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Uncovering
Lost Path of Dr. Aribert Heim,
a Most Wanted Nazi Doctor in
Egypt
By SOUAD MEKHENNET and
NICHOLAS KULISH
February 5, 2009
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Documents used
by officials in the search for Aribert Ferdinand
Heim.
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CAIRO -- Even in
old age the imposingly tall, athletic German known to
locals as Tarek Hussein Farid maintained the discipline
to walk some 15 miles each day through the busy streets
of Egypt's capital. He walked to the world-renowned Al
Azhar mosque here, where he converted to Islam, and to
the ornate J. Groppi Cafe downtown, where he ordered the
chocolate cakes he sent to friends and bought the bonbons
he gave to their children, who called him Uncle
Tarek.
Friends and
acquaintances here in Egypt also remember him as an avid
amateur photographer who almost always wore a camera
around his neck, but never allowed himself to be
photographed. And with good reason: Uncle Tarek was born
Aribert Ferdinand Heim, a member of Hitler's elite
Waffen-SS and a medical doctor at the Buchenwald,
Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration
camps.
It was behind
the gray stone walls of Mauthausen, in his native
Austria, that Dr. Heim committed the atrocities against
hundreds of Jews and others that earned him the nickname
Dr. Death and his status as the most wanted Nazi war
criminal still believed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to
be at large.
Dr. Heim was
accused of performing operations on prisoners without
anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then
leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting
poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others;
and taking the skull of at least one victim as a
souvenir. After living below the radar of Nazi hunters
for more than a decade after World War II --much of it in
the German spa town of Baden-Baden where he had a wife,
two sons and a medical practice as a gynecologist-- he
escaped capture just as investigators closed in on him in
1962.
His hiding
place, as well as his death in 1992, have remained
unknown until now.
Investigators
in Israel and Germany have repeatedly said that they
believed Dr. Heim was alive and hiding in Latin America,
near where a woman alleged to be his illegitimate
daughter lived in Chile. Witnesses from Finland to
Vietnam and from Saudi Arabia to Argentina have sent tips
and reported sightings to investigators.
A dusty
briefcase with rusted buckles, sitting nearly forgotten
in storage here in Cairo, hid the truth behind Dr. Heim's
flight to the Middle East. Obtained by The New York Times
and the German television station ZDF from members of the
Doma family, proprietors of the hotel here where Dr. Heim
resided, the files in the briefcase tell the story of his
life, and death, in Egypt.
The briefcase
contains an archive of yellowed pages, some in envelopes
that were still sealed, of Dr. Heim's letters and medical
test results, his financial records and an underlined,
annotated article from a German magazine about his own
manhunt and trial in absentia, even drawings of soldiers
and trains by the children he left behind in Germany.
Some documents are in the name Heim, others Farid, but
many of the latter, like an application for Egyptian
residency under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, have the
same birthday, June 28, 1914, and the same place of
birth, Radkersburg, Austria, as Dr. Heim.
Although none
of the 10 friends and acquaintances in Cairo who
identified a photograph of Dr. Heim knew his real
identity, they described signs that he might have been on
the run. "My idea, which I've taken from my father at
that time, is that he was in dispute with maybe the Jews,
but he took refuge in Cairo at that time," said Tarek
Abdelmoneim el Rifai, the son of Abdelmoneim el Rifai,
88, Dr. Heim's dentist in Cairo and close
friend.
A certified
copy of a death certificate obtained from Egyptian
authorities confirmed witness accounts that the man
called Tarek Hussein Farid died in 1992. "Tarek Hussein
Farid is the name my father took when he converted to
Islam," said his son Rüdiger Heim. In an interview
in the family's villa in Baden-Baden, Mr. Heim, 53,
admitted publicly for the first time that he was with his
father in Egypt at the time of his death from rectal
cancer.
"It was
during the Olympics. There was a television in the room,
and he was watching the Olympics. It distracted him. He
must have been suffering from serious pain," said Mr.
Heim, who is tall, like his father, with a long mournful
face and speaks softly and carefully. Dr. Aribert Heim
died the day after the Games ended, on Aug. 10, 1992,
according to his son and the death
certificate.
Mr. Heim said
he learned of his father's whereabouts through his aunt,
who has since died. He said he did not come forward
because he did not wish to bring trouble to any of his
father's friends in Egypt. As the number of surviving
Nazi war criminals has dwindled, his father's case has
grown in prominence.
Shelter in the
Middle East
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The
Kasr el Madina Hotel in Cairo, where Aribert
Ferdinand Heim lived under the name of Tarek
Hussein Farid.
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Despite the newly
uncovered evidence of Dr. Heim's time in Egypt, it is
impossible to definitively close his case, with the
location of his burial site still a
mystery.
His death
would be a significant but hitherto unknown milestone in
the winding up of the passionate and at times
controversial hunt for Nazi war criminals that led to the
trial and execution of the Holocaust planner Adolf
Eichmann but never managed to catch up with Josef
Mengele, the most famous of the Nazi doctors, who died in
Brazil in 1979, as forensic tests later
proved.
While the
secret lives of Nazis in countries like Argentina and
Paraguay captured the popular imagination in books and
films like "The Odessa File" and "The Boys From Brazil,"
the Heim case casts light on the often overlooked history
of their flight to the Middle East.
Until
political winds shifted, ex-Nazis were welcomed in Egypt
in the years after World War II, helping in particular
with military technology. Rüdiger Heim said that his
father told him he knew other Nazis there, but tried to
steer clear of them.
Even so, how
Dr. Heim was able to elude his pursuers for so long,
while receiving money from Europe, most notably from his
late sister, Herta Barth, and corresponding with friends
and family in long letters, is unclear.
"The Arab
world was an even better, a safer haven than South
America," said Efraim Zuroff, the Israel director of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, who had been searching for Dr.
Heim and traveled to Chile last July to raise awareness
about the case. Mr. Zuroff expressed surprise when
informed of Dr. Heim's apparent fate, saying the center
had been about to raise the reward for information
leading to his arrest to $1.3 million from
$400,000.
A Trail Gone
Cold
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Dr.
Aribert Ferdinand Heim in 1950
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The only time Dr. Heim was ever jailed was
after World War II when he was held by the American
military in Germany. But the military released him,
apparently unaware that investigators in Austria were
building a case against him. A United States war crimes
team took testimony about his crimes from Josef Kohl, a
former inmate at Mauthausen, on Jan. 18, 1946, less than
a year after the German surrender.
"Dr. Heim had
a habit of looking into inmates' mouths to determine
whether their teeth were in impeccable condition," Mr.
Kohl said, according to a transcript of the interview.
"If this were the case, he would kill the prisoner with
an injection, cut his head off, leave it to cook in the
crematorium for hours, until all the flesh was stripped
from the naked skull, and prepare the skull for himself
and his friends as a decoration for their
desks."
Mr. Zuroff
said that because Dr. Heim was at Mauthausen for a short
time early in the war, in the fall of 1941, he was "aware
of no people alive today who suffered at his hands and
can give first-hand testimony of his
crimes."
German
investigators said that Dr. Heim was careful throughout
the postwar period when less-controlled people might have
let down their guard.
Investigators
noted that Dr. Heim, a talented ice hockey player, stayed
out of pictures when his hockey team posed for its group
portrait, even after they won the German championship.
Dr. Heim owned an apartment building in Berlin, which
investigators said for years provided him with income for
his life incognito.
At the
headquarters of the Baden-Württemberg state police
in Stuttgart today, small magnets freckle a map of the
world, marking the spots where clues or reports of
sightings surfaced. Investigators said that they had
searched continuously since his disappearance in 1962,
checking more than 240 leads and ruling out several
people thought to be Dr. Heim. While they never caught
him, they appear to have come tantalizingly close to his
hiding place in the Middle East.
"There was
information that Heim was in Egypt working as a police
doctor between 1967 and the beginning of the '70s," said
Joachim Schäck, head of the fugitive unit at the
state police. "This lead proved to be
false."
According to
his son, Dr. Heim had left Germany and driven through
France and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and
eventually settling in Egypt. "It was only sheer
coincidence that the police could not arrest me because I
was not at home at the time," Dr. Heim wrote in a letter
to the German magazine Spiegel, after it published a
report about his war-crimes case in 1979. It is unclear
whether he ever sent the letter, which was found in his
files, many of which were written in meticulous cursive
style in German or English.
In the letter
he also accused Simon Wiesenthal, who was interned at
Mauthausen, of being "the one who invented these
atrocities." Dr. Heim went on to discuss what he called
Israeli massacres of Palestinians, and added that "the
Jewish Khazar, Zionist lobby of the U.S. were the first
ones who in 1933 declared war against Hitler's
Germany."
The Turkic
ethnic group the Khazars were a recurring theme for Dr.
Heim, who kept himself busy in Cairo, researching a paper
he wrote in English and German, decrying the possibility
of anti-Semitism owing to the fact, he said, that most
Jews were not Semitic in ethnic origin. Mr. Rifai
recalled that Dr. Heim had shown his family many
different drafts of the paper, which were among the
papers found in the briefcase that The Times and ZDF
television obtained. A list also showed plans to send
drafts of the paper to prominent people around the world
--under the name Dr. Youssef Ibrahim-- including the
United Nations secretary general, Kurt Waldheim, the
United States national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, and Yugoslavia's leader, Marshal
Tito.
Life as Uncle
Tarek
He formed
close bonds with his neighbors, including the Doma
family, which ran the Kasr el Madina hotel, where Dr.
Heim lived the last decade before his death. Mahmoud
Doma, whose father owned the establishment, said Dr. Heim
spoke Arabic, English and French, in addition to German.
Mr. Doma said his neighbor read and studied the Koran,
including a copy in German that the Domas had ordered for
him.
Mr. Doma, 38,
became emotional when talking about the man he knew as
Uncle Tarek, whom he said gave him books and encouraged
him to study. "He was like a father. He loved me and I
loved him."
He recalled
how Uncle Tarek bought rackets and set up a tennis net on
the hotel roof, where he and his siblings played with the
German Muslim until sundown. But by 1990, Dr. Heim's good
health began to fail him and his illness was diagnosed as
cancer.
After his
death, his son Rüdiger insisted that they follow his
father's wishes and donate the body to science, not an
easy task in a Muslim country where the rules dictate a
swift burial and dissection is opposed. Mr. Doma, who
wanted to put Uncle Tarek in the family crypt next to his
father, opposed the plan.
The two men
rode in a white van with the body of Dr. Heim, which had
been washed and wrapped in a white sheet in accordance
with Muslim tradition and placed in a wooden coffin. Mr.
Doma said they bribed a hospital functionary to take the
body, but Egyptian authorities found out, and Dr. Heim
was instead interred in a common grave,
anonymously.
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