His distraction, short temper, and sudden trips all seemed to fit a man with a mistress. The couple slept in separate bedrooms, and the family cleaning lady, Helene Possekel, had been tidying up in Heim’s when she found a gold bracelet. She gave it to Friedl, who handed it to her husband, saying, “This was found in your bedroom, no doubt a memento of beautiful hours.” Heim insisted that he was not having an affair. The bracelet was a present for his niece, Birgit, for her confirmation. This did not put an end to Friedl’s concerns nor ease the growing tension in the Heim household. Her husband doted a little too much on his sister Herta and constantly praised her in his wife’s presence. The amount of time that he spent with the Barth family, and away from home, was troubling.
Friedl had already forgiven him for the distasteful matter of his illegitimate daughter, whom he had confessed to having. Or more like half confessed. Heim claimed to have signed the birth certificate of a fatherless child, knowing that the promiscuous mother had dallied with his SS colleagues. By signing the certificate, he made her eligible for the Lebensborn program to promote the Aryan race, guaranteeing the girl a minimum of support from the state. It was an unpleasant subject, and Friedl preferred to forget it.
Until the spring of that year the couple’s live-in maid, Ursula Kammerer, thought of their relationship as “balanced and harmonious.” Then the household staff sensed a changing mood. The growing pressure on Heim was palpable. The couple’s increasingly frequent fights “did not remain concealed from me,” Ms. Kammerer said, in spite of the fact that “as it grew strained between the Heim couple I would receive days off at the most improbable moments, whereas before my free time was granted according to a definite plan.”
When he was home, Aribert remained a devoted father. His younger son, Rüdiger, had a deviated septum that made him prone to ear infections and other nagging ailments. One night his father came into his room to check up on him and found the boy still awake. The two went downstairs to the kitchen, and Aribert fried a couple of eggs for the boy. They sat together in the kitchen until little Rü felt better. When his father brought him back upstairs, he was finally able to fall asleep.
It was a tender moment, but Heim was also a strict parent, especially as the pressure of discovery grew. As the school year was ending in the summer of 1962, Heim inquired how his son was doing in his classes. The teacher answered that if his work continued so poorly, he might not advance to the next grade. When Rüdiger came home from school, he saw that his desk had been moved to the middle of the living room.
“So what’s this you’ve been telling me all along that you’re doing well?” his father asked. His fuse was shorter in those days, his temper quicker. “You might be held back. Why did you lie to me?”
Rüdiger had to sit there at the little desk under his father’s stern gaze and do math problems and practice spelling. After two hours he began to whimper, asking if he could go outside. His mother said, “Let the poor child go,” but Heim was unmoved, and when Rüdiger began to cry, his father spanked him with the carpet beater. It was the first time Rü had been corporally punished. Like the maid and the cleaning lady, the little boy could sense the tension rising in the house.
Busy and distracted as he was, Heim did not cancel the family summer vacation at Lake Lugano. It was a happy few weeks, and everything felt normal again. In September they returned for the start of the school year.
CHAPTER 19
In 1962 the frenzy of attention around the year-old Berlin Wall continued. The threat of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States was a constant concern as their stockpiles grew, but there was little the Germans on either side of the border could do. West German politicians chose to focus on economic growth and the country’s burgeoning strength as an industrial exporter. German businessmen were preoccupied with the “offensive” of Japanese cars on the world market and whether they might cut too deeply into the business of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen.
At Baden-Baden’s Metropol movie theater, the cultural shifts of the 1960s were already in evidence. The scandalous film Lulu was playing, starring the Austrian actress Nadja Tiller, whose character was described as “a broad like Satan,” along with Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing comedy with Marilyn Monroe, Some Like It Hot.
Late one night that September the Heims’ housekeeper, Ms. Kammerer, could hear the doctor and his wife fighting, even though her room was in the attic and they were down on the ground floor. “They carried on a loud and in part heated discussion, the content of which, since I was in my room, I had no chance to discover,” she later recalled. She said she could not tell if the mother-in-law, Mrs. Bechtold, had taken part in the argument in order to, as she put it, “take her daughter’s side.”
The next day, Heim came to Ms. Kammerer’s bedroom extremely early, around 4:15 a.m., and woke her up. She said she knew right away that something was wrong. “Compared with his otherwise normally calm and even-tempered manner, he appeared to be agitated and nervous, so I asked him if something had happened. He answered that he had to go and that he was in a hurry; probably I would never see him again.”
The maid said he asked her to support his wife, “especially on account of the children, to the best of my strength, and to overlook anything that his mother-in-law might do that bothered me.” She made him breakfast and watched as he loaded his suitcase and briefcase into the Mercedes with the Frankfurt license plates. His wife, Friedl, was still in bed when he left.
Friedl described the arrival of the police that afternoon “like an ambush.” Half a dozen men in plain clothes came into the house and went through the rooms looking for Heim. She stopped them in front of the room where their elder son, Aribert, was doing his homework.
“Please leave the boy,” she told the police. “Look around. Do what you must, but please don’t speak to him. Don’t tell him that you’re looking for his father.” Before departing, one of the officers told her, “You should be glad it’s no longer the Third Reich. Then we would have gone about all of this very differently.”
When Mrs. Possekel, the cleaning lady, returned to the villa a few days later, she noticed Heim’s absence. She assumed that he had left because of the quarrel with his wife over the bracelet. But as the weeks went by without his return, she realized something more serious had happened. The entire family’s mood was gloomy, and “Frau Dr. Heim wandered around with tearstained eyes.”
It was not unusual for Birgit Barth to have her uncle stay with them in Buchschlag. It was almost like Aribert’s second home. The five-bedroom house sat back from the street and was decorated in a tasteful mix of antique and modern. A metal fence ran around the property. The yard was filled with evergreens, birch trees, and an old apple tree. One day the family gathered outside in front of the garden fence to bid Aribert farewell.
This time he appeared to be going on a trip longer than the two-hour hour drive back to Baden-Baden. Birgit thought he was going on a vacation since he was taking the sports car. She noticed that her mother had packed his things into Birgit’s little blue suitcase. With his usual advice to do well in school, Heim left her home for what she did not realize was the last time. The teenager sulked as her beloved suitcase as well as her tweezers and nail file disappeared into the trunk of the Mercedes convertible. “You better get in,” her father said to Aribert. “They’re over there.”
Birgit thought he meant the chatty neighbors down the street, but he actually meant the state police who had begun canvassing the neighborhood with a photograph, asking neighbors if they recognized Dr. Heim. The neighbors knew him, of course, but told the police they had no idea.
A police investigator rang Herta Barth’s doorbell again in February. The officer found Mrs. Barth “indignant” when she discovered that the police were searching for her brother. “She answered questions only grudgingly,” one of the policemen wrote in his report.
Asked when her brother had last been there, she told him mid-January. She did not ask why her
brother was being sought, which seemed like the natural question if she did not know that he was a wanted fugitive. The officer explained that they had leads suggesting that Heim had been staying with her.
German law does not permit the prosecution of direct blood relatives for aiding and abetting fugitive family members. Close relations—fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters—are not expected to cooperate. The ties of blood are stronger, the law presumes, than the individual’s loyalty to the state. That was certainly the case in the Heim family.
Around the same time, Friedl received a card from Heim bearing the postmark of his sister’s suburb. When the police returned to interview her again, Herta was like another person. “Now Mrs. Barth was friendliness itself,” the policeman wrote. Her brother had not visited for some time, she explained, because the two of them had had a difference of opinion. She did not elaborate on the subject of the dispute, but she was now curious enough to ask why the police were looking for her Aribert. The officer did not answer. Instead, he gave her what amounted to a warning: if Heim did not turn himself in, the police would have to ask the public for assistance in apprehending him. Posters with his photograph would be plastered all over the place.
“Apparently, Dr. Heim has very good friends in the federal republic,” the officer wrote, “with whom he can stay for weeks at a time without being noticed.” He had not registered his whereabouts, as German law required, nor was there evidence that he was staying in a hotel. “The search continues,” the investigator wrote in February 1963, five months after the doctor’s disappearance from Baden-Baden and shortly after his sister said he had left Buchschlag.
The Hessian police returned to Bad Nauheim, where Heim had played hockey, to look for clues. Unlike their American counterparts, who had turned up no evidence that Heim had lived there, the Hessian police found that he was still remembered a dozen years later. A doctor told them that Heim had lived at the Sanatorium Hahn in downtown Bad Nauheim.
In the neighboring town of Friedberg, Fräulein Welsch in the personnel department of the hospital found a reference to Heim in her files. She recalled how the doctor had “disappeared unexpectedly from Friedberg.” They were even aware of his next stop. Fräulein Welsch told the investigators that she “surmised that he had then moved to Mannheim,” which was in fact the case. Heim was registered there and could have been easily located by anyone who checked with the local municipal office, under his correct name and place of birth, at Dürerstrasse 7. The chief doctor had not been at all forthcoming a decade earlier when questioned by the Americans. “The possibility has to be considered that Dr. Kramer gave the American authorities false information about Dr. Heim at that time,” the German investigator wrote in his report.
In April 1963, less than a year after he fled Baden-Baden, Heim visited West Berlin to check on his property. He stayed at the Hotel Frühling, not far from the Zoologischer Garten train station and a short walk to the real-estate firm Wilhelm Droste. Heim had come to the office to inform the staff that his sister Herta would now handle the property and that the proceeds from the apartment building should be sent to her. That was the last confirmed sighting of Dr. Aribert Heim in Germany.
CHAPTER 20
Alfred Aedtner relished his job at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. It provided the challenging assignments he was looking for but also meant that he spent less and less time at home with his wife and young son. Rather than drive an hour each way from Gaggenau, Aedtner rented a small apartment near Ludwigsburg, where he worked. Investigations took him all over Germany as well as abroad. He came home on the weekends exhausted.
Even then he had work. While his son splashed at the public swimming pool, Alfred read case files or studied. He needed an Abitur, the highest level of high school degree, to achieve his goal of becoming a Kriminalkommissar, or detective superintendent. He finally received his diploma at the age of thirty-six. Once he had his Abitur, he was able to study at the police academy in Freiburg, and by 1964 he was promoted.
The detective was still a bit of a dandy. He only wore hand-tailored suits and only drove Mercedes cars. A handsome man with a full head of hair, Aedtner marched to work each day in a trench coat, briefcase under his arm and cigarette dangling from his lip. His wife stretched his public-employee salary to shop at the clothier Z. Müller in Gaggenau. His handmade hats came from her sister, who was in the business. He only wore Seidensticker shirts, with the black rose emblem stitched into the side. He was equally loyal to his Peer Export cigarettes, smoking his way through three of the red packs every day. He used American Ronson cigarette lighters, even though the company once made tanks for the United States, which the German soldiers nicknamed Ronsons for their propensity to catch fire.
But just because state justice officials founded an office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes did not mean that they supported it. Aedtner was disappointed by the quality of the policemen assigned to the unit, green recruits, traffic cops, officers with no experience working complex investigations. “You can’t fix a complicated machine with unskilled labor,” was Aedtner’s way of putting it. It quickly became clear that the decision to start the central office was intended more to serve as political cover than to create an actual task force.
Under the leadership of Erwin Schüle, the Ulm prosecutor who became the head of the central office, the group combed through archives from London to Jerusalem, from Washington to Amsterdam, searching for evidence of war crimes. The enormity of the task—often compared to Hercules cleansing the Augean Stables—became clearer the deeper they delved, discovering, for instance, that the Gestapo had issued false identity papers to its officers in the spring of 1945. But the group pursued its cases so diligently and effectively that even the president of the World Jewish Congress, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, praised its work and Schüle personally.
There was no small amount of schadenfreude among the opponents of Nazi prosecution when it emerged that Schüle had been a member of the Nazi Party and the stormtroopers known as the SA. As Schüle arrived in Warsaw in February 1965 to examine archival material about Nazi war crimes the East German news agency ADN reported his membership in the party. His superiors had already known about his past and he was able to cling to his job, even as he was excoriated in the press, received death threats at home, and was mocked on television comedy shows. But after the Soviets alleged that Schüle had been personally involved in executions on the eastern front during the war as a member of the 215th Infantry Division, he resigned the following year.
“Isn’t it time twenty years after the war to end the denazification?” asked Franz Xaver Unertl, a conservative member of the Bundestag at a political gathering. Der Spiegel described the applause as “thunderous.”
The Schüle scandal only compounded the already difficult task of trying to build cases in an uncooperative and at times obstructive justice system. Officials were as likely to warn former comrades of an imminent arrest as to help Aedtner apprehend the accused. Police officers regularly asked Aedtner how he could stand to betray his own. The investigators were called “Nestbeschmutzer,” literally ones who soiled their own nests, but in spirit more like those who denigrate their country. They were cursed to their faces. Taxi drivers often refused fares to their headquarters, so they had to give nearby addresses in order to be picked up. “As a result of these hostilities,” Aedtner said, “more than a few asked to be relieved from the special commission. They were replaced with others for whom it did not go any differently.”
Aedtner described how he once appeared at the Stuttgart apartment of a police commander who had overseen the murder of more than ten thousand Jews, Communists, and partisans in the region around Minsk when he was a member of Police Battalion 322 during the war. The man’s wife loudly cursed Aedtner and his colleagues, saying the impending arrest was “worse than Gestapo methods.” She told him that it was beneath her husband to be ar
rested by such “little people.”
Many former members of Police Battalion 322 were working for the police department again after the war. The defendants were up to date on the finest details of the investigators’ schedules, always prepared in advance when they appeared to question them. “Wherever we showed up, everyone knew the score already,” Aedtner wrote. Witnesses who at first had described the mass shootings in detail, seemingly relieved to confess, stopped cooperating, fearing for their jobs. “For us,” Aedtner said, “this development was more than depressing.”
For a man dedicated to justice, the enormity of the crimes and the fact that so many in the government resisted solving them began to chafe. One case in particular nagged at him. It involved a man who was convicted as an accessory in the murder of 16,500 people who was sentenced to just two and a half years’ imprisonment, little more than an hour for each victim’s life. Still Aedtner remained single-minded in tracking down such perpetrators, tenacious as well as patient.
He kept up his spirits by going out with his colleagues, playing the popular card game skat for beers. The war-crimes unit was tight-knit, “a sworn fellowship,” as his son described the group. On the road, in the office, on weekends, Aedtner could be found with his stout counterpart Ernst Faller, who was his best friend on the force. Aedtner drank pilsner in great quantities and developed a bit of a paunch over the years from his love of hearty German fare, dumplings and spätzle, roasts and schnitzels. On the weekends he never missed his Stammtisch at the local bar back home, the regular gathering of locals at a designated table, something like a drinking club.
He was just thirty-nine when he testified on January 8, 1965, in the Auschwitz trials, as much a sensation inside Germany as the Eichmann trial had been abroad. Aedtner told the court that it was his style to let the perpetrators talk without interruption, as in the case of an SS man named Stark who worked at Auschwitz. “The accused was very willing to make a statement. He described things himself without having to be asked much,” Aedtner told the judges. “It was even the case that he talked about things that we at that point knew nothing about, internal matters about his conduct or to be precise his concrete actions in the camp.”
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 9