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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  By that time, Wiesenthal had some 3,289 completed questionnaires. He had collected not just testimony about suspects but more general information on the operation of the camps and on the implementation of the plan to annihilate Europe’s Jews. In addition, he had a list of some Einsatzgruppen personnel, testimony about forced labor in IG Farben and Krupp facilities, reports on racial research, and Nazi propaganda, including examples from The Eternal Jew, an anti-Semitic exhibition in Munich in 1937 and 1938.

  In Wiesenthal’s telling he held on to one file and one file only, and that was Eichmann’s. In 1954 he saw a letter mentioning that Eichmann was in Argentina. “He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company,” the letter said. Wiesenthal passed the information along to the Israelis. The chances that Eichmann would ever be captured were slim, but Wiesenthal could not give up hope.

  After a few years on the police force in Gaggenau, Alfred Aedtner had graduated from pedaling a bicycle to riding a motorcycle with a sidecar and then to driving a Volkswagen Beetle. Now he aspired to a Mercedes of his own. He wanted a suit instead of a uniform and a detective’s badge to go with it. He did not particularly enjoy the work of a smalltown policeman—the car accidents and disturbances of the peace—and longed for a promotion and more challenging employment.

  But he had a wife and young son to care for, and the job he had would have to suffice. They lived comfortably but modestly in a small apartment in Gaggenau, a few miles of winding roads away from the glamour of Baden-Baden, with its casino and its fancy patisseries, which his wife liked to visit for a slice of cake if she had an excuse. Still, Aedtner was on the lookout for something better. He needed a chance to prove that he was more than a guy without a high school diploma directing traffic. He believed he was made for bigger things, if he could only get the opportunity. Aedtner could not have guessed that the war, nearly a decade past and a period he would just as soon have forgotten, would provide his break.

  CHAPTER 13

  When Aribert and Friedl Heim first moved into the stately villa in Baden-Baden in 1953, the house still needed repairs, not to mention a decent coat of paint. The heat did not work, and several war refugees were still living there. Friedl’s parents, Jakob and Käthe Bechtold, had bought the villa for the young couple after they had been married a few years and were still living in the parents’ house in Heidelberg. When the repairs were finished, movers brought furniture, furnishings, and artwork that the Bechtolds had bought at auctions.

  The house, on Maria-Viktoria-Strasse, was an undeniably beautiful property. There was a large garden in the back and a well-landscaped circular drive in the front. The household staff handled the daily chores, the female servants still wearing traditional black skirts and white aprons. There were a housemaid and a nanny, both of whom lived with the family, and a gardener and a cleaning lady who came in to help.

  The marriage was by all reports an agreeable one. Aribert had a gynecology practice in downtown Baden-Baden, above the old Hofapotheke, a pharmacy. Friedl had a small practice of her own but also was preoccupied with raising their young firstborn son, Aribert Christian. In 1955, just before Christmas, a second son was born, Rolf Rüdiger. He had an Rh-negative reaction, meaning that antibodies in his system were attacking his own blood. The doctors treated him with a transfusion, replacing the entire volume of the baby’s blood. He recovered well and was doted on by his mother and especially his grandmother Käthe Bechtold, who was a regular presence in the house.

  The Heims were well matched. Neither cared much for high fashion, frequent parties, or entertaining at home. Friedl could not drink because of liver complications from her bout with hepatitis, and Aribert only had a glass of wine or a beer when they went out. Although Friedl played tennis and went horseback riding, her husband, the former world-class athlete, had little time for sports. When he played games, it was with his little boys, teaching them to play soccer and table tennis. Acquaintances and former patients often described him with the same word: korrekt. Though it can be easily translated into the English “correct,” in German it means something more intangible, implying propriety and decency.

  The Heim family vacationed in Italy and Switzerland, where Friedl’s parents owned a place in Lugano. If they did entertain at home, they had cakes from Baden-Baden’s elegant Café König, a favorite of Heim’s. They would go to local restaurants during asparagus season, a tradition in Germany, or to the town where Friedl was born, Bad Dürkheim, for its annual wine festival. Such outings were relatively infrequent, but they enjoyed driving across the French border to nearby Strasbourg, where they would dine at the restaurant Maison Kammerzell on the Place de la Cathédrale. As many times as they went, Heim always ordered the roast chicken. He had simple tastes, like many of the generation raised through the Depression and the war.

  The Heims contributed to and enjoyed West Germany’s unprecedented economic growth and newfound stability in the 1950s, known as the economic miracle. The Bechtolds were grateful to Heim for all the work he put into rebuilding their war-damaged properties as well as managing them, a role that grew after Jakob Bechtold’s death. It took a great deal of work, but Heim’s name was never added to the deeds. He began to invest in property on the side with his sister and brother-in-law.

  For a doctor he had a very sharp business sense, as well as a way with people. When Friedl’s young cousin Fritz had finished his schooling and needed a job, Heim simply drove to the nearby Daimler-Benz facility in Gaggenau and struck up a conversation with the boss. By the end of their talk, Heim had persuaded the man to give Fritz a temporary position.

  CHAPTER 14

  West Germany still lacked its own military but had no shortage of soldiers. Most found other work, but a few stuck to their profession, which meant seeking their fortunes abroad. Germans were welcomed not only in Latin America, where they emigrated in droves, but also in Egypt, where their military expertise was prized and their pasts or political leanings were of little concern. The first handful of German military advisers arrived in Cairo around 1950.

  The Egyptian government assumed the moving costs of military advisers and their families, giving them salaries of 150 Egyptian pounds and insurance policies worth 10,000 deutsche marks. Advisers were hired on two-year contracts. News of these opportunities spread, and by the end of 1951 the group consisted of ten—the artillery general Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and nine other officers. There was precedent for this sort of flight to Egypt. The nineteenth-century reformer Muhammad Ali had employed many French officers after Napoleon’s army was defeated.

  The Germans found a warm reception in Egypt. A sizable number of Egyptian elites had studied in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the same Egyptian officers behind the Free Officers Movement, which launched the coup in 1952 that ended the monarchy and led to the Nasser era, had quietly, and occasionally actively, supported Germany in World War II. They hoped that a Nazi victory would put an end to British colonial influence in Egypt. The Free Officers did not change the arrangement. In fact, the new regime encouraged the relocation of yet more German soldiers and technical experts.

  The Wehrmacht veterans remained German citizens and in their capacity as advisers did not have the right to give orders or command troops. They worked with the Ministry of War and the Egyptian general staff on training and evaluating military equipment. General Fahrmbacher and a number of other high-ranking officers formed a group that called itself the Central Planning Board. Dr. Wilhelm Voss, a former SS Standartenführer and onetime head of the Reichswerke industrial conglomerate, founded ammunition and small-arms factories to help the Egyptians upgrade their arsenal. Another German, named Kurt Hermann Füllner, worked with a private company called PAG Near East, which West German embassy officials speculated was a conduit for Germans working for Egyptian intelligence. There were numerous media reports that former Gestapo and SS members augmented the secret police and even helped build concentration camps for opponents of the Nasser regime.

  The Eg
yptians played the West Germans and the East Germans against each other to extract the maximum possible assistance. “Contact with the German military advisers won over a fundamentally positive attitude toward the federal republic,” wrote a West German embassy staffer named Schirmer, “which has repeatedly made itself felt agreeably in negotiations.” When a military adviser, Ernst-Günther Gerhartz, was criminally charged as a result of his divorce proceeding in Germany, the embassy argued for letting him stay in Cairo.

  “Right now Mr. Gerhartz is the only tank expert in the German military advisory group and as such chief adviser at the Egyptian army’s tank school,” Schirmer wrote. More important, his presence “renders unnecessary” experts from East Germany. An attempt to extradite the highly prized Gerhartz would “cause serious damage to the position of the local military advisers and through that, indirectly, the reputation of the federal republic.” As a result, the embassy advised the government in Bonn against bringing extradition proceedings against Gerhartz. Another embassy official pointed out, as did his Egyptian attorney Ragai Youssef Rifaat, that there was no extradition treaty between the two countries. If pressed, Gerhartz might even defect to East Germany. Gerhartz offered his resignation, but his Egyptian superior refused to accept it. Personal matters were of no interest to him, he said.

  The number of Nazi prosecutions had tailed off almost completely by the mid-1950s. Konrad Adenauer had recently made his historic visit to Moscow, securing the return of the surviving German POWs from their detention and work camps in Siberia. On December 31, 1955, West Germany put an end to denazification in almost every corner of the country.

  Most legislators and investigators in West Germany might have been happy to see the Spruchkammer law creating the denazification panels lapse, but West Berlin’s interior minister, Joachim Lipschitz, was not. Just because a Nazi had evaded detection for a decade did not mean he should get away scot-free. Only thirty-seven years old at the time, Lipschitz had already endured his share of hardship. As the son of a Jewish doctor, he was harassed and persecuted in Nazi Germany but still considered fit for active duty on the front. He lost his left arm fighting for a Nazi regime that despised him and after the war had to flee East Berlin for West Germany under pressure from Communist authorities. He was elected to the city parliament in West Berlin and eventually took over law-enforcement matters.

  He was known for making life difficult for the remaining Nazi supporters and for finding ways to honor their forgotten opponents. A Spruchkammer was a good way to seize ill-gotten gains or otherwise sanction major Nazi figures. Lipschitz got the city parliament to pass the Second Law for the Conclusion of Denazification. Under the law, the Spruchkammer could levy “unlimited fines” against Nazi perpetrators in West Berlin and could do so in perpetuity. The exceptional nature of Berlin’s law was not widely known, even among those who should have been paying attention.

  Heim spent the 1950s building his gynecology practice in Baden-Baden and traveling around West Germany as a pharmaceutical representative. In Germany’s divided capital he saw the opportunity to buy an investment property of his own. A man was selling a fifty-year-old prewar building in the West Berlin neighborhood of Moabit, and Heim went to have a look. Centrally located, Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28 was close to public transportation as well as shopping centers. Many of the spacious prewar apartments had been divided as a result of the postwar housing shortage, and there were thirty-four units in all. The entryway had double wooden doors, and behind them there were marble flourishes on the floor and walls of the lobby. The staircase was made of oak. Heim purchased the building on February 8, 1958, for just under 160,000 deutsche marks with the help of a loan from his mother-in-law.

  It was a peaceful corner of the city one block from the Spree River. The neighborhood was a mix of old buildings, new apartment blocks, and a few empty spaces left by Allied bombs. One gaping hole was next to the Heinrich von Kleist School on Levetzowstrasse, just around the corner from Heim’s new investment. A large synagogue, which could seat more than two thousand, had once stood at Levetzowstrasse 7–8. The house of worship was completed in 1914, the year World War I began, a conflict that claimed the lives of many patriotic German Jews serving in the Wehrmacht and the navy. Less than a quarter century later the building was set ablaze by their fellow Germans on Kristallnacht.

  The Nazis used the burned-out building as an assembly point for the deportation of Jews to the camps. The synagogue was damaged further during the war, but local residents said that the structure seemed sturdy enough. Nevertheless, with its worshippers gone, the Levetzowstrasse synagogue was torn down in 1955. A modest plaque noting its existence was all that remained.

  Germans and Austrians like Heim could have reasonably assumed that their nations had put the war behind them. There would be a few plaques and a few commemoration ceremonies, it seemed, but even the worst of the Nazi war criminals focused on their futures rather than worrying about the past. It was a logical assumption to make, but it was wrong. In fact the reckoning with the past was only just beginning, and with it the pursuit and prosecution of Nazi fugitives like Aribert Heim gathered momentum.

  CHAPTER 15

  On January 18, 1954, Bernd Fischer was hired as the director of a refugee camp in Ulm-Wilhelmsburg in North Württemberg. He worked at a lot of jobs after the war, from agriculture to a chemical factory, even as a vacuum salesman. He had a good reputation as a manager, but authorities were suspicious when he wrote down different dates for his birthday on various forms. A background check by the Americans revealed that Bernd Fischer was actually Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, a man with more to conceal than his name.

  Though in his official questionnaire he denied any connection to the Nazi Party, this was not true. Even before joining the Nazis, Fischer-Schweder was a member of two right-wing paramilitary groups, the Freikorps “Fürstner” starting in 1921 and the “Schwarze Reichswehr” in 1923. Two years later, in August 1925, Fischer-Schweder joined the Nazi Party with the membership number 17,141, joining the brown-shirted storm troopers known as the SA. When the Nazis took power in 1933, he was one of the long-standing Nazis, known as the “old fighters,” enrolled at the police academy in Berlin. His path within the party was not entirely smooth. He was briefly held in a concentration camp after the Röhm Putsch, when Hitler purged his rivals in the SA. But he must have proved his loyalty to the Führer because he continued his career in the SS. In October 1940 he became police director of the southwestern town of Memel. When questioned more than a decade later, he justified his omissions in terms of self-preservation. “Only the very biggest calves look for their own butcher,” he said.

  Still the authorities did not respond to these revelations about his past by arresting him or charging him with any crimes. He was not called to account for lying on his Fragebogen or to the Spruchkammer. That was not how things worked in West Germany in the 1950s. Instead, his supervisors in Ulm quietly asked him to resign from his position. It was not worth a public scandal, but neither was it considered appropriate for a senior member of the Gestapo to command a refugee camp. Fischer-Schweder resigned, albeit grudgingly, and took a job working for the American firm Remington Rand. A middle-class existence in a booming country was his for the taking, but a future in government or law enforcement was denied to him.

  It must have been particularly difficult for him to swallow with so many of his former comrades working as policemen and prosecutors, with all the former Nazis in positions of power all the way up to Adenauer’s chancellery; Hans Globke, Adenauer’s national security adviser, had even written anti-Jewish laws for the Nazi regime. Fischer-Schweder did apply for another law-enforcement job, this time in South Baden, and was turned down. Rather than accept that his past now disqualified him from public employment, he retracted his resignation and sued to be reinstated to his former job at the refugee camp.

  The newspapers picked up the story of an SS Obersturmführer insisting on his right to a job working with displaced
persons. As a result, his wartime activities received greater scrutiny. He was recognized not just as a Nazi but also as an executioner. After his appointment as police director in Ulm, Fischer-Schweder had been sent to the eastern front. There his job was to slaughter Jews as a member of Einsatzkommando Tilsit, one of the roving units that massacred Jews, Communists, and other opponents of Nazi rule.

  Although the authorities tried to handle it discreetly, the small controversy in Ulm grew into a major scandal that could no longer be downplayed. On May 2, 1956, the police arrested him. The case expanded beyond just the one SS officer who refused to keep mum about his past. The prosecutor’s investigative files grew to thirty-five hundred pages, and ultimately ten former Gestapo and SS officers were charged for their roles in massacring thousands. Their trial opened on April 28, 1958, and over the course of the proceedings 173 witnesses took the stand. The atrocities of the eastern front, including the execution of frightened, naked women with children clutched in their arms, were revealed in harrowing detail.

  The trial in Ulm was led not by the Americans or the Soviets but by West German prosecutors. Chilling dispatches appeared in all the country’s major newspapers. The Ulm trials marked a breakthrough for postwar Germany’s relationship with its past. While some tried to ignore what had emerged in the courtroom and the press, the Germans had begun, however fitfully, to investigate and prosecute the former Nazis.