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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  Aribert Ferdinand Heim was born in the Austrian town of Radkersburg on June 28, 1914. For the family it was a day of personal tragedy. His twin brother, Peter, was stillborn. For the world it was the disastrous, historic day when the assassin Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, plunging the Continent into the devastating conflict known as the Great War. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1919, when Aribert was barely five years old, dismantled the Habsburg Empire and divided Radkersburg along the line of the Mur River. The part of town south of the river joined the new state of Yugoslavia.

  In 1929, while Aribert was attending the Marien Institute secondary school in Graz, the family suffered a terrible setback when his father, Josef Ferdinand Heim, a gendarmerie commander, passed away from a heart condition. His mother, Anna Heim, was left with four children and only a modest widow’s pension to support them. She, her elder son, Josef, and her younger daughter, Herta, the baby of the family, were high-spirited and enjoyed playing the accordion and laughing. The elder daughter, Hilda, and younger son, Aribert, had inherited their father’s more contemplative manner. Hilda promised her father just before he died that she would take care of her mother so the other children could study medicine.

  Aribert Heim moved to Vienna in the fall of 1931, when he was just seventeen years old, to begin studying Latin at the university with the help of a stipend from the state of 250 Austrian schillings per semester. He rented a room at Alserstrasse 22, in the student quarter to the west of the city center known as Josefstadt. Heim worked as a tutor to earn extra money and also played professional ice hockey for the Eissport Klub Engelmann with increasing success. Sports were his passion. He was also serious about competing in track and field but eventually gave it up as hockey took more and more of his time. Heim was invited to join the Austrian national ice hockey team as well. The Sport-Tagblatt of January 15, 1936, wrote about an upcoming test match for the Austrian national team, listing excellent young players, “most notably the young, talented defenseman Heim.”

  Aribert’s older brother, Josef, was brave but impetuous, once saving a drowning man at risk to his own life. His impulsiveness also carried him headlong into the dangerous politics of the times, as fascists and Communists vied for control of Austria just as they were doing to the north in Germany. Josef took part in the failed Nazi coup in Austria in 1934 and had to flee the country. The government charged him with high treason and stripped him of his citizenship when he refused to appear in court. Josef lived first in Varazdin, which was then in Yugoslavia and is today in Croatia, before arriving in Germany that December. There he underwent military training as part of Hitler’s Austrian Legion.

  Black-and-white photographs show Aribert and Josef visiting Berlin together during the 1936 Olympic Games, a pair of young men dressed up in their best suits attending the biggest sporting event in the world, which became a significant showcase for the resurgence of Germany and the pageantry of Nazism three years into Hitler’s reign. The following year Aribert moved to Rostock in the German Reich, a city with a booming armaments industry that was flush with new contracts from the military. It was there that he, like his brother, joined the party. Back in Vienna, the zealous Nazi anatomist Eduard Pernkopf, who lectured in his SA uniform, was one of his professors and signed his diploma.

  After Nazi Germany absorbed Austria in the Anschluss on March 12, 1938, Josef was able to return home. Under the Nazi regime his participation in the failed coup and the Austrian Legion was now a mark of distinction. According to family stories, he wanted to volunteer for the military without finishing his medical studies first. “The Führer is not going to give you your doctorate,” Aribert told his brother. “You can always join later.” Aribert himself requested deferments twice so that he could complete his studies, in 1938 and 1939, the latter on the eve of the invasion of Poland, which would mark the start of World War II. He was drafted immediately after finishing his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1940.

  After graduation Josef volunteered to join the paratroopers. On May 20, 1941, the young assistant doctor was among the first to parachute into Crete as part of the ill-fated Nazi invasion. With the help of intelligence intercepts, Allied forces were waiting for the landing, and the invasion, though ultimately successful, turned into a bloodbath for the Nazi forces. Josef Heim was among those killed near Chania, in the northwestern part of the island. The official cause of death was infantry fire. When a comrade later came to visit Anna Heim in Radkersburg, he told the grieving mother that her son had volunteered to parachute in with the first wave, saying it was his duty as he had neither wife nor children for whom he had to provide. The comrade went on to tell how Josef had been not just killed but butchered alive by soldiers from New Zealand who were defending the island as part of the British Commonwealth forces. They tore off Josef’s fingernails, jabbed out his eyes, and smashed the teeth from his mouth, the paratrooper said.

  The family feared for Aribert until the very end of the war before learning that he had survived, though he would not be coming home right away. The postwar years were times of deprivation. A colleague warned Heim of the terrible conditions on the outside in a letter in December 1947, saying, “Freedom in destroyed Germany looks quite sad. There are more than enough doctors, and even I, despite good connections and without a political burden, have been unable to find a proper position.”

  The colleague had been working in the tuberculosis station at a displaced-persons hospital near Kassel, where he saw “sad images, poor people without homelands, or those who do not dare return to their homelands, lying here with the gravest pulmonary tuberculosis, most hopeless cases.” He signed off by saying, “I still hope that someday the gateway to the world opens for us too and one can start life again in another part of the world.”

  The Americans freed many of their remaining prisoners at the end of 1947 in what was known as the Christmas Amnesty of 1947, which also spelled the end to Aribert Heim’s detention. Captain John D. Austin signed and stamped Heim’s release papers on December 14, 1947, and eight days later he was allowed to leave after nearly three years in custody. In the same month, the Dachau court ended its work and disbanded, after judging fifteen hundred German defendants and sentencing some four hundred of them to death.

  Heim was allowed to travel the more than 150 miles north to the town of Fritzlar near Kassel to see his sister Herta. He arrived to find a brother-in-law, Georg Barth, he had never met and a baby niece he did not know who was about to be christened. According to family lore, Aribert turned up at the celebration by accident, uninvited but very welcome. He was emotionally overwhelmed seeing the family and the bounteous feast and broke down in tears. But he could not stay for long. For the time being, Heim had to report back to the saltworks and would ultimately have to face a hearing to determine how involved he really had been in Nazi war crimes. He was furloughed, on parole essentially, but not yet truly free.

  CHAPTER 7

  What Ford was to cars or Hershey to chocolate in America, Persil was to laundry detergent in Germany. The product was introduced to the market in 1907 but captured the popular imagination with the introduction in 1922 of a woman clad in a long, spotless white dress and a wide-brimmed white Florentine straw hat, known as the White Lady. She was soon plastered everywhere from packaging to billboards, an elegant symbol of cleanliness to an entire nation.

  In postwar Germany a certificate of denazification quickly acquired the nickname of a Persilschein. To remove the brown stain of Nazism, to wash yourself clean of your Nazi past, you needed a Persilschein. The fact that schein could mean not only certificate but also “in appearance only” or even “phony” made the word all the more fitting. There was no small cynicism in German public opinion about the effectiveness of Allied justice, which could seem capricious to the public and was all the more complicated by the different approaches taken in the different zones of occupation.

  After
the war the Allies had carved Germany into four zones. The Soviets ruled in the east, the British in the north, and the Americans in the south. Stalin initially did not want to give the French their own German territory to administer, but ultimately they received the smallest zone of the four in the west along their border. The entire German population, in the meantime, was divided into five categories based on their complicity in the Nazi regime: Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Followers, and Persons Exonerated. The problem facing the Allies was figuring out who was a clean as the White Lady and who bore that brown stain.

  The three states that made up the American occupation zone—Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse—passed the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism on March 5, 1946. Those found to have played a significant role in the Nazi regime or its crimes faced punishments of up to ten years in work camps as well as fines, confiscations of property, and bans from certain forms of employment. Rooting out the influence of the Nazi Party while building a new, functioning German state proved nearly impossible without making exceptions for some members of the former government. The process was like a strike zone, judgment calls that varied from person to person and place to place.

  The umpires in the American zone were known as Spruchkammern, civil courts, each of which was made up of a panel of three judges. The chairman of each panel was part of the Spruchkammern’s professional staff, and the other two members were nominated by the approved political parties: the Social Democrats, the Communist Party, the Christian Democrats, and the Democratic People’s Party. All were supposedly drawn from the ranks of the upstanding, certifiably non-fascist citizenry.

  In Neckarsulm, where Aribert Heim awaited denazification, members included a brewer, a carpenter, a pharmacist, and a baker. They were checked out with the American military government before they could sit in judgment over their fellow citizens. Officials sent each candidate’s questionnaire to the military government in Heilbronn and a copy to the inspection division of the Ministry for Political Liberation. The pharmacist was rejected for not listing his membership in the Nazi Party for eight months.

  The authorities had their work cut out for them. The local Spruchkammer that would handle Heim’s case was so busy that it was forced to leave its offices in Kochendorf in the summer of 1947 after work came “to a complete standstill as a result of a lack of space,” a member of the body wrote to the building authority in Heilbronn. The very same people charged with determining the Nazi past of Aribert Heim and others were also trying to secure tar paper, roof tiles, and parquet for their new offices in the bombed-out courthouse in Neckarsulm. The staff arrived at their new offices in July, only to find that there were no lights. When they held a morale-building get-together in May 1947 at a local tavern, they were each told to bring ration cards for fifty grams of meat and five grams of fat. “Everything else,” the invitation promised, “including the ride home, is taken care of.”

  By the time Heim’s case came up in March 1948, the Spruchkammer Heilbronn-Neckarsulm had thirty-three employees, near its peak of thirty-five employees the previous October, including prosecutors, investigators, and clerical staff. The prosecutors and investigators prepared the cases against the potential offenders, who could retain their own defense counsel to represent them before the three-member panel that would ultimately rule on their level of involvement. After twelve years of Nazi rule and six years of total war, few could claim to have had no interaction with the regime. Accordingly, the net was cast wide.

  Every German over the age of eighteen in the American zone was required to fill out a survey with 131 questions—known as the Fragebogen. Some thirteen million people reported the details of their party membership, voting record, and military service, their writings and speeches, their income and assets, their travel and residence abroad, both military and civilian, even a honeymoon weekend in Paris. Heim wrote a brief description of his life by hand. He began by telling the German authorities who had taken custody of him after his period as an American prisoner of war had ended, that he was born in Austria but was “the son of German parents.” Heim traced his education from primary school through his postgraduate medical course in jaw surgery. He explained that he reported at the beginning of January 1940 to the Luftwaffe but “was drafted into the Waffen-SS against my will and there pursued a medical career.” When he joined the group, Heim said, “I was unaware of the criminal intentions and goals of the SS. Further I declare that I at no time participated in actions that violated human rights or international law.”

  He moved quickly from his education to his military service, listing wartime service in Russia, Finland, Norway, and France as well as every rank he had held, ending with his final promotion in 1944 to Hauptsturmführer, or captain. He viewed himself as a victim of circumstance, held back by the course of history. “As a result of the events of war I did not have the opportunity to marry,” Heim wrote. “I have no property or other wealth. I was solely dependent on the earnings of a troop doctor for the necessities of life.”

  Heim gathered, with the help of his sister, testimonials to his political reliability. He referred to his internship before the war in the booming northern German port city of Rostock in 1937. It was the first time he lived in Germany. “He dedicated himself to his medical training and in his free time did a lot of sports, so that he could earn additional income for his studies,” wrote Herta Weinaug, a widow in whose home Heim had lived as a boarder. It was true, she acknowledged, that Heim had applied for membership in the Nazi Party but only “after he was advised to do so at the clinic.”

  Otherwise he exhibited, according to Mrs. Weinaug, little interest in party or politics. “His behavior from that point on never gave the appearance that he in any way whatsoever was bound to the party,” she wrote. “He did not promote the party or enthuse about it. The block leader never came to see him. I assumed for that reason that nothing came of his membership application.” Mrs. Weinaug affirmed the truth of her statement and that she had never been a member of the Nazi Party, just “a simple member of the NSV,” the Nazis’ social welfare organization.

  Her daughter, too, attested to Heim’s good character. The medical student had “spent a great deal of time with our family,” Ursula Kraft wrote. She also got to know him while he was stationed in Berlin during the war. “Aribert Heim always carried himself impeccably, courteously, politely and never harmed anyone for political, racial, religious, or other such reasons,” wrote Kraft. “He demonstrated no interest in politics and never exhibited objectionable or harsh behavior.”

  His letter of recommendation from Captain Jones of the U.S. Army was included in his file, as was the one from Pastor Werner Ernst Linz. Linz did his best to impress upon the Allies that Heim might have fought for the Waffen-SS but he deplored its cause. “I learned through conversations with Dr. Heim that he was a convinced opponent of euthanasia and the National Socialist racial theories,” Linz wrote of his friend at the POW hospital. “It would be gratifying if Dr. Heim could once again resume his medical practice.”

  The prosecutor handling the case before the panel was not so sure. “The investigations undertaken did not yield a satisfying result,” he wrote. As a member of the Waffen-SS, Heim “has to prove that he did not participate in the criminal objectives of this organization and in particular that he did not take part in war crimes.” It was Heim’s job, in other words, to prove his innocence. Prosecutors had at their disposal the personnel files of millions of former party and SS members, including Aribert Heim. And something did not add up.

  CHAPTER 8

  The central card catalog of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party had been kept in fireproof cabinets at the party administrative headquarters in Munich. The cards, some 14 million in all, were supposed to be incinerated at the end of the war. However, only around 3 million could be destroyed before the 10.7 million remaining fell into the hands of the U.S. military. The surviving files represented a valuable
trove of information for the Allied effort to identify and root out high-ranking Nazis. The catalog was moved to Berlin for safekeeping.

  Much of the German capital had been destroyed in the invasion, but an underground complex in the Zehlendorf district was largely undamaged. The reinforced bunker had been built as a surveillance post for Hermann Göring. The neighborhood along with the bunker had briefly fallen under Soviet control in the war’s chaotic conclusion before officially ending up in the American zone. Watchful residents in October 1945 saw truck after truck delivering government files for safekeeping. It was the birth of the Berlin Document Center, a central repository for information on Nazis, from the rank and file to the top of the leadership.

  As other documents were discovered, they were also sent to the bunker in Berlin. The personnel files of the Reich Justice Ministry, for instance, were found in Kassel and sent along to the growing Nazi archive. The document center contained files that had been used in the Nuremberg trials, as well as party correspondence, records from the race and resettlement office, paperwork from the chamber of culture, and personnel records of members of the SA and the SS.

  Heim’s file showed that he had joined the party on May 1, 1938, receiving the membership number 6,116,098. He joined the SS a few months later, on October 1, 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht. In 1940 he joined the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the organization, and worked his way up the ranks, first as an Untersturmführer and then as an Obersturmführer. On Hitler’s next-to-last birthday, April 20, 1944, Heim was promoted for the final time to Hauptsturmführer.