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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Steinacker opened the hearing by arguing that the earlier ruling should be put on hold until the criminal case in Baden-Baden was decided. The motion was rejected. Steinacker then asked “in the interest of a fair proceeding” that the surviving witnesses be subject to cross-examination. The court deemed that unnecessary, as was the presentation of additional witnesses for the defense.

  On December 17 the initial ruling was upheld. The appeals panel found that Heim had murdered several patients at Mauthausen. “At least three cases” were proven, and it was not the duty of the panel “to prove Heim’s remaining countless acts or to clear up contradictions.” The penalty of 510,000 deutsche marks, “the value of a Berlin apartment house that Heim owns,” was also upheld. On March 7, 1980, the Berlin Interior Ministry informed Steinacker in writing that if “your client has not paid the fine of 510,000 deutsche marks as well as the trial costs within a week,” the apartment building would be confiscated. In fact, taking the apartment building was not a simple legal matter.

  The prosecutor’s office in Baden-Baden was demanding 18,000 deutsche marks to cover its costs related to the case. The rivalry between state authorities deepened when the prosecutors in Baden-Baden seized all of Heim’s assets “in the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin.” The demands of the competing authorities would have to be reconciled and Heim’s assets would have to be unfrozen before the house could be sold. The building, like its owner, had slipped into a sort of limbo.

  During all this time, Aedtner continued to pursue the investigation against Heim. The detective had traveled almost the length of Germany in the hopes of finding a living witness. The Spruchkammer was nowhere near as rigorous as a trial in criminal court. The prosecutors had left several holes that Aedtner needed to close. With each passing year the pool of potential eyewitnesses was dwindling. But the media attention from the civil case led new witnesses to come forward. The question was, were they reliable?

  Aedtner received a letter from an attorney in Lübeck on the Baltic coast, promising almost ideal testimony. A survivor, Erwin Balczuhn, had come forward. He had been in the operating room and seen Heim administer lethal injections to six inmates. Balczuhn’s attorney described how his client watched the victims make “twitching and convulsing movements” as they died. Balczuhn had read an article in the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper about the case against Heim, which brought back memories of what he had seen in the sick bay nearly forty years before.

  At the Lübeck South police precinct, Balczuhn told Aedtner that he started working at the Mauthausen quarry in October 1940. Roughly a year later he was in the infirmary for a week having the toenail removed from his big toe. He recalled that when he was waiting in the hall outside the operating room, he heard loud screaming. About ten or fifteen minutes later, he watched Heim come out smelling powerfully of gasoline. He watched as orderlies carried out six naked corpses. Their clothes lay on the floor, where he could see the colored badges indicating that the bodies on the stretchers consisted of four Jews, one Pole, and one Russian soldier. He tried to ask a fellow inmate about what he had seen and was told, “Man, keep your mouth shut or you’ll be up next.”

  Aedtner thought this was an affecting story but not the eyewitness account of the actual murders that Balczuhn’s attorney had promised. But at least Balczuhn could place Heim at Mauthausen at precisely the time he was alleged to have committed the atrocities. Balczuhn described Heim’s height and said he must have been quite young, perhaps between twenty-four and twenty-nine years old, at the time. In fact, he was twenty-seven. The former inmate even remembered the scar in the corner of Heim’s mouth. He picked him out of the photo lineup.

  Balczuhn had spent nearly five years at the camp, staying long enough to hear from American soldiers how they had tracked down and killed the camp commandant. But he remembered quite clearly that Heim’s tenure was a short one. The doctor had probably gone by early 1942. Aedtner took the new witness seriously enough to have him deposed by a prosecutor in front of a judge, with a defense attorney standing in for Steinacker. When they did the follow-up deposition, the defense attorney quickly proved that the media attention could be a double-edged sword. He immediately objected to the photo lineup since “countless pictures of the accused had appeared in the press throughout the federal republic.”

  Balczuhn was not perfect, but he was a witness, a living witness. There were few enough of those. Aedtner had continued sending lists of potential witnesses to his counterparts in Vienna. His Austrian colleagues sent them back with black crosses in the margins next to many of the names, marking them as deceased.

  CHAPTER 44

  Aedtner’s efforts to secure the testimony of Dr. Wrazlaw Busek, one of the men who kept the list of the dead at Mauthausen, had ended in failure. His letter to Queens, New York, had been returned unopened. It turned out that Dr. Busek was dead. Busek’s stepson passed along five new leads, the names and addresses of five Polish survivors. Five men in five cities behind the Iron Curtain—Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, Grójec, Torun, and Warsaw—five new chances to find firsthand testimony against Heim.

  Wiesenthal began to consider the possibility that Heim, like Eichmann and so many others, had fled to South America. Media reports said that Interpol believed the fugitive doctor was living in Venezuela. Berlin’s Tagesspiegel reported, “A picture of Heim appeared in all the newspapers in the capital of Caracas.” Wiesenthal had also received a tip that Heim might be living on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where a wealthy doctor by the name of Umberto Hahn occupied the Chalet Partida Soria in Alicante.

  The letter with the tip included a map with the words “Villa Dr. Hahn” marked in red pen. “Since it would be relatively simple to change the forename ‘Aribert’ to ‘Umberto’ and ‘Heim’ to ‘Hahn,’ maybe it would be worthwhile trying to learn a little more about this man,” Wiesenthal wrote to Aedtner. Their correspondence remained for the most part businesslike, though the younger German police officer’s tone was increasingly friendly and at times almost reverential. Their working relationship was deepening into something more, but Aedtner was still just one of many around the world with whom Wiesenthal cooperated.

  Wiesenthal also received information that Heim might be on the Spanish island of Ibiza, a popular destination for West German tourists. He was always on the lookout for surrogates he could ask to follow up leads. The Board of Deputies of British Jews put Wiesenthal in touch with an Englishwoman named Gloria Mound who owned an apartment on the island. “We would be very grateful if you could undertake any researches without personal risks,” Wiesenthal wrote. “Be sure that we’ll handle the whole case most confidentially.” She wrote back under her personal letterhead that she could help him but underscored the fact that “discretion is vital.”

  In the meantime, Aedtner had gotten a hold of a second photograph of Heim, taken in Mannheim in November 1959. Though the picture was already twenty years old, it was more recent than the first photograph he had obtained. The shot appeared to have been taken at a formal event, with Heim in black tie. Aedtner cautioned his colleague not to share the picture with the press. The detective had already shown the photograph to Interpol in Madrid and promised to telephone “as soon as there is any news from Spain.”

  The picture landed in the media anyway. The Spanish magazine Interviú published a long article purporting to follow the doctor’s footsteps through Ibiza, which the magazine called the “Island of the Nazis.” In his tuxedo, under the spy-novel headline “Heim, the Man with a Thousand Faces,” he looked like someone James Bond might cross paths with at the local casino. A German couple was certain they had seen him deep-sea fishing. The myth was outrunning the investigation.

  In Venezuela, Wiesenthal worked with a man in Caracas named Hector Gouverneur to determine whether a German immigrant named Werner Ghunter in San Bernardino might actually be the fugitive Heim. The connections were often gossamer thin, but Aedtner dutifully followed up all the leads that Wiesenthal
sent him. At one point the detective even forwarded a Spanish translation of an arrest warrant to Wiesenthal’s hotel in New York, along with an important new find, a copy of Heim’s fingerprints, taken by the U.S. Army when he was a prisoner of war.

  With little firm information, the search for Heim focused more and more on the Spanish-speaking world. More publicity and more inquiries led to more tips, in a self-reinforcing cycle that seemed to turn every suspicion into a foregone but unfounded conclusion.

  Unbeknownst to either the Nazi hunter or the detective, there was a connection to the case in Latin America, Heim’s illegitimate daughter, Waltraut Böser. Growing up without a father in postwar Austria had been difficult. She had longed to know more about him and most of all to see a photograph of him. Waltraut looked nothing like her own mother or her younger brother. They both had dark hair while she was blond. They were on the smaller side and shied away from sports while she was tall, strong, and physically fearless.

  Once when she was a girl, while attending an ice hockey game in her hometown of Kitzbühel, Waltraut caught a stray puck that had sailed over the goal and into the cheering crowd at the stadium. She pushed and wriggled her way to the front of the crowd to return it to the goalie from the visiting Viennese team. Waltraut might have expected him to say “thanks” or even hoped for “nice catch” but was unprepared for what he said instead. He looked at her closely and told her, “I played with your father.” She was in shock as he skated away. She ran home, missing the rest of the game.

  She had inherited her father’s athleticism, her mother and her aunt told her, his talent for languages, and his love of travel. Her hopes of becoming an Olympic gold medalist with the Austrian ski team were dashed by a terrible fracture of her lower leg when she was fifteen. She knew that her father had been a doctor, and she developed an interest in medicine, reading and rereading the 1956 book The Century of Surgeons and dreaming of one day becoming one.

  In the summer of 1962, after graduating from high school, she worked up the courage to visit Heim’s mother, the grandmother she had never met. She found Anna Heim and her elder daughter, Hilda, living in Graz. Neither asked who she was. The resemblance must have been such that it was unnecessary. They invited her inside, but the looks her grandmother directed at her gave Waltraut the feeling that she was not welcome.

  “I don’t want to trouble you, but I’d like to see a photo of my father,” she said. Waltraut’s father had died in Russia, Heim’s mother answered. They did not have any photographs of him. It was clear that the conversation was over. “Thank you and pardon me for barging in on you,” Waltraut told the two women. Then she left. In her mind, the matter felt closed.

  Before moving to Switzerland, she earned a master’s degree in pharmacology at the University of Innsbruck. She worked at a pharmacy in Geneva, where she got a thrill out of celebrity customers like Sophia Loren, who loyally went to Waltraut for her special beauty treatments because the Austrian woman spoke such good Italian.

  At the age of thirty-four, she met a man from Chile through a friend in Lausanne, and they fell in love. They married at the Goldenes Dachl in Innsbruck, a local landmark with a golden roof made of thousands of gilded copper tiles for the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I. On an adventurous road trip from Canada to Costa Rica, Waltraut learned she was pregnant. The couple settled in her husband’s native Chile. She was unaware that her father had survived the war. Nor did she realize that she had visited his mother and sister at the same time in 1962 that he was planning his escape from Germany. She was living on the opposite end of the world, her past and her father long behind her.

  Waltraut also did not know that she had two half brothers living back in Europe. The elder of the two, Aribert Christian Heim, changed his name to just Christian. Investigators and family members concur that he had little or no contact with his father after he left, never visited him in Egypt as Rüdiger had, and kept his distance from the entire affair.

  Rüdiger had not visited his father since the story became public. His residency permit for Denmark, which he had been told was all but complete, was suddenly rejected. He received his passport back with a stamp that read, “Must leave the country within 20 days.” He continued to live there illegally, but as the restaurant became more and more successful, he grew frustrated that as an undocumented worker he was unable to buy into the business.

  In a letter to Herta, Heim described how he regretted not receiving word from his son. “Unfortunately, I no longer hear from the little one, although it is high time that we talked through everything,” Heim wrote in the summer of 1982. “Yet that which has not happened yet can still come to pass.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Although Heim’s case was his top priority, Aedtner had other investigations to pursue. In 1981 he traveled to Israel with a young German prosecutor to build a case against a work-detail commander from Auschwitz, Karl Pöllmann. Before leaving Germany, Aedtner had been in a car accident and was forced to wear a neck brace. A little on the vain side even in middle age, he wore an ascot to cover up the unsightly white device. The trip, Aedtner’s second to Israel, was for business, but he used the opportunity to see some of the country as well. He was there for nearly a month, from May 16 to June 13, using the Hotel Moriah in Tel Aviv as a base for exploring the ancient land.

  An avid reader with an inquisitive mind, Aedtner was fascinated by the country’s history. He made friends with an Israeli police officer who every Christmas would send him a crate of oranges. He was photographed on the coast in a white cap and short-sleeved shirt standing beside a camel, and again in his red bathing trunks, slathered in mud from the Dead Sea. But Aedtner did not notice that he was drinking too little water and had become severely dehydrated. He passed out on the beach and might have been in serious trouble if people nearby had not noticed that something was wrong and revived him. It might have been the heat, but the episode might also have been a harbinger of more serious health problems.

  He was no longer young, and his health was becoming more fragile. His wife tried to get him to eat a little less, to skip the beers he loved so much, but for the most part he ignored her. All those nights on the road, eating his favorite dishes, roulade, stuffed peppers, and schnitzel, were having an effect. His small paunch had grown to a big belly, and he became diabetic, which likely contributed to his dehydration. Despite his worsening health, his search for Heim continued unabated.

  It took more than a year, but between Aedtner, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police, Interpol, and the Venezuelan authorities, they managed to track down Wiesenthal’s Venezuelan tip. The suspect Ghunter turned out to be Werner Günter Lang, a music teacher of Czech ancestry almost eight years Heim’s senior. After comparing his fingerprints with Heim’s, they realized they had come to another dead end. The investigation appeared to be stalling. “We haven’t heard from one another in quite a while,” Aedtner wrote to Wiesenthal, “because not much new has come out in our endeavor.” He told Wiesenthal that they were sending undercover investigators to try to find old friends or relatives who might know where Heim was hiding.

  By October 1982, Aedtner appeared to be running out of leads. There were “no additional concrete clues about the suspect and no additional criminal-investigative possibilities in the search,” he wrote in his case report. He began to focus on Ilse Lamprecht, a friend of Heim’s ex-wife. A source told investigators that she received mail from Latin America “presumably from Heim.” The prosecutor’s office in Baden-Baden requested searches of Lamprecht’s mail as well as a phone tap. The court found the surveillance of Lamprecht excessive. It did, however, allow the tapping of Heim’s ex-wife’s phone.

  Three months later Aedtner conceded that his health was so poor he could no longer continue working full-time. He put in for retirement. His colleagues began to plan a farewell party. The invitation had an illustration of Aedtner in profile and a ship plowing through the sea. A colleague had written a few rhyming lines, comparing the hunt for Nazi
fugitives to a fishing expedition: “For the catch the old captain no longer sails out. In the future he’ll stay there at home in his house … He did so very much for our land, even Wiesenthal gave him his hand.”

  On April 29, 1983, the cantina at state police headquarters was decked out like a restaurant, with white tablecloths, red napkins, and flowers on every table. They even hired a pianist. The guest of honor received bouquets and books. His son came, along with friends and colleagues from Munich and Berlin. Aedtner’s predecessor and mentor, Robert Waida, gave a speech, surprisingly somber for the occasion, asking whether too many perpetrators like Aribert Heim had gotten away. “I have the feeling,” Waida said, “that we went wrong somewhere.”

  Wiesenthal, who was unable to attend, telegraphed congratulations. He was sorry he could not be there, but he had already booked a trip to the United States. Perhaps the old Nazi hunter knew what the rest of them did not. Aedtner might have put in for his pension, but he would not be able to quit the search for Heim. Without work to fill his days, Aedtner followed the local daily newspaper, watched the evening news, and kept up with the hardbound volumes of the Reader’s Digest book club. But after little more than a year he was back at the central office, following up leads about Heim.

  CHAPTER 46

  Losing the rent money from his apartment building meant that Heim needed to economize, but the move to Port Said Street also meant greater safety. The farther away from downtown he moved, the fewer westerners he would see, reducing the chance of discovery. The Egyptians in the Kasr el-Madina Hotel noticed how the tall foreigner lived a much simpler life than most other Europeans. His small room at the hotel cost him only 7 Egyptian pounds a night.