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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  But the reality of the Nazi effort to exterminate the European Jews did not really sink in for Efraim until the eve of the 1967 war. He was looking at a map in the New York Times about the coming conflict. The map listed the number of troops each Arab army had at its disposal. Zuroff realized that Israel was surrounded and outnumbered. “There’s going to be another Holocaust,” the eighteen-year-old thought.

  Instead, the Israeli military swiftly defeated its opponents in what became known as the Six-Day War, capturing new territory, including the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. As a college student Zuroff spent a year abroad in the young country flush with its triumphs and decided to make his home in Israel.

  Rather than pursuing rabbinical studies, he began graduate school at Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, focusing on the Holocaust. He had gone on to work at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust, before moving with his wife and young children to Los Angeles to work at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Simon Wiesenthal’s first meeting with Zuroff did not go smoothly. Wiesenthal began speaking in German, assuming Zuroff spoke the language, which he did not. “Nicht gut, nicht gut,” the old Nazi hunter said when he learned that he didn’t, “not good, not good.” It was a bumpy start, but Zuroff respected Wiesenthal and dedicated himself to furthering the older man’s work.

  After a few years with the center, Zuroff took a job with the U.S. Justice Department’s newly formed Office of Special Investigations. The work was in Israel, where so many of the historical documents relating to the Nazi genocide were kept and so many of the survivors still lived. Zuroff quickly went from looking for eyewitness accounts to searching for the perpetrators themselves. He became the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s representative in Jerusalem. Zuroff described the job of putting together a Nazi war-crimes investigation as “similar to putting together an extremely large and complicated jigsaw puzzle.”

  In spite of what he called “the aura of adventure and drama” associated with Nazi hunting, the work consisted of “meticulous, detailed research … Yet it is precisely this very prosaic and often monotonous work which yields positive and, at times, spectacular results.”

  Zuroff specialized in the Nazis’ on-site accomplices from countries like Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, and Croatia. Without their local knowledge the extermination of the Jews would not have been nearly as brutally effective. Zuroff put particular emphasis on the collaborators who had fled, not just to the United States, but also to Canada, Britain, and Australia. Wiesenthal liked to say that when he met Holocaust victims in the afterlife, he would tell them, “I did not forget you.” Zuroff made that his mantra.

  Alerted to the bank transfers by Heim’s son, the German manhunt team wanted to know if Zuroff would include Dr. Aribert Heim in the German rollout of Operation Last Chance. On January 26, 2005, Zuroff offered a 140,000-euro reward, nearly $200,000, for information leading to Heim’s capture.

  CHAPTER 53

  In his Gaggenau nursing home, unaware of these developments, Alfred Aedtner was dying. Diabetes ravaged his extremities. First the doctors had to cut off his toes. Then they amputated one of his feet. While he still had one leg, his wife, Lore, had been able to keep him at home and care for him. Once they removed his other leg, the doctor asked if she had anyone to help care for him. When she told the doctor that she was alone, he advised her to put her husband in a nursing home. She sadly but dutifully complied and sat with him every day. The surgeons kept operating, higher and higher up. Why didn’t they just take it all at once and spare him the constant operations? his wife and his son asked. That was against the rules, the doctors answered. Soon it didn’t matter. The patient no longer knew where he was. On the afternoon of April 2, 2005, Alfred Aedtner passed away. He was seventy-nine years old. He died largely in anonymity.

  Two months after Aedtner’s death the president of Austria, Heinz Fischer, appeared at Simon Wiesenthal’s apartment in Vienna to present him with the Gold Medal for Services to the Republic of Austria, one of the highest civilian honors the country could give. The year before, the queen of England had named Wiesenthal knight commander of the Order of the British Empire. There was a growing acknowledgment that the chances to recognize his service while he was still alive were running out. His wife, Cyla, whom he had married in 1936, had died in 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Wiesenthal’s health was finally declining. He died at home on September 20, 2005. He was ninety-six years old. In addition to his daughter, Wiesenthal was survived by three grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, all of whom lived in Israel. His final wish was that he be buried in the Holy Land, and three days later he was laid to rest north of Tel Aviv at a service attended by hundreds of mourners and covered by the international media.

  Around this time investigators went to see Dr. Braun again, to question him about his assertions that Heim was dead. The elderly doctor admitted that it was Heim’s younger sister, the late Herta Barth, who had passed on the news. Under intense questioning he changed his story and said that after her first call, she called back declaring, “Aribert lives!” In their report the investigators wrote their conclusion that “the hint that Dr. Heim was dead was a test of Dr. Braun’s reliability.” They asked for permission to search the old man’s home and tap his phone and were refused.

  But the court said that the Baden-Württemberg state police could once again wiretap the Heim family’s phones. In one conversation Heim’s niece, Birgit, and ex-wife, Friedl, mentioned media reports that the fugitive had been spotted in Austria. “And then it also says that he sat somewhere in Austria having a grand old time,” Friedl told her niece. “And—what does one eat in Austria—and had dumplings or whatever to eat and something to drink.”

  “That must have been in Spiegel,” Birgit answered.

  “Grinning and laughing,” Friedl said. “Could be. I wasn’t there. I mean I don’t want to …”

  “Well, I did not get a card at any rate,” Birgit said, “from the Austrian visit.” The police requested a search warrant for her premises.

  Investigators also overheard Rüdiger and his brother, Christian, discussing the investigative efforts brought to bear on the family. “Die wissen gar nichts,” Rüdiger said of the police. “They don’t know anything.”

  Tano Pisano and his companion Blandine Pellet were preparing to depart from an exhibition in Italy when Rüdiger proposed that they stay a while longer. They told him thanks but no thanks, loaded up their little Fiat Multipla, and started back to the Costa Brava. They spent the night in a small town near the French-Italian border and spoke to Rüdiger again, this time by phone. Once again he suggested, insisted really, that they dally there for a while instead of heading home. Once again they told him they needed to get back.

  As Pellet drove home, they discussed their friend’s strange insistence that they linger in Italy or France. While traveling for the exhibition, they had not kept up with the news. They had not seen the article about a fugitive Nazi hiding in Spain. Even if they had, they would not have connected it to their friend, much less themselves.

  The next morning there was a loud banging at their front door. Pellet answered and found two men waiting outside. They identified themselves as plainclothes police officers and said that she and Pisano had to come to the station. “Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t call anybody. Just come.”

  Two more senior investigators had traveled from Barcelona to question the couple. They kept asking if they had read the article on Heim in the Spanish daily newspaper El Mundo. They said they had not. One of the policemen told them to go outside, buy a paper, and come back. Don’t speak to anyone, just read it. It was a strange way to interrupt an interrogation. When they stepped outside, a photographer started snapping their pictures. It felt like a setup. Once they got a hold of the newspaper, they saw the story about the Nazi war criminal and the Italian man living in Palafrugell who had helped to hide and support him.

/>   “Is this a joke?” Pisano asked.

  In reply, one of the policemen asked if he knew Rüdiger Heim. Pisano answered that he did. “Why is he sending you money?” Pisano explained that Rüdiger was buying a lot of his artwork, acting almost as a patron, and holding the pictures as a guarantee. “I’m sorry, but if your friend is a real friend, he will tell the truth,” said the investigator.

  The police explained that Rüdiger’s father was a wanted Nazi war criminal. Pisano was stunned. He said he thought Rüdiger’s father was dead and insisted that he needed to talk to his friend to clear everything up. With the officer still in front of him, he called his friend at home.

  “It’s me,” Pisano said. “I’m at the police station, and they’re saying here your father is a Nazi.”

  “It is true,” Rüdiger answered. Their conversation ended quickly, although Pisano had many unanswered questions.

  “This is crazy,” he told the police officer. “What do we all have to do with this?”

  They were allowed to leave. The police warned them that the media attention was going to get worse. When they got home, Pisano called Rüdiger again, and the two friends of nearly thirty years fought. Pisano asked him to tell his father to come out and admit he and Pellet had nothing to do with it. Rüdiger said there was nothing he could do. He had not seen his father since he was a little boy and did not know where he was.

  The next day, Pisano picked up the newspaper and saw his face across from Aribert Heim’s with a photograph of Jewish concentration camp victims in between. Soon he realized he was not just in the Spanish press but in papers all over the world. Friends from as far away as South Africa and Australia were calling to ask them if they were hiding a Nazi war criminal. They decided to hold a press conference to declare their innocence. They asked Rüdiger to come, but he did not show up.

  Pisano sat at his computer entering “Gaetano Pisano” into Google. Instead of paintings and ceramics, the search results showed page after page of stories about decapitated concentration camp inmates, the vivisection of living patients on the operating table, and lethal injections of gasoline to the heart. There were articles from Italy, where he was born, from Denmark and France, where he used to live, from Spain, where he had made his home. His exhibitions were canceled, and orders for his artworks slowed dramatically.

  Shortly thereafter officials told Pisano and Pellet that their accounts had checked out. The money sent by Rüdiger Heim had not flowed to his father in hiding but been used for art supplies, food, and gasoline. His name had been cleared. Pisano even had a letter from the government saying as much. But when he entered “Gaetano Pisano” into Google again, the search results still showed page after page of atrocities.

  CHAPTER 54

  Heim’s illegitimate daughter, Waltraut Böser, still lived in Chile, half a world away from her native Austria. She had her husband and now three children. She played tennis and basketball. She had learned to speak Spanish, which came easily to her, as languages always did. Her father was far from her thoughts on the morning in 2006 when she looked at the newspaper and finally saw a picture of the man she had spent years hoping to catch a glimpse of and believed was dead. Aribert Heim’s photograph was in the newspaper sitting on her kitchen table. He might be alive. Then she read about his alleged crimes and began to feel dizzy and sick.

  “Why did your mother never tell you about him?” her husband wanted to know. Gertrud had since passed away. Waltraut tried to remember everything her mother had told her about her father. She had been told nothing of this catalog of atrocities. Still, many of her talents had been inherited from him, her love of sports, her interest in medicine, her ability at languages. She spoke not only German and Spanish but also French and English and a smattering of Italian and Russian, and she was now trying to learn the Chilean Indian language of Mapuche, the local language of where she spent her summers. If the newspapers were right, all the qualities her father bequeathed to her had come from a sadistic killer.

  Reporters and photographers spent days on her front lawn. For five nights she could not sleep. Her father had not died in the war. He had been alive and could have visited her the way that her brother’s father visited him. She had missed knowing the man the newspapers described as a war criminal. And she was accused of hiding him.

  The manhunt unit was not prepared to dismiss a possible connection between Heim and his illegitimate daughter as Aedtner had. Her presence in Latin America fit the pattern of other high-profile fugitives. Like Brazil and Argentina, Chile had its own past with Nazis. Most notably, the country had provided refuge to Walther Rauff, who had designed mobile gas vans used for executions. After immigrating to Latin America, he had worked as an agent of the West German intelligence service—even though the spy service was aware of his past. Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld had both pressed unsuccessfully for Rauff’s extradition. In 1984 he died of natural causes in Santiago.

  The refusal to extradite Rauff “was always in the back of my mind,” said Efraim Zuroff. Learning of Waltraut’s residence in Chile, he decided to launch a version of Operation Last Chance there. The presence of Heim’s illegitimate daughter tantalized him. He believed she was “the key to the mystery, the person who would lead us to the fugitive.” The problem was that “this fugitive happened to be her father.”

  Zuroff had an informant he called Juan B. who said that he had bumped into Böser’s husband carrying bags of groceries to an old relative living on the island of Chiloé, south of Puerto Montt. The informant stated that Böser’s husband did not have any elderly relations living on the island, raising Zuroff’s suspicion that the groceries were intended for Heim.

  He organized a press conference complete with a wanted poster of the fugitive. The reward for information leading to his capture had risen to just under half a million dollars. Zuroff had raised the profile and the urgency of the hunt for Heim significantly in 2008 by declaring him the most wanted Nazi war criminal in the world. The Holocaust organizers and death camp commandants were dead, as were most of those old enough to have occupied leadership positions in the Third Reich. More than six decades after the war, Heim had risen from obscurity to the top of the list.

  Zuroff went “with several journalists to the home of [Waltraut] Böser, for what would basically be a staged encounter for the benefit of the media.” A German shepherd was barking behind the gate. The group arrived “in a driving thunderstorm,” according to the Newsweek correspondent Joe Contreras, who was traveling with Zuroff. The Nazi hunter asked the reporters to try the front door to see if anyone was in. “A visibly nervous man in a white beard and green ski parka [opened] the door a crack” and told the reporters that Böser and her husband were out of town. Zuroff was not so sure. Smoke billowed from the chimney, and two cars belonging to the owners of the house were parked outside the home. It was “astonishing behavior on the part of people who claimed to have done nothing wrong. We left the scene with the disappointed journalists in tow.”

  As Zuroff suspected, Waltraut was doing her best to avoid the reporters. Off and on for two years now, cameramen, photographers, and reporters had waited outside her house, called at all hours, followed her, and, most disconcerting, followed her children. Earlier that year she had been driving in a neighborhood she described as “not exactly the safest” when she turned her car around in a cul-de-sac. An unfamiliar vehicle that had been following her came to a halt in front of her car, blocking her in. It was a television crew filming a documentary.

  When the documentary aired on German television, the footage showed Böser’s Volvo turning in to a side street as the narrator explained that the crew hoped she would lead them to Heim, “if we only observe her long enough.” When she stopped her car, a man with a camera rushed up to her and began questioning her.

  “You can follow me forever,” Böser told the reporter. “You’ll never find my father, because I don’t know him.”

  The reporter continued to interview her through the
window of her car, a blurry rectangle placed over her eyes in postproduction to give her a small measure of anonymity. Her face was round and looked weathered. “I have no idea.”

  “Can it be that you don’t know him but do know where he is?”

  “No, I also don’t know where he is.”

  “Are you in contact with your half brother in Baden-Baden?” he asked.

  “I have no idea who they are,” she said. “I don’t know anyone.”

  The documentary implied that this was a lie, replaying part of an interview with a man who worked for the family. “Once a year she visits her brother,” the man said. Without commenting on the apparent contradiction, or mentioning that she had a maternal half brother, Peter, she had grown up with in Austria, the scene switched back to the interview in Chile.

  “It is a fact that in Berlin there is an account with roughly a million euros,” the reporter said. “You would inherit a large share of it if he’s not alive.”

  “Yes, but … what should I say …,” she stammered. “I’m going to say … Money—” The interviewer interrupted her.

  “Everyone can use money,” he said.

  “Everyone can use money,” Böser repeated, “but I’m not interested in the money. What I’m interested in is that people finally believe that what I say is true and that I’m left in peace. I don’t know him and I don’t need any money.” The reporter said if she didn’t know anything, she should tell the police, not just in Chile, as she claimed she had, but in Austria as well.

  “Why was she so sure we wouldn’t find him? Does she know that he has powerful assistance?” the narrator of the film intoned. “It spoke either for the involvement of a secret service abetting his flight or for a really good hiding place.”