BERLIN (AP) — German investigators said Thursday they want to search in Egypt
for definitive proof that top Nazi war crimes fugitive Aribert
Heim died there years ago after eluding capture for decades.
New information indicates the Austrian concentration camp doctor lived in Cairo
under an Arab name, learned Arabic and converted to Islam
before his death from intestinal cancer in 1992.
Heim was accused of carrying
out gruesome experiments and murdering hundreds of Jews
at Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria.
Horst Haug, spokesman for
the Baden-Wuerttemberg state police unit that investigates
Nazi-era crimes, said his office received word earlier
this week from a person "close to Aribert Heim" confirming the most-wanted fugitive died in Egypt.
He would not identify the
informant, saying only that "it was a serious source that we take earnestly." He added that his office is now working on a request to Egyptian authorities
for German investigators to search there for proof of
Heim's death.
"We want to attempt
to find the body," Haug told The Associated Press.
Haug said his office is examining
copies of 100 documents, believed to have belonged to
Heim, found in a briefcase in the Cairo hotel where the
SS doctor allegedly died.
"We think it is
plausible, but we can't give any official statement yet
that Aribert Heim is dead," he said.
German television station
ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the
poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several
years and so it is unlikely remains will be found.
The new information in the
Heim case came to light after ZDF, working with the New
York Times, reported Wednesday that they had found the
documents left by Heim in a briefcase in the Cairo hotel
room where he lived under the name Tarek Hussein Farid.
They included a passport, application for a residence
permit and personal letters.
Heim's son Ruediger Heim confirmed
to ZDF that his father used the name Farid, and that
the documents belonged to him.
ZDF and the Times both posted
a copy of the death certificate for Tarek Hussein Farid
that was reissued for them last month. It confirms the
date of death as Aug. 10, 1992 — the date cited by Ruediger
Heim.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center's
head Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said Aribert Heim had
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 told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
"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."
Heim is at the top of the
center's list of most wanted Nazis.
Rainer Schopper, spokesman
for the Linz, Austria, public prosecutor's office, said
Austrian investigators were working with their German
counterparts to "meticulously" verify the proof presented by ZDF and the New York Times.
Heim escaped German authorities
in 1962, and his son now says he fled through France
and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and eventually
settling in Egypt — a country where ex-Nazis were welcomed.
During World War II, there
was widespread sympathy for Germany in Egypt, because
many Egyptians hoped German forces would free the country
from British domination. Anwar Sadat, who later became
president and signed a peace treaty with Israel, was
a prominent pro-German figure during the 1940s.
In the 1950s, Egypt's President
Gamal Abdel-Nasser took in a number of former Nazis,
particularly to help train the military.
In Cairo on Thursday, an Egyptian
Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of
anonymity because he was not allowed to talk to the media,
said authorities were investigating, but suggested it
might be difficult to come up with any information.
"The matter took
place during another government's rule, many years ago,
and no one in this government has a clue who that person
was," the official said. "But authorities are working on investigating the whole case."
"He died in 1992,
said Tarek Abdel-Moneim el Rifai, son of Heim's dentist
in Cairo. "I didn't know that he was a doctor and that he is the most wanted Nazi war criminal."
El Rifai said Wednesday he
hadn't seen the man for 20 years, but remembered that
he never allowed himself to be photographed.
The younger Heim told ZDF
that he had met his father several times in Cairo, starting
in the mid-1970s.
He had failed in an attempt
last summer to have his father declared legally dead
so he could take control of an estimated euro1.2 million
in investments in his name, saying he could donate the
money to charity. He told the AP he may try again to
have him declared dead.
Aribert Heim, born in 1914
in Radkersburg, Austria, joined the local Nazi party
in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen,
near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November
1941.
Heim was accused of taking
part in experiments on Jewish prisoners, such as injecting
various solutions into their hearts to see which was
the quickest killer. He was indicted in Germany in absentia
on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.
Karl Lotter, a non-Jewish
prisoner who worked in the Mauthausen concentration camp's
hospital, said he remembered the first time he saw Heim
kill.
An 18-year-old Jew had been
sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation and Heim
asked the boy why he was so fit. The young man said he
had been a soccer player and swimmer before he was imprisoned,
Lotter said.
Lotter said Heim anesthetized
the teenager and began operating on him but instead of
treating the inflamed foot, he cut the young man open,
castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the
second, Lotter said. The victim's head was then removed
and the flesh boiled away so that Heim could keep it
on display.
Lotter's account of the 1941
atrocity was in a witness statement he gave eight years
later, part of a 1950 Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest
uncovered by the AP last year. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the most horrible," Lotter said.
The Heim case seems strikingly
similar to that of another SS doctor — Josef Mengele
— who eluded authorities to the end.
Mengele, who conducted cruel
experiments the Auschwitz death camp, drowned in Brazil
in early 1979 and experts identified the body as his
six years later.
At the hotel where Heim allegedly
lived until his death, the shabby Kasr El Madina Hotel
in a commercial area in downtown Cairo, a daughter of
the owner screamed at reporters on Thursday and refused
to allow anyone inside.
She refused to give her name
but said it all happened a long time ago and they had
nothing to do with it any more.
google.com
|