By the time the decision was announced, Steinacker was already in a taxi on his way to West Berlin’s Tegel Airport. The hearing had lasted less than a workday, and the deliberations would take only half an hour. “The crimes we heard about in court today are even more gruesome and terrible than those shown in the ‘Holocaust’ film,” said Neesemann. The case before them was much worse “because it was no movie.”
Magen did not have to worry about the fact that the witnesses did not appear or about the inconsistencies that cropped up in their testimony, despite how those incongruities had been highlighted by Steinacker. Heim’s family had gathered letters of support and offered witnesses to testify to his good character, but none were heard or introduced into the record. The second Spruchkammer that heard his case found that Heim was a major offender, not the follower he was judged to be in 1948.
“Heim supported the violent National Socialist regime to an exceptional degree,” the panel found as it convicted him in absentia. It levied a fine of 510,000 deutsche marks against him, about $255,000 at the time, as well as the costs of the court case.
The reporter from the Tageszeitung wrote, “The Spruchkammer announces the verdict, sees Heim’s guilt as proven, the building is expropriated. Certainly an appeal will be filed and the case will drag on. Heim lives without his house, still unpunished. And?”
CHAPTER 41
Under the name Alfred Buediger, Heim had started out as a patient of the Egyptian dentist Abdelmoneim el Rifai. The relationship between the two men had quickly grown more personal, and Heim began calling on Rifai at home, where he met Rifai’s wife and his son, Tarek. He often brought Tarek’s favorite chocolate cake with him as a present. The dentist had an extensive library of Arabic literature and liked to talk to his friend about Islam. Rifai hoped that after so many years in Egypt the Christian-born Austrian might consider joining the faith. Buediger graciously accepted the gift of the books. He was a serious, well-read man.
His interests ran toward history. Indeed, he was forever toiling away on a paper about the long-gone empire of the Khazars, whose leaders had converted to Judaism in the eighth century. Most of the world’s Jews were not the descendants of the people of Israel, Buediger argued, but were of ethnically Turkic origin and came from the Caucasus. Buediger had sent his report to many powerful and influential people: the United Nations secretary-general Kurt Waldheim; the American secretary of state Cyrus Vance and the national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as numerous senators and congressmen; Time and Newsweek; the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu and Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito; the head of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, Helmut Kohl, and the foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
The foreigner showed numerous drafts of the research to his friend. History was not Rifai’s subject, but he appreciated discussions on serious topics and was impressed by the European’s thoroughness. “He was someone,” Rifai said, “who wanted to find the truth.”
The work on the Khazars would set the historical record straight, in Buediger’s view, as well as influence current public opinion. “Till now, the mass of the educated people has no knowledge of the true ethnic and religious history of Palestine,” Heim wrote. Once the truth was widely understood, he believed,
the accurate and true justice corresponding to the law would be the re-establishment of the single state of Palestine, eradicated in 1948, where should live together only the native people, the semitic Moslems, the semitic Hebrews and the semitic Christians, like they have lived throughout the millenniums before. The invaders, the 1½ million Khazars, should regain their native countries or join their brothers in the U.S.A.
It was a popular view among Cairo’s Muslim population. Egypt had fought several wars against Israel, and Rifai found his friend very sympathetic to the Egyptian cause. He had fought in World War II with the Nazis. Rifai’s family had the impression that he had some kind of difficulty with the Jews. “It was understood that there was not much of, what would I say, friendship between him and the Jews,” said Tarek, who later also became a dentist. “As far as I remember … he came at a time when there was war between Egypt and Israel, and I think he took refuge here in Egypt for that reason, just to be far away from them and in a place that would welcome his ideas.”
But Egypt’s military and diplomatic relationship with Israel was changing rapidly. Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat had signed the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in March 1979. “I remember that when Egypt had a peace treaty with Israel that he was afraid,” said Mrs. el Rifai, the dentist’s wife. “He said that he feared the peace treaty and that now Israelis were also in Egypt.”
In his hotel room above the Midan Ataba in Cairo, Heim had gone over and over the testimony that Steinacker had sent him. He wrote numerous chronologies of his life both in English and in German, as if the weeks in Mauthausen would shrink when juxtaposed with the decades from his birth in 1914 to the present day in 1979. He studied the charges against him carefully and concluded that he faced a Zionist conspiracy. Simon Wiesenthal had orchestrated the campaign against him. Wiesenthal, or, as Heim code-named him in letters to the family, “Latte,” the German word for the bar of a cage, was the “absolute dominator of all German agencies.” The real Wiesenthal, his letters so often unanswered, could only wish that it were so.
The very point of Heim’s flight from Europe had been to protect his family, “my school-age children, then 6 and 12 years old, whose schools were next to the detention center and the district court, which would have made it impossible for them to continue attending school if I had stayed.” Having now failed to shield his loved ones from the criminal investigation, he viewed his years of self-imposed exile as having effectively been for nothing. Heim believed that he was being punished unjustly for the second time, the first time being his postwar detention. Hardest for him to understand was why his country continued to investigate and prosecute its own veterans.
The loss of the apartment building was a significant financial blow, removing his main means of support, though by no means his only one. He still received his share of the revenues from the hotel overlooking the square where he lived and could count on support from his sister if necessary. But the verdict clearly troubled him. There was still a sliver of hope that his appeal could be won, which spurred him to find a single piece of evidence that might clear him. In the summer between his conviction and his appeal, Heim composed a lengthy missive to the state premier of Baden-Württemberg, Lothar Späth, to try to convince him of his innocence. Heim repeatedly called the case against him “Greuelpropaganda,” atrocity propaganda, which he attributed to Wiesenthal.
Heim also defended himself against the charge of anti-Semitism, highlighting what he called his history of positive interactions with Jews as a defense. At the age of ten, he recalled, he played the violin in a duet with a Jewish girl on piano. A Jewish businessman in his hometown was “the only one constantly informed about my athletic successes during my studies in Vienna.” During his student days, he lived with a Jewish widow and was treated by a famous Jewish sports surgeon named Professor Mandl. One of his friends in those days was a Jewish medical student, Robert Braun. He even brought Braun back to his family home in Radkersburg one summer. Through his athletic pursuits, Heim came “into contact with athletes from other countries, thereby gaining a tolerant attitude in ethnic and religious matters.” Heim also highlighted his friendship with a lawyer named Pauline Kuchelbacher, who had written a letter during his internment affirming that the doctor had helped and supported her after she was disbarred because she was not Aryan.
According to Heim, he was posted to Mauthausen unwillingly, and the brevity of his stay was due to his strenuous efforts to secure a transfer. “Only through athletic occupation could I free myself from service at KL-Mauthausen. If I’d had no athletic skills to exhibit, I could just as easily have landed in Auschwitz, and had to select on the ramp between those capable of worki
ng or not!”
If he was such a heinous criminal, Heim asked, why had none of the charges been aired during his detention? “During my internment in the year 1947, all inquiries were made, and if these atrocious allegations were based on the truth, I at that point would have certainly been made to answer for them by anonymous complaint,” Heim wrote. “Maybe it bothered Wiesenthal that in 1948 I was already playing in the German ice hockey championship with Bad Nauheim, and this could not be permitted for an SS doctor who worked in a KL, because in those days it was a crime just to have been in the Waffen-SS.”
Heim, who had been wounded on the eastern front and won an Iron Cross for his service there, believed that he had suffered enough. “I lost eight years to war and imprisonment in the service of the state, then worked in the hospitals all those years for nothing as an obstetrician,” Heim added. “I can justifiably assert that I have spent my entire life for the betterment of my fellow men and practical Christendom.”
Heim suggested that the prosecutor in the Berlin Spruchkammer case, Magen, who had called him “a beast in the form of a man,” should “try to accomplish a dissection, step-by-step, on a living person, then he would have to concede that such a bestial act is impracticable.” The worst of the accusations against him, according to Heim, was the story of the twelve-year-old Jewish boy whom the doctor was accused of killing after telling him he had to die because the Jews “were responsible for the war.” According to Heim, “No one can deny that at the time I was there, October 1941, only grown-ups (men) were incarcerated at KL-Mauthausen, therefore it is an obvious, clearly proven atrocity-lie.”
The fact that a prominent figure like Hans Globke, who helped write the emergency legislation that gave Hitler his extensive dictatorial powers and who served as an adviser to Eichmann’s Office of Jewish Affairs, could then be the head of Konrad Adenauer’s federal chancellery only underscored what Heim thought was the arbitrary manner in which former Nazis were punished. “The little man alone must atone, when in war he must heed the state and obey postings and commands to particular places, of which he could not suspect beforehand, whereas a Mr. Globke of the Nazi-race ideology could even reach the highest position in the chancellery.” Heim believed, in contrast, that he was ordered to Mauthausen by the state and then singled out for punishment.
He felt betrayed by the country he served. “The citizen must be prepared to sacrifice his life for the state authority, and it would never occur to the average citizen to refuse to obey an order because the consequences would be unforeseeable,” wrote Heim. In war “the citizen is the slave of the state authority.”
It was an impassioned argument that must have taken no small amount of time to draft. It summed up arguments he would make again and again in his personal papers. But according to a note at the top of the letter, he never sent it.
CHAPTER 42
“No freedom for killers,” chanted the protesters dressed in concentration camp uniforms. They barged into the Bundestag chamber and disrupted the already-charged debate over the statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes. The window for prosecutions in cases of murder had been extended for four years in 1965 and for ten years in 1969. To many conservatives it was time to say enough. But Hans-Jochen Vogel, Germany’s justice minister, worried that war criminals might return from hiding the moment the statute expired.
At Wiesenthal’s insistence the Jewish Documentation Center in New York had printed up thousands of postcards with a picture of a German shooting a woman with a baby in her arms. “This must never come under the statute of limitations,” the postcard read in German, English, and French. The postcards were sent to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany. Wiesenthal even paid a personal visit to Franz Josef Strauss, the head of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, one of the political parties in favor of letting the prosecutions lapse. The head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Marvin Hier, led a delegation to meet with Chancellor Schmidt, who was not pleased about the postcards.
The awareness that Nazi war criminals were going unpunished had grown in the United States. On March 28, 1979, the U.S. congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman of New York announced that the Justice Department was launching the Office of Special Investigations with a budget of $2.3 million to uncover and deport Nazi fugitives in the United States. “There should be absolutely no question that the Department of Justice and the U.S. government will act unequivocally and vigorously to deny sanctuary in the United States to persons who committed the worst crimes in the history of humanity,” Holtzman said.
A mere six months after Holocaust aired, lawmakers in Bonn gathered to vote on the statute of limitations. A no vote would likely have served as a symbolic close to the pursuit of war criminals, even if fugitives like Josef Mengele and Aribert Heim could still have been prosecuted, because criminal charges against them had already been filed. But new prosecutions would not have been possible after December 31 if the vote failed. On July 3, the Bundestag voted to suspend the statute of limitations for capital crimes by a narrow vote of 255 to 222.
“During the debate,” Heim wrote, “not one Bundestag representative dared raise the war crimes of other countries.”
Rüdiger hurried back to Baden-Baden from Denmark. His grandmother had fallen in the garden and been rushed to the hospital with a broken hip. It was unclear exactly what had happened, but within the family it was believed that the elderly woman had succumbed to the stress of the ongoing scandal.
The family could feel cold stares on the street and could not help but notice silent snubs from acquaintances. One long-standing Swiss friend was indignant that no one had told her about the situation. She only learned of it when the police questioned her. The media attention made the family feel like a public spectacle. In the midst of all the excitement Mrs. Bechtold, who was living with her daughter, had either missed or ignored a letter sent to her in Heidelberg.
The follow-up notice was impossible to disregard. This time it was correctly addressed to Baden-Baden. The dispatch gave Käthe Bechtold the biggest shock of all. Rolf-Peter Magen from the Interior Ministry in Berlin demanded to know why she had not answered his letter requesting information about the status of the loan she had made to her son-in-law in 1962. “In my letter from March 12 of this year I asked you for a response,” Magen wrote. Since she had not answered him, he said, “I am determining whether I can also begin a case against you under § 5 paragraph 2 of the Second Law for the Conclusion of Denazification of December 20, 1955.”
Her attorneys responded immediately that his letter had left their client “completely taken aback.” Mrs. Bechtold had first met Dr. Heim in 1949 “and knew nothing about his past,” they wrote. Her own history “as an opponent of the National Socialist regime” had earned her significant trouble with the regime. She had not seen her son-in-law since 1962. Magen ultimately never brought a case against her, but the stress had taken its toll on the elderly woman.
When Rüdiger arrived, there were no longer photographers or camera crews waiting outside. The rush of attention and requests for interviews were over for now, though the household continued to receive threatening phone calls. He found his grandmother at the hospital with his exhausted mother watching over her. He relieved Friedl so she could rest but was struck by just how ill Mrs. Bechtold looked. It seemed to him there was more wrong with her than just her hip. He rushed to find the ward physician, who quickly diagnosed a potentially deadly embolism. She was hurried into intensive care.
When Rüdiger saw the letter threatening to drag his grandmother to Berlin, he was appalled. His aunt Herta and the lawyer Steinacker were clearly handling the matter, not his grandmother. The prosecution’s tactics seemed to miss the mark entirely. He realized that he had approached the case with a certain naïveté, assuming that his father was innocent and that his attorney would swiftly clear everything up. The accelerated court proceedings were disorienting, in particular the question of why the defense was not allowed to call witnesses. He did not understand h
ow the panel could determine that his father had killed hundreds of people based only on written testimony. Rüdiger thought it was against “the spirit of the republic we live in.” The conclusion that he drew from the speed with which this complicated, nearly four-decade-old criminal case was handled was that people wanted to get it out of the way as soon as possible.
“Don’t worry about what I think,” he wrote to his father. “I accept you and am on your side.”
I have the wish to visit you and talk with you, but it doesn’t seem to be the right time just now. The whole thing will go on for another while and then lose its public interest. Other things will be given to the people to gossip about. Right now we live in an epoch of desperation, isolation, and continuous assassinating of all that smells of humanity. People feel and think like robots. Give them fear, they will feel afraid; give them hate, they will feel hatred toward everything, even toward their own wives or husbands.
He concluded his letter by telling his father, “I don’t want to say specifically what I’m doing but be sure and confident about me! I love you.”
CHAPTER 43
Heim’s appeal was delayed from October to December. In his filing, Steinacker insisted that his client had performed only two emergency surgeries at Mauthausen. In one case he removed the appendix of a young inmate, who survived. He attempted to do the same for an older patient, who also suffered from cancer and died during the procedure. Steinacker questioned the constitutionality of the first ruling, saying that it violated the principle of retroactive enforcement of the law. The rules had changed, in other words, and his client was being tried after the fact.
The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim Page 18