By Calvin Palmer
As German investigators prepare to confirm the death in Cairo of Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, the infamous “Dr Death,” Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Center remain skeptical.
Efraim Zuroff, the center’s head Nazi hunter, said Aribert Heim has previously been linked to Egypt, but the story raises “more questions than it answers.
“There’s no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave — we can’t sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation,” Zuroff said.
“Keep in mind these people have a vested interested in being declared dead — it’s a perfectly crafted story; that’s the problem, it’s too perfect.”
Horst Haug, spokesman for the Baden-Wuerttemberg State Police, has confirmed the substance of news reports yesterday that Dr Heim had been living in a hotel in Cairo, had converted to Islam and had died of rectal cancer 15 years ago.
Haug said the police had independently received information from someone who knew Dr Heim, but he refused to say who this person was, or whether the person was in Egypt or Germany.
The Baden-Wuerttemberg authorities will now apply to the Egyptian authorities to send police to investigate and confirm Dr Heim’s death.
The new German police investigation will to study Egyptian records and try find Dr Heim’s grave so dental or DNA techniques can be used to verify the identity of the remains.
“We do not have the corpse so we need to go and work closely with the Egyptians to be 100 percent sure,” said Haug.
Haug also confirmed that Dr Heim had owned an apartment building in Berlin that provided him with income but that the German authorities had frozen this asset in the late 1970s, cutting off Dr Heim’s income from the property.
Dr. Heim’s son, Rudiger, will avoid criminal charges for sheltering his father from the police because of a German law that excuses people from giving evidence against their family members.
Rudiger has now admitted that he knew his father’s location in Egypt and was with him when he died.
He has told the German media that he sheltered his Nazi fugitive father because he did not want to bring trouble to the war criminal’s Egyptian friends.
A judge in the regional court of Baden Baden, where Rudiger Heim lives, said the son of a Nazi war criminal could not be prosecuted because he was under no obligation to speak out.
The law in Germany provides for someone to say nothing if it is about a family member.
Last summer, Rudiger tried to have his father declared legally dead so that he could take control of an estimated euro1.2 million ($1.5 million) in investments in his name, saying that he would donate the money to charity.
He indicated today that he might now try again to have his father declared dead so that he can access the money — though not immediately.
“I’m going to wait and see how the case develops,” he said.
Born in 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Aribert Ferdinand Heim joined the Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany and when it was illegal to do so.
He then became a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS in 1940 and, after stints at the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps in Germany, was posted to the infamous Mauthausen camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in 1941.
It was at Mauthausen that he became known as “Doctor Death” after performing sadistic and grotesque medical experiments, removing organs from inmates and leaving them to die on the operating table and injecting various solutions, including gasoline, into inmates’ hearts to see which killed them the fastest.
According to the 1950 testimony of Karl Lotter, a non-Jewish political prisoner who worked alongside Heim in the camp hospital, the doctor killed an 18-year-old Jew with a minor foot injury.
Instead of treating the teenager, Heim cut him open, castrated him and removed some of his organs, before removing his head, which was put on display.
“He needed the head because of its perfect teeth,” said Mr Lotter in his testimony. “Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr Heim was the most horrible.”
After the war, Heim practised in West Germany as a gynaecologist but went missing in 1962 as police prepared to prosecute him. It is believed he was tipped off.
German TV station ZDF, working with The New York Times, reported yesterday that they had found a passport, application for a residence permit, bank slips, personal letters and medical papers — more than 100 documents in all — left by Heim in a briefcase in the Cairo hotel room where he lived under the name Tarek Hussein Farid.
Haug said that the state police investigators now had copies of the documents as well, but without the originals could not vouch for their authenticity.
He said: “We got information one way and The New York Times and ZDF got it another and they add up, so we think it is plausible, but we can’t give any official statement yet that Aribert Heim is dead.”
Haug said the police investigators received their information at the beginning of this week from someone “close to Aribert Heim” who said Heim died in Egypt in 1992.
Haug would not say whether the source was Heim’s son, saying only that “it was a serious source that we take earnestly.”
ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several years “so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely.”
Haug said that it would take some time for his office’s request to be allowed to search for the body to be processed.
[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph, Associated Press and AFP.]
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