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 remembered 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, member of Adolf Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS, and 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
to be at large by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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.
It 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, such
as 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 may 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
have dwindled, his father’s case has grown in prominence.
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 mark 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. “On one
level I’m in complete shock,” said Mr. Zuroff when informed
of Dr. Heim’s apparent fate.
He said the center was about
to raise the reward for information leading to his arrest
from $400,000 to $1.3 million .
The search for Dr. Heim began
shortly after World War II, while he was still an American
prisoner of war. A United States war crimes investigating
team took testimony about his alleged 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 is “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 continually 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 seventies,” 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 a report about his war-crimes case was
published there 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
showed 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 United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim,
United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
and Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito.
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.
Mahmoud Doma, 38, became emotional
when talking about the man he knew as Uncle Tarek, whom
he described giving him books and encouraging 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 he was diagnosed with 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. Mahmoud, 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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