It could have been the biggest private operation of the decade. Its impact on
the Holocaust ethos would have equaled the capture of Adolf
Eichmann.
Several former senior security officials with proven skills and experience in
monitoring, establishing contact, intelligence gathering,
and data analysis had already been enlisted. There were
several working meetings and efforts were already underway,
despite the world financial crisis, to raise funds from
foreign donors. The still as of yet unnamed operation
would have capped the many years devoted by Dr. Efraim
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem
branch, of locating Nazi war criminals, bringing about
their arrest and extradition to their native countries
and putting them on trial.
The target was Dr. Aribert
Ferdinand Heim, who had merited the title, "the most wanted living Nazi war criminal." But the joint investigation by the German television station ZDF and The New
York Times upset the operation.
Earlier this month, the two
media outlets publicized the news that Heim, a senior
Waffen SS officer, died in the Egyptian capital of Cairo
in 1992.
Heim, a native of Austria,
was a doctor in the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen
concentration camps, where he committed awful acts and
abused hundreds of prisoners. He would amputate limbs
without an anesthetic, and would inject gasoline into
the hearts of his victims and use a stopwatch to clock
how long it took them to die. In another case, he scraped
the tattooed skin off a live prisoner to use as a cover
for the camp commandant's chair. On his desk there was
a human skull he had chopped off as a souvenir. In 1942,
his mistress got pregnant and gave birth to his daughter,
Waltraud, who would later play a central role in the
efforts of Heim's family and friends to protect him and
conceal his whereabouts. After the war, the United States
army captured Heim. He remained in a detention camp for
two and a half years, but was not identified and eventually
was released.
He married and had two children,
Rudiger, who still lives today in his parents' home in
Baden-Baden, and Christian, who lives in the university
town of Heidelberg.
For almost a decade and a
half, Dr. Aribert Heim continued working unhindered in
his hometown as a gynecologist. But in 1962, after Adolf
Eichmann's capture, he grew concerned that the Mossad
and law enforcement agencies in Austria and Germany,
who had issued an arrest warrant for him, were also on
his tail. So he got into his red Mercedes and escaped
with the help of relatives and Nazi friends from Germany
to an unknown destination.
The search for him never officially
stopped, but the efforts to capture gradually waned until
2004. That year, law enforcement authorities in Germany
investigated a charge of suspected tax evasion against
one of Heim's sons. During the course of the investigation,
they came across a bank account in Berlin in Dr. Aribert
Heim's name with two million euros in it. Following that,
the hunt for him was renewed and the German government
offered a reward of $130,000 for anyone with information
about him that would lead to his arrest.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center,
which two years earlier had launched Operation Last Chance
to locate the last of the war criminals, obtained a donation
and increased the amount of the reward by another $135,000.
Dr. Zuroff persuaded the Austrian government to also
contribute another $50,000.
The search changed direction
when the Wiesenthal Center received information claiming
that Heim may be hiding in southern Chile and living
near his illegitimate daughter, Waltraud. In the 1970s,
Waltraud married Ivan Diharce, a businessman and building
contractor, and the couple settled in the city of Puerto
Montt on the Pacific coast. Dr. Zuroff traveled to Chile
twice and managed to establish contact with one of Diharce's
workers.
He told him that a few days
earlier he had met his employer as he was carrying large
bags of food. According to the employee's testimony,
Diharce told him the food was for one of his elderly
relatives. This testimony strengthened the suspicions
that the devoted daughter and her husband were hiding
the Nazi war criminal.
Zuroff even conjectured where
the hiding place might be: a forest preserve on an island
not far from the city's coast. Zuroff sailed to the island
but discovered to his disappointment that the wooden
hut in the heart of the forest was destroyed in a winter
storm.
Despite the news, Zuroff redoubled
his efforts. He contacted private investigators and former
intelligence officials in order to look into the possibility
of enlisting them in the effort. In the end, he chose
two former security officials who agreed to join the
effort.
"I considered this
operation a challenging assignment of unprecedented national
and moral importance," said one of them, who asked to remain anonymous. Efforts were also undertaken
to finance the operation, cut short by the report on
German television and in The New York Times.
According to the investigation,
Heim converted to Islam in Egypt, called himself Tarek
Hussein Farid and lived modestly in a small Cairo hotel,
until his death in 1992. He left his body to science,
but Islamic law prohibits this. His son Rudiger claimed
in the article that he traveled to Egypt to try and smuggle
his father's body into Germany so that his organs could
be donated to fulfill his will. He said the authorities
uncovered the plan and buried Heim anonymously in a common
grave. He also has a certificate documenting his father's
death that was issued by the Egyptian authorities.
"I'm still not
convinced about the veracity of the story," said Zuroff. "Such a document can easily be forged."
Why, he asks, did the son
remember only now "to kill" his father. How is it possible to explain the fact that to this day Heim has
a bank account? If he died 16 years ago, why was his
bequest not distributed and why does it remain in his
name at the bank?
One possible answer to this
question is that perhaps Heim is still alive and by staging
his death, his sons are trying to put an end to the chase
after him. Zuroff is also responsible to a certain extent.
On his trip to Chile he went to the public about the
hunt for "the butcher" of Mauthausen and prompted a lot of media coverage.
Heim and his family may have
gotten scared and decided what they decided. Zuroff says
in response that he had no choice but to use the help
of the media to obtain information and spur interest
in the chase.
"It is possible
that we will never know the truth," he concluded sadly, "because there is no body and it will not be possible to conduct checks to verify
what happened to the last notorious war criminal on earth." haaretz.com
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