time he had the correct spelling of Heim’s first name and as a precaution put “Heribert” in parentheses. He also appealed to the central office in Ludwigsburg for information, which repeated back to him Wiesenthal’s own suspicion that the former Nazi was in Egypt, working as a police doctor. In the meantime, Wiesenthal received an anonymous tip that Heim was living with a woman in Riezlern in Kleinwalsertal, an isolated Austrian mountain valley near the German border. The man’s name was Leopold Heim, and the woman’s Anni. It proved a false lead. The trail had gone cold.

  Meanwhile, with the ample time at his disposal, Heim became interested in tourism, studying statistics on the travel patterns of Western European vacationers to beachfront properties in Majorca and Crete. He believed Egypt’s coast could be turned into a destination to rival Spain or Italy. He even wrote a report titled “Beach-Bathing Tourism,” which he sent to the Egyptian minister of tourism and to the German ambassador. English and German travelers would be especially interested because of their “joint history interests from World War II” at El Alamein. He was referring to the tens of thousands of casualties suffered in the North Africa campaign.

  His sister Herta was still managing their properties in Germany, the source of the income that allowed him to invest in a seaside lot outside Alexandria. In his absence his wife had begun looking after her family properties herself, no longer able to lean on her husband for assistance. She and her mother had been called in again to answer questions about his disappearance.

  The two women were told that Dr. Heim was wanted for suspicion of murdering inmates at Mauthausen between 1941 and 1942. Both told the police inspector that they believed in his innocence. Both said they did not know his whereabouts. The police countered that it was then hard to understand why Heim had not turned himself in, to which they replied that he would very likely have been held for years in pretrial detention. The inspector did not find it credible that Friedl knew nothing about her husband’s whereabouts.

  A few months later, in February 1967, Friedl decided to file for divorce, listing their home in Baden-Baden as Heim’s last known address and “now unknown residence.” According to the filing, her husband told her he was wanted in connection with the Nazi euthanasia cases but that he was innocent, before he “packed with the greatest speed and drove off to an unknown destination.” Promises that they would be reunited had not been fulfilled. “The respondent [had] told the plaintiff it would only be a short separation. Today, after four years, the respondent is still away … Naturally, the burden of the maintenance of the family since 1962 has fallen on the shoulders of the plaintiff and her mother … After the above-presented developments, the plaintiff no longer has any marital feelings toward the respondent. The dissolution of the marriage is also in the interest of the children.” The reality of Heim’s long stay in Egypt began to sink in.

  Life as a fugitive presented constant problems, and their resolution usually fell to Herta. Often it was trouble with money transfers from Switzerland to Egypt, or in one instance help acquiring a car in Europe and getting it through Egyptian customs. Even after her brother’s departure, Herta traveled frequently to Baden-Baden to visit with her sister-in-law and to share the absent father’s letters to his sons. She burned their business correspondence but ferried the innocent missives to the children.

  Once, as she was leaving the mansion, tears began to roll down her cheeks. “What’s wrong?” Birgit asked. “I thought you wanted to come.”

  “But when I think about how he has to live …” She could not continue. The thought of her brother living all alone, thousands of miles from his family, was sometimes more than she could bear. That his children were growing up without a father was even harder. A letter here and there, a spoken message on spooled magnetic tape, this was not the same as having a father. She knew. She had lost her own father at about the same age as Rüdiger, the younger of the two Heim boys, had lost his.

  Heim’s German passport expired, and he could not risk renewing it. He had once planned a possible move to Spain, but with his property investment in Alexandria that plan was now “passé.” He intended to stay in Egypt for ten more years. He asked his lawyer, Steinacker, to compos
e a letter to Heim’s mother-in-law, in which he tried to convince both his ex-wife, Friedl, and her mother to send the boys to him in Egypt.

  “Herr Dr. H. informed me that his sons could begin their studies in the country where he is living at any time,” the lawyer wrote. Their father could handle the applications and only needed copies of their passports and birth certificates. “The climate and the sports facilities are world famous.” He mentioned the nineteenth-century German doctors Robert Koch and Theodor Bilharz and noted that their successful research had been pursued in this unnamed country, even though both had famously worked in Egypt. Heim knew several of the teaching professors at the university and assured his wife and mother-in-law that they had trained in England and the United States. “The children could pursue their studies with complete independence as if they were alone in a major city,” Steinacker wrote on behalf of his client. “Naturally, Dr. H. would stand ready with help and advice.”

  Nothing came of the proposal. There was little evidence that Friedl wanted anything other than for the two Heim boys to remain close to home and as far as possible out of harm’s way.

  CHAPTER 25

  Over the next few years the political and social climate changed dramatically while Heim was in hiding. The relative calm of Germany’s postwar years came decisively to a close after student demonstrations broke out in 1968. The extreme elements of the left-wing protest movement transformed into a potent terrorist group, calling itself the Red Army Faction and dubbed the Baader-Meinhof Gang by the press. They considered the West German state little more than a successor to the Nazi regime with its own fascist agenda.

  The Red Army Faction seized the West German embassy in Stockholm, killing two hostages and blowing up part of the building. The terrorist group was in the middle of a spree of kidnappings and shootings, even though their leaders were held in the maximum-security prison in Stammheim, just a fifteen-minute drive from Alfred Aedtner’s office.

  In the midst of this severe turmoil, investigators had quietly redoubled their efforts on a war-crimes case that was thirty years old and begun searching intensively for a suspect who had fled more than a dozen years earlier. The police believed they now had information that Aribert Heim was alive and still in contact with his family in Germany. The investigation took on a new urgency.

  Aedtner, who had been put in charge of his department in 1973, became obsessed with the concentration camp doctor who had lived undiscovered a short drive away in Baden-Baden. “His goal was to hunt down this Aribert Heim,” said Karl-Heinz Weisshaupt, a colleague who socialized with Aedtner after work. “One could almost say it was his dream.”

  German police officers were working with their counterparts in Switzerland to expand their search in and around Lugano, where Heim’s wife’s family had property. They had few fresh clues to work with, only contradictory theories. Heim might have been in Germany, living under an assumed name, or across the border in his native Austria in an isolated mountain village. He could have gone to Argentina like Adolf Eichmann or to Bolivia like Klaus Barbie. Barbie had been discovered in 1972, but the South American country refused to extradite him. It was yet another hurdle Aedtner might have to face.

  He decided to start over, beginning with the witnesses. On a July afternoon in 1975 he traveled from Stuttgart to the police station in the Bavarian town of Schongau to speak with Gustav Rieger, sixty-seven, a doctor of law and a camp survivor. Aedtner had questions about the young Austrian physician Rieger had known at the concentration camp more than thirty years earlier.

  “I had seen Dr. Heim already in the sick bay, but it was through his and my tasks in the camp bordello,” said Rieger, “that I came to know him somewhat better.” He looked at a photo lineup of four pictures and correctly identified the SS doctor as number 3. “I remember Dr. Heim well,” the former inmate said. “He was very tall,” Rieger recalled, over six feet three, and “he boasted that he was a good hockey player.”

  The subject Rieger dwelled on during his interview with the investigator was the bordello where he and Dr. Heim worked. The former inmate described his duties with the women euphemistically, as “cleaning up the inmates before and after the exercise.” It was Heim’s responsibility to examine the women for sexually transmitted diseases several times a week. According to Rieger, the Austrian liked to visit the women for more than professional purposes and encouraged Rieger to do so as well. Rieger described in some detail the infection and multiple operations that prevented him from taking part. He recalled how he had tricked Heim once, going off with the oldest woman, the one they called “the procuress,” and letting the SS doctor think they had had sex.

  But Aedtner had not driven the two and a half hours from Stuttgart to this small town to talk about the bordello. Only capital crimes were still prosecutable under the German statute of limitations, and he was there to investigate multiple homicides. The warrant issued for Heim’s arrest declared that the doctor was strongly suspected of killing “a large but as of yet undetermined number of inmates.” The warrant described his “bloodlust” as he injected gasoline directly into the hearts of his victims. Then there were the operations in which the surgeon was accused of opening his patients’ abdominal cavities and removing internal organs while the victims were still alive. The ultimate badges of inhumanity were the trophies he made out of victims. “He sent all the inmates out of the operating room, cut off the heads of the two corpses, and let them cook until the flesh separated from the bone. Several days later the two skulls stood on his desk,” the arrest warrant said.

  “What do you know about Dr. Heim’s tasks in the sick bay generally, and especially the deaths of inmates effected by him?” Aedtner asked him.

  “I am aware that Dr. Heim performed operations,” Rieger answered. “I believe that there was no actual reason for many of these, but instead they were performed by him out of his own interests. When an inmate … died after the operation, it was registered in the operation book merely as exitus letalis,” fatal outcome. Rieger had not himself witnessed cases where Dr. Heim dispatched patients through lethal injections to the heart but said that he was “of the opinion that he acted the same way, if perhaps not to the same extent, as the other SS doctors.” It was a fairly standard procedure to euthanize sickly inmates given the Nazi obsession with breeding a superrace.

  Rieger had worked in the laboratory as well as the bordello, testing blood, urine, and phlegm with Nikolaus Howorka, a fellow inmate. Several doctors were known among the inmates for their decency, Rieger said, but he did not list Heim among them. He suggested to Aedtner that two other former inmates named Lotter and Sommer, both of whom were in Austria, would be better able to help him with his investigation. Rieger was a little fuzzy on the dates. He had been released from the camp around Christmas in 1942 and was under the impression that Heim was still there at that time. Rieger added that Heim was friends with the SS dentist but could not remember his name. At the end of Rieger’s testimony, he and Aedtner both signed the transcript of his statement.

  It was difficult to actually prove what had happened all those years ago. At one point after the war Rieger had been investigated himself over possible involvement in killings, though he had been exonerated. Still, as damning as Rieger’s statement sounded, it was not going to help convict the Nazi physician. “I am aware that Dr. Heim” was a caveat that flagged every statement. Rieger could not—or would not—name a single instance in which Heim had killed a specific patient. Aedtner needed more.

  Two days later he was in Munich, interviewing another survivor, Ramón Verge Armengol from Barcelona, but the Spaniard did not remember the tall, hockey-playing doctor in the slightest. It was just another dead end. Another witness who lived in Munich, Gebhard Westner, was on vacation. Missed chance; Aedtner would have to return to depose Westner later. More frustrating still were those camp survivors he would never reach. Gustav Claussen had died in 1968, and Howorka, Rieger’s partner in the lab, had passed away in 1966. Fran
z Powolny, who reportedly worked in the infirmary, had died in 1962, and Vladimir Kostujak, another sick-bay worker, in 1960.

  More than twelve years after his disappearance the police had not gotten any closer to finding Heim than they were in the years immediately following his disappearance. In March the police began tapping the Barths’ phones, but without much success. “The analysis of the audiotapes from the telephone surveillance of the sister of the accused yielded no concrete clues as to the whereabouts of the accused Dr. Heim,” Aedtner wrote in his report. The best he could hope for was that his watch on the sister and brother-in-law would provide a break.

  CHAPTER 26

  In 1975, Rüdiger Heim, approaching his twentieth birthday, decided that he had to see his father again. He remembered little from his childhood. He recalled the soccer goal his father had built and how he would try to keep up with his older brother as the three of them kicked the ball around. Rüdiger also remembered spending time at his father’s medical practice.

  His mother and grandmother told the boys that their father was living in Berlin. As a small child Rüdiger received letters from him and wrote notes in return, in one describing how good he was in school, “above all in arithmetic.” On the back of the letter, Rüdiger drew a house with two chimneys under a large sun. He often asked his father when he was coming home. He listened over and over to the tape recordings in which Heim talked to his sons in a calm and reassuring voice.