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

by Kulish, Nicholas

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  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Photo of Mauthausen: BMI/Fotoarchiv der KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen

  Photos of Alfred Aedtner: courtesy of the Aedtner family

  Photo of Simon Wiesenthal: courtesy of the Simon Wiesenthal Archive, Vienna

  Photo of Waltraut Böser: courtesy of Waltraut Böser

  Photos of al-Azhar mosque and Kasr el-Madina hotel: Ariana Drehsler

  Photos of Heim’s briefcase, Egyptian documents, Mahmoud Doma, and elderly Heim in Egypt: courtesy of the authors

  Photo of Gaetano Pisano and Blandine Pellet: Joseluis Aznar Muñoz

  All other photographs courtesy of the Heim family

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Nicholas Kulish is a correspondent for The New York Times. He was the paper’s Berlin bureau chief from 2007 to 2013.

  Souad Mekhennet is a journalist and reports for The Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and ZDF German television. She is an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and she previously worked for The New York Times.

  SS officer Dr. Aribert Heim is pictured here in a tuxedo, enjoying Germany’s postwar prosperity.

  Aribert Ferdinand Heim was born in Austria on June 28, 1914, the same day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered, plunging Europe into war. His twin brother was stillborn.

  His father, Josef Ferdinand Heim, was a gendarmerie commander in the town of Radkersburg in what was then Austria-Hungary.

  Heim moved to Vienna in the fall of 1931, when he was seventeen years old, to begin studying at the university there.

  Heim (far left, with bandage) played professional ice hockey and was so skilled he was invited to play for the Austrian national team. He suffered a gash to the corner of his mouth, which left a distinctive V-shaped scar.

  Heim (center) at the University of Vienna, where he completed his medical degree in 1940 at the age of twenty-five, a few months after World War II broke out. He was drafted into the SS upon graduation.

  Heim’s older brother, Josef Heim (right), was a staunch Nazi who took part in a failed coup attempt in Austria and then served in exile in Germany as part of Hitler’s Austrian Legion until the Anschluss. He was killed during the invasion of Crete in 1941.

  Heim worked as a doctor at Mauthausen for several months in 1941. The concentration camp, located near the Danube River in Austria, was one of the harshest in the Nazi system, designed as a forced labor camp for quarrying granite.

  Heim’s signature on the Mauthausen operation book. Records show he operated 263 times while he was at the camp. All eleven of the Jewish inmates he operated on were listed as having died within a few weeks.

  After leaving Mauthausen, Heim, pictured here in SS uniform while in Finland, was wounded on the eastern front and received the Iron Cross.

  After the war, Heim was detained by the victorious Allies for nearly three years, first at a POW camp in France and then in a series of internment facilities in the American sector of Germany. He was released in December 1947 as part of a Christmas amnesty.

  After his release, he resumed practicing medicine (right, leaning over the patient) and played in the German professional hockey championship game under his own name.

  Heim married Friedl Bechtold in July 1949, and they moved to this villa on Maria-Viktoria-Strasse in the resort town of Baden-Baden in 1953. They lived comfortably and enjoyed vacations in Italy and Switzerland, where Friedl’s parents owned a place in Lugano.

  Heim practiced as a gynecologist and Friedl gave birth to two sons, Aribert Christian and Rolf Rüdiger (pictured with Heim).

  Realizing that the authorities were closing in on him, Heim fled his home in 1962. There were rumors that he had settled in Egypt, where a number of former Nazis and German weapons experts had found refuge. Heim, pictured here after his escape, on the Mediterranean coast.

  Fritz Steinacker (at right in a photograph taken by Heim) was widely known as a defense lawyer for Nazis, including Josef Mengele and Heim. The lawyer visited Heim in Cairo and carried back a message from Heim to his wife, asking if his sons could travel to his new home where “the climate and the sports facilities are world famous.”

  Alfred Aedtner spearheaded the search for Aribert Heim as a police investigator focusing on war crimes for the West German government. He joined the war crimes unit at its inception in 1959, and by 1973, as head of the department in Stuttgart, Aedtner’s primary target was the fugitive doctor.

  Aedtner developed a close working relationship with renowned Nazi hunter and Mauthausen survivor Simon Wiesenthal. From his office in Vienna, Wiesenthal used his media contacts to focus the public’s attention on the SS doctor.

  Aedtner tracked down Heim’s illegitimate daughter, Waltraut Böser, while she was living in Switzerland and working as a pharmacist. Although she never met her father, she inherited his love of sports and aptitude for languages.

  In 1979, German authorities seized an apartment house in Berlin that belonged to Heim, squeezing his income. He moved to the Kasr el-Madina, a hotel in a working-class Cairo neighborhood, where he rented a small room.

  With the help of Egyptian associates, Heim was able to purchase property and remain in Egypt even after his German passport expired. At right is his Egyptian driver’s license.

  Even as his exile in Egypt grew from a temporary measure to a permanent circumstance, Heim maintained his innocence, drafting numerous written arguments and letters about the case. This is the first page of a handwritten chronicle of his life.

  As Egypt was becoming more religiously conservative, Heim, raised a Christian, began reading the Koran and visiting mosques, including al-Azhar, the famous center of Islamic learning in Cairo.

  In 1980, the fugitive converted to Islam. Heim, who had gone by the names Ferdinand Heim and Alfred Buediger in Cairo, adopted the Muslim name Tarek Hussein Farid, throwing investigators farther off his trail.

  Heim’s son Rüdiger visited his father numerous times in his hiding place and kept in touch with him through letters using code names.

  Aedtner worked with Wiesenthal to continue the search for Heim even after he retired from the police force. But as he grew older, he focused his efforts on archiving the case files from Nazi investigations and giving speeches about the crimes of the Holocaust.

  Large money transfers from Rüdiger Heim to his friends Gaetano Pisano and Blandine Pe
llet in Spain led investigators to wrongly conclude that the couple was harboring the fugitive Nazi doctor. They were later cleared of any involvement.

  In 2008, the authors used this picture of Heim to track down his friends and acquaintances in Egypt.

  The authors recovered a briefcase full of Heim’s papers, including medical records and correspondence with his family. Forensic tests and handwriting analysis proved that the briefcase was Heim’s and that he had hidden in Cairo for decades.

  Now a grown man with his own family, Mahmoud Doma recalled learning English and playing games as a child on the roof of his family’s hotel with the man he knew as Uncle Tarek.

  Heim on the roof of the Kasr el-Madina in 1990. He is believed to have died in 1992. His body was never discovered.