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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  The floor was tile, with an inexpensive little rug. The walls were painted light green, but the color only went about two-thirds of the way up to the ceiling. The rest was bare, chalky white plaster. He had a steel-frame bed and a simple wardrobe for his clothes. There was a cheap metal office cabinet, a small table, and a single chair, along with an extra stool.

  The kitchen, such as it was, consisted of a tin end table with a single gas burner atop it, not unlike a camping stove. Below was a miniature refrigerator. He owned only two plates and two glasses. The bathroom held just a simple white ceramic washbasin, a plastic mirror, and a toilet, along with dozens of plastic bottles filled with water, a reserve for when the pressure was weak and there was no water that high up in the building. There were no private baths, just a common shower room on each floor for the hotel guests.

  A degree of chaos crept into Heim’s living space simply because the room was so small. Books were piled high wherever there was room, dictionaries and reference books, history books and language studies. Employees at the hotel had never seen so many books, in English, German, and Arabic, including a large copy of the Koran. The foreigner spent a lot of time in his room reading.

  Although he hung some photographs taken on the streets of Cairo, there were no family portraits on the walls. Those he kept in the wardrobe, hidden from view. He had photographs of the family, vacation photographs of his ex-wife and children that his sister sent him. He even paid an Egyptian to make paintings of his Friedl and their sons from some of the photographs. He also had a Grundig shortwave radio so he could hear news broadcasts or enjoy Viennese lieder on Austria’s public radio. He often sat on the balcony facing the street and watched the busy little shopping street across the way.

  Though he told his neighborhood acquaintances he was a businessman, he would often offer minor medical aid. In a sheaf of documents he kept with him in Egypt about Mauthausen, he left a note in the margins that said someone named Ali should take Inderal, a medicine for angina.

  His manners were impeccable, never forgetting the formal greeting of “salaam alaikum.” He played with the hotel proprietor’s children, seeming to love them as if they were his own. He did not talk about where he came from. “You have to respect that there are certain boundaries,” was the way Ali al Hussein Ahmed, a porter at the hotel, saw it. “Not everyone wants to talk about his past.”

  Mahmoud Doma loved growing up in a Cairo hotel as the son of the owner. There was always some new traveler ready to share stories about his native land or a peddler with a suitcase full of whirring toys eager to demonstrate his latest product for the amusement of Mahmoud and his siblings. With its seventy rooms and its location in the heart of old Cairo, the Kasr el-Madina Hotel was usually filled with guests from the Middle East hungry to do business in the bustling city. A few guests called the brown nine-story building home.

  The Palestinian with the big, bushy mustache and ink-black hair on the sixth floor was quiet and kept to himself. He left the hotel in the mornings and came back at night hardly saying a word to anyone, though he lived there for years. The portly money changer everyone called Sheikh Taha on the fifth floor talked to everyone. He sat outside on a little wooden chair in front of the hotel chattering away with the merchants hawking clothes and electronics on the ground floor. But the only one who befriended Mahmoud, who taught him English and gave him books to read, was the Austrian who lived next door to his family on the eighth floor, Tarek Hussein Farid.

  Mahmoud could not remember exactly when he moved in, but it was when the boy was still little, certainly before he turned ten. “When I opened my eyes, he was there,” was how he liked to put it. Mahmoud knew the man he called Amu Tarek, Uncle Tarek, also went by the name Alfred Buediger. He had moved to Egypt because of a problem with his back, which healed in Egypt’s warm, dry climate. Mahmoud also knew his friend had a wife and two sons back home in Germany, but they did not come to visit.

  Unlike Tarek, Mahmoud himself was hardly ever alone. He was one of twenty-five children from his father’s three wives. Mahmoud’s mother and her seven children lived in the hotel. Of her four boys and three girls, he was the eldest, but many of his half siblings also came and went, along with the sixteen staff members and of course the guests. Every day people arrived in Cairo from the countryside hoping to better their circumstances in the capital. Centuries earlier the Nile had flowed down what became Port Said Street, and now the street channeled crowds of men and women along the river’s former path. It was loud and busy, and it smelled of food, garbage, coal fires, and the sickly sweet smell of human sweat. When the Doma children were bored, they went up to the roof. Uncle Tarek had set up a net there where he taught the children to play tennis, badminton, and Ping-Pong.

  Everyone at the hotel laughed in a friendly manner at the foreigner’s devotion to exercise. He was in his late sixties but still very strong, and no one could fathom why he would take the stairs all the way up to the eighth floor when the elevator was right there. “Sport!” he would answer and invite them to join him. He walked everywhere, for miles. He would only take a taxi if he was going as far as Giza. He also visited one of the sporting clubs or the university, where he played squash and tennis, swam, and ran track.

  Mahmoud would tag along with Uncle Tarek when his chores at the hotel allowed and he thought he could keep up. Sometimes they simply went on errands, to buy pens or film for Heim’s camera at the Kodak store. Other times they went to the zoo or even to the pyramids. Uncle Tarek carried his camera with him—he loved to take photographs—but he never wanted to be photographed himself. When he returned from his solitary walks, he would give the children bonbons or Egyptian candies and sit down for a cup of tea with their father. Sometimes he ate with the family.

  In the evening they could often hear him pounding away on his typewriter. He wrote letters all the time, mostly in English and German from what Mahmoud could tell. He tried to teach Mahmoud and the other Doma children European languages. He would say a word in Arabic, then say the same word in English and then in French. Finally, he would write down all three. He gave Mahmoud history texts and detective novels. He bought him a book by the Egyptian writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, in the hopes of inspiring the boy. He wanted the children to study and to be curious about the world around them.

  There was a telephone in the hotel downstairs where he received calls from his own physician and from his Egyptian business associates, Nagy Khafagy and Rifat. Mahmoud was more familiar with Khafagy, who took care of Tarek’s more sensitive paperwork. “Dr. Nagy always extended his residency permit,” Mahmoud said. “Dr. Nagy was responsible for everything that had something to do with the government.” He recalled that Khafagy had power of attorney for bank matters and that he brought Uncle Tarek money from the hotel on Midan Ataba.

  Once in a while Heim’s younger son would call him. “Why don’t your sons come here?” Mahmoud asked. “They are very busy and they don’t like Egypt,” the Austrian answered.

  “I had the impression that he seemed glum,” Mahmoud said. “No one checked up on him. No one showed an interest in him.” Mahmoud thought that there was some kind of tension within the family, but it was clear that Tarek missed them. Once Mahmoud had seen a black-and-white picture of the man’s whole family that he kept hidden in his room.

  Tarek’s Egyptian friends liked to take credit for convincing him to convert to Islam. The Domas recalled how they had bought him a Koran in German at the special German-language bookstore, a holy book that had to be ordered all the way from Saudi Arabia. “When he came to us, he was not a Muslim yet,” said Sharif Doma, one of Mahmoud’s older half brothers. “Then he started a friendship with my father, and this friendship led to them talking about Islam and the Muslim religion.” Not far from the hotel was one of the preeminent mosques in the world. “Any Christian who wants to convert needs to take lessons at the al-Azhar, has to go to al-Azhar,” Sharif said, “and the sheikh at al-Azhar has then to confirm that he is a Mus
lim.”

  The dentist Dr. Rifai said that it was he who brought his friend to the famous mosque to join the faith. “He came across to me as a man who was very interested in Islam, and therefore I took him to the al-Azhar sheikh,” Dr. Rifai said. “There he did his shahada.” On February 16, 1980, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the sixty-five-year-old Austrian appeared before the officials of the great mosque and said that there was “no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet,” as he renounced all other faiths and accepted Islam as his religion. “With that his entry into Islam was complete.”

  The friendly competition to take credit for his decision to convert showed how important it was to the Egyptians that an educated, respected man from the West would not only learn their language but adopt their faith as well. Of great interest to his Muslim friends were the names he selected for himself. “He chose the name Tarek because also my son’s name is Tarek,” said the dentist, who added that Hussein was the name of the imam who oversaw the conversion.

  None of them had considered the possibility that he might have had very different reasons to change his name as well as to convert. “Even his bank account was in his Muslim name,” Sharif Doma said. “All the other people then only called him by his new name, his Muslim name.” Barely two months after the appeal of the Spruchkammer verdict failed, Heim abandoned his birth name for a new Muslim one. The name could be viewed as a relatively good effort at preserving some of the sounds of his German name: with Tarek for Aribert, Farid for Ferdinand, and Hussein for Heim.

  CHAPTER 47

  When Rüdiger Heim returned to Egypt to visit his father again, the ever-practical Heim asked only for razor blades and Faber-Castell pencils. Rüdiger brought exactly what he was told. He was not, however, fully prepared for what awaited him upon their reunion. The two men could no longer avoid the topic of his father’s wartime service and fugitive status as they had during his first visit.

  For hours each day, Rüdiger had to relive his father’s months at Mauthausen. Heim defined the terms of the discussion with his son. They did not talk about the condition of the inmates brought to the infirmary from the stone quarry. They did not discuss how the patients were treated. Heim tried to reinforce the point that he did not want to work at Mauthausen. “That was something he expressed to me unequivocally: that he did everything he could to get out of this concentration camp as quickly as possible,” Rüdiger said. Each day the son dutifully walked from the Scarabee Hotel downtown to listen to hours of lectures on the crimes his father was accused of committing.

  The visit was much more of a shock than his previous trip to Cairo and not just because of the civil case. The city was busier, more crowded. Downtown had fallen into disrepair. The country had become more religious, and the girls in miniskirts were gone. Women in modest clothes and head scarves had replaced them. The religious revival was in part due to the rising tide of migrants from more observant villages. But many young people had simply fled their stagnant economy and found jobs thanks to the oil boom in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. When they returned with petrodollars in their pockets, they often practiced a stricter Wahhabi form of Islam. Rüdiger realized that along with changing his name to Tarek Hussein Farid, his father had converted to Islam. But this also was a subject they did not discuss.

  As in his instructions to Steinacker, Heim talked a great deal about when he was actually at Mauthausen. Witnesses described him working at the camp in 1942 when in reality he left in 1941. Der Spiegel magazine said he had committed his crimes between a special room for shooting prisoners in the neck and the gas chamber, when neither existed in 1941.

  He spoke very specifically about the charge that he had murdered an older inmate. Heim explained that the patient wanted an operation for his hernia but the doctor determined once he began that the man had not only a hernia but also cancer. That was the reason he had taken the intestines out of the abdomen. “If someone comes in at that point who has never seen an operation, he would say, ‘Look, he’s tearing out all his intestines,’ ” he told his son. Rüdiger asked him why he was even there in the first place. His father explained how in order for him to finish his studies, it was necessary for him to enlist in the Waffen-SS. He did not realize that would mean service at concentration camps.

  Eventually, Rüdiger could not take it anymore. “The subject isn’t pretty, and naturally your head is smoking after two, three hours.” His father suggested he spend a week on the Red Sea to recuperate. Rüdiger traveled to Hurghada, where he stayed in a small bungalow on stilts at the edge of the water. He found he could get along quite well on his own and that his few phrases of Arabic were beginning to coalesce into coherent speech. He went for walks and swam. He read extensively about Egypt, which he had not done on his first visit. He enjoyed looking out across the water at the Sinai Peninsula. Upon his return to Cairo, the staff at the Scarabee welcomed him enthusiastically.

  When he was not sorting through his father’s criminal case, Rüdiger would take a few hours to explore Cairo’s markets or eat out by himself. Generally, Mrs. Doma, the hotel owner’s wife, cooked for everyone, making stuffed fish, noodle casseroles, and chicken. She was sturdily built with a friendly laugh. Even though Rüdiger only spoke a bit of Arabic and she just a few words of English, they enjoyed talking. She kept her menagerie of children under control and made sure that all of them received a good education. In turn they tried to teach the visiting young man, whom they knew only as Roy, Arabic script. Games with the children became a nightly ritual. Rüdiger would head back to the Scarabee around 9:00 p.m., smoking one of the cigarettes his father detested.

  But soon he grew weary of Egyptian manners, the need to say hello “ten times,” as he put it, and ask about every family member: “ ‘How is the dog? How is the cat?’ ” He made the mistake of complaining to his father, who told him that he needed to develop “a little more tolerance for the fact that people do things differently here.” Heim said the Europe of the 1980s that his son described had no appeal to him, as a place to live or even to visit.

  After several weeks it was time to say good-bye. Rüdiger left still believing his father was innocent of most of the charges against him. He remembered too how one-sided the trial had seemed, and Heim seemed to have an answer for every allegation. Throughout their discussions his father had been “factual and sober,” Rüdiger said, “not emotional.” Rüdiger remained uncertain about what had taken place at Mauthausen. He did not believe that his father was wholly blameless after working in a concentration camp. But he also could not believe that Aribert Heim was guilty of the atrocities he was alleged to have committed.

  Back in Germany, Rüdiger began trying to help his father. He questioned the state-appointed administrator of the apartment house, which still had not been sold. Heim wanted the building checked out because he suspected that the receiver might have been enriching himself in the process of acting as caretaker. The administrator bluntly told Rüdiger that he was responsible to the district court and not to any relative of Aribert Heim’s.

  Rüdiger refused to contact Gustav Rieger, who, in Heim’s opinion, was one of the key witnesses, if not the key witness, who could prove his innocence. They had worked together daily in the clinic. In his first interview, Rieger claimed he had not seen Heim commit any specific crimes. In his father’s view, Rieger could help more but was afraid. That was why he later changed his testimony. Rüdiger feared that getting in touch with Rieger could constitute witness tampering. The dutiful son discovered, like his aunt Herta, that when he did not like a request from his father, he could simply put off answering it indefinitely.

  CHAPTER 48

  Aedtner had an unconventional notion of the meaning of retirement. In the summer of 1984 he went on what he called his “Spanish holiday,” but he did not take his wife or friends. He went alone, on an assignment for Simon Wiesenthal. With the famous Nazi hunter’s financial backing he departed for Madrid on June 28, Aribert Heim’s birthday, to try to learn m
ore about the man named Umberto Hahn, who was believed to have been a member of the SS. His full name was Umberto Hahn-Stropninsky and he ran a real-estate company in Benidorm called UBAGO and was the chairman or “at the very least a prominent member” of an organization called El Europeo, supposedly made up of former SS officers and their sympathizers. The question was whether Hahn-Stropninsky was in fact Aribert Heim.

  From the very beginning the trip did not go as planned. Aedtner was supposed to make contact with an informant he identified as Karmele Marchante, who worked for a local television show. He waited “in vain” for three hours at the Serrano Hotel, but she never showed up. The next day he drove to her office at Televisión Madrid but was still unable to meet with her. He went to the German embassy, where on a previous trip he had gotten to know the vice-consul. Unfortunately, the diplomat had since been transferred back to Bonn.

  At the train station that same day a man bumped into Aedtner and spilled something on him. The stranger apologized and tried to help clean up the mess as an accomplice took advantage of the diversion and stole Aedtner’s briefcase. Mercifully, the thieves dumped the files he was carrying—a bunch of paperwork in German must have been worthless to them—and the police recovered them. It still must have stung for the retired detective to be conned like a regular tourist.

  The following day he met with another of Wiesenthal’s colleagues, Max Mazin. Mazin had managed to track down the wayward informant Marchante. “She would not or could not—it was not clear to me—give any additional information,” Aedtner wrote to Wiesenthal. She added that she would not be in Madrid in the coming days and had in fact already left for Barcelona. Aedtner would have to rely on Mazin’s help to track down Hahn-Stropninsky and UBAGO. The detective had managed to learn that Hahn-Stropninsky had been living in Brazil and had moved to Benidorm in 1947, at a time when Heim was still in detention. “Based on the available information, I am operating under the assumption that we are not dealing with ‘our Dr. HEIM’ here,” Aedtner wrote.