It has been so long -- nearly 64 years -- since the end of the Second World War
that you might be tempted to think there are no more Nazi
war criminals to find, much less prosecute. Yet that's not
the case.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
aging Nazis still hiding out in South America, Eastern
Europe, the United States and, yes, even Canada. And
this week we learned that one of the most infamous Nazi
war criminals -- Dr. Death as he was known to inmates
at Mauthausen concentration camp -- apparently spent
much of his postwar life living contentedly in Egypt
as a convert to Islam.
According to newspaper reports,
Aribert Ferdinand Heim was buried in a pauper's mass
grave in Cairo in 1992 after apparently having lived
in the city for some 30 years.
Heim was the most wanted Nazi since Josef Mengele, another doctor infamous for
his concentration camp butchery. The Austrian-born doctor
Heim is accused of killing hundreds of people, mostly
Jews, at the concentration camp.
He fled Germany in 1962 shortly before he was to be arrested. In Egypt he took
the name of Tarek Hussein Farid when he became a Muslim.
He was, according to reports,
a regular at the Al Azhar mosque. He was also popular
with locals. A longtime resident at the Kasr el Madina
hotel and habitue of Cairo's cafes, "Uncle Tarek" was a favourite with local children, to whom he handed out candy.
That's a far cry from the
way he allegedly treated Jewish children in Mauthausen.
Heim, who was at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's "Operation Last Chance" list of wanted Nazi war criminals, was notorious for performing medical experiments
that included severing organs, often without anesthetic,
and injecting inmates' hearts with gasoline.
Heim meticulously documented
his experiments, including one in which he removed a
prisoner's tattooed skin to make seat coverings for the
camp commandant's apartment. One camp survivor told war
crimes investigators about a young prisoner who came
to Heim with an infected foot. After anesthetizing the
boy, Dr. Death removed and dissected his kidneys and
cut off his head, which he used as a paperweight after
boiling it clean of flesh.
Obviously, the world would
be better off without Dr. Death. The problem is whether
reports of his demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Officials with the Simon Wiesenthal
Center question whether Heim died in Egypt 17 years ago. "There's no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave," Efraim Zuroff, the centre's leading Nazi hunter, told the Associated Press. "We can't sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation.
Keep in mind these people have a vested interest in being
declared dead -- it's a perfectly crafted story; that's
the problem, it's too perfect." Indeed, Nazi hunters had long thought Heim, who has a bounty of about US$450,000
on his head, was hiding near the resort town of San Carlos
de Bariloche in Argentina's Patagonian region. Zuroff
pointed out in 2007 that Heim's daughter lives in Chile,
just across the border from the town, and that a German
bank account holding more than $1 million was still held
in Heim's name
In 2008, the Guardian newspaper reported "investigators have a hunch that somewhere among the skiers and student revelers
who throng the picturesque streets is a 93-year-old Austrian
by the name of Aribert Heim -- otherwise known as Doctor
Death." Is it just too convenient that we now hear Dr. Death is dead? It is certainly
plausible that he is dead. He would be 94 years old otherwise.
The question, says Zuroff, is whether he died in Egypt. "We have serious doubts about that." There is another question that needs answering, too. How was Uncle Tarek able
to live in Cairo so openly, without, as it seems, anyone
aware of or suspicious of his real identity? The New
York Times, which, along with a German TV station, broke
the story, reported that Egyptian officials issued a
death certificate for a man named Tarek Hussein Farid,
who died in 1992.
The paper quoted Heim's son,
Rudiger Heim, as saying that was the name his father
took when he converted to Islam. The 53-year-old also
said he was with his father in Egypt when he died from
rectal cancer.
Surely Egyptian authorities were aware of this "imposingly tall athletic German," as the Times describes him, and, at some point during his long stay in the country,
made inquiries about him. If so, surely they knew of
his background.
That likely scenario raises an obvious question, although so far as I can tell
from news reports, no one has asked it: Was the Egyptian
government complicit in hiding Dr. Death?
Robert Sibley is an Ottawa
Citizen columnist.
canada.com
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