The head of Berlin’s Jewish community forwarded Wiesenthal’s request for help with the Heim case to the director of the Interior Ministry of West Berlin, Jürgen Brinkmeier. He, in turn, passed the request down to Rolf-Peter Magen. Magen was a short man with a pudgy face, a small, fine mouth, and a pronounced bald spot. He looked like what he was, a bespectacled, middle-aged lawyer. Magen normally handled cases involving voter rights. He was not a criminal prosecutor. He was, however, tenacious and creative, refusing to accept that there was nothing the city could do about the Aribert Heim case. The Heim case posed a legal challenge, but Magen was also interested in raising his profile politically, with an eye on higher office. The case was all over the city’s newspapers and even on national television, presenting the perfect opportunity. “He immediately smelled blood,” said his colleague Ernst R. Zivier, who worked on the Heim case with him.
It was not an auspicious beginning for the prosecution. The lack of firsthand testimony would hurt their case. Magen hoped to have witness statements from the early stages of the investigation in the postwar years if he could convince the Baden-Baden prosecutors to help. He also had the foremost expert in German law enforcement as it related to Aribert Heim at his side. Alfred Aedtner traveled to Berlin to walk Magen and his colleague Zivier through the depositions he had taken and the archival material he had unearthed. The detective remembered every last detail from his witness interviews, each tiny point from the files. “He had jealously driven all over the place in his search,” Zivier said. “It made an impression how utterly engaged he was.”
Like Aedtner, Magen went to the Berlin Document Center, where he determined that Dr. Aribert Heim had indeed been part of the Nazi army, a member of the SA and the Waffen-SS. He learned that Heim had worked as an inspector at Buchenwald. Magen’s first instinct must have been to build a criminal case against the Nazi doctor. The Berlin files contained a copy of the death notice of a Berliner who died on November 3, 1941, while Heim worked at Mauthausen. But the person who provided the information did not have evidence of any specific crime. Magen wrote to the prosecutors in Baden-Baden, asking them to turn over “the results of their investigation as quickly as possible.”
The officials in southwest Germany rebuffed Magen’s request, writing, “I regret once again that I cannot send you the complete files to examine, but there is an ongoing need for them here.” The official added that the witness statements were “extremely incriminating.” Lacking the support from Baden-Baden, Magen’s boss, Brinkmeier, appealed instead to Wiesenthal, who sent along a photocopy of the German arrest warrant as well as information on the Austrian investigation.
“I am under the impression that that will be sufficient for your purposes,” Wiesenthal wrote. “If you should require the Austrian arrest warrant, request it please from the federal minister of justice.” He commented that the case had turned into “a parody” and that he felt obliged to send a copy of the file to Justice Minister Vogel himself. Though Wiesenthal was frustrated with the progress and insulted that Vogel never answered him, he was soon pleased to learn that the West Berlin lawyers planned to use their “Berlin specialty” to go after the Nazi doctor.
The Spruchkammer law had been used to seize funds from the heirs of Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, as well as the estate of the Buchenwald commandant Hermann Pister. It had last been used against the estate of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, in 1971. The Berliners assured Wiesenthal that they could make the same case against Heim.
With every passing year the need to keep denazification panels at the ready seemed less and less pressing. When new members were nominated for the standing three-judge panel, “every time people just smiled,” Magen told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. The Spruchkammer was a quaint historical relic, not a tool of justice. Then the Heim case broke in 1979.
CHAPTER 39
Unlike most criminal cases, where the guilt of the accused is determined before the appropriate punishment, Heim’s sentence was chosen before the hearing even began. The correspondence between the authorities reveals that they would seize the building if the accused was found guilty. A letter from Berlin to the court in Linz observed that the “goal of the procedure” was to “impose a monetary penalty on Dr. Heim such that, after the verdict of the Spruchkammer has legal force, the rental-apartment property belonging to Dr. Heim in Berlin could be taken.” In order to take that step, however, it was necessary to know what the building was worth.
The city finance ministry made a simple calculation based on similar properties. It came to the conclusion that Tile-Wardenberg-Strasse 28 was worth 690,000 deutsche marks. The building authority was more thorough. It sent inspectors to the apartment house in March 1979 for a complete assessment. They found that the elevator had not worked since the end of World War II. There were cracks in the inner and outer walls. The stucco on the facade was damaged, especially on the fourth story. The roof was leaking, and there was moisture damage as a result. Banister rungs were missing. The basement floor was sinking. The whole building needed to be rewired. The list went on and on.
“The damages determined could in large part be a result of war activities, as well as the omission of necessary repairs and upkeep,” the inspector wrote. He assessed the value of the house as 590,000 deutsche marks, 100,000 marks lower than the colleague at the finance ministry.
The moment had come, but the authorities in Baden-Baden, Heim’s last known address, were still not on board. The prosecutors there had handled the case since before Heim fled in September 1962. As Der Spiegel put it, “They fear that evidence already used in a Spruchkammer procedure would lose some of its strength for criminal sentencing.” The magazine posited that it was dangerous to let the defense attorney see the witnesses in the civil procedure. It would make them “half as useful” if they ever brought their criminal case to trial. The Berlin authorities appealed once more to Baden-Baden, insisting that “in light of the current discussion about the hunt for Nazi criminals, the public would have little understanding” if an effort by the Berlin authority to prosecute a man accused of such serious crimes were hindered by the Baden-Württemberg officials.
Wiesenthal kept up the pressure in the media. In an interview with the Berliner Morgenpost paper on February 13, 1979, he repeated his assertion that he had “reason to believe that [Heim is] living not all that far from us and in all likelihood practicing his profession, but under a false name.” Three days later, the director of the Interior Ministry, Brinkmeier, answered: “I hope as soon as possible to apply for the introduction of a penalty procedure before the Spruchkammer.”
City authorities filed to request a hearing on March 29, 1979. The Berlin Spruchkammer granted the request on April 27, 1979, announcing that it was opening proceedings against Dr. Heim. “The personal appearance at the hearing of the person concerned is hereby ordered,” said the panel.
Aedtner followed the current actions against Heim with an almost obsessive zeal. He had in the meantime learned that a Dr. Wrazlaw Busek, who had kept the list of the dead at Mauthausen along with Josef Kohl, had moved to Queens, New York. He wrote to the former inmate asking for his help, adding that Heim was “definitely still alive and we have well-founded hopes that we could soon have him in hand.” The moment Fritz Steinacker submitted a letter from Heim granting him power of attorney for the case in Berlin, Aedtner got hold of it and sent it away for forensic analysis.
The forensics department at the state police headquarters in Stuttgart completed its analysis of the typeface and signatures on the letters submitted in the tax case. The typewriter was from one of five manufacturers, Adler, Triumph, Facit, Royal, or Imperial, using a particular rotating-type-ball technology first introduced in the IBM Selectric, of a model that had only existed since 1974. There was no evidence that Heim’s signature had been forged. The letter appeared to be genuine, which meant that Heim was still alive and still in contact with Steinacker.
As i
f to prove that they were not just sitting idly by, the Baden-Baden prosecutors announced a 15,000-deutsche-mark reward for Heim on March 19. Although there had been an arrest warrant since 1962, prosecutors had never formally filed charges, a step they finally took on June 11, 1979, just two days before the trial in Berlin was scheduled to begin. Then, under severe political pressure, they finally sent the Berliners eight hundred out of the two thousand pages in their file on the accused, including witness statements but not investigative findings.
That the fugitive Heim would not attend was a foregone conclusion. It was more of a surprise that the surviving witnesses also refused to appear. The Mauthausen inmate Gustav Rieger wrote reminding them that he had already given sworn testimony before a judge. “A trip to Berlin is impossible for me for health reasons.” He explained that he was in such poor physical condition he had been officially designated as handicapped, and he included his identification number with the Munich health authorities if they wanted to confirm it.
The former political inmate Johann Payerl had a very different reaction, expressing deep skepticism whether his appearance would make any difference to the outcome of the trial. Years of not-guilty verdicts and suspended sentences had taken their toll, Payerl wrote.
I would like to answer your letter of March 6 with a question. Is it so important for me to give testimony before the Berlin Spruchkammer against KZ physician Dr. Heim when he is sure to be acquitted? We KZ survivors have learned the fact that “not guilty” verdicts for former KZ murderers are reached despite the most serious incrimination by witnesses. So it was in the Sachsenhausen trial, Buchenwald, etc. and also many other NS cases.
If you can give me evidence to the contrary, then please let me know as soon as possible.
Magen replied that he could not “judge what decision the Berlin Spruchkammer will impose against Dr. Heim.” The balking witness insisted that he might well suffer a nervous breakdown or even a stroke were he confronted in court by Heim. “Imagine for a moment,” Payerl wrote back to the city attorney. “I am classified as 80% affected by a nervous disorder and this man stands in front of me?” The handwritten letter becomes illegible as Payerl writes of “a murderer before me” “who killed my buddies.”
Karl Lotter, who had given Aedtner the precise descriptions of Heim, declined the invitation as well. “As a witness in the criminal matter of Dr. Heim, I inform you of the following: unfortunately, in light of my age (76 years) and in consideration of the state of my health, it is not possible for me to come to Berlin.” He reminded Magen that he had been deposed twice in the case, most recently in 1976. “Both times officers came to Mürzzuschlag.”
Despite the lack of flesh-and-blood witnesses in court Magen pressed ahead. He would have to work with the transcripts of past testimony. With the trial date approaching, he would have to work fast.
CHAPTER 40
The hearing began at 10:30 in the morning on June 13, 1979, in the government complex on Preussen Platz in West Berlin. The large room on the eleventh floor was not a courtroom but part of the building authority’s offices. It was an abnormally speedy start for a trial requested by prosecutors less than three months before. Fritz Steinacker arrived sharply dressed in suit and tie, wearing tinted glasses, his hair combed back and going white at the temples and sideburns.
The judge and chairman of the panel, Wolfgang Neesemann, opened the proceeding by asking Steinacker, “Is your client present?”
“No,” the defense attorney answered.
“I specifically ordered his appearance,” Neesemann said. “Do you know where he is?”
“No,” Steinacker answered, “but even if I knew, I wouldn’t say. I am under the attorney’s obligation of secrecy.” Steinacker then filed a motion to dismiss the case against his client as baseless. The motion was rejected. The hearing would proceed without Aribert Heim.
Magen presented his case. Although lawyers from his division rarely had to appear in court, he was not nervous but instead calm and collected, quite in his element that day. He described Heim as “part of the enforcement clique around Hitler,” without whom “the regime would not have been capable of committing these crimes.” Heim had “advanced the rule of National Socialism to a significant extent.” He had overstepped orders to euthanize the ill and the infirm by killing even healthy inmates “out of lust for murder and boredom.” He was, in Magen’s words, “a beast in the form of a man.”
The witness statements were read out loud in a flat monotone. The Berliner Morgenpost newspaper called it “deadly silent” as testimony from the five witnesses reaching back to 1949 was presented one after another. Karl Kaufmann, who began the process with his letter to Heim’s former ice hockey team, had passed away, but his words stunned the courtroom. He knew Heim while working as the capo in the operating room in 1941. At the time there were many transports arriving at Mauthausen, including many Jews. Heim would order “26 to 30 prisoners incapable of working,” without regard for nationality or religion, who would be brought to him and whom he “killed with gasoline injections in the vein or in the heart.” When he had Sunday duty, he ordered “30 to 35 Jews, all of them healthy,” who were killed the same way.
An old Jewish man, Kaufmann guessed around seventy years old, came to Heim and said, “Herr Obersturmführer, you like to operate. Look here, I am an old man and won’t live that much longer. Operate on me. I have a bad hernia. I know that I will have to die in a few days.” According to Kaufmann, Heim obliged by cutting into the Jew’s abdomen and poking around at his internal organs until he died. Kaufmann then described the lethal injections. “Countless Jews were liquidated in this way without any difference made between young or old, and also those of other nations, but then only those who were weak and incapable of work,” Kaufmann said.
Josef Kohl, who had been the first to give testimony about Heim to the investigator Arthur A. Becker less than a year after Mauthausen was liberated, described how Heim brought his victims to tears with “seemingly very humane” questions about their family members. Only then would he give the deadly injection. Karl Lotter called Heim “a markedly perverse mass murderer” who “with a cold-blooded look killed people by the dozens.” Lotter said that he was personally present for seven murders but that Heim could have been responsible for more than a hundred. “The Jews were brought in, injected, and then thrown out.”
The left-wing Tageszeitung newspaper described the testimony as “taking the air away, causing nausea.” The correspondent noted with great disappointment that the courtroom was not full, how only “a few interested parties, above all younger people, came this Wednesday to the hearing, to recall the memory—indeed the cruelest parts—of National Socialism.” The businesslike approach clashed with the depravity of the crimes in question, creating “an atmosphere like in a trial over a used car. There was no indignation, no whispering in the room.”
Working against Steinacker’s client was the fact that Heim presented such a memorable figure, what with his height, his athletic build, and his trips to play professional hockey. A former member of the SS who served at Mauthausen, Otto Kleingünther, did not testify to any specific crimes but confirmed the doctor’s presence and his appearance. Lotter and Kaufmann both remembered that he played for the same ice hockey team in Vienna. In summing up their statements, Magen made clear that this was not a man easily confused with others.
“All testified in agreement,” Magen said. “He was there, he looked like this, he did this.”
Steinacker began not by defending his client but by defending himself. To assume, he told the court, that a lawyer identifies with a Nazi war criminal just because he represented the accused was false. “Whether he is supposed to be a left-wing terrorist or a right-wing criminal, every client has a right to a fair trial,” Steinacker declared.
“But you live off this,” shouted one of the spectators. Steinacker did not answer but continued his opening statement.
“Dr. Heim rejects all of the acc
usations,” Steinacker said. “He spent just a few weeks at KZ Mauthausen—as troop doctor for the SS guards.” The files at the Berlin Document Center in Zehlendorf clearly stated that Heim was a troop doctor and not a camp doctor. “Heim does not deny that he was there for a certain time, but he says that he came to Mauthausen in the fall of 1941 and was there for seven weeks,” Steinacker said. “Based on the information available to me, Heim at no time committed the acts he stands accused of.” Heim’s name appeared in the operation book for the first time on October 8 and for the last time on November 29.
Josef Kohl said that Heim was at the camp from September 1940 to June 1942. Sommer said he came in 1942 or as late as 1943. Referring to a handwritten letter from his client, Steinacker returned time and again to the contradictory dates in the testimony in order, as the Spiegel correspondent wrote, “to devalue the witness testimony at its core.”
Listening to Steinacker it was as though “a medium was speaking for the missing accused in the court chamber.” The claims against his client were full of “sweeping descriptions, the Jews, the Germans.” Unless the witnesses were questioned again, his client could not be found guilty. Considering that several of the most important witnesses had died since they were deposed, this was as good as saying it was too late to try his client.
“We only have paper here,” Steinacker said, referring to the statements, and pointed out that after concentration camps were liberated, the inmates tended to exaggerate and conflate. The statements were too “polemical and not precise enough.” Many witnesses described events as if they had seen them firsthand, then modified them by adding “I came to know” or “I learned” to their statements. Steinacker summed up the accusations against his client as “latrine rumors.” The left-wing Tageszeitung described the lawyer as excellently prepared as he “picked apart” the statements, raised contradictions in the timelines, and imputed false memories and exaggerations. Legally, his client’s fortune could not be touched.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 17