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

by Kulish, Nicholas

  On May 30 of the same year, Wilhelm Jellinek, a businessman from Aschaffenburg, gave the Munich police a sworn statement that Dr. Hans Eisele, a physician living comfortably in the suburb of Pasing, had killed at least two hundred concentration camp inmates as an SS doctor. Jellinek said that he personally witnessed Dr. Eisele commit the murders with injections of an Evipan-Natrium solution.

  The Munich police took Jellinek’s statement but did not immediately arrest the doctor, who continued to practice medicine, including treating state-insured patients. It was not until three weeks later, on June 20, that the police forwarded the case to the appropriate prosecutor. By that time the story had already made it into the newspapers.

  At first Eisele defended himself vigorously, even writing a letter to the editor of one of the newspapers that published the accusations against him. Then a sympathetic individual in the government warned Eisele that his arrest was imminent. The man who had beaten two death sentences vanished from West Germany and quickly resurfaced in Egypt. The West Germans tried to have him extradited, but according to Egyptian law the murders and attempted murders he was accused of committing had already passed their statute of limitations. Like the tank officer Gerhartz before him, Dr. Eisele was allowed to build a new life in the Middle East.

  On August 29, 1958, the court in Ulm found ten defendants, including Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, guilty in connection with the Einsatzkommando case. Though the men were convicted, they were only determined by the court to be culpable as accessories, and they were given between three and fifteen years in prison. Their defense that they were just following orders spared them more serious sentences. The verdicts disappointed many hoping to see real justice done, however belatedly.

  But the case had a ripple effect. Under pressure from the media and with an eye on diplomatic reaction, West German state ministers created a special body to investigate war crimes with the prosecutor in charge of the Ulm Trial, Erwin Schüle, at its helm. The Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes began its work on December 1, 1958, in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, making Baden-Württemberg the center of Nazi investigations in Germany. By the end of the first month the office had opened sixty-four cases. On July 23, 1959, Schüle could lay claim to the group’s first big victory when police arrested the head of the criminal police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Georg Heuser, for taking part in mass shootings in Minsk. After a year, the number of active cases had reached four hundred.

  Among the first employees to report for work at the new Nazi-hunting unit was the ambitious thirty-four-year-old police officer Alfred Aedtner. He had already secured a transfer from his post as beat cop to one watching trains arriving from East Germany for suspicious activity, perhaps not the most exciting job, but of greater significance than writing up fender benders in Gaggenau. Aedtner would now turn his attention to war crimes. He thought it would probably take “at the most a year” to clear up the remaining cases and then move on.

  But as the small band of prosecutors began to read through the multitude of witness statements, the magnitude of the crimes came into focus. Their problem was finding the funds and manpower to handle the investigations. Aedtner was immediately given some of the toughest cases.

  The Frankfurt prosecutor Fritz Bauer had begun pursuing criminal prosecutions for the murders committed at Auschwitz. By April, Aedtner was delving into the investigation. He heard how new arrivals at Auschwitz were lined up and executed before the notorious Black Wall, which had stood between the crematorium and the barracks where medical experiments were performed. A man who had shaken pellets of Zyklon B into the gas chamber with his own hands explained to Aedtner how he stood before the vents on the roof and emptied the deadly canister of pellets onto the victims packed below him.

  Aedtner quickly realized that the case before him went far beyond routine violations of the rules of war. These cases had to be solved, they had to be prosecuted and the perpetrators punished, of that he was certain.

  CHAPTER 16

  When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Stuttgart district judge Fritz Bauer knew the new government had two strikes against him: he was a Social Democrat, and he came from a German-Jewish family. The thirty-year-old was forced to resign and spent several months in the Heuberg concentration camp. Once freed in 1935, he first moved to Denmark and then, after nearly being recaptured, escaped to Sweden, where he worked on an opposition newspaper with his fellow Social Democrat Willy Brandt.

  Bauer returned to Germany after the war intent on meting out justice through the legal system. There were former Nazis at every level of German government, and Bauer was determined to prosecute them. Threats, sabotage, and suspiciously missing files did not intimidate him. With his ample jowls, under his shock of white hair, Bauer made a lasting impression. He had begun building what he hoped would be a successful case against the perpetrators of Auschwitz, and in December 1956 he issued an arrest warrant for Eichmann.

  The following year Lothar Hermann, a Holocaust survivor and immigrant to Argentina, wrote to Bauer stating that he knew where Eichmann was. Hermann’s teenage daughter, Sylvia, had been dating Eichmann’s son Nick, who was living in Buenos Aires under his own name and talking a little too openly about the past. Bauer was not the first person Hermann had told about his discovery of Eichmann’s whereabouts. He had informed the local Jewish organization as well as Tuviah Friedman in Israel. But nothing had happened.

  Bauer did not like his chances if he pursued the case himself. There were so many former Nazis in the ranks of the police, prosecutors, and government officials that he believed Eichmann would be warned before he could be found, much less arrested and extradited. The German ambassador to Argentina had once been an aide to the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Instead, Bauer chose to meet secretly with Israel’s representative in Germany, Felix Shinar. They met at a nondescript highway motel. Bauer pointed out that by handing over the information to an agent of a foreign government, he was committing treason. Shinar promised that Israel would act.

  But the Israelis equivocated, saying they needed more evidence. Instead of sending experienced agents, they had directed Hermann, blind from beatings he had received at Dachau, and his young daughter to look for proof that the man living as Ricardo Klement was actually Adolf Eichmann. Sylvia found the modest house where Eichmann said he was living and went all alone to seek him out. The amateur detectives were surprisingly effective, but Bauer was furious. The Mossad was just sitting on the information. In December 1959, Bauer decided to fly to Israel and demand action.

  He set up a meeting at the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem. “Any second-class policeman would be able to follow such a lead!” Bauer shouted at the Israeli officials. “Just go and ask the nearest butcher or greengrocer and you will learn all there is to know about him!” Bauer had brought further proof with him, details about how Eichmann had used the rat lines to flee Germany. Bauer threatened to extradite Eichmann himself unless the Israelis acted. They tried to mollify him, promising that with the new information they would move against Eichmann as quickly as possible. Bauer returned to Germany and waited to see if they kept their word.

  On May 11, 1960, Ricardo Klement was walking home from the bus stop after his shift at the Mercedes-Benz factory. He passed a car that had broken down on Garibaldi Street. Two men were working on it. “Un momentito, señor,” one of them said to him, and before he knew it, Eichmann was pinned to the ground by the men, who wrestled him into the car and drove to a safe house. The Nazi was questioned, drugged, dressed in an El Al airlines uniform, and carried onto a jet. The agents charged with getting him onto the plane said he was a pilot who had partied a little too hard. They were there to take him home.

  Simon Wiesenthal learned of Adolf Eichmann’s capture when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion addressed the Israeli Parliament on May 23, 1960. “I must inform the Knesset that some time ago, Israeli security forces tracked down one of
the greater Nazi criminals, Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge, together with the Nazi leadership, of what they referred to as ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish problem,’ ” he told the chamber. “Adolf Eichmann is already held in custody in Israel and will soon be brought to trial.”

  The prime minister received a standing ovation. The architect of the Holocaust, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, was in Israel, where he would be tried for murder. None of the details of his spectacular capture by the Mossad and the Shin Bet were made public. While it was a moment of great pride for the young nation, the Argentine government was protesting that its sovereignty had been violated. Nationalists in Buenos Aires began attacking Jews and Jewish sites. Argentina went to the United Nations demanding action.

  It was not the time to trumpet the details of their operation. Nor could Fritz Bauer take credit for his part in the capture for fear of prosecution. His role remained a closely kept secret. Chancellor Adenauer had already protested the Israeli action and said that Eichmann should be sent to Germany. To deflect criticism, Ben-Gurion’s government claimed that it was not the Mossad who captured the Nazi but an independent group of Jews who had taken it upon themselves to seize the Obersturmbannführer. Beyond that the details were sketchy.

  Meanwhile, Wiesenthal had already received a cable from Yad Vashem, congratulating him. He had once passed on information that Eichmann was in Argentina. His files, along with Tuviah Friedman’s, were now being used to help with the criminal’s interrogation. Wiesenthal began to give interviews. After six years, the Nazi hunter was back, with a new global profile.

  No trial since Nuremberg had received such attention when the Eichmann trial opened on April 11, 1961. Israeli officials wanted to tell the world what the Nazis had done during the war. Famous writers like Hannah Arendt descended on the courtroom, making controversial declarations about the “banality of evil.” Unlike the Nuremberg trials, Eichmann’s was televised. For the first time the world was forced to recognize the severity of the crimes during the Holocaust. Eichmann’s trial would keep the Jewish demand for justice from becoming a historical footnote.

  CHAPTER 17

  The dance floor at the Casino Gala Evening in Baden-Baden was full of men and women in black tie. On the edge of the crowd, a blonde with carefully curled, shoulder-length hair danced with a tall man with a receding hairline. The moment was captured in a black-and-white photograph that took up an entire page in Baden-Baden magazine. Friedl and Aribert Heim saved the magazine as a keepsake. A dozen years into their marriage, they were enjoying life in a beautiful spa town.

  After working in numerous hospitals, performing clinical drug trials, and publishing an article in a medical journal, Heim was thriving at his gynecological practice on Lange Strasse. Word traveled quickly that Dr. Heim was an attractive physician with a pleasing bedside manner. At home he tried to spend what little free time he had with his two young boys. He built a goal in the backyard for the kids to practice playing soccer. There was no net, just two posts and a crossbar. When it rained, they played table tennis. Heim put great emphasis on sport and physical activity.

  In the summers Heim’s mother, Anna, and his older sister, Hilda, would come from Austria and stay with his younger sister, Herta, in an affluent bedroom community a twenty-minute drive from Frankfurt. When Dr. Heim and his children visited, the two boys would follow their cousin Birgit around. Birgit adored her uncle, though she was angry when he banished her beloved dachshund from sleeping in her bed on the grounds that she might catch toxoplasmosis. Otherwise her world was a happy one, roughhousing with the local boys or playing at the tennis club. The wall that had divided Berlin in 1961 was a frightening but distant thought. She was more concerned with getting her hands on the latest record by Peter Kraus, the teenage heartthrob.

  Noticing that she spent a good deal of time playing with boys, her mother felt it was time to teach her the facts of life. Instead of sitting her daughter down herself, she turned to Uncle Ferdi. He took Birgit into the study with a pencil and a notebook. But the tomboy could not understand why his diagrams meant she should stop playing cops and robbers with the neighborhood boys. Still, Herta was satisfied that her brother had taken care of the issue. “What do you have such a brother for,” his sister asked, “if not to handle such a job?”

  It was during this otherwise peaceful time that Heim began to fear his past might catch up with him. He had received an inquiry about his wartime service from investigators, specifically his service at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He decided to visit Frankfurt’s leading defense attorneys for Nazi cases, the former Nuremberg lawyer Hans Laternser and his young protégé Fritz Steinacker.

  Steinacker had stumbled into his unusual legal specialty almost by accident. The young man from Hesse always thought he would grow up to be a doctor. Born in 1921, he did not even get to finish high school. He went straight from the Hitler Youth to the Luftwaffe. Steinacker was trained as a bomber pilot. He flew Heinkel 111s and Ju 88s for the Luftwaffe, and he flew them well. He received one of the highest decorations, the German Cross in Gold, for extraordinary acts of valor.

  On one mission he took heavy antiaircraft fire and had to crash-land near the town of Taufkirchen. His injuries weren’t life threatening, and when he was taken to the hospital, he lay on the stretcher waiting for treatment as doctors tended to the more serious cases. The smells in the infirmary, the mixtures of human odors and disinfectants, made him sick to the point of passing out. Steinacker survived his wounds and survived the war, but the smell stuck with him. He realized he could not train on cadavers, could not work among those medical odors. They made him nauseated and light-headed. It did not take long before he realized that he would never be a physician.

  He went to law school instead. It was, he thought, “an honorable job as well.” The young lawyer studied civil law, but a friend asked him if he could substitute for another attorney on a criminal case. He protested that he was not trained for it, but his friend said he just needed to sit there next to the accused, a place holder with a law degree. He was diligent and effective, surpassing the expectations of Hans Laternser, the experienced attorney on the case, who had worked as a defender at the Nuremberg trials and later been part of the Heidelberger Juristenkreis, the lobbying and legal aid group for Nazi detainees.

  The two men hit it off, and Laternser asked if they could continue working together. The older lawyer’s specialty was defending Nazis. Many German attorneys avoided such cases for moral reasons or out of fear that it would hurt their other business. But Laternser had built his practice on exactly such cases. Steinacker had no such qualms and quickly accepted. By 1962 they had a full client list of former Nazis and a growing reputation.

  The day Heim went to their office, Laternser was away, so Steinacker received the visitor by himself. Heim explained that for a short period of one or two months he was stationed as an SS doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He said that he had not been concerned about possible legal repercussions until the previous year, when two men had contacted him to question him about it.

  The meeting had taken place at the Heidelberg train station. It was not a confrontational conversation, but they had brought a file with them and wanted to know whether he was the man mentioned in the paperwork. Heim said yes, but as he examined the documents, he had the feeling that he could have walked away with the file, the proceeding was so informal. Heim said that he had gone to the police station in Baden-Baden to inquire whether there was any sort of criminal case against him. The police told him that there was none that they were aware of, but shortly thereafter he was warned—he did not say how—that proceedings were brewing against him. As early as 1961 he had been advised that it would be impossible to get a fair trial in such a case. He believed that even a single witness giving incriminating testimony would be enough to win a conviction.

  “I know that there’s a case against me, and I’m giving you power of attorney to represent me,” Heim told
Steinacker. He wrote out a statement naming Steinacker and Laternser as his legal representatives, then gave the young lawyer his address. They could always reach his wife there. He explained that his sister would handle any financial issues that arose, including Steinacker’s fee. The two men stood up and shook hands. “You’ll be hearing from me,” Heim said.

  Meanwhile, his appeals exhausted, Adolf Eichmann awaited his death sentence in the Ramleh prison in Israel. Shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, he was taken to a wooden platform with a trapdoor. A noose hung from an iron frame above his head. The guards tied his legs together to prevent him from kicking. He declined a hood to cover his face.

  “Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria,” Eichmann said. “I shall not forget them.”

  He was the first and only prisoner ever executed by the state of Israel. He was cremated and his ashes placed in a small nickel canister. Later the ashes were sprinkled at sea. There would be no grave, no shrine. Eichmann’s sentence was complete.

  CHAPTER 18

  There were many possible explanations for the growing amount of time that Dr. Heim spent away from home in the spring and summer of 1962. His medical practice absorbed a great deal of his attention, and managing the Bechtold family properties since the death of Friedl’s father took up more and more of his energy. He also was a frequent visitor at Herta’s house in Buchschlag. There were many plausible explanations for his absences until the bracelet appeared. After that it was difficult for Friedl Heim to dispel her fear that Aribert was having an affair.