BERLIN
— The hunt for Aribert Ferdinand Heim, a Nazi fugitive and
concentration camp doctor, has officially come to a close,
the German authorities said Friday, after they determined
that the man known as Dr. Death for his unnecessary operations
had died in Egypt in 1992.
A regional court in Baden-Baden, Dr. Heim’s last known residence in Germany,
said it had suspended the criminal investigation because
“no doubts remained” that the fugitive who eluded the authorities
for decades had died of cancer in Cairo in 1992.
The New York Times and the German television station ZDF reported in 2009 that
Dr. Heim had escaped justice by hiding in North Africa. An
old, dusty briefcase full of letters, handwritten notes about
the case against him and medical records corroborated the
accounts of Egyptians who knew him there.
Investigators established that the
documents were real and had belonged to Dr. Heim but could
not prove conclusively that he was dead. Witnesses said he
had died after a long struggle with rectal cancer. At the
same time, they said he had been buried in a common grave,
meaning that nearly 20 years on, neither DNA nor dental records
could be used to confirm his death.
“The only way that could have been
proven conclusively was with forensics,” Efraim Zuroff, the
chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New
York, said in a telephone interview. “I’m not ruling it out
conclusively, but I, in good conscience, could not rule out
the case without some forensic proof of a dead person who
is Aribert Heim.”
The Egyptian authorities produced
a death certificate in the name of Tarek Hussein Farid, which
witnesses said was the name Dr. Heim took after becoming
a Muslim. There was insufficient evidence in 2009 proving
that Dr. Heim and Mr. Farid were the same person, the court
said, and the case remained open.
This year, however, Dr. Heim’s lawyer
presented the court with additional papers, including an
Egyptian driver’s license with a photograph of Dr. Heim under
the name Tarek Hussein Farid and most significantly a certificate
confirming his conversion to Islam and name change.
“Tests by the state police confirmed
the authenticity of this certificate,” the Baden-Baden court
said in its statement. The court also questioned Dr. Heim’s
son Rüdiger Heim, who said he was in Cairo when his father
died.
In a telephone interview on Friday,
Mr. Heim said: “I am relieved that I could be helpful to
German justice in drawing the logical conclusions from the
revelations in recent years. I hope that this brings an end
to the many rumors that have circulated without foundation
in fact.”
Austrian by birth, Dr. Heim was a
member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS and worked at the Buchenwald,
Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was
held as a prisoner of war by the American authorities after
the war and detained for more than two years, but he escaped
prosecution.
Dr. Heim married, had two sons and
had a gynecology practice in the spa town of Baden-Baden,
in southwest Germany, where the family lived in a stately
white villa. His time at Mauthausen came back to haunt him
after former inmates told the police that he had killed healthy
prisoners in senseless operations and murdered others with
lethal injections to the heart.
He fled Baden-Baden in 1962 with investigators
at his heels. After a shorter stay in Morocco, he moved to
Egypt in 1963, slowly integrating into the local culture.
He learned to speak Arabic and lived in a modest hotel away
from other expatriates in a middle-class area of Cairo.
The search for Dr. Heim, named the
most-wanted Nazi war criminal in the world by the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in 2008, rekindled interest in the fates of Nazi fugitives
more than half a century after the end of World War II. Like
a character out of a James Bond film, Dr. Heim, a tall, athletic,
former professional ice hockey player, wore a tuxedo in one
of the photographs circulated by investigators, which only
added to his mystique.
“People’s fantasies elevated him to
the status of a myth,” his son said.
nytimes.com
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