The most prominent Nazi war criminal still at large -- Aribert Heim, nicknamed "Dr. Death" -- died in Cairo more than 16 years ago, according to newly surfaced documents
from Egypt. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi
hunter isn't wholly convinced.
Aribert Heim, a doctor in Hitler's SS who was accused of cold-blooded lethal
injections and gruesome experiments in an Austrian concentration
camp, died in Cairo in 1992, according to a joint report
Wednesday by Germany's ZDF television and The New York
Times.
Heim is currently considered
the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, especially
since a Nazi hunter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center
flew to South America last July saying he had significant
leads that Heim was hiding there.
But the Times and ZDF report that Heim disappeared to Egypt after a brush with
West German authorities in 1962. They claim a dusty briefcase
full of documents show Heim changed his name to Tarek
Hussein Farid, converted to Islam, lived for years in
the Cairo hotel where the briefcase has now surfaced
and died of rectal cancer at the age of 78.
Heim would be 94 now if he were still alive.
He was nicknamed "Dr.
Death" for his career as a Nazi doctor at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen
in Austria. His alleged crimes at Mauthausen include
poisonous injections, removing organs from healthy patients
and surgery without anaesthesia -- in essence the sadistic
murder of hundreds of non-terminal prisoners. Witness
testimony from Mauthausen claimed he would choose prisoners
with good teeth, kill them with injections and prepare
their skulls as paperweights.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
made a last public effort to arrest Heim in July 2008.
The passage of time had left him at the top of the list
of the world's most wanted Nazi criminals. "In the last few days," said the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff last July, "we've received information from two different sources, both relating to Chile,
which we think have very good potential."
Heim's daughter lived in Chile
at the time. But Zuroff's subsequent trip there failed
to find him.
'There's No Grave'
People who remember "Uncle
Tarek" in Cairo say they remember a tall German who liked to wander the streets with
a camera but didn't want his own picture taken. "I didn't know that he was a doctor and that he is the most wanted Nazi war criminal," said Tarek Abdelmoneim el Rifai, a dentist who treated the man he knew as Tarek
Hussein Farid, in a phone interview with the Associated
Press. "I am surprised. He introduced himself to my father as a German and I know that
he converted to Islam and changed his name. … The only
thing I knew about him is that he fled from the Jews."
Heim's son, Rüdiger, lives
in the German city of Baden-Baden. In a Wednesday interview
with ZDF he claimed for the first time in public that
he had visited his father in Cairo more than once. The
last visit, he said, was in the summer of 1992, when
his father died. "It was during the Olympics," he said. "There was a television in the room, and he was watching the Olympics. It distracted
him. He must have been suffering from serious pain."
Zuroff told the Associated
Press on Wednesday that the evidence from Cairo -- which
he had not yet seen -- sounded strong, but wasn't conclusive.
He also said Rüdiger Heim now has to account for discrepancies
in the story he has told the Wiesenthal Center and German
officials until now.
"Rüdiger has been
lying," Zuroff told AP. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in
this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain
amount of scepticism and suspicion -- and the most important
thing is missing: the body. There's no grave, there's
no corpse, there's no DNA tests."
Rüdiger Heim told ZDF that
his father had been buried in a common grave in Cairo,
where many graves are recycled, "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely."
Almost 50 years ago, German
investigators had closed in on Heim while he still lived
in Baden-Baden and maintained a gynecological practice.
When they tried to arrest him in September, 1962, he
slipped away, probably acting on a tip. His son now says
Heim travelled through France, Spain and Morocco before
settling in Egypt.
Documents in the briefcase
include an Egyptian death certificate for Tarek Hussein
Farid, according to the New York Times and ZDF, as well
as passports for Farid that show a man who resembles
Heim. They also include a letter addressed to SPIEGEL
responding to a 1979 report about his case in the magazine. "It was only sheer coincidence that the police could not arrest me because I was
not at home at the time," the letter claims.
So far there's no evidence
the letter was sent. SPIEGEL has no copy in its archive.
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