Dr. Aribert Heim: The Butcher of Mauthausen and His Disappearance

Thanks to a network of secret support organisations, many Nazi criminals escaped justice, including the Austrian doctor Dr Aribert Heim, who remained in hiding until his officially unconfirmed death in 1992. For many years, the most wanted Nazi war criminal of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was considered one of the most vicious torturers in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Nicknamed ‘Doctor Death’ and ‘The Butcher of Mauthausen’ by his fellow inmates, Dr Heim removed organs from healthy camp in anaesthetic-free operations and carried out horrific medical experiments, which involved injecting various toxic compounds directly into the hearts of the inmates to see how much pain his victims could endure, and what would kill them the fastest.

Aribert Heim was one of the most chilling of Nazi criminals. The SS doctor was the archetypal Nazi of the Third Reich. He was a horrific sadist driven by a deep-seated cruelty. The young, inexperienced doctor operated on almost 300 camp inmates quite unnecessarily and murdered people he should have been treating.

He admired Hitler, who had the same initials as him, and identified with the Reich’s teachings on the stature and greatness of the Aryans. But after the war, this criminal mysteriously escaped justice and became one of the most wanted Nazis in the world.

Who was Aribert Heim?

In 1941, Mauthausen was one of the most murderous concentration camps in the Reich. Aribert Heim, a new medical graduate and one of many young SS members, made his mark in the history of the camp with his sadism and cruelty. He entered the medical profession only in the Mauthausen infirmary and gained his reputation in just six weeks, during which time he performed almost 300 surgical procedures.

Many prisoners died in terrible pain as he carried out many unspeakable atrocities. He mutilated, disfigured and tortured people to death. He cut people alive during operations. Many camp inmates who came to his clinic for treatment were not given the chance to survive. They became the subject of criminal experiments, because he treated the prisoners as guinea pigs. Like many other Nazi doctors in the concentration camps.

In Mauthausen, Heim became a real executioner in a short time in the midst of a racist anti-Semitic system. A system that encouraged violence against Jews, the disabled, homosexuals and all its opponents. Five million people died in killing centres all over Europe as a result of Nazi ideology, which was based on the superiority of the Aryan race.

The bloody path

Aribert Heim’s story began in the small town of Bad Radkersburg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the dark day of 28 June 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War, a multi-year slaughter that engulfed all of Europe.

The assassination also marked the life of young Aribert, as after the war in 1918 his birthplace was divided in two, the southern part of the town, today’s Gornja Radgona, belonging to the Kingdom of the SHS, and the northern part to Austria. Aribert Heim’s home landscape was deeply marked by the war. The people became more radical and nationalistic. Many supported the aims that were then adopted by the Nazis.

Between the end of the First World War and the 1930s, Aribert grew up in a defeated country plagued by economic crisis. Poverty and a sense of powerlessness led to despondency, which fed a new German movement: Nazism. In Germany, Adolf Hitler skilfully exploited this despair and, with his charismatic speeches, seduced the masses into blindly following his ideas of a thousand-year Reich. This enabled him to sweep to power in record time.

On 30 January 1933, he became Chancellor and established the Third Reich with a totalitarian dictatorship. At the time, Aribert Heim was 19 years old. The Nazi Party was banned in Austria, but the young man secretly found out everything he could about it and secretly joined the NSDAP. He watched Hitler implement his political programme in Germany, based on a racist ideology that fired up the masses and gave hope to the people during the crisis. An ideology in which the Jew was enemy number one and which demanded racial cleansing.

The key moment was the adoption of the criminal laws of September 1935, which stripped the Jews of their German citizenship. These were exclusionary laws aimed at excluding Jews from society. Any evidence Hitler could find in support of Nazi ideology came in handy, and German medical science, even on the shakiest of foundations, plied him with it.

For Hitler and other Nazi leaders, German doctors were by definition soldiers on the biological front. Their ideology was based, among other things, on anatomical measurements, which were intended to create the ideal Aryan. And it was anatomy that Aribert was passionate about. He studied it at the Vienna Medical School, which was one of the leading medical centres in the world in the 1920s and 1930s.

It was there that he met Dr Eduard Pernkopf, the famous anatomist and enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi regime, who co-created the Nazi atmosphere at the university and lectured students in the brown uniform of the SA.

Heim first studied Latin at the Faculty of Literature and later medicine under Prof. Pernkopf, who was the head of the Institute of Anatomy. The young student admired Dr Pernkopf greatly and soon became very interested in dissection. He practised on the many cadavers that the faculty had no difficulty in obtaining, so he was able to study human bodies in detail.

Professor Pernkopf was the author of a distinguished anatomical atlas published after the war. It was an important work of medical science and is still used in the USA and some other countries. However, it is also controversial because it is probably closely linked to the horrors of Nazism. In the early 1990s, it was suspected that the drawings might be of concentration camp inmates.

Surrounded by like-minded students and professors, Heim committed himself heart and soul to the Nazi ideology. The young man identified with the archetype of the Aryan, as glorified by Hitler. His striking figure fitted Hitler’s criteria perfectly. The young, charismatic Aribert was tall, broad-shouldered, muscular and handsome. He seemed to be truly obsessed with the cult of the body. He was also a very good athlete and played as a hockey defenceman for the best team in Vienna. Articles have survived in which we can read how good a hockey player he was.

In 1936, a well-known Austrian newspaper praised young Aribert’s sporting talents and the young man could have gone on to a brilliant career as a professional hockey player. But because he was fascinated by Hitler, he chose politics instead. Because of his exceptional stature – he stood 193 centimetres tall – he was gladly accepted into the Firer’s elite paramilitary group, the Schutzstaffel, in October 1938. You were only accepted into the SS if you met the demanding criteria of good looks, family background, height, fair hair and good health.

Top athletes ideally represented the image of the Germans who were supposed to conquer the whole world, get rid of the opponents of Nazi ideology and exterminate inferior races and people. It was the SS, which Heim joined, that was later given the task of carrying out the final solution, that is, the murder of millions of innocent people.

Doctor Death with a stopwatch

On the twelfth of March 1938, troops of the German Wehrmacht crossed the border and entered Austria. Most people enthusiastically welcomed the German army, which by the end of the day had occupied the whole country. Several buildings in Vienna were decorated with Nazi symbols and banners with slogans such as One Nation, One Empire, One Leader! and With our firer Adolf Hitler to work and bread!

Hitler proclaimed the so-called Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich. This event had profound consequences for Heim’s and Hitler’s homeland – from then on, Austria was ruled by the same authorities as Nazi Germany. The country was gripped by the oppression of the Jews and all opponents of the regime.

“German Austria must once again return to the bosom of its great German mother, but not for any economic calculations. … No, no: equal blood belongs to a common country.” So begins the first chapter of the pragmatic Mein Kampf, the book in which Adolf Hitler openly set out his political programme – along with his anti-Semitism – as early as 1923.

Aribert Heim was elated. Events finally coincided with his convictions. He had been a convinced Nazi from the start. It cannot be said that he was just going with the flow, because he had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1935.

On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Aribert Heim was not immediately conscripted, but was allowed to finish his studies. He did not join the Waffen SS until 1940 and started his medical career in the middle of the war.

But the young doctor was not sent to the front. He was given a position in which he could practise his sadism with impunity. In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, some 39 kilometres from Berlin, he took up his first job in April 1941.

Sachsenhausen’s architecture already hinted at the power of the Nazis. The camp had a special, triangular floor plan, which allowed the entire area to be controlled from a central point at the upper tip of the triangle. It was here that Aribert Heim became familiar with the violence of the camp system. He was not yet in a leading position, but he had already learnt that the Nazis were allowed to do everything.

The deaths of prisoners and the first gas experiments left a strong imprint on him. He also worked briefly in Buchenwald, Germany’s largest concentration camp, near Weimar, before being sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in October 1941. He was 27 years old. Hitler’s extermination camps did not yet exist in Poland. So Mauthausen was the only category III camp, with the highest level of cruelty.

200,000 people were interned at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945. Just over half of the internees died. Judging by this, it was the most unforgiving labour camp in occupied Europe. When the camp was at its most crowded, according to the camp officials, between 800 and 1 000 people were crammed into each barrack.

The camp stood next to a granite quarry where the prisoners were forced to work in slave-like conditions. They dug and broke stones for various construction projects of the Reich. Every day, weighed down by rocks, they had to climb steep stairs, which they called ‘the stairs of death’. “If a stone fell on the ground, they were beaten. If someone fell, they were crushed by others. If he was still alive, he got a new load. It was downright bestial.”

One of the last surviving camp inmates, Bernard Maingot, a member of the French Resistance, was interned at Mauthausen at the age of 17. He recalls the torture he endured: “We were slaves. Numbers, to be precise. Not once did anyone call me by name. I was 62739. My friends were dying one by one.”

When Aribert Heim arrived at Mauthausen in October 1941, the camp was developing rapidly. The number of prisoners grew sharply as the German army invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. The SS decided that Mauthausen had to be cleansed, which meant that a greater number of camp inmates had to be executed.

Almost all the murders at Mauthausen were carried out to make room for new prisoners. They were killed on the basis of who was sick and who was not. It was not wise to go to the infirmary, because nobody was helped there. You died there. Most of the executions were carried out in the camp infirmary, which the Germans called the ‘district’.

The staff in the camps had not the slightest respect for human life. At Mauthausen, extermination had not yet been fully industrialised and gas cells did not yet exist, so SS doctors were ordered to execute internees personally. But the executions had to be carried out in accordance with SS rules, which meant that every death had to be recorded. The name of the ‘patient’, the fictitious illness and the date of death had to be stated. The lists were made very scrupulously.

In the autumn of 1941, when Aribert Heim was working at Mauthausen, 50 people a day died in the main camp and in the annexed Gusen camp. At that time, the systematic extermination of people was still being perfected, so that the SS doctors could kill whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Sick people went to the clinic thinking that the doctor would help them, but the opposite happened.

In the Mauthausen concentration camp, Heim was able to carry out horrific murders with impunity, because the SS doctors had a mission to kill. The fusion of murderous instinct and Nazi ideology gave birth to a bloody, sadistic monster.

That the young Aribert came to the camp completely inexperienced was no obstacle. On the contrary. Young doctors were sent to the camps precisely to gain experience. He did not have a very high rank in the SS, but because he was a doctor, that did not matter. What was important was that he was a doctor and a member of the SS. People in similar positions to Heim were afraid of being transferred to the Eastern Front and were prepared to carry out any order to keep their position. And perverted executioners were born.

Heim was in Mauthausen for only six weeks, but his brutality left a lasting mark on the surviving prisoners. Dr Death was capable of extreme inhumanity and followed the established procedure to the letter. Like serial killers, he methodically selected his victims from among the camp inmates. He sometimes spoke kindly to prospective victims at first, but then behaved towards them in an extremely cruel and sadistic manner.

One witness told the story of a Viennese Jew whom Heim once dragged in front of a mirror and told him: ‘Look at that nose of yours! Our firer doesn’t need anything like that!” The Jew begged for his life in tears, as he had to take care of his helpless old mother, but the doctor did not spare him and sentenced him to die in agony.

Witnesses who survived the Mauthausen camp said that Aribert Heim often operated unnecessarily on perfectly healthy patients, killing them. He was practically conducting medical experiments on them. After the war, survivors recalled the details of these crimes and records of conversations with them have survived. For example, Heim checked that the prisoners had healthy teeth. If they did, he murdered them by injecting them with poison.

The case of two young prisoners is known. He promised two Jewish boys, aged eighteen and twenty, that he would release them if they cooperated in a minor medical procedure. The two young prisoners of course agreed, but Dr Death had no intention of releasing them. According to the testimony of Karl Lotter, who worked as a prisoner with Heim in the camp clinic, he removed some of their organs, castrated them and then cut them open.

He sawed off their heads and cooked them until the flesh fell off their skulls. He prepared the two heads and sent one to a friend as a special gift to decorate his office. He kept the other skull as a trophy in his surgery and proudly showed it to visitors as a paperweight on his desk: “Wouldn’t it be a pity to burn such a beautiful head?”

Heim’s violence was perverse, as another witness testified. One prisoner, who had a tattoo of a ship, had large chunks of skin cut off his back and left to die in agony. He cut off the skin and made a lampshade out of it, which he gave to the camp commander.

But the horrors of amputation of healthy limbs and removal of organs – all without anaesthesia and with the patient fully conscious – were not over. Heim became famous in the camp for his lethal injections. Together with the SS camp pharmacist Erich Wasicky, he tested various lethal cocktails, such as petrol and phenol, and murdered prisoners by injecting poisonous substances directly into their hearts.

Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi hunter who survived internment in twelve concentration camps, including Mauthausen, describes in his book Justice, Not Vengeance the story of a twelve-year-old Jewish boy who, according to prisoners, was killed by one of these ‘heart’ injections.

When they put him on the table, the boy sensed that he was going to be killed and said goodbye to his parents in prayer. Heim listened attentively to his prayer, then told him in an eerily calm voice that he had to die because he was a Jew. All Jews must die because they are guilty of all the evils in the world, and especially of war.

Dr Death performed each operation according to the same ritual. Without saying a word, he watched the reactions of the patients with a stopwatch in his hand and patiently and carefully measured how long the prisoner writhed in painful spasms until he died. He was checking which substance, suitable for ‘heart’ injection, would cause death fastest – and which method was the cheapest. Out of sheer sadism, he occasionally took a scalpel and also tested the reactions of the nervous system when amputating or removing the liver, kidneys and intestines, all this with the prisoner fully conscious and without the use of anaesthetics. He was able to see how much pain a person could suffer and how long he could survive without each organ.

Aribert Heim had another habit that stood out at Mauthausen. The doctor was still a keen sportsman and was able to play hockey immediately after his execution as if nothing had happened. One moment he was operating in the middle of the camp, the next he was doing his favourite pastime and skating.

Heim’s surgical procedures are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by the Nazis at Mauthausen during the war. But the murders of Dr Death were something special. He carried them out in cold blood and with the utmost cruelty. There is no evidence that these medical experiments were ordered by his superiors. He seems to have carried them out on his own initiative. He practised his surgical skills in this way, but sometimes he did it out of sheer cruelty. The most horrifying thing is that he often carried out medical experiments because he was bored.

The medical experiments ordered by the official German authorities must be distinguished from the killing at Mauthausen. Other doctors operated on the camp in the same sadistic way as Heim. In Auschwitz, the infamous Dr Josef Mengele tortured twins and Roma from 1943, two years after Heim. The difference was that Mengele carried out the experiments for the Reich, in the name of pseudo-science, while Aribert carried them out for himself.

Even today, it is difficult to know the extent of his crimes and the number of victims, because it is difficult to say how many people Aribert Heim killed. The operation book in which he entered the names of the people he operated on has been preserved. The deaths are recorded, but investigators believe that the prisoners he killed by injecting petrol and other poisonous substances into their hearts are not listed in the operation book and are therefore not counted among the victims.

Heim acted as a serial killer, a murderer who covered up crimes. The SS doctors knew that after the war they could be held accountable for the crimes, so Heim destroyed the evidence after each operation. Thus, we do not know the details and the real causes of death, because he fabricated many of them. If the doctors were operating on people who were dying, nobody cared, because dozens of people a day were dying all the time. In the midst of the Holocaust, no one missed a prisoner or a patient here and there.

Aribert Heim was far from the only criminal. The whole camp system was extremely violent towards prisoners who were considered subhuman. They were constantly punished for all sorts of things. If a camp inmate did not reveal himself to the SS, it was called ‘fünfundzwanzig’. Twenty-five. The prisoner knelt down and received 25 strokes of the cane. For the concentration camp guards and staff, the camp inmates were animals, members of an inferior species.

The mysterious case of the Mauthausen executioner

After the war, from March 1946, the administrators of Mathausen were tried by an American military tribunal. Most of the accused were hanged, but Aribert Heim escaped this fate.

Dr. Death was lucky to leave Mauthausen quickly and after six weeks almost no trace of him remained. Many doctors, after relatively short periods of service, were constantly changing jobs, because doctors and SS members were constantly being redeployed.

In November 1941, Heim was sent to a military hospital in Vienna to treat wounded men returning from the front. A year later, he was in another military hospital, thousands of kilometres away, on the Eastern Front, in the Finnish city of Oulu, but the details of his activities in Finland are not known. But the end of the war was approaching and the noose around Heimo’s neck was tightening.

On 15 March 1945, Heim and his unit were captured by the Americans. Hitler committed suicide in April, and Germany was defeated and devastated. The Allies liberated one camp after another, and the world discovered the sacrifices made there. The time had come when Germany had to pay for its war crimes. The Allies began to denationalise the country and destroyed all symbols of the Third Reich. At the end of 1945, the trial of the Nazi leaders began in Nuremberg.

Aribert Heim was imprisoned as a prisoner of war in the Hohenasperg fortress in Ludwigsburg, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Heim, who was forced to perform forced labour between 1945 and 1947, was denationalised during his internment. His political background was checked and it was probably discovered that he had been an SS man and a camp doctor. They must have also known about the incriminating evidence.

He gave a written statement in which he declared that he had been conscripted into the Waffen SS against his will and that he knew nothing of the criminal intentions and aims of the SS. At the same time, he assured that he had never participated in any action contrary to human rights or international law. The proceedings were suspended and he was released from prison in December 1947, during the Christmas amnesty. Dr. Death was set free.

The case of Aribert Heim is shrouded in mystery. Why was he not tried, even though he was involved in the crimes? Although his superiors at the Mauthausen concentration camp and the camp pharmacist Erich Wasicky were convicted and executed at his trial in 1947, he escaped scot-free, despite numerous testimonies and accounts of his torture operations.

In his files kept in the USA, the Mauthausen period is mysteriously omitted, leading some to speculate that he offered his services – in whatever form – to the Americans. It is known that the Americans and Russians sought to enrich Nazi scientists and offered them safe haven in exchange for their knowledge.

Heim did not pay for the atrocities he committed at Mauthausen and was able to live a normal life afterwards. After the war, Germany was in ruins and chaos. In the confusion, among the millions of people, among the refugees and the wounded, nobody noticed him. Germany could not condemn all Nazi war criminals and concentrated on rebuilding the country. The whole country tried to forget the atrocities and concentrated on making money and on comfort, not on mental suffering.

According to Efraim Zuroff, one of the main Nazi hunters, perhaps one of the most terrible aspects of the Holocaust is that people who were not criminals before the war committed unimaginable atrocities during the war, and then became ‘normal’ people again and lived peaceful and orderly lives.

A lazy post-war life

After his release from internment, Heim worked as an assistant surgeon at the Bürgerhospital in Friedberg, Hessen, while playing ice hockey for the Bad Nauheim ‘Red Devils’, a sports club founded by Americans in 1946, and becoming German champion in 1947/48.

Thanks to his wife Friedl, also a doctor, whom he married in 1949, he settled in the wealthy spa town of Baden-Baden and started a family. The former Dr Death made no secret of who he was. Because he was convinced that he was untouchable, he did not change his name and could be found in the telephone directory.

Probably after his release from prisoner of war, like most Nazis, he believed that he would no longer be persecuted. He lived in this belief in a state of absolute ease. His wife was from a very wealthy family and her relatives had enabled them to buy an extremely large villa where they brought up their two sons.

As if nothing had happened during the war, in 1955 Heim opened a well frequented gynaecological clinic in the middle of the city. His patients later said that they thought he was a good doctor and that he was a very popular gynaecologist among women.

In 1956, when he wanted to obtain German citizenship, the German police contacted the Austrian authorities. The 1950 arrest warrant contained inaccurate information with the name Heribert and the place of birth Ingstfeld, so that, by a combination of circumstances, no arrest was made. Aribert Heim thus took German nationality in December 1956.

But behind his impeccable appearance, there was something he did not want to come out. People remembered that he did not like to be photographed. It seemed that he was avoiding something or did not want to attract too much attention. The fact that he almost never took photographs of himself shows that he was cautious. He saved his earnings carefully and invested them in real estate, in particular an apartment building with 24 rental flats in Berlin. He earned an extra 6 000 marks a month from renting out the flats, which came in very handy later when he fled.

The peace of the former Mauthausen butcher, as the prisoners called him, was suddenly threatened. For some time, the hunt for the former Nazis had been on again.

A game of cat and mouse

Ten years passed in the peaceful Baden-Baden and Aribert Heim’s murderous past slowly came to light. After years of turning a blind eye to the crimes of the Nazi era, the German authorities began to search again for the perpetrators of the atrocities at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The eyewitnesses from Mauthausen were still alive and now former camp inmates were breaking their silence. More and more statements were recorded from survivors who had seen the atrocities committed by Heim at Mauthausen.

The investigation had taken a long time, but now the situation was clear: Heim must be punished for his crimes. The West German authorities had gathered information and evidence that could bring him to justice. In particular, those who had assisted Heim in his operational interventions and had been in close proximity to him during the six murderous weeks became key witnesses in the investigation.

What happened in the clinic in less than two months has been deeply imprinted on the souls and minds of Holocaust survivors. As the files show, the young, inexperienced doctor killed his victims in a mixture of racial hatred, medical curiosity and lust for killing – or simply for training.

Heim was, of course, known and seen at work by many, for example by other doctors, cleaners and secretaries of SS doctors, and described him in detail to the authorities after the war. The authorities examined many camp files, records of operations and deaths of patients. The SS diligently kept books of the dead, and these became the main source of information on the stories of the victims and the types of crimes committed at Mauthausen.

But Aribert was betrayed by one in particular. It was his unusually tall stature. His height and stature made him stand out and he was easily recognisable. One day, two men approached him to discuss his service during the war, and in particular his work at Mauthausen. It was then that Heim realised that his carefully constructed life was about to collapse like a house of cards. It became clear to him that they could come after him at any moment.

One autumn morning in 1962, he secretly left home to avoid being arrested by the police. He left his wife and child behind and never returned. He left very early in the morning on the day the police wanted to arrest him. Someone said that he left when the police had already arrived, which suggests that someone might have warned him.

To make an imminent arrestee disappear and to protect him, to send him somewhere from where he would not be extradited, was a nightmare in the 1960s. For decades afterwards, he was sought all over Europe, particularly in Switzerland and Spain, where he had connections, but also in Latin America, Argentina and Chile, where a very large number of Nazis had taken refuge after the Second World War. There have even been suggestions that he went to Arab countries such as Syria or Egypt. Aribert Heim became one of the most wanted former Nazis, alongside Mengele and Eichmann, but no one came close to the Nazi doctor.

Heim was in fact hiding on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt. After fleeing through France, Spain and Morocco, the sadistic former SS doctor hid from the world in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, and lived a completely fictitious life undercover. For a while he used his middle name, Ferdinand Heim, then changed his name to Tarek Hussein Farid, apparently converted to Islam, spoke another language and had contact only with Egyptians.

Despite hiding, he continued to correspond with friends and family in Europe. In 1967, Heim’s wife filed for divorce and publicly distanced herself from her husband. She later said that she had no idea of his atrocities during the war until she met the investigators.

Many former Nazis took refuge in Egypt after the war, and Aribert Heim successfully hid there for 30 years. With the help of an Egyptian friend, he bought several properties, including the Karak Hotel in Cairo and an apartment in Alexandria.

His friends there were unaware of his dark past. They knew that he had previously lived in Germany and that he had two children. They remembered him as a kindly Uncle Tarek, admired for his gallantry. He liked to go to the café in the centre of town, buy chocolate cakes and send them to his friends and sweets to their children.

He organised various sports games on the roof of the hotel he co-owned. He liked to wander the streets with a camera in his hand, but he never allowed himself to be photographed. He became close friends with Mr Domo, the owner of the hotel where he spent the last years of his life. He even became a second father to the under-age Mahmoud Domo and his younger brother when their father died.

But the further the investigation progressed, the harder life became. In June 1979, a Berlin court sentenced him in absentia to a fine of 510,000 Deutschmarks for having promoted the rule of National Socialism in a particularly brutal way by murdering at least 100 prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The fine was unenforceable and all his assets were seized and sold.

This severely cut into his income. Although he was not caught, his life was made very difficult. A reward of €315,000 was offered for information leading to his arrest, but the tips did not bear fruit and all in turn ended in dead ends. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre recalled: “I did what I could. I went to the end of the world. Nobody noticed.”

He believes that the German Embassy in Cairo allowed Heim to escape justice and that the German Embassy in Cairo must have known that Aribert Heim was there, since he used a German passport number in his application for an extension of his right to stay in Egypt in 1981. Zuroff asked the German Foreign Ministry to question the staff working at the embassy in Cairo at the time.

Unsatisfactory epilogue

In August 1992, in a remote room of a secluded hotel in Cairo, where he had moved a few years before his death, the story of the former SS doctor who, at a young age, was the embodiment of power, cruelty and intimidation came to an end. In the end, he was a shadow of himself.

On 4 February 2009, after years of unsuccessfully searching for the Nazi fugitive, German state television ZDF and The New York Times reported on the circumstances of Heim’s escape and years of hiding, and announced that, according to their research, Aribert Heim had indeed died of bowel cancer in 1992. They based their conclusion on documents they found that finally proved who Tarek really was, including a copy of his passport, bank statements, medical records and letters secretly sent to him by family members and friends.

But these documents, discovered in a brown leather briefcase that Mahmoud handed over to two investigative German journalists at home, were discovered too late, only 17 years after his death, leaving Heim with more questions than answers.

Following the publication of the article and the TV programme by German journalists Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish, Heim’s youngest son Rüdiger came forward and, in an interview at the family villa in Baden-Baden, admitted publicly for the first time that he had visited his father in Egypt several times since 1979, the first time he had seen him since he was six years old. He had learned about his inter-war life from the newspapers, as his mother and grandmother had kept quiet about the details.

He was aware that his father was not completely innocent, but he did not believe that he would have been capable of committing the atrocities attributed to him when he was serving as a doctor in the Mauthausen concentration camp. He was almost obsessed with disproving the accusations against his father, for whom he had longed for years. His elder brother Christian still remembered his father, but refused to have any contact with him.

In Cairo, Rüdiger had cared for his father for six months before his death, so that he succumbed to cancer in his presence. He gave his father’s false date of birth to the Egyptian official who came to fill in the death certificate, in order to mislead those who were looking for him and to avoid disturbing his family and Dom’s family in Cairo.

He learned of his father’s whereabouts from his late aunt, Herta Barth, who had always been in contact with her brother and had supported him financially, sending him money from the rent of his Berlin apartment block.

When Heim died, Rüdiger followed his father’s wishes and donated his body to a hospital for scientific research, but years later, when he returned to Cairo, he found that his wishes had not been respected. The Islamic religion does not allow body donations. He said he did not know in which anonymous cemetery his father was buried and refused to provide a sample of his own DNA. It is unlikely that Heim’s remains will ever be found, as cemeteries for the poor in Cairo are razed after a few years and prepared for new burials.

Rüdiger asked for his father to be declared legally dead so that his family could get their hands on his property, worth €1.5 million. He claimed that he intended to contribute to humanitarian projects to document the atrocities committed in the camps.

For years, investigators suspected that Rüdiger Heim knew more than he was telling. He was interrogated several times and his statements changed all the time. The stories of Aribert’s son also seemed “very strange” to the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuruff, and he refused to close the investigation into the Heim case, even after the Nazi doctor’s death had been announced. In March 2009, he filed a criminal complaint on suspicion of perjury, because until the publication of the results of the investigations on public television and in the newspapers, Rüdiger had consistently denied knowing his father’s whereabouts.

On 21 September 2012, the Baden-Baden District Court declared Heim officially dead and cancelled the prosecution.

Aribert Heim remains an enigma, as to date neither his grave nor his corpse have been found to identify him on the basis of his teeth and DNA analysis.

During the search for the fugitive Nazi criminal, many speculations and stories have been spun as to what happened to him. In 2007, former Israeli Air Force Colonel Danny Baza published a story called ‘The Secret Executioners’, in which he claims that Heim was tracked down in Canada and flown to Santa Catalina on the Californian coast, where he was killed in 1982 by a secret Nazi-hunting organisation called ‘The Owl’, which operates outside international law. Baz claimed to have been a member of this group himself, adding that his group had carried out several assassinations of Nazis who had taken refuge in the US.

Investigators from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre expressed doubts about his claims and hoped for more from the suggestion that Heim was hiding in Chile, where his illegitimate daughter, born during the war, was also living, but all efforts to find the fugitive were in vain.

Heim embodies the history of the concentration camps. He is undoubtedly a symbol of evil, but he is only one of the many evil spirits created by Nazi ideology. The fact that he has not been punished because several institutions have collapsed on several levels is testimony to the fact that full disclosure of Nazi crimes was not in the interests of those in charge, either in Germany or elsewhere in the world. Dr Death has left behind questions that will probably never be answered. But his case serves as a reminder for future generations.