Father and son walked together to Midan Ataba, the square where the twisting lanes of Islamic Cairo met the orderly grid of the European quarter. The square itself mixed elements of the two. It was bustling and chaotic, full of Fiat taxicabs and horse-drawn carts. Booksellers and market stalls lined the narrow alleyways. But there were also grand buildings, like the former Tiring department store topped with three stone figures holding a globe like a trio of Atlases, the old fire station with its turreted tower, and the domed central post office. This was where his father fetched the mail for the fictional Camvaro Company from one of the service windows in a courtyard ringed with mosaics depicting the ancient Egyptian gods Horus with the head of a falcon and Anubis with the head of a jackal.
Aribert Heim lived across the way at the Karnak Hotel, of which he was a partial owner. He had a small room with a view of the square. It was one of several property investments he had made in Egypt. The purchases were complicated by ownership rules that forbade foreigners to buy property, but with the help of local partners he owned a share of the postwar building in Cairo, an apartment in Alexandria, and a plot of land he was trying to develop in the coastal resort of Agamy Beach. He intended to show them all to his son. He had many plans—and even more opinions.
He gave Rüdiger advice about his health and about relationships, his medical studies, and his career. Aribert showed great interest in his son’s efforts to break into professional tennis by playing in satellite tournaments and qualifier events around Europe. Heim, once an athletic trainer before the war during his time in Rostock, wanted to watch his son play and set him up against a coach he knew at a local club. Rüdiger gamely donned an ill-fitting pair of borrowed pants and played against the instructor, only to find himself constantly critiqued by his father. “Go to the net. You’re tall. Serve and get to the net!”
Rüdiger’s worry about his hippie appearance proved well-founded as his father repeatedly complained about the length of his hair. No matter what the fashion might have been in Europe, Heim explained, in Egypt men simply did not wear their hair long. Finally, he took his son to a barbershop where Rüdiger let the man cut his hair as his father wished. He also went to a local ear, nose, and throat specialist, who examined his deviated septum and recommended surgery. His father concurred, but Rüdiger wanted to wait until he returned to Europe.
Together with his father, Rüdiger traveled by train from Cairo’s Ramses Station northwest through the Nile delta to the ancient capital of Alexandria. The journey made a deep impression on the young German. From the dense and dirty Egyptian capital he found himself soothed by the rhythmic motion of the train moving through the country’s agricultural heartland and the passing bucolic scenes of fellahin working the fields in their long jellabiyas. It seemed to Rüdiger as if little had changed in the rhythm of their lives in hundreds of years, maybe thousands, even as political turmoil swept the country’s largest cities.
In Alexandria, Rüdiger met the tall, debonair Egyptian Nagy Khafagy, who helped his father with his investment in the Karnak Hotel. Khafagy worked at the Montazah Gardens and El Salamlek Palace on the western edge of the city, the king’s summer palace before the revolution. He was always ready with a joke or a kind word. A Cleopatra-brand cigarette dangled perpetually from his lip, yet somehow his pressed white shirts remained pristine.
They visited the beachfront property in Agamy, between the water and the first coastal road. Heim had purchased the plot of land in 1966 for 60,000 Swiss francs, 30,000 francs down plus installments of 7,500 francs each of the next four years. The plan was to construct a building on the empty lot with multiple apartments, some for Heim and his family and some for his other business partner, a man named Rifat. At sixty-one, Heim was already thinking about what he could leave behind for his children.
One evening during their stay in Alexandria, Rüdiger and his father turned onto a small side street and stopped in a local restaurant, the kind of place where only the Egyptians go to eat for 2 or 3 pounds. The furniture was nothing fancy, just cheap tables and chairs. There they had simple, filling Egyptian fare like the fava bean stew known as ful and roast chicken. His father chatted amiably with the people there in Arabic. They knew his father, and Heim introduced him, saying, “This is my son.”
The boy still wanted to ask about his father’s sudden departure and the reasons behind it, but he never found the right moment. Questions about Heim’s military service and possible war crimes were never broached. Instead, Rüdiger studied his father, asking himself, “Is this how a Nazi behaves? Was he one?” Rüdiger’s notion of Nazis was based on Hollywood films, which presented those Germans as racists who felt justified in exterminating those to whom they felt superior. They were people who killed without being troubled by the act.
CHAPTER 29
Berlin had changed since the war. Musicians like Iggy Pop and David Bowie moved to West Berlin in the 1970s for the artistic ferment but also, in Bowie’s words, to “shoot drugs in the heroin capital of the world.” The Zoologischer Garten train station was a hangout for junkies and teenage prostitutes. West Berliners did not have to serve the compulsory year of military service, which helped draw counterculture types from all over Germany, as well as many left-wing revolutionaries. Soldiers from the American Berlin Brigade partied at Rolf Eden’s racy nightclubs on the once-proper Kurfürstendamm. Looming over it all stood the bomb-damaged steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in jagged ruins as a reminder of the war.
The Berlin Wall did not so much separate East and West Berlin as it surrounded West Berlin, making it an island of freedom. Two East Germans had been killed at the wall in 1975 trying to escape to the West. A guard shot down a third man who was merely trying to get to his home near the heavily fortified border after a night of drinking. There were other accidents. A five-year-old Turkish boy in the West died after chasing a ball to the Spree River. He fell into the water, and rescuers on the West Berlin side could not get permission to dive in to find him as the Communists controlled the water itself. The boy’s body was fished out barely fifteen feet from the western bank. Then, rather than being handed over to his family, his body was taken to East Berlin’s Charité Hospital and autopsied.
When Alfred Aedtner arrived in the divided city in February 1976, there had been no recent fatalities. The Soviet sector included the city’s historic downtown, the grand avenue Unter den Linden with its splendid opera house and celebrated university. The Brandenburg Gate stood at the end, sealed off from the West by the wall. Aedtner was tracking the owner of a piece of property in the British sector, an apartment block at Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28.
Investigators had known about Heim’s apartment building almost from the beginning of the hunt but initially just considered it a possible hiding place. The Berlin police had been asked to search in the “vicinity of the apartment building.” They complied but found nothing, saying, “No indications came out of it that could have delivered clues as to his whereabouts.”
Aedtner, on the other hand, was interested in the building itself, specifically what happened to the tenants’ rent. Tax inspectors suspected that Heim was dead and the money was going to his sister Herta. The management company, Wilhelm Droste, regularly transferred money to her at the Volksbank Dreieich “because the brother was often traveling overseas [so] the money was transferred to her account … Whenever her brother came to visit, she withdrew large amounts of money and handed it over to him directly.” There was no proof that he had received the money, but she was not paying income taxes on it. The inspectors had checked with officials in Baden-Baden and found it odd that Dr. Heim claimed no other income. Barth’s statements “raised doubts.” “The suspicion arises that her brother is already dead and the receipts flow to Mrs. Herta Barth and she must pay taxes on them.” Aedtner decided to visit Heim’s property managers.
A native Berliner, Rolf Gallner had worked at Wilhelm Droste for sixteen years and never met the doctor. Gallner’s job was to send t
he rent after expenses to Baden-Baden. He had heard rumors that Heim’s absence had something to do with accusations of war crimes. Now, seated across from Aedtner, he felt sure this was the case.
He told the detective that Heim was one of their customers but, without looking at the files, he could not say how long the company had handled the account. It was at least as long as the sixteen years that Gallner had been working there. He quickly ruled out the possibility that the suspect had hidden in one of his own apartments. He said all correspondence went through Dr. Heim’s sister. “Over the course of time I came to learn through conversations why Dr. Heim did not handle his own affairs. The way I heard it, Dr. Heim is being sought by German authorities because he committed crimes along the lines of euthanasia in the past under the Third Reich.”
From time to time Heim sent handwritten letters through his sister, generally about once a year. The last time they had received any communication was just before Christmas. Heim had thanked the managers for their good work and even given instructions for bonuses and holiday tips for Droste’s employees. When legal forms were needed, they arrived already signed. Gallner did not know if there was a return address as the envelopes were already opened when they landed in his in-box. Maybe they could figure out where Dr. Heim was from the paper, the real-estate manager suggested.
Aedtner acquired a search warrant for the premises. He, Gallner, and an officer from the Berlin police went to the offices, where Gallner gave them access to the files. Heim’s file filled two binders. Aedtner left with nine handwritten letters. “The striking thing,” Aedtner wrote, is the “foreign paper format,” common in Austria, Switzerland, and the United States. After checking with experts, he learned that the style was also common to international hotels, and thus could have been purchased in Germany. The glue at the top edge indicated it had come from a pad he could have taken with him.
The records revealed Heim to be an absolute stickler for detail. Even with the police in pursuit, he was writing to Droste about the heating system for his apartment building. The old coal boiler had been replaced by a new gas system, and Dr. Heim gave detailed instructions for paying the remaining balance. One thing was certain: the apartment building allowed the doctor to finance what was probably a quite comfortable lifestyle. The building housed thirty-four tenants, paying anywhere from 118 to 475 deutsche marks a month. One firm even paid 15 deutsche marks for the privilege of hanging a cigarette vending machine by the front door. In all, Gallner estimated that the properties yielded 24,000 deutsche marks a month, sent to Heim’s sister. It was not a fortune, but it was more than enough to live on, more than a lot of German police officers made at the time.
The fact that Heim did not have to work in order to survive made it easier for him to remain out of view. For the same reason Josef Mengele, who came from a wealthy family, also managed to elude capture. The considerable resources of Heim’s in-laws meant that there were many places out of sight but in considerable luxury where he could hide. His wife’s family owned property in Germany and Switzerland. Lake Lugano, where they owned an apartment, seemed like the sort of place a fugitive would live, right on the border between Switzerland and Italy, where one could easily cross a frontier if necessary. Or Heim could pass the time at one of the three apartments in Bad Kissingen that his brother-in-law Georg Barth owned. They were rented to spa guests, with lots of people always coming and going.
Aedtner had one other stop before he could leave Berlin. He traveled to Zehlendorf in the city’s southwest, a neighborhood filled with villas and fine homes. His destination, though, was a modest cluster of buildings in the Heimatschutz style, an architectural movement in Germany from the turn of the century to revive traditional building styles. It was not the buildings, however, but the vast archive that lay in the bunker beneath them that brought Aedtner there.
CHAPTER 30
Aedtner parked at the Berlin Document Center, which thirty years after the war still contained personnel files of members of the SA and SS. According to his file, Heim had served in Prague, Vienna, and Berlin. He inspected concentration camps for two months in 1941 and was a doctor at Buchenwald for a month. Nowhere in his personnel file did it mention working at Mauthausen. According to the papers, Heim spent the final years of the war with a division of mountain troops.
Again, Aedtner focused on the money trail. Here, to the investigator’s surprise, he discovered that Heim’s pay included an allowance for an illegitimate daughter, born on July 28, 1942, and listed under the name Waltraud Böser, which was a slight but persistent misspelling of her first name, Waltraut. The transfers were sent to the Sparkasse Graz, in the care of Heim’s elder sister, with an address listed in the Austrian city of Graz. On May 1, 1945, in the bloody waning days of World War II, another name was briefly listed in the records, that of Gertrud Böser, living in the Austrian ski resort town of Kitzbühel. Shortly after, her name was crossed off and the payments sent to Heim’s sister Hilda. “It has to be assumed,” Aedtner wrote, “that this Gertrud Böser is the mother of the child.”
Aedtner saw that Hilda was still legally registered in Graz, but efforts to find Gertrud Böser were less successful. The street address, listed as Sonnenhofgebiet 467, appeared to be incorrect. The closest investigators came was a Sonnentalhof. Aedtner noted that locating the Bösers was a priority. “There is definitely the possibility,” Aedtner wrote, “that the accused remains in contact with his illegitimate daughter or potentially with the child’s mother.”
Aedtner continued to pursue every lead he could. One former victim said that he had known Dr. Heim at Sachsenhausen, but was aware of the lethal injections only secondhand. “For me the man in the photo is simply the murderer from Sachsenhausen.” Back in Austria, Aedtner interviewed the former inmate Franz Kuczera, who claimed that he had seen Heim “removing the skin from the corpse of a tattooed inmate” in the autopsy room.
But what Aedtner needed most of all was concrete information that would lead him to the doctor’s whereabouts. Finally, in 1977, his search for Heim’s illegitimate daughter bore fruit. Swiss authorities informed him that Waltraut Böser was now in Switzerland, working as a pharmacist in Geneva. This was particularly intriguing, considering that Heim’s wife owned property in Lugano. “There is definitely a chance,” Aedtner wrote, “that Waltraud Böser is in contact with her father.” He asked the Swiss prosecutors to look into the young woman’s life. Don’t let her guess “that she is being checked out,” he wrote. “It cannot be ruled out that the accused is in her close personal circle.”
The Austrians, meanwhile, had tracked down her mother, who was living in Innsbruck. Gertrud Böser had a difficult life from the start. She was born in the Austrian town of Marburg, which after World War I became part of Yugoslavia. Her entire family contracted tuberculosis when she was young. Her father died, her mother went to a sanatorium, and Gertrud and her sister were sent for some time to an orphanage. She pursued her dream of singing and acting and performed as an opera singer in Milan and Vienna, including at the Theater in der Josefstadt, where Beethoven and Wagner had both conducted. A dark-haired beauty, she also worked as an actress in Frankfurt and Berlin and raved about the latter as the greatest city of all for artists.
Gertrud had a long affair with the handsome young doctor Aribert Heim, whom she had known since his student days in Graz, when she worked in the school cafeteria. Once he completed his medical studies, Heim joined the military and was stationed all over, including in Berlin and Vienna. She became pregnant while he was at Mauthausen. Gertrud saw him exactly one more time after Waltraut was born. He appeared a few months later to sign the birth certificate. All she knew after that was that he was fighting on the eastern front. She never saw him again.
After she gave birth to her second child, Peter, she developed varicose veins and had a difficult time standing for long periods on the stage. She moved to the mountain town of Kitzbühel with her mother, a seamstress, who helped pay the bills and watched the chi
ldren. Gerturd began performing with a puppet theater at schools, often towing the wooden theater and puppets behind her bicycle up and down the Alpine roads.
Her little daughter, blond like her father, took after him in many other ways. She was a talented downhill skier, already racing at the age of five. Because her father was believed killed in the war, Waltraut received while at school a small orphan’s pension from the Austrian government, the same bureau responsible for the disabled.
Her children grown up, Gertrud owned her own home on Innsbruck’s Kugelfangweg. Since 1973 she had received a monthly pension of 3,900 schillings. According to the police report, she claimed she received financial support from her children. She had never married and lived alone since her own mother passed away, putting on puppet-theater performances now and then, on invitation from the local schools. “Gertrud Böser enjoys a good reputation in her neighborhood,” the report noted.
On April 26, 1977, six days after her sixty-third birthday, Aedtner appeared at the postwar apartment building where she lived. He found himself answering more questions than he asked. Gertrud wanted to know where Heim was. If he were alive, he would owe child support. What was his address? How could she reach him? Gertrud seemed unaware of the more or less publicly available address for Heim in Baden-Baden.
Aedtner said he was pursuing a criminal matter, but they ultimately agreed that if he located the doctor, he would pass along the address, and she in return agreed that if Heim contacted her, she would notify the Austrian authorities. Gertrud told Aedtner that she had tried to locate Heim right after the war and how in 1966 her daughter had placed a request through the Red Cross in Munich to find her father. The Red Cross officials could say no more than that he was missing in action. By the end of the meeting, Aedtner found Gertrud to be “completely ingenuous” and was convinced that neither she nor her daughter knew where Heim lived.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 13
