CAIRO (AP) — Nazi hunters urged Egypt on Friday to come clean about how much
it knew about a fugitive dubbed "Dr. Death," who reportedly lived here for decades until he died in 1992. But Egypt has long
kept a strict silence about former Nazis reported to have
taken refuge on its soil.
The discovery of Aribert Heim's secret life throws light on how the Arab world
took in members of the Nazi regime after World War II,
said Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center. The region's role as a haven has gone little
examined while researchers focused on the larger, better
known influx of Nazis to Latin America.
A number of Nazis are believed
to have been welcomed in the 1950s by the Egyptian regime
of then-President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who was locked
in an intense rivalry with Israel that erupted into wars
in 1956 and 1967. Nasser enlisted some Nazis to train
Egypt's military or produce anti-Israel propaganda —
and Israel feared they were involved in building a rocket
program.
So far there is no indication
that the Austrian-born Heim, a former concentration camp
doctor accused of carrying out gruesome, deadly experiments
on Jewish prisoners, played any role with the Egyptian
government.
Instead, it appears he lived
a quiet life in downtown Cairo since the early 1960s.
A later convert to Islam, he bought sweets for friends
from a famed confectionary and was known for playing
pingpong and taking long walks for exercise, said Egyptians
who knew him.
The only hint of his past
— besides a constant refusal to be photographed — was
the personal "research" that he wrote purporting to prove that the Jews of Israel are not true Semites,
according to the son of Heim's Egyptian dentist, who
saw the paper.
The Egyptian government has
been silent since Heim's presence in Egypt was first
reported by The New York Times and Germany's ZPF television
Thursday. Government officials and several former Nasser-era
officials approached by The Associated Press refused
to comment on any aspect of the reports.
One current security official
would say only that if Heim was in Egypt, he was let
in under a previous government. The official, speaking
on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity
of the issue, said Egypt would look into the reports.
The silence reflects a reluctance
to acknowledge an era that is potentially embarrassing
now, three decades after Egypt's peace accords with Israel.
German investigators say they
want to search in Egypt for definitive proof of Heim's
death and are preparing a request to Egypt for permission.
It remains unknown whether
the Egyptian government knew who Heim was when he first
entered the country in 1963 and, if not, whether it subsequently
found out. He entered using his real last name and middle
name, Ferdinand Heim, which appear on a 1964 residency
permit found in a satchel of Heim's documents in a Cairo
hotel where he lived his last years.
Zuroff said Heim's name was
on a 1967 list of 26 former Nazis believed to be hiding
in Egypt at that time, drawn up by Wiesenthal, a Holocaust
survivor who became the most prominent Nazi hunter.
Zuroff said he didn't know
why the lead on Heim was never pursued. It appears to
have been forgotten: Most reports on Heim over the past
decade speculated he was living in Latin America.
Also on the list was Alois
Brunner, long one of the most wanted Nazi fugitives as
commander of a camp that processed Jews for deportation
from occupied France. Brunner is believed to have later
moved to Damascus and worked for the Syrian government.
He is widely thought to have died in Syria in the 1990s,
though the Damascus regime has never confirmed he was
there.
Of the 26 on Wiesenthal's
list, Zuroff said, "I don't think any of them are alive — or are in Egypt, for that matter — because
they have either left the country or died in Egypt." He said no pressure was ever put "on Egypt in any way to cooperate in investigation and prosecution of Nazi war
crimes."
Rafael Medoff, director of
the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in
Washington, said Cairo should start accounting for Nazis
it harbored.
"In the 1950s,
Egypt opened its doors wide to fugitive Nazi war criminals," he said in an e-mail interview with the AP. "The time has come for Egypt to give a full accounting of its policy of sheltering
Nazi war criminals — and if any of those Nazis are still
alive, they should be surrendered for prosecution."
The total number of Third
Reich figures who fled to Egypt is not known, and the
Egyptian government has never acknowledged any were present.
Egypt would not be the only
state to try to draw on the expertise of former Nazis
— the United States took in a number of German rocket
scientists to work in its space program, particularly
Wernher von Braun, who headed NASA's Marshall Space Flight
Center.
The prospect of Egypt using
Nazis to develop a rocket program "was a major concern for Israel," Zuroff said. In the early 1960s, Israel sent a spy posing as a former Nazi,
Wolfgang Lotz, who reported back on German scientists
working in Egyptian armaments programs, according to
Lotz's 1972 memoir.
But most Nazis taken in by
Nasser's regime appear to have been involved in training
the Egyptian military and police or in producing propaganda
to foment anti-Israeli attitudes.
Among those whom researchers
have placed in Egypt were Johann von Leers, a Nazi propagandist,
who allegedly worked in Egypt's Information Ministry,
converted to Islam and died in Cairo in 1965. Leopold
Gleim, a Gestapo colonel in Poland, is believed to have
worked with Egypt's secret police.
Nasser touted himself as the
leader of the Arab world against Israel, and his regime
fought the Jewish state in two wars, suffering a devastating
defeat in 1967.
"In the Arab world,
there was a great sympathy to Nazis," said Emad Gad, an expert on Egyptian relations with Israel at Cairo's Al-Ahram
Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
But the welcome began to chill
during the 1960s, when Egypt came to rely more on Soviet
aid and training for its military. The atmosphere for
former Nazis further soured when Nasser's successor —
Anwar Sadat — began the peace process with Israel in
the mid-1970s, signing a peace accord in 1979.
Gad said Heim's story may
give hints on how the Egyptian government became less
willing to protect hidden Nazis.
Heim's documents suggest he
likely converted to Islam in the late 1970s, since the
first one bearing his Muslim name, Tarek Hussein Farid,
is dated 1981.
Gad speculated Heim converted
after "he was advised that there will be no political cover anymore and that he has
to search for other means."
"So he choose to
convert and dissolve in the community," Gad said.
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