“The news just came on the radio that the hostage drama in Somalia is over,” Rüdiger wrote to his father. He was conflicted about the situation, a young man with an artistic bent who hung out with Italian Communists on the fringe of the Red Brigade but who was not committed to the point of condoning violence. “I’m not happy about it, but I also don’t want to forget that three terrorists who brought so much suffering to people have taken their lives.”
Baader was dead and the hostage crisis foiled, but the group continued, as did other groups like the June 2 Movement and the Revolutionary Cells. Putting a halt to the violence shaking West Germany remained the priority for law enforcement. Yet through his methodical work with the tax authorities, Aedtner was drawing closer to his target. In his efforts to prove that rent money from the Berlin apartment building was going to Dr. Heim in hiding and not remaining in his sister’s hands, Steinacker had been forced to release an audio recording of his client’s voice as a proof of life.
The tape might have helped the family save a few thousand deutsche marks, but it was a risky maneuver, announcing to the world that a wanted Nazi was alive and receiving material support. If the news traveled no farther than the courtroom, it was a canny step. If Heim’s voice carried farther, it might lead to his capture. There were people outside Germany who cared about Nazi fugitives, people who cared very much.
CHAPTER 34
An audiotape proving that a Nazi murderer was alive and well, living comfortably abroad or even disguised closer to home off the proceeds of his apartment building in Germany, would have been galling to any survivor of the Holocaust, but particularly to one like Simon Wiesenthal who had devoted his life to catching Nazi fugitives. There was a personal edge to the Aribert Heim case because Wiesenthal had been imprisoned at Mauthausen, nearly died there at the end of the war, and said that while an inmate there, he had heard the stories about the gruesome Dr. Death who decapitated inmates and kept their skulls as trophies.
Aedtner and Wiesenthal spoke by phone about the case and exchanged letters. They might have seemed a mismatched pair, the Holocaust survivor and the Wehrmacht veteran turned police detective, but they shared a dedication that included a willingness to bend the rules to catch their quarry. Wiesenthal scrawled handwritten notes about Heim on a flyer for the Seconda Sessione delle Udienze Internazionali Sacharov, an event dedicated to Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. There was Herta Barth’s address, information about the building at Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28, and details concerning the tax accountant Michael Barth.
Aedtner sent Wiesenthal two photographs, as well as a physical description of Heim: six feet three and speaking an Austrian dialect. It was in 1977, just weeks after Steinacker played the recording of Heim’s voice, that Wiesenthal’s search began in earnest. The Nazi hunter wrote to an acquaintance in Graz in the hopes that he knew someone in Hilda Heim’s circle of friends. He called Heim “one of the most sadistic and anti-Semitic camp doctors in Mauthausen,” and added, “He is one of our most emotional cases.”
Wiesenthal’s office was at Salztorgasse 6, on the site of the former Hotel Metropol, which the Nazis used as the Gestapo’s Vienna headquarters. The apartment building that replaced it was unassuming, an ugly postwar building. Wiesenthal’s shelves bent under the weight of his many boxes so full of paper they looked about to spill onto the black-and-white tile floor.
Approaching his seventieth birthday, Simon Wiesenthal had hardly slowed down. His work helped raise awareness in the United States of the Holocaust perpetrators who had moved to America like Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the brutal “Mare of Majdanek.” She was stripped of her citizenship and by 1975 was on trial with other Majdanek officers in Düsseldorf. The U.S. government, in the meantime, was in the process of founding a special unit in the Justice Department to root out further Nazi fugitives. And in 1977 the Nazi hunter struck a deal to have his name grace the new Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Wiesenthal made a lasting impression in part because of his gentle public persona. Justice, not vengeance, was his stated goal (and later the title of one of his books). He chose to stay in Austria, where he spoke simply as a citizen, rather than move to Israel, where he would be perceived as representing the Jewish state. Wiesenthal’s rising profile had its uses as well. People with tips—Good Samaritans and fellow Nazis with grudges against former comrades—knew they could take them to the celebrity Nazi hunter.
In his own country, Wiesenthal was still a controversial figure. Austria preferred to depict itself as the first victim of Nazi Germany, conquered in the Anschluss, rather than a willing partner in war and extermination. Abroad, especially in America, Wiesenthal was embraced as a hero. He gave lectures and published books, including the memoir The Murderers Among Us and a parable of guilt, The Sunflower, which had passages by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.
In his novel The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth sends his hero, the fictional reporter Peter Miller, to meet with Simon Wiesenthal as he searches for a real-life perpetrator known as “the Butcher of Riga.” Much of the book is set in Cairo, and the plot turns on the German scientists working on Egypt’s rocket program. Published in 1972, The Odessa File went on to sell more than 2.5 million copies, earning Wiesenthal a measure of fame that went far beyond any he had known. In the 1974 film version the actor Shmuel Rodensky portrayed Wiesenthal.
There was also a character clearly inspired by Wiesenthal in the 1976 movie Marathon Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman. That same year a novel called The Boys from Brazil, by Ira Levin, the best-selling author of Rosemary’s Baby, featured a Nazi hunter named Yakov Liebermann who runs a documentation center in Vienna. Liebermann is searching for Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who became Wiesenthal’s greatest obsession after Eichmann’s execution. A film based on Levin’s novel was set to come out in 1978, with Gregory Peck portraying Mengele and Sir Laurence Olivier as the Wiesenthal character.
The more famous he became, the more pressure Wiesenthal could bring to bear on Austrian and German officials who clearly preferred to have the Nazi issues go away. In this, he was very useful to Detective Aedtner. Since the tax case had ended in Herta Barth’s favor, there had been little or no movement in the criminal case. Wiesenthal did what he always did and bombarded officials with correspondence. The large blue print on the letterhead read “DOCUMENTATION CENTER,” all in capital letters. In smaller letters it said, “Of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime.”
He appealed to the president of the Jewish Community of Berlin, Heinz Galinski, saying, “The fugitive SS camp doctor owns a large house in Berlin-Tiergarten with 42 apartments, which a property management company called Wilhelm Droste manages. The proceeds go to his sister, who gives him the money.” He drew particular attention to the unusual fact that the doctor, living underground, gave his lawyer an audiotape in which he confirms that it is his signature presented to the tax office in Berlin-Tiergarten.
“As far as I know the wealth of Nazi criminals can be taken for restitution. Does that only apply to the wealth of those who have already been convicted?” Wiesenthal asked. “Could it be the case that—because the man is still alive and won’t turn himself in—it could also be done with the assets of a fugitive?” Wiesenthal had Galinski forward his inquiry to the proper authorities, which Galinski did shortly thereafter, directing it to a city official at Berlin’s interior department.
On October 18, 1978, Wiesenthal wrote directly to Dr. Hans-Jochen Vogel, reminding the minister of justice that they had met personally at an event in Munich when he was still mayor there. Wiesenthal was canny, not just relying on sympathy, but always looking for an angle to drive it home, whatever the audience. “We don’t know whether Dr. Heim is practicing somewhere under a fake name. If he is, one would have to consider that with his predisposition and lack of conscience, which we know from his activities at Mauthausen (the arrest warrant speaks expressly of bloodlust),
he could pose a direct danger to his potential patients.”
Wiesenthal also referred to Steinacker’s role in the case. “No one wants to rob Dr. Heim of good legal counsel, but this legal counsel is not defending his client in court, but instead much more through his counsel making it possible for him to live carefree, helping him with the monthly receipts of DM 6,500, enough money after all to live illegally.” Wiesenthal pointed to the pursuit of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, whose lawyers “were accused of supporting a criminal organization and of having knowledge as to the location of those underground.” The SS was also a criminal organization, one that had committed far worse crimes than the RAF. “Justice found a way in the case of the Baader-Meinhof attorneys,” Wiesenthal wrote. Maybe justice could pressure Heim’s attorney in a similar manner.
As he waited for a reply, Wiesenthal decided that the case could use a little more public attention, so on November 30, 1978, he picked up the phone and called Heinz Höhne at Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading magazine. Höhne was well-known and respected in journalistic circles, in particular for his articles on Nazis. He worked for two years and went through more than seventy thousand documents from the Nazi archives for a Spiegel series on the history of the SS. After they talked, Wiesenthal sent the reporter files and photographs of both Heim and Steinacker. The reporter dug into the story. There was no question whether he could produce an article. The question was, would anyone care?
CHAPTER 35
In the autumn of 1977, a film crew transformed the working-class West Berlin neighborhood of Wedding into the Warsaw Ghetto. Government officials in Poland and the Soviet Union had refused to give the production company permits to shoot in either country. For the same reason, they could not film at the Auschwitz or Sobibor death camp. For those scenes the producers turned to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. West Berlin did double duty as the capital of the German Reich and as occupied Poland. Although the German authorities allowed the movie studio to film there, the reception in Berlin was anything but universally positive. Swastikas were painted onto cameras, and rolls of film disappeared. One passerby was so angry about the Hollywood production that he threw bottles at the set. An old man screamed, “I killed you Jews once before. I’ll kill you again.”
The cast and crew persisted. After the blockbuster success of the miniseries Roots, about an African slave and his descendants, executives at rival NBC wanted their own miniseries, one with the emotional resonance of slavery. They chose the Holocaust. The director, Marvin J. Chomsky, had been one of the directors of Roots and was a television veteran, with episodes of Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Mission: Impossible, and Hawaii Five-O among his credits. The novelist Gerald Green, author of The Last Angry Man, was given the difficult task of squeezing the fates of millions of Jews into one identifiable and sympathetic group, the family Weiss. A single ambitious SS officer, Erik Dorf, played by the actor Michael Moriarty, would serve as the primary carrier of German guilt. Meryl Streep and James Woods starred in the miniseries.
When it aired on U.S. television in 1978, Holocaust generated significant controversy. Writing in the New York Times, the television critic John J. O’Connor attacked what he called the “sterile collection of wooden characters and ridiculous coincidences” necessary to submit a single family to the events of Kristallnacht, the terrors of Auschwitz’s selection ramp, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and more. The writer and prominent survivor Elie Wiesel called the miniseries “untrue, offensive, cheap,” and “an insult to those who perished and to those who survived.” Particularly galling for many was the juxtaposition of genocide with bright and gaudy commercials for household products, which many deemed indecent, if not downright obscene.
For all the criticisms, the miniseries was a professional production with star actors that brought the history of the Holocaust into millions of homes. Yet few would have predicted at the time that a mainstream entertainment aimed at an American audience would have a significant and lasting effect on Germany’s attitude toward its war crimes. The result was an unlikely national catharsis that would lead to greater public support for the pursuit of war criminals decades after the war. Far from flagging with the passage of time, investigations into Nazis like Dr. Aribert Heim would be pursued with new vigor and growing resources.
German public television purchased the foreign rights in Germany for $600,000. The fact that it was state-owned television meant that the decision was politically charged from the start, urged by leading members of the left-leaning Social Democrats and largely opposed by the right-wing Christian Democrats. Helmut Oeller, the program director of Bavarian television, Bayerischer Rundfunk, said, “I say no because ‘Holocaust’ puts the horror within boundaries, presents it in the same familiar limiting format as Westerns and murder mysteries, all of which we view as entertainment and something not quite real, not quite the truth.”
Public critiques of the program’s commercialism, the soap-opera quality of its filming, and the historical inaccuracies led the directors of the main television network, ARD, to demote the miniseries to its regional stations. Expectations for the program were low and falling. Germans, it was widely believed, were tired of hearing about a war more than three decades in the past, tired of lectures about their culpability. The strange foreign word “Holocaust,” taken from the Greek holos and kaustos, for “completely” and “burned,” was almost unknown in Germany.
“The problem will be getting people to turn on their sets when it is broadcast,” said Heinz Galinski, leader of the Jewish Community of Berlin, with whom Wiesenthal had corresponded on the Heim case.
But not everyone, it turned out, was feeling apathetic about the renewed attention to the murder of the European Jews. Right-wing groups opposed to the broadcast were in some instances ready to take action to prevent Holocaust from airing. At 8:40 p.m. on a Thursday evening in January 1979, a ten-kilogram bomb detonated near Koblenz, severing television cables belonging to the regional public television station. Barely twenty minutes later another explosion destroyed the cables running from an antenna not far from Münster. A right-wing radical group claimed responsibility, saying its goal had been to prevent the airing of a documentary called The Final Solution in the run-up to the broadcast of Holocaust. Weeks before the miniseries was scheduled to air, threatening phone calls to German television stations had begun.
The concerns of anti-Semites and unreconstructed Nazis were well-founded. When the four-part, seven-and-a-half-hour miniseries finally aired in Germany, viewers tuned in by the droves, with more than twenty million West Germans watching. One station, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, hosted “Midnight Discussions” after each episode, and roughly thirty-five thousand Germans called in. Viewing groups were started for singles because the program was considered too traumatic to watch alone. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed by West German television and the Federal Office for Political Education described themselves as “deeply shaken.” The Holocaust turned into an inescapable national debate in Germany, on the front page of every newspaper, the cover of every magazine, discussed from elementary schools to universities, which would soon register a surge of interest in studying the crimes of the Nazi era.
The question was whether this was what the Germans call a “straw fire,” which flares up bright but burns out immediately, or whether it would have a practical impact in the search for Nazi war criminals. The Bundestag in Bonn was due to debate the statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes. A survey of twenty-eight hundred people before the program aired found only 15 percent of Germans wanted the statute of limitations removed. Two weeks later that figure had leaped to 39 percent. A majority of Germans, 51 percent, said before the miniseries aired that Nazi trials should end. After the program was broadcast, the number dropped to 35 percent.
“In the house of the hangman,” Der Spiegel wrote, “the rope was spoken of as never before.”
CHAPTER 36
Tano Pisano never expected to have much of a relationship with Rüdi
ger Heim, the slightly withdrawn young man he got to know a little in Florence. Where the Sicilian painter was a radical and an artist, Rüdiger mostly liked to talk about tennis. He wore shorts, wristbands, and a headband to keep his long blond hair away from his face. The two men moved in some of the same social circles, and many of the people they knew in common were American students. Rüdiger was friends with one of Pisano’s girlfriends, a Frenchwoman, and would tag along sometimes when the couple went out to dinner or to an event.
At one point Pisano asked Rüdiger where he was from, and he answered that he came from Germany and was supposed to study medicine at Pisa. To Pisano’s eyes it did not appear that his acquaintance was spending very much time at the university at all. Pisano found himself asking more questions, a spark of interest forming in the quiet young man. He learned that Rüdiger was good at languages. They spoke Italian together, but the young man could also speak French and English as well as his native German. He had a serious interest in photography and, Pisano thought, some talent as well. He had a good sense of light.
Still, Pisano did not believe they would stay in touch when he moved from Italy to Denmark, part of his restless wandering between northern and southern Europe and a symptom of his own conflicted feelings about painting and the art market. He rankled when an art dealer told him one style or another was selling and that he should make more of those paintings. He stopped making art and opened a restaurant instead.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 15
