Gertrud did not inform her daughter about the police officer’s visit, nor the fact that her father might still be alive. The girl had made a good life for herself in Switzerland as a pharmacist, and Gertrud did not wish her disturbed.
CHAPTER 31
Oblivious to the fact that police had intensified their search for his father, Rüdiger returned to Florence in January 1976, where he worked on his application for medical school. Now that he had made contact with Heim, he kept in close touch. He wrote a letter telling his father he was glad he made the trip and that he “had reassured me of many things I was in doubt of.” Rüdiger also apologized for the fact that he had not had a haircut since leaving Egypt, admitting that it was because “a girl told me not to,” but promised that as soon as his hair interfered with his tennis game, he would get it trimmed. He said that if he failed to get into the Italian university, he might come and live in Cairo for a year. He signed the letter, “Your ‘true one.’ ” But, like his Aunt Herta, he could not shake a sense of sorrow at his father’s solitary life so far away.
The young man had the operation to correct the deviated septum diagnosed in Egypt, putting an end to his constant earaches. He dutifully thanked his father but found the influence of other of Heim’s opinions weakening. Even as he announced his relief at getting into medical school, he wrote about his passionate interest in photography and his growing portfolio of pictures. An upcoming exhibition and meetings with photo editors at magazines clearly had greater appeal than chemistry and biology.
But he was brutally honest in a way that children rarely are with their parents. He was comfortable writing about masturbation and satisfying his sexual needs “to a certain point” with a girlfriend. His father became his sounding board, and Rüdiger had much to discuss. His writings reveal a young man of artistic temperament, out of step with the people around him, searching for authenticity and honesty. “Some days I feel terribly miserable because I could walk for miles in the streets of the city without being paid attention to,” he wrote. “From time to time I want to explode, hit someone’s bloody face, kick someone, or whatever because this ‘indifference’ around me is hard to bear. But what is the most terrifying thing is I can’t even explode. I’m too fucking afraid to do so.” In the very next paragraph, however, he said he often feels “free and a part of this world.” He described trips to an art gallery and his rising nervousness as they discussed his pictures. “I’m trying to learn as much as possible … but again all kinds of walls are building up in front of me.”
Aribert’s side of the correspondence showed that although he missed his family, he expected more support from them than he felt he was receiving. He relied on his sister for more than money and expected her to help curb his loneliness through regular visits. His own letters often complained that he had not heard from her sooner or more often. As much as he had integrated into Cairo society, life there was not easy for him. The country’s infrastructure had deteriorated significantly under Nasser. Blackouts were common. Telephone lines were overloaded at peak hours, making calls impossible. Buses were so overcrowded people would hang dangerously on the outsides. The population of the Cairo metropolitan area had roughly doubled to 9 million over the previous decade. Some 200,000 newcomers were arriving every year. It could be a hard city to call home.
Rüdiger kept up the correspondence with his father as he had promised. He told him that he was reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet novels, about the city on the coast that they had visited. “I feel that I should know more about this town,” Rüdiger wrote. On another occasion Rüdiger assured Heim that he and his aunt had sent difficult-to-acquire equipment for his father’s friend, an Egyptian dentist. “Most probably they got lost on their way as they didn’t reach you,” Rüdiger wrote. “Anyway, there is no reason to blame your sister.”
Herta had always done all she could to help her brother with anything he asked. When Nagy Khafagy, Heim’s Egyptian friend and business associate, needed assistance importing a Peugeot to be used as a taxi, she handled the European side of the transaction. In addition, she had always taken care of her brother’s bills, transfers of money, and taxes. Now tax officials had begun demanding either proof that she was sending the rent from the Tile-Wardenberg apartments to her brother or a payment of 10,000 deutsche marks. Given that her brother was a fugitive in hiding, he could hardly fly back to Germany, march into a courtroom, and affirm his identity.
The family took great precautions to avoid divulging his location. Not only was mail sent to the Weil family, Herta’s friends, who handed her the plain manila envelopes, but they also used their own improvised code to identify people in correspondence. Herta was Gerda; their sister, Hilda, was Lyda. Heim was Gretl, and Friedl was Dora. On the Egyptian side, Rifat became Richard, and the suave Khafagy became the dashing Don Alfonso. The money itself was called pralines.
There was one more member of the group, a man who was referred to as Rainer. His real name was Steinacker, the prominent defense attorney for Nazis accused of war crimes. Steinacker never received mail directly from Heim; it was always routed through Herta Barth. Heim’s sister handled his correspondence as well as his financial matters. She asked if the lawyer would meet personally with her brother and see if he could resolve the tax problem. For 1,760 deutsche marks Steinacker booked a seat on Lufthansa flight 626 on March 30, 1977, bound for Cairo.
CHAPTER 32
It had been six years since the lawyer and his client last met. On Steinacker’s first trip to Cairo they had discussed routine business, investments, money transfers, his car, and other matters. Now his sister’s role in handling Heim’s business had caused her significant and potentially costly difficulties.
Heim was thinner and tanner but still instantly recognizable, tall and broad shouldered, a man with a great deal of presence. The two sat together at a café on the Nile and discussed the best way to handle the tax dispute. There was little movement visible in the criminal case against him, but it still hardly seemed wise to Steinacker for Heim to travel to Germany. Instead, Steinacker asked his client to sign a statement that it was he and not his sister who ultimately received the rents collected in Germany. The lawyer could then affirm before the court that his client had written the letter in his presence, but there remained the very real possibility that the court would not find Steinacker’s word sufficient. So Steinacker prepared a fallback plan. Using a reel-to-reel recorder, they made a tape of Dr. Heim saying that he was alive and the lawful recipient of the funds in question.
Attorney and client said their farewells and parted ways. Steinacker returned to Germany after spending only a single night in Egypt. There were complications given Dr. Heim’s fugitive status, but otherwise the case seemed straightforward. All parties assumed the criminal case had fallen into hibernation. The lawyer prepared letters to tax offices both in Hesse, where Herta lived, and in Baden-Württemberg, where Heim had his last known address, including along with them copies of Heim’s letter and Steinacker’s sworn statement that he had personally laid eyes on the fugitive doctor.
Heim meanwhile was preoccupied with questions of guilt. He could visit with friends, work out, and manage investments, but without his wife and children, without his practice, he was left with a great deal of time to reflect on his circumstances. He read widely, clipping articles about Christ and Hitler, the partition of Poland, and the Soviet Politburo. At one point he analyzed the promise of Israel to the Jews, examining the Old Testament and the New Testament, before noting that it was “already well cultivated by the Philistines and the Canaanites who possessed a highly developed copper and steel industry.” In the next paragraph he mused on the Second Vatican Council’s examination of Jewish guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
But Heim kept coming back to two particular historical events. The first was the April 9, 1948, attack by Zionist paramilitary groups on the village of Deir Yassin, not far from Jerusalem, in what was then the British Mandate of Palest
ine. The Irgun and the Lehi killed more than two hundred Arabs, including women and children, in the village. Captives were paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem. The incident was infamous throughout the Arab world. News reports of the massacre at Deir Yassin caused Arabs to flee in panic and helped provoke the Arab invasion. Heim noted bitterly that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun at the time of the attack, was not in jail or in hiding but poised to become prime minister of Israel.
The second incident was the American massacre of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai in 1968. Heim clipped and saved numerous articles about William L. Calley Jr. Out of twenty-five enlisted men and officers, only Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of Vietnamese civilians. After Calley was found guilty in 1971, he received a surge of support from the American public, including a hit song with the lyrics “My name is William Calley / I’m a soldier of this land / I’ve tried to do my duty / And to gain the upper hand / But they’ve made me out a villain / They have stamped me with a brand / As we go marching on.” Within three days of his conviction the record had already sold 202,000 copies.
Unlike West German politicians, Heim wrote, American politicians defended their soldier. They even used the same argument German defenders had employed—and American prosecutors had rejected—at the Nuremberg trials: he was only following orders. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Calley spent only three months confined at Fort Leavenworth before President Richard Nixon ordered him released pending appeal. He then spent three years under house arrest in a “comfortable two-bedroom apartment,” according to the New York Times.
For Heim, the difference between the treatment of former Nazis like himself and that of Israelis and Americans was a double standard. Soviet leaders responsible for purges had also gone unpunished. Heim had spent nearly three years as a POW and postwar detainee. He had lived in exile for more than fourteen years. As time passed, the doctor would focus more and more on Israel and the Jewish lobby in the United States, which he believed had pressured postwar West Germany into abandoning its own soldiers.
An article published in English in the Egyptian Gazette in the autumn of 1976 had captured Heim’s attention. Titled “Counterfeit Semites,” the article reviewed a new book by the novelist Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler was a literary lion, a Zionist turned Communist who finally became a staunch anti-Communist. His best-known novel, Darkness at Noon, was inspired by Stalin’s show trials. His views could be idiosyncratic. Although members of his family perished in the Holocaust, Koestler opposed the death penalty and wrote an impassioned plea for Eichmann’s life. His reputation declined rather sharply later in life with his growing interest in the occult and the supernatural.
Koestler blended history, genetics, and a fair amount of conjecture in The Thirteenth Tribe, arguing that the majority of the world’s Jews were descended not from the people of Israel but from a Turkic tribe known as the Khazars who had converted to Judaism. The book was widely rejected by Western scholars, the facts as well as the author’s motives questioned. “The lingering influence of Judaism’s racial and historical message, though based on illusion, acts as a powerful emotional brake by appealing to tribal loyalty,” Koestler wrote.
Koestler foresaw the implications his book would have in the debate over Israel’s legitimacy. He wrote, “While this book deals with past history, it unavoidably carries certain implications for the present and future … I am aware of the danger that it may be maliciously misinterpreted as a denial of the state of Israel’s right to exist.” He insisted that the partition of Palestine and a century of peaceful Jewish immigration provided the ethical justification for the state’s legal existence.
Despite his protestations, the book found a rapt audience in the Arab world, which saw Koestler’s work as undermining the Jewish claim to Israel. The reviewer in the Egyptian Gazette suggested that the Balfour Declaration should have promised a national home for the Jewish people between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, where the Khazar Empire had once reigned. He wrote, “Mr. Koestler, a distinguished Jewish author, should be congratulated on the courage of his convictions and on a scholarly exposition of a little known episode in history which may have a great influence on events in future.”
Heim’s copy of the article was heavily underlined in red ink. “Indeed if Mr. Koestler’s point is accepted by the world at large then the term anti-Semitism will have no meaning and the world will have come to realise that for many centuries it had been the victim of a colossal hoax.” The words “anti-Semitism will have no meaning” became Heim’s preoccupation.
CHAPTER 33
Aedtner rented an empty apartment in Frankfurt’s West End. At 6 deutsche marks a day the rent for his ten days there in the spring of 1977 came to 60 deutsche marks, which was billed to the Baden-Württemberg state police. It was neither the price nor the size of the apartment that impressed Aedtner but the view. Not only could he see anyone entering and leaving the building on Savignystrasse where Steinacker had his office, but he could peer in through the office window. A decade before, Steinacker had watched Aedtner testify at the Auschwitz trials. Now the detective returned the favor, the difference being that the lawyer was unaware that he was under observation.
Aedtner was working with accountants and tax collectors to quietly raise pressure on Herta Barth. He had explained to the finance officials that their tax-evasion case was his murder case. He included them in the investigation and remained in close contact with the responsible department head at the state tax office in Hesse. They all waited for Herta’s response. It was probably too much to hope that the Nazi doctor would walk through the door himself, but there was always the chance. An important hearing was coming up in the tax case, and Steinacker had written in two separate letters the month before that he had personally met with Dr. Heim about the matter. The lawyer said he watched his client sign letters swearing that the rent money from the Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse apartments came to him.
As the tax case gathered speed, Aedtner did not take his eyes off Steinacker’s office. On May 24 at 3:35 p.m., he saw Herta Barth arrive at the attorney’s office. From his vantage point in the building across the street, Aedtner could see into the meeting room where Steinacker received clients, and witnessed what he described in his report as a “very lively discussion” between Steinacker and Herta Barth. The two spoke for over two hours. Ms. Barth did not leave until 5:45 p.m. Shortly thereafter, Steinacker asked to postpone the hearing. They were far from apprehending Heim, but it felt as if they were drawing slightly closer.
If there was ever a time when Aedtner could have been pulled off the case, this was probably it. Shortly before his latest trip to Austria, on April 7, 1977, the attorney general of Germany, Siegfried Buback, was shot to death in Baden-Württemberg by Red Army Faction terrorists. He was on his way to work just an hour’s drive from the state police headquarters in Stuttgart. The Mercedes he was riding in was idling at a red light just after nine o’clock in the morning when bullets from a Heckler & Koch machine pistol shattered the windows. Buback, his driver, and another justice official were killed, and the assassins sped away on a Suzuki GS750 motorcycle.
At the time German society was divided between, on the one hand, angry leftists warning of a reinvented police state and, on the other, a conservative society concerned about the counterculture and terrified of terrorism. Buback had been a member of the Nazi Party for five years and had come down hard on the Baader-Meinhof Gang and its sympathizers.
While his colleagues were hunting Buback’s killers, Aedtner remained on the trail of the Nazi doctor. He interviewed other doctors who had served in the SS at Mauthausen, and even their widows, but there was no evidence that Heim had stayed in any form of contact with those particular colleagues. Aedtner questioned inmates whom Heim had operated upon and sought former Mauthausen prisoners from Spain through the consulate. The state police asked colleagues in Tel Aviv for help tracking down victims in Israel.
Aedtner also targeted Herta’s friends, such as her confidante Katharina Kallmann. The police spoke with the Barth family’s longtime Austrian housekeeper who started working there in 1961, the year before Heim disappeared. They spoke with the former fiancée of Joachim Gäde, Herta Barth’s son from her previous marriage. She insisted that she knew nothing about Heim’s whereabouts. They explored whether Heim’s accountant Michael Barth, no relation to Herta’s husband, had any grounds on which to refuse to testify as to the suspect’s whereabouts. Aedtner was convinced that the accountant was in direct contact with Heim.
As for the doctor’s family, they were quietly going about their business. Heim’s elder son, Aribert, was studying in Heidelberg. Rüdiger was taking courses in Italy and playing tennis tournaments around the Continent, usually for no more than room and board. Heim’s ex-wife, Friedl, was living in the same Baden-Baden villa as she had with her ex-husband. The family appeared unaware that anything more than a routine tax case was going on.
Most West Germans were focused on the violence that became known as the German Autumn that followed Buback’s murder. The impression among German citizens of lawlessness was growing. Hundreds of suspected anarchists were brought in for questioning and to have their alibis checked. Police in Holland, France, and Sweden joined the search.
A botched kidnapping attempt ended with the murder of the head of Dresdner Bank. A leading industrialist and former SS officer, Hanns Martin Schleyer, was also kidnapped and killed. Four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a Lufthansa aircraft, demanding the release of leading members of the group from Stammheim Prison near Stuttgart. The hijackers killed the captain, Jürgen Schumann, before German commandos successfully stormed the airplane in Somalia, freeing the hostages. Three of the top terrorists, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader himself, committed suicide in the wake of the failed attempt.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 14
