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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Through his aunt, Rüdiger received books from his father, such as primers on how to learn English. Heim stressed the importance of studying foreign languages from a very early age and recommended that his older son visit Greece to learn about antiquity. In the letters Heim sent to Herta, there were many recommendations—directions really—for the children’s schooling, their participation in sports, and even when and how to talk to the boys about girls and contraception. He was a gynecologist, after all, but no longer there to give the talk himself.

  As Rüdiger grew older, he eventually came to understand that his father was not in Berlin. But he was never told where Heim had really gone. The boys’ home in Baden-Baden was loving but stifling for a teenager. Rüdiger had more restrictions than any of his friends, always having to tell his mother and grandmother where he was going. It was difficult for him to leave the house alone after 7:00 p.m. in the sleepy spa town without causing them alarm. The two women seemed to have overblown fears that he might be kidnapped or that someone would want to hurt him. As the 1960s generation came of age, the silence around the war began to break down. As his teachers discussed Germany’s Nazi past, Rüdiger wondered if this explained why his father had left.

  The restrictions on his autonomy had become oppressive. At a time when personal freedom and self-expression swept the country, Rüdiger pressed for more independence. He did not join any of the left-wing groups springing up in Germany, but he wanted to be sent to boarding school. At seventeen he left Baden-Baden to go to St. Gallen, Switzerland.

  In the international atmosphere he found himself shying away from the other Germans and making friends among the Italians. After graduation he spent a few months in Lausanne studying French, then moved to Florence to study Italian. He had applied to medical school in Pisa, expecting to follow in the footsteps of his father, his mother, and by now his older brother, who was studying in Heidelberg. As he thought about his future, he became determined to see his father again.

  He knew that Aunt Herta had close contact with her brother, and she seemed pleased that he wanted to see him. His aunt told him it was more complicated and dangerous than a trip to Berlin. But she helped him arrange a visit. Although his mother expressed reservations about the trip, she gave him the money to pay for it.

  As Heim looked forward to seeing his younger son, he was increasingly careful about the locations he visited. Not only had the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, but in Uruguay the Mossad had also executed the SS captain Herbert Cukurs, known as “the Hangman of Riga.” Cukurs was accused of killing thirty-two thousand Latvian Jews in 1941. His body was found in a large trunk in the bedroom of a beach house, with a note saying he had been executed by “Those Who Shall Never Forget.”

  Even Cairo’s German community had been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence. In 1965, Egyptian authorities arrested a wealthy horse breeder and former Wehrmacht officer named Wolfgang Lotz on espionage charges. Lotz threw lavish booze-soaked parties for Egyptian generals, cabinet members, and German scientists, rising quickly to the top of Egyptian society while making no effort to dispel rumors that he had been in the SS.

  Lotz even attended parties hosted by a Ministry of Information official named Omar Amin, where inebriated guests sang the Nazi anthem known as the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” Omar Amin was not an Egyptian but rather a convert to Islam once known as Johann von Leers. He had been a leading anti-Semitic propagandist under Joseph Goebbels. Heim had met von Leers a few times, but it was not an acquaintance he had any interest in deepening.

  Heim’s distance from his fellow Germans might have protected him. Lotz was not who he claimed to be. Rather than serving with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he had fought against him with the British army. He had been born in Germany, and his fluent German led the Mossad to recruit him and send him to Egypt as an agent. The lavish parties were part of his cover, and after his arrest by the Egyptians he earned the nickname “the Champagne Spy.”

  Others besides the Israelis and Wiesenthal made it their business to chase Nazi war criminals. Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, part of the 1968 protest generation, joined the hunt when Kurt Georg Kiesinger became chancellor of West Germany. Beate wrote an article for the Parisian daily Combat saying that Kiesinger’s work on Nazi propaganda should have disqualified him from holding office. For her outspokenness she was fired by the Franco-German Alliance for Youth, which only increased her zeal.

  In 1968 she publicly slapped Chancellor Kiesinger in the face at a party congress for his conservative Christian Democratic Union. Shaming former Nazis was not enough for the couple. Their tactics became even more extreme. In 1971 they unsuccessfully attempted to kidnap the former Gestapo chief for Jewish affairs in France, Kurt Lischka, from Cologne and bring him back to France by force. The following year, Beate identified a man named Klaus Altmann, who had recently been living in Peru, as the German Gestapo chief of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. New identities were not always enough to prevent discovery was the lesson for those still in hiding.

  Reading all the headlines, Heim distrusted anyone who displayed interest in him. At one point he ended up chatting briefly with a motorcyclist in Alexandria. The man might have been just a curious traveler, but he also could have been working for a Western intelligence service. Heim excused himself from the conversation, only to receive a written message from the man at the hotel where Heim was staying.

  “I think that you don’t give the chance to anyone to talk to you,” it read. “Traveling and meeting people or friends is something fun, especially fellow motorcyclists.” He left his name and his phone number “if you need any help.” Heim filed the message with his documents, noting that he had refused to engage because the man “definitely worked for some group.”

  Later Heim had a great scare, finding himself face-to-face with a woman who had worked at the very pharmacy downstairs from his medical practice in Baden-Baden. She greeted him saying, “Herr Dr. Heim, what are you doing here?” apparently as surprised as he was. Dr. Heim, or the man who looked strikingly like him, kept walking, pretending he did not recognize her.

  Not only the fear of discovery but significant shifts in Middle East politics offered a fresh source of worry as his months of exile stretched to years. When Gamal Abdel Nasser died in September 1970, Heim feared a change in Egypt’s relationship with Israel could jeopardize his safety. In 1974, Israel and Egypt signed an agreement, and in June 1975 the Suez Canal reopened. The days of safety for Germans in Egypt were coming to a close.

  CHAPTER 27

  In 1975 officials in Stuttgart believed that “the odds are that in the near future [Heim’s] location will be tracked down,” or so Aedtner’s office informed the Austrians in asking for their assistance. Aedtner’s own assessment was more restrained, but he prepared himself for the trip to Heim’s former home. The German detective arrived in Vienna on September 8, 1975. His schedule called for him to question witnesses all over Austria in the course of twelve days. In accordance with the legal requirement for foreign detectives, the Austrians assigned an inspector of their own, Bendl, to the investigation. Technically, Aedtner was just observing while Bendl did the police work. It soon became apparent that gathering new evidence in Austria was going to be difficult.

  Two of the four key witnesses, Karl Kaufmann and Josef Kohl, were dead. When Aedtner sat down with a third, Rupert Sommer, he found the man “obviously making an effort to remember concrete events” but barely able to recall any specific incidents. Sommer was seventy-one years old by the time Aedtner spoke with him. His host of ailments required treatments with numerous medications, some through injections. Aedtner observed that the man was suffering a “general physical breakdown.” Sommer identified Heim correctly in the photo lineup but then said he was not certain. In Aedtner’s judgment, he was no longer useful.

  Nor was Sommer the only disappointment. Ernst Martin, one of the main witnesses at the U.S. military trial of Mauthausen perpetrators in 1946 and someone Bendl considered reliable, “no longe
r had his powers of recollection at his disposal,” Aedtner wrote in his report. “Somehow the name is familiar” was all the survivor could say. Another former prisoner, who had served seven and a half years in jail for cooperating with the SS at Mauthausen, told the police officers that the name Heim “awakens no memory.” Another inmate, whose job had been removing corpses, neither remembered the name nor recognized the doctor.

  Even the leading expert on Mauthausen could offer little in the way of assistance. Hans Maršálek was part cop, part historian, and himself a survivor of the concentration camp. He had been active first in Austria’s Social Democratic Party and then in the Communist Party. He was sent to Mauthausen in 1942. During his time at the camp he joined the underground resistance. After he was released, he became a police officer tasked with bringing war criminals to trial. By the time Aedtner came to see him, he was serving as the head of the Mauthausen Memorial. Maršálek said he arrived at the camp in 1942 after Heim’s departure.

  Stories about Heim had coursed through the camp, but Maršálek only knew them secondhand. Heim was known to have shown great interest in the heads of skeletons. It was quite possible that he had also worked at the Gusen satellite camp, where the skeletons of “scientifically interesting prisoners” were preserved in the pathology department, some two hundred in all. He referred Aedtner to a young inmate who had grown up to become the head of the Polish Red Cross and another who had worked under the camp pharmacist who prepared the lethal injections. Both suggestions were time-consuming dead ends.

  Nearly a week into their journey Aedtner and Bendl arrived in Mürzzuschlag, a town of roughly eleven thousand inhabitants. There they at last found a witness who not only remembered Heim but recalled the doctor’s actions in detail. At seventy-three Karl Lotter could still remember the five years he spent working as an orderly at the infirmary in Mauthausen. Dr. Heim stood out, Lotter told Aedtner, because the staff in the operating room wore wooden clogs. Heim’s feet were so big, Lotter said, that he had to ask the camp carpenter to make a custom pair for the SS officer.

  Dr. Heim was a “strikingly athletic figure,” the former orderly recalled, and a competitive ice hockey player. At the time the Völkischer Beobachter, which called itself the “fighting paper of the National Socialist movement of Greater Germany,” described how Dr. Heim played on an Austrian all-star team against the Germans. The young doctor had a scar on his cheek, Lotter believed, from a fencing duel. He treated the staff at the sick bay relatively well, Lotter said.

  Every evening, ill and injured inmates came to the infirmary for examination and were told to return in the morning for treatment. The next day the simpler cases were put at the front of the line, the more serious ones at the back. Dr. Heim tended to the blisters, bruises, and coughs of the patients who were in basically good health. Then Heim explained to the seriously ill and debilitated patients, “The German state could not afford to feed sick people, and the simplest solution was to give them lethal injections.” He then pushed needles into their chests and injected deadly chemical solutions directly into their hearts.

  The former orderly had a clear memory of specific instances of cruelty, as when a Jewish boy of about twelve lay on the operating table with his hands folded and said, “Good-bye, Mommy.” Dr. Heim said that he had to die because the Jews were responsible for the war. In another instance a Jewish inmate who had been partially anesthetized called Dr. Heim a murderer. The physician stopped the anesthesia and when the man was fully conscious told the patient that the Jews had caused the war, before dispatching him with an injection to the heart. On another occasion Heim anesthetized a relatively healthy young man, then “lightning-quick made a powerful cut through his stomach, from bottom to top,” Lotter said. “I saw too how the intestines bulged out and immediately found a pretext to leave the room.”

  In spite of his age, Aedtner judged Lotter’s memory to be excellent. He stood by his earlier statements in depositions and corroborated the testimony of the late Kaufmann and Kohl. “He has to be considered the most valuable witness,” Aedtner wrote. He was particularly intrigued by what Lotter told him about Gustav Rieger. According to an off-the-record remark Aedtner jotted down, Rieger spent only a short time each day working in the camp bordello and the rest of the time as Heim’s anesthetist. Lotter believed that Rieger must have been a witness to the killing of at least one of the victims. Aedtner now believed Rieger had held back in his testimony. According to Lotter’s official statement, the reason for this was Rieger’s good relationship with Heim. Aedtner began to believe that there might have been an even more compelling reason, his own fear of prosecution.

  Although he remained in Austria several more days, Aedtner would not find a better witness. Another former corpse bearer, though he did not remember Heim, did remember a decapitated head prepared in the crematorium, cooked until all that remained was the bare skull. Aedtner left behind copies of the lineup photographs of Heim with Inspector Bendl so that he could show them when speaking with additional witnesses.

  The German detective returned home with copies of two pages from the operation book at Mauthausen bearing Heim’s looping signature. He also had leads for several other camp survivors, living everywhere from Communist Poland to Jackson Heights, Queens. What he did not find was any information as to the doctor’s present whereabouts. For all of his boss’s optimism, Aedtner’s assessment stood: there was no concrete information about the location of the fugitive.

  CHAPTER 28

  Rüdiger Heim arrived in Egypt in December 1975 to meet his father for the first time since he was six years old. He had traveled from Florence, where he had recently moved to study Italian, first heading to Rome to catch his flight and then transferring through Athens. On the airplane Rüdiger felt nervous and excited wondering whether he was being followed.

  He did not have his father’s exact address or telephone number. He sent a letter general delivery to the central post office addressed to Camvaro Company, a firm that did not exist. In the letter, he told his father that he would look for him each day between eleven o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon at the outdoor café at the Nile Hilton. Nasser had inaugurated the modern glass-front hotel in 1959. He met with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat at the hotel in 1970 and it was rumored, probably apocryphally, that Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, gave him a fatal dose of poison in his coffee.

  Rüdiger wandered back and forth among the vacationing families and businessmen. With his shaggy hair, T-shirt, and blue jeans, he stood out at the luxury hotel, all the more because he was six feet four, with the same broad shoulders and athletic build as his father. At least that was what Heim looked like in family photographs. Rüdiger did not know how much the doctor had changed, but when he finally spotted him, wearing a striped shirt and carrying a briefcase, Rüdiger had no doubt the man was his father. They did not call out or embrace for fear of being recognized.

  At the age of sixty-one, Aribert Heim was still a vital presence. Rüdiger was taken aback by his father’s barrage of questions. Heim wanted to know about not just his ex-wife and elder son but his sister and niece, his friends and business associates from home. He also wanted to hear all about Rüdiger’s future medical studies. Across from him, his son was having difficulty absorbing everything. Although the nineteen-year-old had no doubt the man was his father, his first impression was of “foreignness.” Rüdiger had the feeling, too, that he, a long-haired young man who idolized Bob Dylan, was not quite the son his father, who had left a much more conservative, traditional Germany in the early 1960s, had been expecting.

  Another issue loomed over their reunion, the reason Aribert Heim was in Egypt. Was his father a Nazi? It was not a question Rüdiger knew how to ask, so he did not. Instead, he buried his reservations in rote answers and let his father show him his adopted country, fascinated but never quite able to quell the fear that they would be discovered.

  Early in his visit, Rüdiger awoke in the m
iddle of the night to loud pounding on his door. His heart was beating fast as he got out of bed. “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Let me in,” said a voice in accented English. “This is my room.”

  “No,” Rüdiger answered. “It’s my room.” His father had brought him to the Mena House, a luxurious hotel in Giza, insisting that his son see the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx before leaving. At the time, the Mena House was filled not only with travelers but also with United Nations peacekeepers.

  The pounding continued. “This is my room. Let me in.”

  “You must be wrong. This is my room. Go to the concierge.” It might have been an innocent misunderstanding, a confused tourist, or a drunken soldier on the wrong floor. It might have been an attempt to rob him. But he could not banish the thought that it might be someone who wanted information about his father. Rüdiger waited by the door, but he did not open it. At last the man gave up. In the morning Heim made his son move to a less expensive, and less conspicuous, hotel.

  Rüdiger checked in to the Scarabee Hotel on 26 July Street. The grand boulevard, formerly Fouad Street after King Fouad I, had been renamed in honor of the date of his successor’s abdication in 1952. The Scarabee looked as if it were built in the same era. It was clean and orderly, but unlike at the Hilton or the Mena House, European visitors were rare. It was frequented for the most part by fellow Egyptians and Sudanese who wanted to stay downtown for business.

  His father showed him the European quarter of the city where French architects had laid out the grid of streets in the nineteenth century. Heim would buy slightly outdated copies of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. If the local vendors did not have what he was looking for, he could try the nearby German-language bookshop, Lehnert & Landrock. He took his son to the expensive but increasingly shabby Western spots for coffee and pastries, including the café Al Americaine and the famous Groppi café. With foreigners Aribert spoke English; in the local quarters he used his fluent Arabic.