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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Wiesenthal was born on New Year’s Eve in 1908 in Buczacz, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father died in 1915 fighting in World War I. Young Simon himself barely survived a pogrom by Cossacks. His homeland ended up as part of the Second Polish Republic. He studied architectural engineering first in Prague and then in Lvov, where he settled with his wife. Under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide Poland between them, Wiesenthal found himself a citizen of the Soviet Union. Less than two years later Hitler broke the deal, and Wiesenthal, like the majority of European Jewry, found himself at the mercy of the Nazis. He secured false papers for Cyla that spared her from the death camps but could not escape himself.

  Four years later he emerged from Mauthausen weighing less than a hundred pounds. He had fended off consignment to the gas chambers. He narrowly escaped execution on numerous occasions and finally, barely surviving the death marches of prisoners as the Nazis retreated, ended up in a Mauthausen barrack reserved chiefly for the dead and the dying. When the U.S. Army liberated the camp, Wiesenthal had no interest in a long convalescence. He wanted those responsible brought to account. Less than three weeks after being rescued, he addressed a letter to Colonel Richard Seibel, the American officer in charge of the camp, offering his services in hunting for war criminals. In addition to a curriculum vitae he provided a list of ninety-one Nazis, describing in the most detail he could their crimes and physical appearances. The Americans accepted his letter and told him to come back when he had regained some fraction of his strength.

  Wiesenthal kept coming back, and his persistence soon paid off. He began working for the War Crimes Unit of the American Counter Intelligence Corps. He was so weak when he went to make his first solo arrest that he barely made it up the stairs to the ex-Nazi’s apartment. He was so light-headed on the way back down that the man he apprehended had to help him down the stairs to the waiting jeep.

  At first Wiesenthal lived in a displaced-persons camp set up at the local school in Leonding near Linz, where as a boy Adolf Hitler attended primary school. Wiesenthal could look out the window and see the small house where Hitler’s parents had lived, and he knew they were buried in the nearby cemetery. He quickly moved to Landstrasse 40 in Linz. There, Wiesenthal lived just a few doors down from the father and stepmother of Adolf Eichmann. As Hungarian survivors told him about Eichmann and his meticulous orchestration of the mass deportations in Hungary, finding the man responsible for so much slaughter became an obsession for Wiesenthal. In the meantime, he worked with the Briha, which funneled survivors to Palestine. Some forty thousand of the nearly quarter million displaced Jews lived in Austria. Wiesenthal helped refugees make contact with living family members or, more often, find out how they died.

  At that point he still believed his own wife had been killed in Warsaw during the war. In fact she had been forced to work in an ammunition factory in Germany. Cyla in turn believed Simon was dead. By coincidence she met a common acquaintance in Krakow who had just received a letter from Wiesenthal, and they were reunited. By Wiesenthal’s count a combined eighty-nine members of his family and his wife’s family had been killed in the Holocaust. On September 5, 1946, Simon and Cyla added to their depleted ranks with the birth of their daughter, Pauline Rosa.

  The public in Germany and the United States was absorbed by the Nuremberg Major War Criminals Trial, which played out between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946, in the city’s Palace of Justice before the International Military Tribunal. Many German citizens, struggling with deprivation and occupation, blamed the upper echelon of the Nazi leadership for their own suffering at the end of the war and were happy to see them brought to account. Others grumbled about victors’ justice, a complaint that would grow with each new trial.

  The desire to hunt down war criminals was quickly fading on the Allied side. The soldiers who had witnessed the inhumanities at the liberated concentration camps rotated back home. Wiesenthal perceived a lack of drive among many of the U.S. officers. There were a few anti-Semitic comments that rang in the Holocaust survivor’s ears, making it that much harder to deal with the growing apathy on the part of his associates.

  The focus of American enmity was rapidly shifting away from the defeated Nazis and toward the Soviets and Joseph Stalin’s rising ambitions in Europe. The division of the Continent deepened, with Eastern Europe slipping into the Communist camp and Western Europe gravitating toward the Americans. The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, former allies and budding superpowers, meant that both sides hoped to win the gathering battle for German public opinion. The defeated power in the heart of Europe could prove decisive in a struggle between east and west. The German people might have tolerated seeing Nazi leadership in the dock, but they wanted their privates, sergeants, and lieutenants home, whether they served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS.

  Wiesenthal wanted to keep looking for perpetrators but decided he was better going out on his own than working with the increasingly distracted Americans. Wiesenthal started the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in 1947 with the help of like-minded survivors, whom he called fellow “desperadoes.”

  Any refugee was a witness. Name, appearance, age, where did he work? What was his rank? What had he—or she—done? Before computers Wiesenthal had to meticulously organize by card file the perpetrators, the witnesses, and the locations of the crimes. He was not the only one assembling evidence. In Vienna another survivor, named Tuviah Friedman, had set up his own Jewish Historical Documentation Center and worked for the Haganah, the paramilitary group that would become the Israel Defense Forces.

  Friedman was an avenger with a relish for brutal retaliation. He was from Radom, Poland, and only he and his sister survived the Holocaust out of his immediate family. He escaped one camp just before the inmates were sent to Auschwitz. He was recaptured but got hold of a bayonet, crept up to his sleeping guard, and felt “the sensation of ripping his flesh” as he “plunged the bayonet into his neck.” In the immediate postwar days Friedman quite literally hunted Nazis “with burning enthusiasm” and, when he caught them, by his own account, whipped, tortured, and even killed them.

  Friedman and Wiesenthal exchanged nearly two hundred letters in 1947, swapping information about war criminals and survivor testimony from their files. It felt at times like a losing battle. More and more of the refugees received emigration visas or left the displaced-persons camps and restarted their lives. The Allies had other priorities, and the German and Austrian authorities, to the extent that they wanted to deal with Nazi crimes at all, focused on the regime’s persecution of its own people or the euthanasia program, the systematic murder of mentally and physically disabled Germans, not the mechanized slaughter of Jews in the east.

  In 1947, Wiesenthal published a book about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had worked with the Nazis and even visited concentration camps. Wiesenthal was interested in the collaboration between the Nazis and their Arab allies. But his real passion was Eichmann, who as a member of the Reich Security Central Office played a fundamental role in the attempted extermination of the European Jews. Wiesenthal had found purpose after the war in part by focusing on the killers, listening to the stories of refugees in the faint hope that someday they would aid in bringing men like Heim to justice. The nightmare was over, and most people went back to the closest thing they could find to their old lives. Wiesenthal could not let go, could not forget.

  CHAPTER 5

  Alfred Aedtner never had any intention of hunting Nazi war criminals for a living. Then again, the young Wehrmacht veteran did not have any real plans for the future after the war ended. If there was any group for whom the rapid collapse of the Thousand-Year Reich was particularly difficult to comprehend, it was young men like Aedtner. Born in 1925, he was barely seven years old when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Nazi propaganda served as the foundation of his schooling.

  He was born in Alt-Seid
enberg in Silesia, at the old Three Kings’ Corner, where the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and Saxony once met. Like the other boys, young Fredi, as he was known, wore the brown shirt and black shorts of the Hitler Youth, a dagger in his belt and a swastika armband on his upper arm. He was good-looking, a bit vain about his clothes, always wanting to be perfectly dressed, but a well-behaved teenager. He led the younger boys in their calisthenic exercises, serving as a Fähnleinführer, little flag leader, a position of responsibility in the top-to-bottom hierarchy of the Reich.

  Growing up in a newly built settlement on the edge of town, Aedtner did not want to go to the town’s largest employer, the Seidenberger Tonwerke, the factory where his father worked and, when Fredi was just sixteen, died of a heart attack. Fredi was a cadet at a military school. With his military haircut buzzed short on the sides, his ears stuck out, making him look younger than his years, but he still kept his cadet’s cap tilted just so. He looked forward to a career as an army officer. While many were drafted, Aedtner volunteered for the Wehrmacht on January 3, 1944, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. A private in a grenadier regiment, he was stationed on the western front.

  The fact that Nazi Germany was going to lose the war had been apparent to many Germans for some time, from the high command down to the gossips on the street. The information machine so carefully tended by Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels could not explain away the costly defeat at Stalingrad. The letters announcing the deaths of sons, husbands, and brothers added up to a different narrative from the official version of events, one that could be no more easily ignored than the nearing echo of booming artillery just on the other side of the Rhine or the streams of refugees fleeing the Red Army from the east.

  Aedtner continued to believe what his superiors told him. During what would be his final visit home in the autumn of that year, he told the family friends and next-door neighbors, the Montags, that the Endsieg, the final victory promised by the Führer, was coming. “We won’t lose the war,” he told them. “Whoever believes that has a loose screw.”

  Aedtner returned to the front and in December 1944 faced French forces near Cernay, where an Allied offensive aimed to retake the town. They retook Thann, just to the west, on December 10. They seized Aspach-le-Bas and Aspach-le-Haut to the south on December 11, soldiers from the 6e Régiment de Chasseurs d’Afrique destroying a machine-gun position and capturing twenty German soldiers. The following day the French pressed to gain control of Cernay, but German troops had dug in at an SS training facility and fought back. A grenade exploded, wounding Private Aedtner and killing the man beside him. Aedtner had shrapnel in his right eye. He was carried from a first-aid station to a field hospital before eventually landing in a military hospital in Singen, a peaceful corner of Germany near Lake Constance, not far from the border with Switzerland.

  At the hospital Aedtner made friends with another wounded veteran his age named Fritz Haag. Both wore the gray uniform of the Wehrmacht as eighteen-year-olds, and both had been wounded less than a year into their military service, suffering shrapnel injuries to the face. Haag, from the southwest region of Baden, had been in combat on the eastern front, near Minsk. Though an avid athlete, in a black-and-white photograph young Haag hardly looked big enough to carry the oversized pack strapped to his back. He still managed to win an Iron Cross, First Class, for bravery. A shell had exploded near him, severing an artery in his neck and nearly killing him. He survived the explosion but lost both of his eyes.

  When he was physically strong enough, with Aedtner’s help, at least he got to go home. Aedtner had been declared fit for military service again, but rather than returning to the front, he first escorted his friend home. They traveled together from Singen almost a hundred miles through the Black Forest. Haag was born and raised on the edge of the famous woods, in Oberschopfheim, a village between the foothills of the mountainous forest and the flat valley of the Rhine River, not far from Strasbourg and the region known as Alsace. The territory had traded hands between Germany and France several times, a violent process playing out once again at that very moment.

  It was February 1945, and the war was nearly over. These two blond, baby-faced young veterans moved through a landscape of defeat. Fate had proved capricious in its treatment of the towns and cities along their way; one stood pristine, untouched by conflict, while the next lay in smoking ruins from the Allied air raids. Often the only difference was a railway switching station or a small factory producing ball bearings, the sort needed for armaments.

  Haag’s hometown of Oberschopfheim was one of the lucky places that were spared the aerial bombardment. Landmarks like the church tower, the local inn, the Gasthaus zur Linde, the stately older houses with the wooden beams, and even the Haag family home on Meiersmattstrasse were still standing. It was still more than a month before French forces took the town in April 1945.

  It was a dangerous time for Aedtner, fit for military service but not with a combat unit. Overzealous SS officers summarily executed deserters with growing frequency as the certainty of defeat loomed larger. Some twenty-two thousand German soldiers were killed in all. It was not just soldiers but the boys drafted to fire the antiaircraft guns, the so-called Flakhelfer, and the middle-aged men of the Volkssturm auxiliary forces charged with defending their cities, towns, and villages to their last breaths. Bodies hung from lampposts in the final spasm of violence that was the bloody end of a murderous regime.

  In Oberschopfheim the local residents knew that defending their homes was best accomplished by surrendering before they were destroyed by Allied artillery. When French forces arrived outside neighboring Niederschopfheim that April, a few men from the local Volkssturm took down the defensive barricades in the dark of night. Residents hung white sheets out the windows, and children waved white handkerchiefs as French soldiers, many of them Moroccans from the North African protectorate, marched into town. The German surrender followed the next month, on May 7, 1945.

  With the capitulation, everything young men like Alfred Aedtner knew was gone. Adolf Hitler had been not just the chancellor or the president but the Führer, the totalitarian leader in every way. He had led Germans not into lasting victory and world domination but into total defeat. When Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, his entire worldview died with him.

  Even after the war ended, Aedtner still could not go home. The Soviets controlled his family home in Seidenberg. For a German Wehrmacht veteran to travel into the Soviet zone would mean risking detention by the Red Army and deportation to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. Aedtner had no work, nothing to do but hang around in the front yard of the Haag house, gently kicking a soccer ball back and forth with Fritz. He was like a sleepwalker awakened from a dream that had lasted a dozen years.

  One of the punishments the victors inflicted was a loss of territory, a border redrawn on a map for most but a very personal loss for Aedtner. Stalin claimed Polish territory in the east for the Soviet Union and compensated Poland with German lands in the west, including Aedtner’s home in Seidenberg. Görlitz, about a half hour’s drive away, was divided into two parts, a German city on the west bank and a Polish city on the east. In Oberschopfheim, almost at the French border, Aedtner was about as far from home as he could get and still be in Germany.

  Aedtner continued to help Haag, taking his friend to doctors’ appointments. They went to the eye clinic in Freiburg and to training courses to help Haag learn braille and make other practical adjustments to the loss of his sight. Haag wore a yellow armband with black dots to alert drivers and passersby to the presence of a blind person. Aedtner kept busy doing odd jobs like painting houses, maybe baling a little hay. No one went hungry in the village. The Haags kept pigs and a milk cow in the barn next to the house and had potato fields; others grew grapes, corn, and tobacco.

  When the war ended, Aedtner had nothing but the uniform on his back. For a born clotheshorse that was an unacceptable state of affairs. If he could
not afford a new suit, he could at least ask the local tailor, Johannes Ackermann, for alterations to make the trousers and jacket look a little more civilian—perhaps a bit more fashionable if that was remotely possible. Ackermann was friends with Fritz’s father, Johann Haag, and the two had served in World War I together. They lived down the block on Meiersmattstrasse. Ackermann’s daughter Eleonore quickly caught Aedtner’s eye. As it did for men and women across war-torn Germany, zero hour began to recede for the young man, and the possibility of a future, however different, began to take shape.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Americans held Heim until December 1946, then handed him into German custody. As a former member of the SS, he was transferred from detention camp to detention camp. He was briefly held in the hilltop stone fortress in southwest Germany known as Hohenasperg, which had been used as a prison for centuries, holding poets and deserters, students who had fought illegal duels, and regime opponents in the years after Hitler came to power. From there he went to Lager 74, the former Flakkaserne, the antiaircraft barracks in the town of Ludwigsburg. The Flakkaserne had been a symbol of the Nazis’ decision to flout the conditions of the Versailles Treaty and remilitarize Germany once they took power. Construction began in late 1935, the year before Heim and his brother visited Berlin for Hitler’s Olympics. By the time Heim got there a decade later, it was under the control of the U.S. Seventh Army.

  There was a twenty-foot-high watchtower and ten-foot barbed-wire fencing. The men slept in crowded dormitory rooms with three-tiered bunk beds. For their edification and reeducation, there were concerts and theater performances. One photograph from the time shows a basketball game in which the ball handler and the opponent defending him had only one arm each. Men worked at the shoemaker, watchmaker, or bookbinder, at the motor pool or the blacksmith shop, where a sign over the anvil read “We want to go home to wife and child!” Finally, Heim found himself at the state-owned salt mine that had been the concentration camp Kochendorf, used for defense production during the final year of the war. He worked there hauling salt and awaiting a final judgment in his case.