Aribert Heim served as an SS doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria from October to December 1941. In ten weeks he is reported by survivors to have killed several hundred prisoners through phenol injections to the heart, surgical experiments without anaesthesia, and the harvesting of body parts including a skull he kept as a souvenir on his desk. He escaped post-war prosecution by going underground in West Germany in 1962 and reaching Egypt, where he lived under a false name in Cairo until his death of cancer on 10 August 1992. He was 78. He was never tried.
The ten weeks at Mauthausen
Heim arrived at Mauthausen on 8 October 1941 as one of around fifteen SS doctors at the camp. He worked for ten weeks before being transferred to a Waffen-SS unit at the front. Survivor testimony from the camp prisoners who served as orderlies in the camp infirmary, particularly the testimony of Karl Kaufmann, Josef Kohl, and Gustav Wegerer, established what Heim had done in those ten weeks.
The killings recorded by these prisoners include the injection of around three hundred prisoners with phenol or petrol directly into the heart. Heim used the injections both as a routine method of killing prisoners selected as unfit for labour and as a research method, timing how long death took. He performed surgical operations on healthy prisoners without anaesthesia, removing organs to test surgical techniques. He selected prisoners specifically for what he could harvest from their bodies. The most-cited single case is that of an eighteen-year-old Jewish prisoner whose skull Heim kept as a paperweight on his office desk after killing him and dissecting the head. The prisoner had volunteered to play in the camp football team because he had been told it would help his survival; instead it brought him to Heim’s attention.
The investigation
Heim was investigated after the war by Allied and West German authorities on the basis of the survivor testimony. The investigation moved slowly. He worked openly in West Germany as a gynaecologist in Baden-Baden through the 1950s. The case began to gather pace in 1962, when an arrest warrant was issued. Heim was tipped off, fled West Germany, and disappeared.
The disappearance and the Cairo years
Heim reached Egypt via Spain and Switzerland in 1962. He converted to Islam in 1980 under the name Tarek Hussein Farid and lived in a small hotel in central Cairo for the rest of his life. He worked at first as a doctor in private clinics that catered to the German émigré community, later in old age living off his German real estate income, which his daughter sent him through Swiss bank channels. He was supported financially by the Mengele family business in Bavaria for some years.
The Mossad and the West German federal prosecutor’s office continued to search for him for decades. He was the last major Nazi war criminal still being actively pursued. His son Rüdiger gave a series of interviews in the 1990s and 2000s in which he denied that his father was alive and refused any contact with investigators. The case became one of the most-publicised post-war Nazi-hunting operations.
The discovery of his death
The German news magazine ZDF and the New York Times published a joint investigation in February 2009 establishing that Heim had died of bowel cancer in his Cairo hotel on 10 August 1992. His briefcase, containing detailed personal records of his Cairo years, had been retained by an Egyptian friend who had cared for him in his final months. The journalists obtained the briefcase contents and confirmed the identification through the Egyptian authorities. The story is told in detail in Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet’s 2014 book The Eternal Nazi.
The German federal prosecutor’s office formally closed the Heim case in 2009 on the basis of the Cairo evidence. The case had been open for forty-six years. Heim died in his bed at 78, having lived as a free man for thirty more years than his Mauthausen tenure had lasted. He was buried in an unmarked grave in a Muslim cemetery in Cairo.
What he was
Heim is the case of the SS doctor as personal sadist. Unlike Mengele, who pursued an organised research programme and could justify his work to himself in pseudo-scientific terms, Heim conducted what survivor witnesses describe as essentially personal torture and killing. He kept the skull on his desk. He timed deaths with a stopwatch. The phenol-injection killings were not part of any wider research project. They were the work of a man given an unrestrained position over helpless prisoners who used the position to do what he wanted to do. He spent ten weeks at Mauthausen and produced enough evidence in those ten weeks to be the subject of a manhunt that lasted forty-seven years. He died unprosecuted in 1992.
See also
Sources
- Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet, The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim, Doubleday, 2014
- Mauthausen survivor testimony from Karl Kaufmann, Josef Kohl, and Gustav Wegerer, recorded 1945 to 1947
- ZDF and New York Times joint investigation, February 2009
- USHMM: Aribert Heim