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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  While the bickering between jurisdictions delayed the sale, the real-estate market did not remain frozen. The price of property in the city rose considerably. When West Berlin finally auctioned off the apartment building to pay Heim’s fine, the sale price was 1,710,000 deutsche marks, compared with the city building authority’s 1979 estimate of 510,000 marks. But the authorities could legally only take the amount of the fine. The remaining funds still belonged to Aribert Heim, though as a fugitive he was not allowed to touch them. Instead, the fortune of nearly 1.2 million deutsche marks sat in an account at the Landesbank Berlin.

  CHAPTER 51

  Rüdiger Heim flew to Cairo in the spring of 1990 with 20,000 deutsche marks in a wad of 100- and 500-mark bills stuffed into the front pocket of his jeans. Aunt Herta’s message had been urgent. Travel to Egypt and bring money. His father was in the hospital and it was serious.

  By 1990, Rüdiger had moved from Denmark to Avignon, France, where he and Tano Pisano had opened another restaurant, this time as partners. Though the restaurant was a success, they gave it up after a couple of years, and from that point on Rüdiger led a wandering existence, migrating at irregular intervals between Germany, France, and Spain, where Pisano had settled to rededicate himself full-time to his art. While his best friend had found a new career, Rüdiger felt adrift.

  In some ways he felt as if he were leading a double life. In Germany he was the dutiful son, taking over the management of the family real-estate holdings from his mother. In Spain, by his own admission, he had “dedicated myself rather extravagantly to the nightlife,” going out to the nightclubs, having affairs with women, and shooting photographs, without focus, direction, or commitment, “idling in neutral.” Once or twice a month he would call his father in Egypt from a pay phone, just to see how he was doing.

  But after a conversation with Khafagy, the business associate, Rüdiger knew he had to make the trip quickly. His father had just been operated on, and there was some kind of problem. Rüdiger could not find out the exact diagnosis. He had the impression that Khafagy was trying to make things sound better than they actually were.

  The money that he took with him was his own. While a substantial sum, 20,000 deutsche marks was “not an amount that one would have to make an extra big deal to fund,” he said. Nor was it as suspicious in those days to take out large quantities of cash. He was not searched either departing Europe or landing in Egypt.

  When he arrived in Cairo, he went as usual to the Scarabee Hotel. Once there he contacted Khafagy, and the following morning they drove to Misr International Hospital in the neighborhood of Dokki. “Thank God everything went well,” Khafagy said on their way to the leafy side street near the Nile. Rüdiger still could not get a straight answer about the diagnosis.

  His father was awake when he entered the room. More than a week had passed since his surgery. The complications had left him in the intensive care unit, but he did not talk about his health problems. He greeted his son warmly, then stood up so that they could walk up and down the hallway together. Heim pointed out the window to a new high-rise going up on the Nile and suggested Rüdiger purchase an apartment there. Egypt, his father reminded him, was a wonderful country, where one could live very well. Rüdiger could buy the place and come for a month or so each year, then rent it out the rest of the time.

  It was not until they spoke with a doctor that Rüdiger learned that his father had a cancerous tumor in his rectum. The cancer was already in an advanced stage when it was detected, and it was doubtful that the surgeons had been able to remove all the malignant cells. The seventy-six-year-old Heim had suffered heart complications during the surgery, which was why he was in intensive care. Although he was still wearing a colostomy bag, he would be going home soon. In the coming weeks and months he would need chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Given the grim forecast, Rüdiger decided to stay and help his father through his illness.

  Rüdiger had helped nurse his grandmother when she was dying. Caring for his father gave him the sense of direction he lacked in Spain, where he “lived more during the night than the day” and essentially without responsibility.

  He cooked whatever he could easily whip together from ingredients he found at the market. His time working in restaurants came in handy. Making the best of the single gas burner, Rüdiger purchased a two-tiered metal pot that allowed him to make couscous or rice on top while stewing meats and vegetables underneath. He took his father’s clothes to the dry cleaner and picked up medicine from the pharmacy. All the while Rüdiger pretended he was from Switzerland.

  When Heim had a doctor’s appointment, they took the subway. Rüdiger once made the mistake of boarding the first car on the train, the one reserved for women. He quickly realized his mistake, but police in black uniforms came running after him yelling. Father and son tried to argue their case to the police, who would not listen. The punishment would have been no more than a small fine, but they feared the attention would reveal Heim’s identity. A couple of Cairo residents solved the problem by pulling the two foreigners into the train’s second car just as the automatic doors were about to slam shut. The flummoxed policemen were stuck outside watching the train pull away.

  At home Rüdiger tried to make his father comfortable. He bought an electric fan, but it only seemed to swirl the hot air. He would then sprinkle water on the balcony to try to lower the temperature through evaporation. He was there in the summer when it was so hot the asphalt was practically melting. At one point Rüdiger noticed that near the market there was a stand selling “measly roses in little earthenware jars.” He bought a rosebush along with a small green plant and watered and kept them on the balcony to the joy of the children next door.

  Something had changed since his father’s surgery. The subject of the trial, which had dominated Rüdiger’s previous visit, was largely ignored. Heim described how he felt about not being allowed to practice medicine. He added that the rumor he had worked as a police doctor in Egypt was false. Egyptian universities trained more doctors than could find jobs. At one point he had discussed moving to Libya to work at a clinic there run by a German doctor, but nothing came of it.

  Heim had also grown more relaxed about Rüdiger’s failure to finish his studies. “Too bad you didn’t become a doctor,” he told his son, “but at the end of the day it doesn’t really make a difference.” Rüdiger began to believe that his father wanted a normal and satisfying life for him, and whether he became a doctor or a carpenter was unimportant. Heim related an anecdote from his youth. A friend, the son of an aristocrat, was forced to live in a certain style while the rest of the boys could frolic about as they wished. Heim had felt sorry for him because he was so isolated.

  Father and son still played with the children in the evenings, and Rüdiger often bought them sweets as his father once had. Heim explained how their father had passed away the year before and that he was trying to support the children however he could. Mahmoud Doma was now eighteen years old, and Heim said he understood what the young man was going through. His own father had died when he was just fifteen. He did not try to spare the teenager’s feelings with false reassurance but spoke to him like an adult. “So it is,” Uncle Tarek told him. “We all die.” He was there at the burial and said the prayer of the dead for his Egyptian friend. Afterward he had taken Mahmoud to the beach in Alexandria.

  Heim told his son how after his own father had been orphaned, his inheritance had been stolen by his great-uncle. As a result Josef Ferdinand Heim could not even afford to go to university, and although he eventually rose high enough in the ranks of the gendarmerie to lead the police in the provincial capital of Radkersburg, his progress beyond the provinces was halted by his lack of education. Rüdiger realized that this was why his own father had pressed his children to finish their education.

  By 1990, Heim’s remaining assets had dwindled. He lost the rent money first from Berlin and then from the apartment in Alexandria, which a business associate said had been
condemned but Heim suspected had been stolen. Worse still, he lost his property in Agamy Beach. His associate in that deal, Rifat, claimed that they had been too slow to develop the land and a rich, politically connected businessman had begun building on the site and there was nothing they could do. As a result of Rifat’s actions, Heim accused him in an angry letter, “I became in the last days of my life a beggar.”

  Heim feared he had been betrayed, his investments slowly taken by confidants as his strength faded. As a fugitive Nazi, he could hardly take Egyptians to court. His partners might have been counting on exactly that. The loss of the beachside property especially stung. Heim had drawn floor plan after floor plan for the layout of the apartments he had wanted to leave to his sons. It was almost all that he could bequeath to them. He was unaware of the 1.2 million deutsche marks accruing interest in the Landesbank Berlin. Khafagy continued to bring money from the Karnak Hotel for the time being, and their relationship persisted.

  At least the World Cup was a pleasant distraction. The West Germans were playing in the tournament for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They won the world championship just a few months before East and West Germany would formally reunify. But Rüdiger noticed that his father was even more excited about the team from Cameroon becoming the first African country ever to reach the quarterfinals.

  For the first time Rüdiger considered taking his father’s advice and staying in Egypt. He had no restaurant in Copenhagen or Avignon calling him back, no wife or children waiting for him in Europe. But history intervened when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. There was talk of war everywhere. The Americans were building up forces in Saudi Arabia, and there was fear in Egypt that as an American ally missiles would be fired against it. With conditions in the Middle East so uncertain, Rüdiger Heim boarded a plane and returned to Europe.

  CHAPTER 52

  The first word that Aribert Heim had died came in the form of an unsolicited letter to Simon Wiesenthal. In February 1994, a Viennese doctor, Robert Braun, told the Nazi hunter he believed he could save him a little bit of time by striking one name off his list of war criminals. Aribert Heim was dead.

  Braun and Heim had become friends at university, where they played sports together. Heim later helped Braun get a job on the medical staff at the Eissport Klub Engelmann, where Heim played ice hockey. According to Braun, Heim was not put off by the fact that Braun was half-Jewish, even inviting him home to Radkersburg to stay with his family during one school vacation. They lost track of each other after the Anschluss. The Brauns were occupied with their struggle to survive. Robert did not hear from his friend and knew nothing about the alleged war crimes.

  Decades later, in 1979, he received a letter from Heim’s family asking for testimony that the doctor was not anti-Semitic. “I didn’t think he could hurt a fly,” Braun wrote to Wiesenthal. “Thus one can make mistakes.” In the meantime, Braun learned that Heim had died from cancer. He did not say how he had learned it, but added, “I do not doubt that you can close this case and share completely your regret, that this offender was not brought before any court.”

  For all that the world had changed since Heim fled Germany, the fascination with Nazi crimes showed little sign of abating. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened to great fanfare in Washington, D.C. That same year Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List, which played to huge audiences worldwide and swept the Academy Awards in 1994. The German government was planning to build a national Holocaust monument in Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

  In October 1996, a documentary about Nazi physicians called Doctors Without Consciences aired on German television, once again featuring Aribert Heim. An employee of the Landesbank Berlin who had seen the show told the police that Dr. Heim had an account at his bank totaling millions of deutsche marks. The tipster did not want to break any privacy laws but hoped it might help the investigation and earn him reward money. After several inquiries investigators realized it was the account set up after the sale of Heim’s apartment building with the more than 1 million deutsche marks left over after the fine. As long as Heim was on the run, he could not touch it. As long as he was alive, neither could his heirs.

  In Vienna, Wiesenthal was still pursuing Nazis from the cluttered confines of his documentation center. In 1992 he had watched with great satisfaction as the former SS officer Josef Schwammberger, who had been arrested in Argentina, was extradited to Germany. Schwammberger was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In the meantime, Heim’s case remained dormant, not closed, but not exactly active either.

  Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, governments around the world stepped up enforcement against suspicious money transfers. They weren’t looking for elderly Nazis in hiding but attempting to identify irregular patterns of financial activity that might turn up terrorist financing. Indeed, employees at Western Union in Germany noticed an unusual pattern of money transfers had taken place between October 11, 2002, and August 18, 2003. Over that period of less than a year, a man named Rüdiger Heim had sent 88,147 euros from Germany to Spain. The sums were all between 950 and 2,500 euros and always to one of two people, Gaetano Pisano or Blandine Pellet, both of whom lived on the Costa Brava. In March 2004, Western Union informed the German authorities about the suspicious transactions.

  Investigators quickly realized the information had nothing to do with terrorism. Rüdiger Heim was the younger son of the fugitive Aribert Heim. More than forty years after Heim’s disappearance, here was a new impetus to pursue the case. Alfred Aedtner was now in a nursing home, and the case was given to the manhunt unit. Founded in 1996 “for the seizure of fugitive serious criminals,” the group was made up of volunteers who were prepared to spend long hours at work and willing to travel abroad. The unit was not concerned with proving Heim guilty. It only cared about the capture.

  The members of the unit started over from the beginning, going carefully through the more than forty binders of material on Heim, most of it gathered during Alfred Aedtner’s time on the case. Tips still continued to come in and were duly checked out. A great deal of effort had gone into alleged sightings in Uruguay. A former police officer in Wisconsin was certain that he had located Heim in Milwaukee. Dr. Robert Braun of Vienna claimed to have information that Heim had died in 1992, and he had been questioned several times. Unfortunately, with each interview the ninety-four-year-old Braun seemed less certain. They weren’t sure whether he was just a confused old man or if he was protecting his old friend.

  The investigators were now able to look for Heim in East Germany and found that the Stasi had kept a file on him. It had even spied on West German efforts to locate the fugitive, including a detailed report on the failure of investigators to follow Rüdiger and Friedl on a Swiss vacation. But the Stasi’s investigations had also proved fruitless.

  The manhunt team focused on the money at the Landesbank. If Heim were dead, the family could claim the fortune that had grown to nearly 1 million euros. The fact that the money was still there was “a very strong indication that he is still alive,” said one of the policemen. Meanwhile, the investigators uncovered even more transfers than the initial Western Union report had indicated. Including direct transfers from his own bank account, Rüdiger had sent 289,617.71 euros to Pisano and Pellet between January 2000 and December 2004 and was continuing to send roughly 3,000 to 4,000 euros a month.

  Herta, who had forwarded the receipts from the Berlin apartment building to her brother, had passed away in 1997. It appeared that Rüdiger had taken up the responsibility of supporting his father. The investigators suspected Pisano and Pellet of working as his accomplices. Friedl Heim had sent packages to Pisano back in the late 1970s. According to the French National Police, Rüdiger and Pisano had lived together in Avignon. They had a bar on rue Carreterie until around 1990. When Rüdiger returned to Germany, Pisano moved to a home near the Spanish coast with Pellet, a French national. Together th
ey operated an arts and decoration store.

  The investigators needed outside help to locate and apprehend Heim. The logical choice would have been Simon Wiesenthal, but he had retired the year before. “My job is done,” Wiesenthal said in an interview with the Austrian magazine Format in April 2003. “I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived all of them.” Wiesenthal, now ninety-four, concluded, “Those whom I didn’t look for are too old and sick today to be pursued legally.”

  Fortunately for the manhunt unit, Wiesenthal had an heir apparent in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He was already working on his own initiative to apprehend aging Nazis, a project named Operation Last Chance. In late 2004, the Baden-Württemberg state police asked Zuroff for his help in finding Heim.

  Efraim Zuroff had been named after his grandfather’s brother who was murdered during the war. Yet the Holocaust was not a big part of his upbringing in 1950s America. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, he was far removed from the deprivation of postwar Europe. Efraim Zuroff dreamed of becoming the first Orthodox Jew to play in the National Basketball Association, though given his highly educated and highly religious family, it was more likely that he would become a rabbi. He was born after World War II, in 1948. In any event he had scant knowledge of the Holocaust.

  Then, in 1961, his mother made him watch Eichmann’s trial on television. The Nazi was not wearing his SS uniform. Sitting behind bulletproof glass, he looked more like an accountant than a mass murderer. Eichmann’s expression remained impassive as witnesses testified to inconceivable crimes at places like Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.