| Aribert Heim, a former concentration camp doctor, apparently received support
from his family in Germany as he hid for decades in Egypt.
His family allegedly visited him without attracting the attention
of authorities and kept mum about his death for 16 years.
Ataba is a neighborhood in Cairo where tourists rarely go astray. This was probably
precisely what made it such a perfect hiding place for
the tall German man. Abd al-Hakim Duma remembers the
slim, athletic man well. Everyone in the neighborhood
called him "the foreigner."
Duma's father owned the Hotel Kasr al-Medina on Port Said Street. The foreigner
lived in a plain room on the eighth floor, directly adjacent
to the Duma family. "He often came to our apartment for lunch," Abd al-Hakim Duma recalls. After converting to Islam, the German, who spoke
fluent Arabic, took the name Tarek Hussein Farid. He
was like an uncle to the children, often taking them
along on his walks. He cited "problems with his family" at home in Germany as the reason that he emigrated to Egypt.
But his problems were of a more existential nature. The hotel in Cairo was apparently
the last refuge for Aribert Heim, who is believed to
have committed atrocities and murder at the Mauthausen
concentration camp in 1941 and had been sought by police
since 1962. Last week the New York Times and Germany's
ZDF television network aired some of the mysteries surrounding
the former Nazi's fate. According to their accounts,
Heim died of cancer in Cairo on Aug. 10, 1992, at the
age of 78. Several witnesses, including Heim's son Rüdiger,
and file full of documents allegedly described his life
in hiding.
The news of this death on the Nile marks the preliminary end of a decades-long
hunt around the globe. But the details also attest to
the embarrassingly lax work of the German investigators,
who searched for Heim around the world after he had fled
Germany in 1962. As far back as 1965 and 1967, the investigators
had uncovered clues that Heim was living in Egypt. The
German officials mailed friendly requests to the Egyptian
authorities, and when they were unable to contribute
in a substantive way, the Germans let the matter drop.
They failed to notice the regular trips family members
were apparently making between Germany and Egypt at the
time.
According to information SPIEGEL has obtained, Rüdiger Heim was not the only
one to visit the convert with a Nazi past in his new
home on the Nile. His sister, his Frankfurt attorney
and his mother-in-law are also believed to have met with
Heim. Of all his relatives, he could rely most on his
sister Hertha.
According to information recently uncovered, she was the one who brought cash
to Switzerland in a suitcase and transferred it to Egypt
from there, using Heim's only slightly modified name
(he simply used his middle name, Ferdinand, as his first
name). Heim used the money to buy more than just chocolate
cake, too. Using a middleman, he bought property, including
the Hotel Baghdad and an apartment in Alexandria. Investigators
at the time also completely missed the flow of money
to Egypt, which was only moderately concealed. Heim's
sister, who had always held a protective hand over her
brother and his memory, died in 1997. Shortly before
her death, she told an acquaintance in Vienna that her
brother had died of cancer. But she lied about the place
of his death, telling her friend that Heim had passed
away in South America. His other confidants remained
tight-lipped. Only six months ago, Heim's son Rüdiger
said: "If he is dead, I don't know where he is buried."
Investigators suspected for
years that Rüdiger Heim knew more than he was saying.
They questioned him repeatedly, even after they had received
new clues about Egypt in 2004. This time they had a contact
make inquiries locally, although he was unable to find
a single one of the numerous clues that have now emerged.
AP
Heim apparently lived on this street in Cairo, evading
German investigators for decades.
The investigators are irritated by the revelation that
Heim's family, living in the southwestern German city
of Baden-Baden, had not reported the fugitive's death
in the last 16 years. Their doubts are also fueled by
a current clue, unearthed in late January, that Heim
supposedly lives in Spain and still receives money from
family and friends. For this reason, the investigators
are not yet prepared to close the case. Experts are still
perplexed by the missing body and the strange role played
by Heim's son Rüdiger. He claims to have been by his
father's side when he died, but that he knows nothing
about the whereabouts of the body. The Stuttgart investigators'
next step is to search for DNA evidence in Cairo.
A fully packed briefcase belonging to Haim, which has now surfaced, closes some
gaps in information about the suspected war criminal's
spectacular run from the law. One of the documents is
an eight-page letter to SPIEGEL, dated March 19, 1979,
as a "response" to an article the magazine published about Heim's dark past. In the letter,
which he never sent, Heim sets aside suspicions that
he had received an insider tip before his abrupt disappearance
in 1962. It was "pure coincide," Heim writes, "that the police were unable to arrest me, because (I) happened to be away from
my house on business at the time."
Translated from the German
by Christopher Sultan
spiegel.de
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