Wikipedia

Aribert Heim

Aribert Ferdinand Heim (28 June 1914 – 10 August 1992),[1] also known as Dr. Death and Butcher of Mauthausen, was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) doctor. During World War II, he served at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Mauthausen, killing and torturing inmates using various methods, such as the direct injection of toxic compounds into the hearts of his victims.[2]

Aribert Heim
Birth nameAribert Ferdinand Heim
Nickname(s)
  • Dr. Death
  • Butcher of Mauthausen
  • Tarek Farid Hussein
Born(1914-06-28)June 28, 1914
Bad Radkersburg, Austria-Hungary
DiedAugust 10, 1992(1992-08-10) (aged 78)
Cairo, Egypt
Allegiance Nazi Germany
Service / branch Schutzstaffel
Years of service1940 (1940)–1945 (1945)
RankSS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain)
UnitMauthausen-Gusen concentration camp
6th SS Mountain Division Nord

After the war, Heim lived in Cairo, Egypt, under the alias of Tarek Farid Hussein after his conversion to Islam.[3] In February 2009, after years of attempts to locate him, German television network ZDF had found Heim's passport and other documents in Cairo.[4] It was then reported that Heim had died there on 10 August 1992 from complications of rectal cancer, according to testimony by his son Ruediger and lawyer.[5] This information, though set forth by a German court, was questioned by Efraim Zuroff, a leading Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.[2][6][4] Zuroff stated that on a visit to Puerto Montt, Chile, in July 2008, Heim's daughter told him that Heim had died in 1993 in Argentina.[2] In 2012, a court in Baden-Baden confirmed again that Heim had died in 1992 in Egypt, based on new evidence provided by his family and lawyer.[1] The Wiesenthal Center continued to dispute these findings, and Heim remained on the list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals until 2013.[7]

Life

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Early life

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Heim was born on June 28, 1914, in Bad Radkersburg, Austria-Hungary,[8] the son of a policeman and a housewife. He studied in Graz, and received his diploma in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1940.[9]

Heim volunteered for the Waffen-SS in April 1940, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmführer (Captain).[10]

Mauthausen concentration camp

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Aribert Heim worked in Mauthausen for six weeks as a doctor starting in October 1941 at the age of 27.[11] Prisoners at Mauthausen called Heim "Dr. Death", or the "Butcher of Mauthausen" for his cruelty.[12]

According to witnesses, Heim worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky. The two performed gruesome experiments together, such as injecting various solutions into the hearts of Jewish prisoners to see which killed them the fastest.[13]

Heim was known for performing operations without anesthesia. For about two months (October to December 1941), Heim was stationed at the Ebensee concentration camp near Linz, Austria, where he carried out experiments on Jews and others similar to those performed at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele. According to Holocaust survivors, Jewish prisoners were poisoned with various injections directly into the heart, including petrol, phenol, available poisons, or even water, to induce death.[14]

Heim reportedly removed organs from living prisoners without anesthesia, killing hundreds.[15] A prisoner by the name of Karl Lotter also worked in the Mauthausen hospital at the time Aribert Heim was there.[16] Lotter testified that in 1941, he witnessed Aribert Heim butcher a prisoner who came to him with an inflamed foot.[16] Lotter provided more gruesome details about how Aribert butchered the 18-year-old prisoner, stating that Aribert gave him anesthetic and then proceeded to cut him open, castrate him, and take out one of his kidneys. The prisoner died, and his head was cut off, boiled and stripped of its flesh.[16]

Heim then allegedly used this young man's skull as a paperweight on his desk.[16] In a sworn statement that was given eight years after the incident Lotter stated that Heim "needed the head because of its perfect teeth".[16] Other survivors of the Holocaust referred to Aribert removing tattooed flesh from prisoners and using the skin to make seat coverings, which he gave to the commandant of the camp.[11] Marcelino Bilbao Bilbao stated that Heim drew blood from him for six weeks and later injected him with a liquid that ended up paralyzing his body.[17]

Later service

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From February 1942, Heim served in the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord in northern Finland, especially in Oulu's hospitals as an SS doctor. His service continued until at least October 1942.[18][19]

On 15 March 1945, Heim was captured by US soldiers and sent to a camp for prisoners of war. He would remain imprisoned for a two-and-a-half year period.[20] But while Heim's former colleague, Erich Wasicky, and dozens of others were tried and executed in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, Heim was never prosecuted.[21] In December 1947, he was released and worked as a gynecologist at Baden-Baden until his disappearance in 1962; he had telephoned his home and was told that the police were waiting for him. Having been questioned on previous occasions, he surmised the reason (an international warrant for his arrest had been in place since that date) and went into hiding.[15] According to his son, Rüdiger Heim, he drove through France and Spain onward to Morocco, moving finally to Egypt via Libya.[22]

Investigations and possible sightings

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In the years following his disappearance, Heim was the target of a rapidly escalating manhunt and ever-increasing rewards for his capture. Following his escape there were reported sightings in Latin America, Spain and Africa, as well as formal investigations aimed at bringing him to justice, some of which took place even after he had apparently died in Egypt. The German government offered €150,000 for information leading to his arrest, while the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched Operation Last Chance, a project to assist governments in the location and arrest of suspected Nazi war criminals who are still alive.[23] Tax records prove that, as late as 2001, Heim's lawyer asked the German authorities to refund capital gains taxes levied on him because he was living abroad.[23]

Heim reportedly hid out in South America, Spain and the Balkans, but only his presence in Spain has ever been confirmed.[22] Efraim Zuroff, of the Wiesenthal Center, initiated an active search for his whereabouts,[23] and in late 2005, Spanish police incorrectly determined he was in Palafrugell, Spain.[24] According to El Mundo, Heim had been helped by associates of Otto Skorzeny, who had organised one of the biggest ODESSA bases in Franco's Spain.[25]

Press reports in mid-October 2005 suggested that Heim's arrest by Spanish police was "imminent". Within a few days, however, newer reports suggested that he had evaded capture and had moved either to another part of Spain or to Denmark.[26][27][28][29]

Fredrik Jensen, a Norwegian and a former SS Obersturmführer, was put under police investigation in June 2007, and charged with assisting Heim in his escape. The accusation was denied by Jensen.[30] In July 2007, the Austrian Ministry of Justice declared that it would pay €50,000 for information leading to his arrest and extradition to Austria.[31]

On 6 July 2008, Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi-hunter, went to South America as part of a public campaign to capture the most wanted Nazi in the world and bring him to justice,[23] claiming that Heim was alive and hiding in Patagonia, either in Chile or in Argentina. He elaborated on 15 July 2008 that he was sure Heim was alive and the groundwork had been laid to capture him within weeks.[14][32][33][34][35][36]

In 2008, Heim was named as one of the ten most wanted Nazi war criminals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.[15][37]

Later years and death

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Heim and his former wife, Friedl, had two sons. He also had a daughter, Waltraud, born out of wedlock in Chile.[38]

In 2006, a German newspaper reported that he had a daughter, Waltraud, living on the outskirts of Puerto Montt, Chile, who said he had died in 1993.[39] However, when she tried to recover a multimillion-euro inheritance from an account in his name, she was unable to provide a death certificate.[40][41][42]

In August 2008, Heim's son Rüdiger asked that his father be declared legally dead, in order to take hold of his assets. He claimed he intended to make a donation to humanitarian projects working to document the atrocities committed in the camps.[43]

After years of apparently false sightings, the circumstances surrounding Heim's escape, life in hiding and death were jointly reported by the German broadcaster ZDF and The New York Times in February 2009. It was reported that Heim died on August 10, 1992, in Cairo, Egypt with his cause of death being colorectal cancer.[44][45] In the later years of his life, Heim had named himself Tarek Farid Hussein.[44] People in Egypt who knew Heim said they did not know he was a wanted man.[46]

In an interview at the family's villa in Baden-Baden, his son Rüdiger admitted publicly for the first time that he was with his father in Egypt at the time of Heim's death, saying that it was during the Olympics, and that he died the day after the games ended. According to Efraim Zuroff, Rüdiger Heim had constantly denied having any knowledge of the whereabouts of his father until the publishing of the ZDF research results.[23]

On 18 March 2009, the Simon Wiesenthal Center filed a criminal complaint due to suspicion of false testimony.[47] In 2012, a regional court in Baden-Baden confirmed that Heim died under the assumed identity of Tarek Hussein Farid in Egypt in 1992, based on papers from his lawyer and testimony from his son.[1]

In its 2013 annual Nazi war criminal report, the Simon Wiesenthal Center disputed the 2012 ruling by the Baden-Baden court, claiming a lack of forensic confirmation of Heim's death.[48] Ruediger Heim recounted how Egyptian authorities had forced him to have his father interred in an unmarked common grave in Cairo, rendering it impossible for investigators to find Heim's remains for DNA testing.[10] Heim was not included in the 2014 report.[49]

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Israeli author Danny Baz published The Secret Executioners in 2007, in which he claimed that a clandestine organisation called 'The Owl', operating outside of international law, tracked Heim down and assassinated him in the U.S. on an island off the California coast in 1982.[50][51] Baz claimed he was a member of 'The Owl' himself and claimed that his group carried out several assassinations of Nazis who had sought refuge in the US. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has expressed doubts regarding Baz's claims.[52]

In her novel The Scent of Lemon Leaves (Lo que esconde tu nombre, 2010) Clara Sánchez gives a fictional account of Heim's refuge in Spain.[53] In the afterword to the novel the author states that she used a real name for a fictional character.

In the fictional Netflix series Jaguar (Global release 22 September 2021) a group of Nazi hunters attempt to catch Heim in Spain in 1962.[54][55][56]

References

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  1. ^ a b c "German court confirms Nazi 'Doctor Death' died in 1992". BBC. September 21, 2012. Retrieved September 21, 2012.
  2. ^ a b c "The life and crimes of 'Dr Death'". BBC News. February 5, 2009.
  3. ^ "The SS Doctor Who Converted to Islam and Escaped the Nazi Hunters". VICE. April 21, 2014. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  4. ^ a b "Nazi camp doctor 'died in 1992'". BBC News. February 4, 2009.
  5. ^ "Nazi hunters want German probe on war criminal Heim". Reuters. February 11, 2009.
  6. ^ From the Briefcase of Dr. Aribert Heim, The New York Times, 4 February 2009.
  7. ^ "Simon Wiesenthal Center 2013 Annual Report on the Status of Nazi War Criminals" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 3, 2014.
  8. ^ Weaver, Matthew (February 5, 2009). "Hunt for most-wanted Nazi war criminal ends in Egypt". The Guardian. Retrieved August 22, 2019.
  9. ^ Nicholas Kulish; Souad Mekhennet (March 22, 2014). "Being the Son of a Nazi". The Atlantic.
  10. ^ a b "Rat Lines -The Hunt for Nazi War Criminals (Episode 5)". YouTube. May 31, 2020.
  11. ^ a b Carroll, Rory, Goni, Uki. "G2: The Hunt for Doctor Death: As an SS Medic, Aribert Heim Carried Out Horrific Experiments on Concentration Camp Prisoners. He Escaped and is Thought to be Hiding in Argentina - but the Net may Finally be Closing. Rory Carroll and Uki Goni on the Search for the Last of the Nazis" (Document). The Guardian: 4. ProQuest 246764188.{{cite document}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  12. ^ Dsl with Wires (September 21, 2012). "Search for 'Dr Death' Ends: Nazi War Criminal Aribert Heim Declared Dead". Der Spiegel Online. Retrieved July 21, 2013.
  13. ^ "Hunt on for Nazi concentration camp doctor". NBC News. April 29, 2008. Retrieved August 1, 2022.
  14. ^ a b "Nazi doctor 'is alive in Chile'". BBC. July 8, 2008. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  15. ^ a b c "Most Wanted Nazis Archived October 16, 2011, at the Wayback Machine", Bridget Johnson, About.com
  16. ^ a b c d e Harris, Ed. "Butcher of Mauthausen' is the Most Wanted Nazi". Evening Standard. ProQuest 330210412.
  17. ^ Etxahun, Galparsoro (2020). Bilbao en Mauthausen. Barcelona: Crítica. ISBN 9788491991786.
  18. ^ (in Finnish) ETSITTY NATSIRIKOLLINEN TOIMI LÄÄKÄRINÄ MYÖS SUOMESSA A-Piste, 30 November 2007.
  19. ^ "Es geht mir gut", Der Spiegel, 9 July 2008. (in German)
  20. ^ "Is 'Dr Death' Aribert Heim Really Dead?". ABC News. May 4, 2009. Retrieved February 11, 2023.
  21. ^ "Hunt on for Nazi concentration camp doctor". NBC News. April 29, 2008. Retrieved February 20, 2023.
  22. ^ a b "Meistgesuchter Nazi-Verbrecher seit 1992 tot" (in German). ZDF. Retrieved February 4, 2009.
  23. ^ a b c d e Zuroff, Efraim (2009). "Dr. Heim, the most wanted Nazi in the world". Operation Last Chance: One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 185–207. ISBN 978-0-230-61730-8.
  24. ^ Nazi war criminal escapes Costa Brava police search, The Guardian, 17 October 2005
  25. ^ (in Spanish) A la caza del último nazi, El Mundo, 30 October 2005
  26. ^ Germany expresses 'utmost interest' in seeing Nazi face justice, Ireland Online, 17 October 2005.
  27. ^ "Nazi 'Dr. Death' tracked to Spain", Ottawa Sun, 16 October 2005.
  28. ^ "German courts seek Nazi fugitive thought to be in Chile" Archived October 17, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, The Santiago Times, 26 April 2006.
  29. ^ "Warrant of Apprehension", Austrian Ministry of Justice website (July 2007).
  30. ^ Accused of hiding "Doctor Death" Archived 2007-10-04 at the Wayback Machine, Aftenposten, 23 August 2007.
  31. ^ "Report: Net closing in on top Nazi criminal Aribert Heim", Haaretz, 28 July 2007.
  32. ^ "SS doctor 'still alive in Chile'". BBC News. July 15, 2008. Retrieved November 9, 2016.
  33. ^ "Nazi hunters search Chile for 'Dr Death'". Archived from the original on December 8, 2008.
  34. ^ Concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim is the most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Telegraph.co.uk, 30 April 2008.
  35. ^ "Nazi doctor 'is alive in Chile'", bbc.co.uk, 9 July 2008.
  36. ^ "The Hunt for Nazi War Criminal Aribert Heim, aka Dr Death'" Archived 13 July 2008 at the Wayback Machine Investigation Discovery 10 July 2008
  37. ^ "Fugitive Hunt", Dateline World Jewry, World Jewish Congress, July/August 2008.
  38. ^ "The Hunt for 'Dr Death'". The Last Nazis. Episode 1. September 12, 2009. BBC Two. Retrieved March 10, 2014.
  39. ^ "Nazi hunter: 'Give up, Dr. Death'". msn.com. July 9, 2008. Archived from the original on July 11, 2008.
  40. ^ "The life and crimes of 'Dr Death'". February 5, 2009 – via news.bbc.co.uk.
  41. ^ (in German) Geheimorganisation angeblich auf Nazi Jagd, ORF; accessed 14 October 2007.
  42. ^ (in Spanish) Un tribunal alemán pide a la justicia chilena datos sobre el paradero del ‘carnicero de Mathausen’, El País, 28 April 2006
  43. ^ "Son of Nazi wants him declared dead". Archived from the original on December 8, 2008.
  44. ^ a b "Nazi war criminal Heim died in Cairo 1992 - report". Reuters. February 4, 2009. Retrieved August 29, 2019.
  45. ^ "German investigators to look for Nazi's body". NBC News. Associated Press. February 5, 2009. Retrieved August 22, 2019.
  46. ^ "Nazi-hunters cast doubt over Heim death reports". Reuters. February 5, 2009. Retrieved August 29, 2019.
  47. ^ Mekhennet, Souad; Kulish, Nicholas (February 5, 2009). "Uncovering Lost Path of the Most Wanted Nazi (Dr Death)". The New York Times.
  48. ^ "Simon Wiesenthal Center 2013 Annual Report on the Status of Nazi War Criminals" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 3, 2014.
  49. ^ "Wiesenthal Center 2014 Annual Report Praises New Legal Strategy by German Prosecutors Which Has Led to Impressive Results".
  50. ^ Danny Baz (2009). The secret executioners. London John Blake. ISBN 9781459681293. OCLC 892707276.
  51. ^ Danny Baz (2009). The Secret Executioners: The Amazing True Story of the Death Squad who Tracked Down and Killed Nazi War Criminals. John Blake. ISBN 9781844547005 – via Google Books.
  52. ^ Hugh Schofield (October 15, 2007). "Missing Nazi 'was killed by revenge group'". Paris: The Telegraph World News.
  53. ^ "Clara Sánchez gana el premio Nadal con 'Lo que esconde tu nombre'". Hoy. January 7, 2010.
  54. ^ "Jaguar". IMDB. September 22, 2021.
  55. ^ "Jaguar: Netflix Spanish Historical Drama Gets Global Release Date & Trailer". The Euro TV Place. August 24, 2021.
  56. ^ "Stream It Or Skip It: 'Jaguar' On Netflix, About Nazi Hunters In 1962 Madrid, Including A Concentration Camp Survivor". decider. September 22, 2021.

Further reading

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