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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  It still seemed worthwhile to continue his investigation in Spain while he was there, but the detective’s run of bad luck continued. There was a strike by ground personnel at the nearest airport. “Given that, I decided to break things off there and fly back” as soon as he could, Aedtner wrote. He apologized to Wiesenthal for the delay in getting him the report, but by the time he returned, he had fallen extremely ill. He said that his doctor chalked it up to the hot temperature in Spain. There was no mention of his worsening diabetes.

  Wiesenthal wished him a speedy recovery and said that he hoped Aedtner had received the check for 3,800 deutsche marks he had sent to cover the costs of the trip. Wiesenthal promised to work with Mazin to learn more about “this ominous Dr. Umberto Hahn,” adding, however, “the fact that he returned to Europe from Brazil in 1947 speaks against a Nazi past.” In the meantime, he would also do what he could to learn more about El Europeo.

  Since Aedtner had formally left the police force, the relationship between the two men had grown even warmer. In the cover letter to his report on the “Spanish holiday,” Aedtner said how much he hoped “for you personally” that Wiesenthal had enjoyed good weather and “beautiful and restful vacation days” on his own holiday.

  But there was a valedictory note in Wiesenthal’s response, as if the latest bout of illness and Aedtner’s decision to break off his investigations early and return home signaled the beginning of the end of their years-long partnership. “I want to send you particularly heartfelt thanks for your total commitment to this matter—and with it to justice,” Wiesenthal wrote. “I say that also as a former inmate of Mauthausen whose comrades Dr. Heim killed.”

  That September, Wiesenthal asked Aedtner for his help in obtaining Heim’s file from the Berlin Document Center. More than a month later, Aedtner had to admit that as a pensioned detective he no longer had access to such records. He could usually get a hold of them through his close friend Detective Faller, but Faller had been away for weeks on vacation followed by a business trip to Heidelberg.

  Aedtner also thanked Wiesenthal for his “generous help” in another project he had undertaken, working at the federal archive in Ludwigsburg. With Wiesenthal’s financial support, the detective had turned his hand from police work to history. He was beginning his transition from hunting Nazis to preserving the memory of their crimes.

  On May 31, 1985, West German police searched the home of the Mengele family confidant Hans Sedlmeier. In the past he had been warned about their visits, giving him enough time to hide anything about Mengele’s location, but this time the federal police appeared without warning. During their search they found addresses in São Paulo they suspected had a connection to Mengele.

  Brazilian police responded quickly, but instead of finding a Nazi doctor in hiding, they discovered Mengele’s grave. The highest-profile Nazi fugitive since Adolf Eichmann, Dr. Josef Mengele had drowned on February 7, 1979. Investigators quickly zeroed in on his final resting place and invited reporters along for the very public disinterment. Authors Gerald Posner and John Ware described the scene:

  For nearly an hour three gravediggers with picks and shovels burrowed four feet down before they struck the coffin. Its top was stuck, and the police ordered one of the gravediggers to smash it open. His pick shattered the wooden lid, revealing shreds of clothing and mud-colored bones. Mengele’s arms had been placed at his side, the traditional burial pose for SS men, instead of with hands crossed over the breast, as is the Brazilian custom. Bending down over the open grave, Dr. Jose Antonio de Mello, assistant director of the police forensic laboratory, picked up the skull, then held it high for what surely was one of the world’s most grisly photographs.

  The five years between Mengele’s death and its revelation embarrassed those Nazi hunters who claimed to know where he was hiding. Wiesenthal had made numerous far-fetched pronouncements about the doctor’s whereabouts while the war criminal was still alive, at one point placing him on a yacht anchored off a Greek island and another time putting him in a Mercedes with armed guards in Paraguay. More problematic were Wiesenthal’s sightings of the doctor after he was dead. On Israeli television the Nazi hunter had confidently stated on December 27, 1980, that Mengele had been spotted in Río Negro, Uruguay, nine weeks earlier. “I think he is contemplating suicide, or has decided to give himself up to a West German Embassy,” Wiesenthal had said. At that time Mengele had been dead for nearly two years.

  Wiesenthal remained defiant, questioning the legitimacy of the trail that led to Brazil. “This is Mengele’s seventh death,” he said on ABC’s Nightline news program. “On one of these occasions, we found the body of a woman. If Mengele really died, then the whole world would have been informed five minutes after, not five years.” But as dental records and later DNA tests would prove, it was Josef Mengele.

  The Nazi doctor was the inspiration for the villains in the films Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil, but the humdrum reality of his final years was nothing like the superhuman Nazi of popular imagination. A flood of Mengele’s writings were published, and his life after escaping postwar Germany to South America hardly conformed to the tales of powerful organizations of former Nazis bent on world domination. Mengele was not engaged in the biological engineering of an Aryan superrace or plotting the return of a Fourth Reich. He was supported in part by his wealthy family and lived with a series of Nazi sympathizers, frequently bickering with his hosts and often miserable.

  Among the people following the explosion of publicity surrounding Mengele’s death was Aribert Heim. The public disinterment, the photographs, the trophy held up for the world press—it was a fate the Mauthausen doctor dearly hoped to avoid.

  CHAPTER 49

  The black letters X and Y met in the middle of the television screen. The words “Search,” “Investigation,” and “Prevention” were quickly superimposed one after another. Eduard Zimmermann, host of the popular crime show Aktenzeichen XY … Ungelöst, welcomed viewers to the first episode of the show’s 1986 season. Already in its eighteenth year, the show remained a hit, with a simple format that has been copied by programs like America’s Most Wanted.

  Zimmermann told the audience that a criminal had been arrested not just as a result of the last episode but literally while it was still on the air. With the help of studios and hotlines in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, Zimmermann brought the viewer an hour’s worth of reenactments of murders and robberies. Typewriters and ringing telephones in the background at the studio signaled that it was work as much as entertainment. As Zimmermann began to introduce case number 7, the words “LKA Stuttgart” and the telephone number (0711) 5 06 01 appeared on the screen. This case dealt not with the recent past but with wartime history.

  “The grand jury in Baden-Baden, ladies and gentlemen, is pursuing a case of multiple homicides against a man who disappeared twenty-three years ago. The crimes he stands accused of go back even further, more than forty years,” Zimmermann said. “The state police in Stuttgart are responsible for the search for the accused fugitive. The man they are looking for is named Dr. Aribert Heim.” The photograph of Heim in his tuxedo appeared on the screen. As Aedtner had written to Wiesenthal several years earlier, they were running out of ways to search for Heim. Aedtner’s successors turned to television to appeal to the public for assistance. The Justice Ministry of Baden-Württemberg had agreed to double the reward for Heim to 30,000 deutsche marks in time for the program’s broadcast.

  The previous fall the prosecutors in Baden-Baden had written to Zimmermann. “The accused Dr. Heim managed to escape arrest in the year 1962; it is clearly the case that he is still alive, and the most firmly supported clues available to us point to the assumption that he is currently in Germany or Austria,” read the letter. “The grand jury, the district attorney, and the prosecutors’ office in Baden-Baden see a search within the framework of the program as the last chance to arrest the accused.”

  Investigators hoped that even if the viewers were u
nable to point the finger at Heim’s hiding place, the pressure created by the popular program featuring his case would provoke either a call from him to his wiretapped family or a discussion between other family members about whether he was safe in hiding. Detective Faller, handling the matter now that his former colleague Aedtner had retired, had based his request for continuous wiretaps on an anonymous tip from a source in the town of Gaggenau—the same city where Aedtner lived.

  Zimmermann gave a description of Heim’s crimes at Mauthausen, before telling the audience how the former Nazi doctor had settled in Baden-Baden to work as a gynecologist. “After his past became public, he fled just before his arrest. The state police in Stuttgart have multiple recent signs that he is still alive, but they have not been able to discover his location.” He described the fugitive as seventy-one years old, six feet three, possibly speaking with an Austrian accent. “Tips please to the state police in Stuttgart,” Zimmermann concluded, before turning his attention to another bank robbery.

  Plenty of people phoned in after the program, but none of their tips led to an arrest. Heim remained safely in hiding. The police knew they were running out of chances to find him.

  After the discovery of Mengele’s body, Simon Wiesenthal suffered a number of other setbacks. His image had been further tarnished over a scandal involving the former United Nations secretary-general and Austria’s then president, Kurt Waldheim. Wiesenthal appeared to have supported Waldheim when he lied about his wartime service in areas where Jews were being deported to the camps. At the very least he had been slow to condemn the Austrian politician. The New York–based World Jewish Congress led the campaign against Waldheim. At one point officials there even referred to the Nazi hunter as “Sleazenthal” in an internal memo.

  The most severe blow came when he was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize. The bad publicity over Waldheim probably hurt his chances, and his long-simmering feud with the writer and fellow survivor Elie Wiesel could not have helped. Both had worked to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, one through literature and the other through prosecution. Wiesenthal’s supporters hoped the two men might share the award, but the two Jews disagreed on how much emphasis should be placed on gentile victims at the concentration camps. Wiesenthal argued for a more inclusive position, Wiesel for emphasizing the uniqueness of the Nazi effort to extinguish the Jews. Wiesenthal hurt the chances that they would share the award when he called Wiesel “a superchauvinist.” On October 15, 1986, it was announced that Wiesel would receive the award alone. Wiesenthal was crushed.

  In the meantime, what little control he might have exercised over the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which bore his name but operated independently, seemed to have slipped away. He often found himself at odds with the center’s leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier. In addition, the donations to his documentation center in Vienna had fallen off significantly. Supporters wrote checks to the center in Los Angeles assuming that they were supporting Wiesenthal, but that was not the case. To prevent a damaging public rift, Hier basically kept the world-famous Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter on a comfortable but not rich allowance.

  It provided Wiesenthal with enough money to play the role of benefactor to Aedtner. His support had proven crucial to getting the detective’s historical project off the ground: Aedtner had cataloged thousands of files from the state police investigations of Nazi war crimes into a historical archive for future generations. Aedtner realized that if nothing were done, the files would eventually be thrown out. But in this case, their work included significant primary research into the crimes of the Holocaust, including interviews with perpetrators, witnesses, and survivors. Aedtner received permission to work with an assistant at the State Archive in Ludwigsburg preparing the collection. After the initial support from Wiesenthal, Aedtner managed to secure public funds to continue the project.

  The catalog, composed of index cards, written by hand in the neat script of Aedtner’s assistant, constituted a frank record of humiliation, torture, and mass murder. Under the heading “Particular Cruelty” was the synagogue in Bialystok, Poland, that the Nazis set on fire with some two thousand men, women, and children inside. Members of Police Battalion 309 shot those who tried to escape. A similar scene served as the opening sequence of the Holocaust miniseries.

  Every card was like a window into the cruel and complicated Nazi world. A man named Jakob Gorzelezyk was listed as “Jew and inmate at KL-Auschwitz, earlier trainer and sparring partner of German boxing world champion Max Schmeling.” German women in Konstanz who slept with Polish men had their heads shaved and were forced to parade through the streets wearing signs that said, “I am a Pole’s whore.” It was recommended that the Polish men in question be executed, though “milder suggestions” were possible under the law.

  CHAPTER 50

  Freed from the discretion required by his job as a detective, Aedtner now made public appearances, earning some measure of attention. He published a lengthy article in Der Spiegel about his efforts against the members of Police Battalion 322, responsible for the deaths of more than ten thousand people. Called “Shot to Death on the Spot,” the article focused on the impediments he and the other investigators faced trying to bring the killers to justice. In spite of well-documented evidence, most of them went unpunished.

  A camera crew filmed Aedtner for a documentary aired on German television about his career titled Alfred Aedtner: A German Fate. To the sound of lugubrious horn music Aedtner can be seen shuffling to the archive, graffiti sprayed on the front door of the building, the paint on the halls inside peeling. Aedtner puffs away at his cigarette, his mustache turning down at the corners of his mouth in a constant scowl.

  The film commended his work and dedication but, like Aedtner’s own article in Der Spiegel, in the context of “bitter experiences.” The filmmaker, Yoash Tatari, focused not on how many perpetrators were caught but on the greater number who went free. Too few investigators, too little support, cases sabotaged—it was a litany of futility. The filmmaker visited the state police office in Stuttgart. No one would speak to him on camera. They did show him around and let him film as they flipped through a few files for his benefit. There, in a thick binder, is a glimpse of Heim’s photograph and the set of fingerprints Aedtner acquired from the Americans.

  The documentary made the retired detective appear uncomfortable. That might have been because he was called into the headquarters in Stuttgart before Tatari recorded his interviews. The implication in the film was that he had been warned not to speak out of turn. Even in spite of the circumstances it was apparent that he did not have Wiesenthal’s natural poise in front of a camera or an audience or his talent for spinning yarns. Despite the recent bad publicity, Wiesenthal had lost none of his flair for self-promotion, and another film about him was in the works.

  HBO had paid him $350,000 for the right to produce his life story. Unsatisfied with Sir Laurence Olivier’s portrayal in The Boys from Brazil, Wiesenthal insisted on having a say in casting the actor who would play him, finally agreeing to Ben Kingsley, who had won the Academy Award for Gandhi. It was more than just charisma that made Wiesenthal so captivating. He knew how to place hope above despair; death played an important role in his narrative, but it was always followed by rebirth. It helped make him a popular lecturer and author. He was not just a reminder of the Holocaust but an inspirational success story.

  Aedtner’s largest audiences were composed of small historical societies and students. He lectured to them, bringing along 8-millimeter film reels of mass executions. Had it changed him? the filmmaker asked. “Of course it changed me,” Aedtner answered. “You never get away from something like this.” His voice was raspy from the cigarettes, and his war-damaged eye sometimes strayed. “You stand before such an abyss with total incomprehension,” he said. “All the things a human being can be, on the outside once again a person no one believes could harm anyone, who shoots defenseless old men, women, even infants.”

  H
is assistant at the archive confided to Aedtner’s wife that he did not seem to have the energy for his work there. “Your husband is declining. By noon every day he’s asleep on the table,” she said. The documentary ended with Aedtner preparing a finished file for the archives. First he stamped a brown folder with the abbreviation for the state police in Baden-Württemberg, “LKA BW,” and the words “Investigative File NS Violent Crimes.” He stacked the papers neatly inside, closed the folder, then took a length of white ribbon, tied it into a neat package, and cut the cord.

  Around this time memorials were springing up all over West Germany, some built by Jewish groups, others by local governments or groups of German citizens. The West Berlin neighborhood of Moabit built a monument on the site of the demolished Levetzowstrasse synagogue. It was dedicated on November 14, 1988. There was a large statue that depicted a giant ramp and railway car in memory of the synagogue’s use as a gathering point for transports to the concentration camps. There was also a plaque dedicated to the city’s synagogues, which had been damaged or destroyed on Kristallnacht.

  Around the corner from the memorial was the apartment building at Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28 that had financed Dr. Aribert Heim’s life in hiding. The public paid little attention to the building once it was clear the rent money no longer abetted the Nazi doctor’s flight. Heim’s lawyer lost his appeal at the end of 1979. But behind the scenes the bureaucratic infighting between the authorities in West Berlin and those in Baden-Baden over who should be handling the Heim case and which office should receive compensation went on for more than eight years.