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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Pisano’s restaurant was an idyllic, peaceful place in a tiny yellow cottage on a gentle sloping hillside facing the Øresund Strait in Charlottenlund, north of Copenhagen. The unassuming little gatekeeper’s house of a nineteenth-century spa was a historic landmark, built by the famous Danish architect Gottlieb Bindesbøll, better known for churches, town halls, and the Thorvaldsens Museum in the capital. The spa was gone, and the house had been used as a kiosk in the summer for selling food to beachgoers before Pisano and his wife received permission to turn it into a year-round restaurant.

  Den Gule Cottage, or the Yellow Cottage, as the restaurant was called, was “a missionary place,” in Pisano’s words, an effort to bring Mediterranean cooking to the still relatively narrow Scandinavian culinary environment. Pisano would buy whatever fresh ingredients he could find at the market and create the sorts of meals he had grown up eating. He perplexed his diners the first time he served artichokes because most did not know what they were.

  In the end it was tennis that brought Rüdiger and Pisano back together when Rüdiger showed up in Denmark to play in yet another tournament. He mostly played in Italy, in Palermo or Padua, but traveled to Belgium and Denmark for matches as well. It was a roving life for those on the margins of the tour and neither a very lucrative nor a comfortable one, tramping around with your rackets, staying at places that offered cheap rates for the competitors, eating at the tennis clubs. Rüdiger only won prize money a single time, in 1978 in Messina. Denmark was the worst place to play, in Rüdiger’s experience, because they only let the Danes train before the events. That might have contributed to his decision to quit competing.

  Rüdiger told Pisano that he didn’t want to go on playing tennis or studying medicine and asked if perhaps he could work in the restaurant. “Why not?” Pisano said. The Yellow Cottage was a place where a conflicted young man could find a measure of peace.

  Rüdiger had never washed dishes, waited tables, or worked in a kitchen before. Pisano knew enough about his new employee to know that he did not need the job. But the young man was a hard worker, and it seemed as though he had something to prove to himself. Meanwhile, he enjoyed meeting all kinds of new people, not just artists and intellectuals, but workers and activists. Pisano provided entry into an egalitarian world unlike Rüdiger’s spa-town upbringing or his years in a Swiss boarding school. Rüdiger Heim wanted to be a part of that world if his past would let him.

  His idea was to move to Copenhagen, work at the restaurant, and continue with his newfound love of photography. He was studying Danish and planned to stay. His mother was extremely disappointed that her younger son had chosen to abandon his studies, and Rüdiger believed the knowledge would drive his father crazy. “I also knew that he would certainly reject everything that I was doing. No sport. No studies,” Heim said. He was not quite ready to tell his father that he had given up school to wash dishes and wait tables.

  Instead, he wrote that in 1978 he competed in ten tournaments all over Europe, meeting “people from every corner of the world.” There was a new optimism to his correspondence. “Here and there I had small romances but nothing solid. I hope that one of these stories will turn into something serious as I would like to have a girl to love and to be loved by,” Rüdiger wrote to his father. “It’s just that I don’t quite know yet what really is love!” He told his father he was in Denmark but not why. “I’m afraid this is not a long letter since I can’t write about myself and what I am doing and thinking. I prefer to talk about it. Let me say only that I know in which direction to go. It is only a matter of getting enough courage to start.”

  At the beginning of 1979, Rüdiger Heim’s main worry was his father’s prostate operation. He did not know that the police were keeping track of him and his family. He did not know that packages sent by his mother to Pisano’s address were duly noted in the investigative file, including the artist’s name. Rüdiger Heim did not know how his family’s fortunes were about to change. He had paid no attention to the renewed public interest in Nazi war criminals, but he could not miss the article about his father in Der Spiegel. It fell to Rüdiger to warn Heim.

  In the family’s correspondence the code name for Aribert Heim was Gretl, the little girl who got lost in the woods with her brother, Hansel. When Rüdiger sat down to inform his father what was happening, he spun his own fairy tale modeled on the Brothers Grimm.

  When Gretl awoke one morning, it had just turned the fifth week of the New Year, and she was not feeling particularly well. She decided to buy herself a Spiegel. The old one was already too old, and one couldn’t recognize anything in it anymore. But no sooner had she bought the new Spiegel than she went home and looked inside. It shocked her terribly for what was inside did not please her at all. Her entire misery was mirrored in her face once more. She suddenly had a vision that came out of this Spiegel. If one day, all of a sudden, the poor girl could no longer receive bread and if water was no longer brought up to her room, well, then she would inevitably starve and die of thirst or else she would have to go out into the forest to provide for herself. But the forest was teeming with wolves, and they would most certainly tear her to pieces. There was still Rainer, however, and he could certainly help her. She simply had to make contact with him, and he would give her counsel. Oh, that would all be terrible, thought Gretl, and sat down to try to recover from the scare.

  In plain language, Rüdiger wanted his father to acquire a copy of Der Spiegel. He had to talk to Fritz Steinacker, Rainer in code. His livelihood, and possibly his life, depended on it.

  CHAPTER 37

  The February 5, 1979, issue of Der Spiegel featured a black-and-white photograph of train tracks dusted with snow leading into Auschwitz, an image of hopelessness and desolation. Inmate number 290, a survivor who had become a film director, shared his experiences at the death camp with the magazine. Another article speculated whether the Bundestag would overturn the statute of limitations for Nazi murders. Under the title “NS Crimes: Out the Back” was the story of a Nazi doctor who had escaped and was still living in hiding. One week after the national catharsis of the Holocaust miniseries, Aribert Heim had been designated as the new face of Nazi impunity.

  The three-page article took what had been essentially a quiet police investigation and laid it out for the world to see. The circulation of Der Spiegel at the time was 1.1 million in a country of roughly 60 million people. Even that number understated the publication’s importance to the nation. In 1962, when the magazine reported that the West German army was unprepared for war, the government declared treason and arrested the publisher and the deputy editor in chief. The public protests that followed, combined with court rulings in the magazine’s favor, helped secure freedom of the press in the young democracy and establish civil society. Der Spiegel was the secular bible of the educated middle class. Its national reach and moral authority exceeded any other mainstream publication at the time.

  The black-and-white photograph accompanying the article showed Heim unsmiling with his hair slicked back. It listed his SS membership number as 367,744 and his Nazi Party membership number as 6,116,098. “For 17 years the former KZ physician Dr. Aribert Heim has lived underground,” read the bold text, “provided for financially by a Berlin apartment house, legally advised by a Frankfurt attorney.” With so much support, the magazine concluded, “the investigators are powerless.” The terrible crimes were described in detail, starting with the deadly injection of chemicals directly into the hearts of the victims. The suspect had killed “because he was bored at his job,” taking skulls for “personal uses,” including that of a young inmate with a perfect bite. He forced patients to undergo unnecessary operations, removing their organs and killing them in the process.

  But Mauthausen was not the main focus of the article, which scrutinized how it was possible for someone like Heim to live undetected and unpunished for so long. The title came from a quotation from a state police officer, saying that he had the impression Heim had gone “
out the back as we came in the front.” The message throughout the article was that eluding justice was only possible with a lot of help, whether in the forms of warnings, tips, professional assistance, or financial help.

  “Roughly 120,000 inmates were killed in the Mauthausen camp, yet by all appearances one of the murderers involved can spend his rental proceeds undisturbed because property managers, tax accountants, and lawyers stand ready to help in exchange for their honorariums.” Walter Rebbe, the Frankfurt notary who helped Heim with various contracts when he went on the run, was quoted as saying, “Do I have to ask every time someone shows me their identification card?”

  The residents of his apartment block, the article continued, also helped the fugitive, albeit unwittingly. “Like most renters in large buildings in big cities, the parties at Berlin’s Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28 do not know whose building they really live in,” the article began. That was because the name in the entryway was not Heim but Wilhelm Droste & Co. Heim’s contact there was Rolf Gallner, whom Aedtner had already interviewed. “We have a management contract,” Gallner told the magazine, and the company was “not a moral institution.”

  Heim’s tax accountant in Heidelberg, Michael Barth, told Der Spiegel that he was “completely unaware of what Mr. Heim might have done at some point in time.” He added that this was the first time he had been told there was an arrest warrant against his client. The only inkling he had had was certain “hints from Steinacker.” The lawyer was featured in the article, too, with a photograph showing him wearing tinted glasses and an unbecoming smirk. When the reader looked over at the facing page, he saw a field of white crosses, grave markers for many who had died at Mauthausen.

  Der Spiegel described Steinacker’s work in the Arajs trial in Hamburg, the Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf, and the Fasold case in Frankfurt. When asked where his client Dr. Heim was residing, he answered that he had “a certain idea” but added he “would not like to be more concrete than that.” The magazine found it “noteworthy” that Steinacker assessed the West German justice system and found it lacking. “At this point one could not advise one’s client to turn himself in,” the attorney said, because he couldn’t get “a fair trial.” The magazine described Steinacker’s conduct in shielding his client as “just on the border of permissible.” The head of the state police in Baden-Württemberg agreed, complaining that the investigation was much more difficult because “members of certain professions are excessively employing their rights, or, better put, their supposed rights.” But the minister of justice conceded that the lawyer could not be charged for failing to reveal confidential information like the location of his client.

  Alfred Aedtner’s name appears nowhere in Der Spiegel’s article, but the fruits of his investigation and the insights from his files and official reports are seeded throughout. In the course of the investigation police had questioned more than two hundred people, the article said. There had been a tip from an intelligence service in 1967 that Heim was in Egypt, but by the end of 1969 or the beginning of 1970, Heim was believed to be back in “the German-speaking area.”

  The magazine also included Herta Barth’s involvement in forwarding the rent money to her brother. Her husband, Georg, was named in the article, along with the fact that he had his own engineering firm. The article even gave his and Herta’s home address in Buchschlag. Friedl’s exact address on Maria-Viktoria-Strasse in Baden-Baden was also included. Mrs. Heim protested that her ex-husband had fooled her too. His flight from justice had “surprised her completely,” and only after his departure did she learn about his past. “I wasn’t even in the BDM,” Friedl told the magazine, referring to the Bund Deutscher Mädel, or League of German Girls, the female version of the Hitler Youth. Käthe Bechtold, identified only as “the aged mother,” said that the family had a long anti-Nazi tradition. “Three of my husband’s siblings were arrested by Hitler,” she told the magazine. “We fought so hard for the Jews.”

  Though twelve years had passed since the divorce, Aribert Heim still haunted the family. After the Spiegel article appeared, a man phoned the home on Maria-Viktoria-Strasse saying he was a reporter for the tabloid Bild. Mrs. Bechtold answered the phone and couldn’t quite understand the name he gave, if he had said Berger, Börger, or Burger. When she said that her daughter was away, the man, who was not the reporter he claimed, became increasingly incensed and threatening, saying that the negative publicity was only the beginning. “Soon bombs are going to be planted at your home. That’s already been decided.” When Mrs. Bechtold called the newsroom at Bild, she was told that no one by that name worked at the paper.

  “It is self-evident for our client the case has increasingly become a personal burden and beyond that a danger,” the family attorney, Dr. Klaus Froebel, said. Froebel wanted to know why his client’s full name and address had appeared in a national magazine, even though in the same article “it is remarked that she never knew anything.” Froebel continued, “Our client has noticed that the press has at its disposal facts out of the investigation and also from the divorce proceedings.”

  Steinacker personally visited the family to update them on the defense. Rüdiger drove down from Denmark to be with the family. Unlike his mother and grandmother, who had kept many of the details from him, he was learning the specifics of his father’s alleged crimes for the first time. His grandmother told him, “Your father swore on his children that he had not done anything.”

  A trip to visit his father in Egypt at that point was out of the question, since the family assumed that they were under constant surveillance. What Rüdiger learned about the government’s charges against his father clearly shook him. He resolved never to tell his friends in Denmark about the charges, to keep his two worlds separate and spare himself their judgment.

  CHAPTER 38

  “Indignant, shocked, and shaken.” Those were some of the words that residents of Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28 used to describe their reaction when they learned how their rent money was being used. “I can’t believe that I am financing the flight of a Nazi criminal,” one woman told the local Tagesspiegel newspaper. The Holocaust series and the related media coverage had successfully re-focused German public opinion on Nazi war criminals.

  Many tenants had long been dissatisfied with their absentee landlord, but they neither knew who he was nor what he had done during the war. Decades of neglect, chipped paint, cracks in the walls, burst pipes, long waits for other repairs, all took on a sudden significance. Many reacted with more than just fury. They organized protests, which in turn ensured that the case did not slip back into obscurity.

  By February 1979, many of the tenants had begun questioning how they could stop assisting the fugitive. “We want to speak with an attorney about whether we can pay our rent into a frozen account,” Lothar Tuchen, a thirty-four-year-old electrician, told the local B.Z. tabloid. “We don’t want our money financing the livelihood of a Nazi criminal.” Some of the older residents, however, said they couldn’t care less. It was the younger renters who sent letters to their political representatives asking for help in stopping payments to the accused killer. They began collecting signatures demanding “a new owner who will make sure that our house is led correctly.”

  Their protest became a news story that threatened to explode into a political scandal. At one point someone burst into Droste’s offices and threw stink bombs so foul the company briefly evacuated the premises. The vandal left a note declaring, “Money stinks,” as a preface to angry statements about the firm’s handling of Heim’s business. The Berlin authorities were helpless with Dr. Heim hiding safely abroad, but the idea that he could continue to receive support was simply unacceptable from a political standpoint. Even state television was calling to find out what was going on with the Heim case. Something had to be done.

  In an open letter, many of the tenants appealed to the city government not only that “the house be placed immediately under court supervision” but also that more be done to educate
German youth about the past. “What will you do and what have you done up to this point to honor the opponents and victims of the National Socialist dictatorship?” the letter asked. “What position do you take on the question of the statute of limitations for the systematic eradication of people and the other murderous deeds of National Socialism?”

  The younger residents discovered how the local Levetzowstrasse synagogue had been used as one of Berlin’s main deportation centers to the concentration camps. After watching the Holocaust miniseries, several tenants told reporters they were appalled to have helped support a Nazi criminal. On March 3, 1979, the renters collected signatures at the site of the former synagogue. “Countless Jewish fellow citizens live in the immediate vicinity of Dr. Heim’s rental building,” scolded the neighborhood representative Gottfried Wurche in a letter to the city government. Shortly afterward the renters made good on their threat and began paying into a frozen account. “The authorities have been aware of the dark past of the building’s owner, Dr. Heim, for 17 years,” they wrote in a letter, “without an arrest.”

  Still, there was little West Berlin police could do; the criminal case was in the hands of Aedtner and the prosecutors in Baden-Württemberg. The tax authorities said that as long as Heim and his representatives paid the taxes he owed, the government was powerless. But city justice officials raised the possibility of pursuing Heim under an antiquated statute aimed at depriving the Nazi leadership of its ill-gotten gains.

  The former minister of the interior, the one-armed Nazi-hating veteran Joachim Lipschitz, had died in December 1961. But he left behind the Second Law for the Conclusion of Denazification. Under it, the independent panel known as the Spruchkammer could levy “unlimited fines” against Nazi perpetrators. The “Berlin specialty,” as the Tagesspiegel called it, might allow them to put Heim’s crimes before a civil panel and try to take the building from him. There was the chance, as Der Spiegel had written, to “bring Heim’s house under the hammer.” Rüdiger had warned his father: “If one day, all of a sudden, the poor girl could no longer receive bread and if water was no longer brought up to her room …” The strategy was straightforward. Cut off Gretl’s food and water, force her into the forest, and leave the rest to the wolves.