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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  The next time she was in Austria, Waltraut gave a statement to the police. The German manhunt unit believed the Austrians “treated her far too gently,” according to Zuroff. In September 2008, she and Peter, with whom she was raised and whom she actually visited each year in Austria, sat down with Zuroff and his German colleague, the historian Stefan Klemp, in Innsbruck.

  “I have never set eyes on my father,” she stated.

  “If your father walked in this door right now, what would you say to him?” Zuroff asked her.

  “Where have you been all this time?”

  The answer neither satisfied his curiosity nor stilled his skepticism. “Very touching perhaps,” he wrote later, “but I was not convinced by her version of the events.” The key question for Zuroff was how her mother, after multiple interviews with police, could not have told her daughter that her father was a mass murderer.

  “I could not believe, for example, that many years previously when the Austrian police came to question her mother about Heim, and she was in the house at the time (claiming to be ill, which is why she was not present at the questioning), she never asked her mother why the police had come to speak to her,” Zuroff said. “In short, we did not receive convincing answers for many of the questions we posed.” Yet there was a plausible and relatively simple explanation, of a mother trying to protect her daughter.

  CHAPTER 55

  In August 2008, Rüdiger welcomed a reporter named Burkhard Uhlenbroich from Bild am Sonntag, the Sunday edition of the popular German tabloid, to his family’s home for an interview. When the reporter arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning as arranged, Rüdiger told him he was “punctual as a Swiss watch.” As he walked into the house, Uhlenbroich marveled at the twelve-foot ceilings, the antique furniture, and the oil paintings, all purchased by Rüdiger’s maternal grandparents, the Bechtolds, who made successful real-estate investments before World War II.

  The pleasantries dispensed with, they began to talk about his father. “I cannot even remember when I last saw him,” Rüdiger told Uhlenbroich. “I do not know where he lives, nor am I financing his flight. If he is dead, I do not know where he is buried.” Had the family really never heard from Dr. Heim after he fled? the interviewer asked. “Between 1962 and 1967, two notes appeared in our mailbox. Each contained a single sentence, ‘I am doing well,’ ” Rüdiger said. “Whether those letters really came from my father, I do not know.” When Uhlenbroich asked Rüdiger what he would do if he knew where his father was living, he declared, “I would shout it out to the entire world that he should turn himself in and answer to the terrible accusations.

  “My father’s past is a part of my life,” Rüdiger said. “To deny this would be pointless.” He revealed precisely what he wanted without necessarily answering the questions he was asked. Rather than saying when he last saw Aribert Heim, he simply told a story about two anonymous letters.

  The burden on Heim’s family and acquaintances was rising. In the same television documentary whose crew had cornered Waltraut Böser in the cul-de-sac, long-lensed cameras peered into Heim’s old house in Baden-Baden. The Heim family, like Böser, chafed under the investigative pressure, but the difference was they were actually complicit, having hidden and financially supported Heim. The legal protections afforded to relatives meant they were not guilty of any crime, but they were involved in exactly the ways that the police believed they were.

  For Pisano and Pellet, their innocent association with Rüdiger made them victims of overzealous journalists as well as law enforcement. All this distress had a purpose, however: to break the silence surrounding Heim’s whereabouts. Because he was the most wanted Nazi war criminal in the world, the attention to Heim’s case had grown exponentially, and with it the incentive for someone to bring it to a conclusion. In the end, the public pressure had the intended effect.

  The break came in the form of a tip not to law enforcement but to a journalist. “I can’t tell you on the phone, but I need to see you in person,” said the caller. “It’s important.” For several years he had been a reliable source for Souad. “I’m flying via Frankfurt tomorrow and will have some time around noon,” he told her. They agreed on a place near the city’s famous Hauptwache plaza.

  The source produced a file with a photograph of a middle-aged man in a suit and tie. In the lower left-hand corner, part of a stamp with markings in Arabic was visible. “Do you know who this man is?” he asked. She said she did not. “Aribert Heim, they also call him Dr. Death.” After extracting a promise of anonymity, the tipster revealed where the Nazi fugitive had fled when he left Germany in 1963.

  Just as the neighbors had whispered in the wake of his departure and as Simon Wiesenthal had suspected in 1967, the trail led not to the Costa Brava or a Chilean island but to Cairo’s Kasr el-Madina Hotel and to the Doma family that used to run it. The evidence of Aribert Heim’s hideout was uncovered in a storage space in Cairo’s Nasr City neighborhood, in a clothing store owned by the Doma brothers, filled with women’s blue jeans, skirts, and blouses and one leather attaché case with rusty clasps.

  “This is the briefcase of Amu,” said Ahmed Doma, Mahmoud’s younger brother, as he set it down on the table. “We haven’t opened it for the last fifteen, maybe sixteen years,” he said. Sharif, their older half brother, undid the clasps. Inside were hundreds of pieces of paper, some sealed in yellowed envelopes with handwritten titles that read “Bills” or “Documents.” He took out a page.

  “Here is a hotel bill of his from Alexandria,” Sharif said. To the incessant sound of city traffic they read aloud the letters, written in blue ink on yellowish paper, as they were pulled from the briefcase. There were black-and-white photographs of athletes training, brochures and articles on the tourism industry, dozens of letters and medical prescriptions, bills, and other paperwork inside.

  “He loved reading,” Ahmed said. He described how Uncle Tarek would go to the famed Groppi café, once among the finest Western locales in the city, by 2008 a run-down shadow of itself like much of Cairo’s old European quarter. “He would bring cake for us sometimes, and he would play Ping-Pong and other sports on the roof with us children.”

  The papers inside the case were mostly written in German and English and some in French and were therefore indecipherable to the Domas. Uncle Tarek tried to teach them all three languages, but they forgot much of what they learned, except for the English they used in commercial transactions. Mahmoud in particular regretted that he had forgotten so much of what Uncle Tarek taught him.

  In addition to the many defenses Heim had composed about his criminal case and the report about anti-Semitism and the Khazars, there were a great number of medical records among the papers, including more than a dozen urinalysis reports, as well as careful sketches in colored pencil of his urinary, digestive, and reproductive systems, apparently drawn by Dr. Heim himself. On one envelope he wrote the names of two doctors. Next to one was the word “treatment,” next to the other, “inoperable.” One paper said “Pathology Report” at the top and dealt with a “rectal carcinoid.” Another was labeled “Biological Tumor Markers,” and the referral was from Dr. Mohsen Barsoum, a professor of radiotherapy at the cancer center of Cairo University.

  When we visited Dr. Barsoum at his practice in the Cairo neighborhood of Dokki, he instantly recognized his former patient from the photograph. “He was a peculiar case,” Dr. Barsoum said. “In your career, some people have special features.” He said that Heim had spent a year under his observation and that the cancer was advanced. After looking at a copy of a prescription he had written, found in Heim’s briefcase, he said, “I’m sure he was stage 4. It was not an early case.”

  Many other people recognized Heim from the photograph. The dentist Abdelmoneim el Rifai and his family remembered Heim. Abu Ahmad, who used to help out at the Kasr el-Madina, explained simply, “He always stood out in the crowd.” Downstairs in the building a seller of cheese, peppers, and olives took one look at the photogra
ph and before he was even asked about it offered, “That was the foreigner upstairs.” Everyone in the neighborhood remembered the day that he died, the cheese seller recalled. Wrapped in white cotton for a traditional Muslim burial, he was still recognizable because of his height as they carried him out of the building.

  It was a rainy and cold January morning in 2009 when Rüdiger Heim welcomed us into his home. He was a gracious and polite host, offering drinks and snacks as a crew set up a camera and lights in the living room and hooked him up to a microphone. He spoke quietly and slowly as if a single false word would be held against him, which in some cases it had been.

  His skin was pale from spending too much time indoors, his hair graying, yet he looked younger than his fifty-three years. His large glasses were at least a decade out of fashion, but his appearance did not seem to interest him much. He tended to wear faded blue jeans and T-shirts, a vest or a sweater if it was cold. The family had money, but he drove an old Opel rather than a fancy car.

  Now it was time for Rüdiger to tell his story, once and for all. If for no other reason, he could do it for the sake of his friends in Spain. If he remained silent, there was no sign that the pursuit of his father would ever cease. Silence had only made his legend grow.

  “Mr. Heim,” Souad said, “do you know the person in this photograph?” It was the same picture the source had handed over, the same one identified by the friends, acquaintances, and physicians in Egypt.

  “Yes, that is my father,” Rüdiger said.

  “Do you know where this photograph comes from?” she asked.

  “It must be from an Egyptian document, probably my father’s residency permit.”

  “That means your father lived in Cairo?”

  “Yes,” Rüdiger answered. “My father lived in Cairo.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Rüdiger had returned to Egypt in July 1992 for what he expected to be his last visit. Father and son spoke regularly, with Rüdiger calling from pay phones so that their conversations could not be tapped. In the first few months after Rüdiger returned to Europe, his father would say, “It would be nice if you came.” Finally, as his illness worsened, Heim had simply said, “It is time now for you to come.”

  By that point Aribert Heim did not leave the Kasr el-Madina. A nurse visited each day to check on him and to change his colostomy bag. His room was next to Mahmoud Doma’s, and if he needed something, he would knock on the wall. Mahmoud was twenty-two years old by then and studying engineering at the university. Heim became more candid as his life slipped away. His cover story with so many Egyptian friends—Alfred Buediger, the owner of a demolition company—was gone, and he told Mahmoud that he had been a doctor who used to study women’s cancer. “He said he was very famous and a very good doctor,” Mahmoud said. Heim never told him anything about his military service.

  Toward the end he asked his young friend, “Can I donate my body after I die so that the university can use it for tests?” Mahmoud said it was because his uncle Tarek had an unusual illness and hoped that before he was buried the students at the medical school could learn from his body. “I told him that our Islamic beliefs did not allow you to donate your body. It is a sin.”

  “All right,” Heim said. “If that is so, then it does not have to happen.”

  When Rüdiger entered his father’s room in the Kasr el-Madina, the lights were off, and Heim was sitting in a wheelchair. Rüdiger greeted his father.

  His father returned his greeting, then immediately turned to practical matters. “We have to decide now if I’m going to remain in this chair for my final days or if I’m going to lie in the bed.” He refused to discuss recovery, remission, or improvement. Rüdiger learned most of what he needed to know just by looking at the weakened state of his father’s once-powerful body. Moving from the wheelchair to the bed to sleep at night had become an excruciating ordeal. Heim finally said, “From now on I will be in the bed.”

  The following day Rüdiger helped his father lie down. “He was a moribund, doomed person, slowly rotting from the inside,” Rüdiger said. His pain was compounded by a return bout of kidney stones. At one point the agony was so overpowering he demanded that Rüdiger give him all the painkilling medication they had at once.

  For nourishment, he took only warmed milk. “Milk has everything in it that the body needs, and I don’t need any more than that now,” Heim said.

  Father and son spent much of the time watching the Barcelona Olympics. When the Olympics were not on, they tuned to coverage of the war in Bosnia. On the matter of his own criminal case, the dying man expressed conflicting wishes. He said at one point that he wanted “the truth to come to light,” but at another he told his son, “Don’t worry about this nonsense anymore.”

  At a certain juncture his pain was so great that Heim could no longer roll over to urinate, and short of taking him to a hospital for a catheter to be inserted, Rüdiger had to help him pee every two or three hours. When Rüdiger made a mistake, the bed would be soaked in urine, and it became a major production to move his father to change the sheets. Rüdiger had taken to massaging his father’s arms and legs because he noticed that it helped with the pain.

  “I also caught myself thinking that the suffering actually had to end, that it was too much, that it was outrageous,” Rüdiger said. “And one discovers, too, in oneself, the weakness to hope that it stops, and it is actually a shameless thought, a terrible thought,” thinking ahead to his father’s death. At one point, Rüdiger went to the bathroom and wept. He was sure that in Europe no one would have to die like that.

  Heim’s voice gave out several days before he passed away. Rüdiger blamed himself for dallying in Europe before coming to Egypt. He had lost his last chance to ask the lingering questions he had about his father’s past.

  On August 9, 1992, Aribert and Rüdiger Heim watched the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. Dr. Heim fell asleep at around 10:00 p.m. Instead of going back to the Scarabee to sleep, Rüdiger now had a thin mattress that he rolled out in front of the balcony. Around one o’clock in the morning he noticed that his father’s breathing was slowing. Over the course of hours, his father had “hinüber gedämmert” (“faded across”).

  “There was no exact time of death, but at some point he had stopped breathing,” Rüdiger said. He spoke to him, checked to make sure his father was not still alive, and placed his hand over his father’s head. When it was clear he had died, Rüdiger took a piece of white cloth and ran it under his father’s chin, tying it at the top of his head. He had learned when his grandmother died that this was necessary so that rigor mortis would not leave his mouth hanging open.

  “One says good-bye in a very personal way,” Rüdiger said. He smoked a cigarette on the balcony, staring out into the Cairo streets. Then he went downstairs and notified the hotel’s night porter that his father was dead. The porter reached Mahmoud, who had been away in Alexandria. The young man arrived with his mother and one of his brothers within a few hours. The hotel also notified the authorities. A representative from the German embassy came to Heim’s deathbed, as well as the Egyptian official who filled out the death certificate.

  Ever wary of the authorities, Rüdiger gave them his Danish driver’s license as identification. He also put down a false birthday for his father, to further throw off anyone trying to find Aribert Heim. Rüdiger said Heim did not want investigators to bother his family and he did not want trouble for the Domas.

  Some time after sunrise, two men came to bathe his father one final time. They took the body out into the hall, where they had set up a table. They took off his clothes, removed the colostomy bag, and began to wash him according to the Islamic ritual known as kafan. Mahmoud didn’t want Rüdiger to watch, but the Egyptian man cleaning his father said, “Come, look at this. This is your father.” When they were done with the washing, they wrapped him in long white winding sheets.

  It is Muslim tradition to bury the body as quickly as possible, without embalming or autop
sies. Mahmoud wanted to inter Uncle Tarek in the same tomb with his own father. Rüdiger wanted to honor Heim’s wish that his cadaver be used for medical research. Mahmoud tried to explain that it would be simplest if he were buried according to local custom, but the son refused. The man from the German embassy, an Arab who spoke German, finally told Mahmoud that as the son Rüdiger had certain rights in deciding what would happen to the body. Mahmoud did not like it, but he remembered his uncle Tarek’s request and reluctantly went along.

  The body was carried downstairs to a waiting mortuary van, where it was laid out on a wooden bier in the back. Mahmoud cried. “He was like a father. He loved me and I loved him. He was the same as my father.”

  Mahmoud and Rüdiger, the son Mahmoud knew only as Roy, drove to several hospitals, but none of them wanted to take the corpse. It was an unusual request with possible legal repercussions. The orderlies told them that they could not accept corpses for donation. After several hours Rüdiger began to wonder if his father’s body was beginning to putrefy. Mahmoud said finally, “That’s enough. We can’t go on like this. Let’s first of all put him in a refrigerator. You’re more than welcome to keep looking, but I’m tired.”

  They eventually found a man at one of the hospitals who was willing to take the body. The details were sketchy. He might have been bribed or simply offered to do them a favor by keeping Heim’s body overnight. Either way the two men left his body there. Rüdiger believed that the body had been accepted according to his father’s last wishes. Mahmoud described the arrangement as more temporary.

  When the two returned to the Kasr el-Madina, they sorted through Heim’s belongings, packing his papers into the old leather briefcase and a hard-shell Samsonite case. Once this was done, Rüdiger told Mahmoud to watch his father’s effects and said he would soon return for them. He did not give his address or any way to contact him. Mahmoud found it strange at the time but did not ask any questions. He might have had an ulterior motive in helping to speed Rüdiger’s departure, for, once the son left, Mahmoud went back to try to claim Heim’s body so that it could be interred in his family tomb, as he had wanted to do in the first place. The hospital told him that he might have called the man uncle but that did not make him a legal relative. Corpses were not just given out to anyone who wanted them.