Aribert Heim

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Aribert Ferdinand Heim (born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg , Austria-Hungary ; † officially: August 10, 1992 in Cairo , Egypt ) was an Austro-German doctor and SS member. He is charged with murdering numerous prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp as a camp doctor . Heim had been on the run since 1962 and was wanted by international arrest warrant under the name Heribert Heim . In media reports also as “Dr. Death ”and“ Butcher of Mauthausen ”, it was temporarily number 1 on the list of the most wanted Nazi war criminals at the Simon Wiesenthal Center . In February 2009, ZDF and the New York Times reported that Heim died in Cairo in 1992. In September 2012 , the Baden-Baden Regional Court declared Heim to be dead and closed the criminal proceedings against him.

Life

Aribert Ferdinand Heim, son of a gendarmerie district inspector , ended his attendance at the elementary school in his home town and the middle school in Graz with the acquisition of the school leaving certificate . From 1931 he studied at the University of Vienna , where he took the Latinum and in 1933 also began studying medicine in Vienna . In 1937 he moved to the University of Rostock . In January 1940 home was in Vienna for MD PhD ; at the same time his medical appointment took place .

In 1935 Heim joined the NSDAP, which was illegal in Austria at the time ( membership number 6.116.098) and the SA . After Austria's " annexation " to the National Socialist German Reich , he became a member of the SS on October 1, 1938 (SS no. 367.744). As an SS member, Heim also attended the SS Medical Academy .

War crimes as a camp doctor

In April 1940 Heim volunteered for the Waffen SS . After training as recruits, he was stationed with the medical replacement battalion of the SS disposable troops in Prague from August 1940 . Since April 1941 he was taken to the concentration camp inspector (IKL). Home was initially camp doctor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and moved in June 1941 in the same capacity in the Buchenwald concentration camp and in July 1941 in the Mauthausen concentration camp .

Mauthausen concentration camp

Handwritten entries in the Mauthausen operation book document at least 243 operations by Heim on prisoners in October and November 1941. According to testimony from a district clerk and an operation assistant, Heim, together with the camp pharmacist Erich Wasicky , murdered hundreds of Jews through intracardiac poison injections, for example with phenol . In addition, Heim is said to have removed organs from prisoners during operations for exercise purposes, out of boredom or sadism . According to the Mauthausen Memorial, Heim operated on around 220 prisoners, some several times. According to the Mauthausen death register, 53 of these prisoners died in the 30 days after the operation. Witness statements accuse Heim of murdering other prisoners who had not previously been operated on. One of the prisoners who survived an operation at Heims was Otto Peltzer , a multiple German athletics champion who was imprisoned for his homosexuality. How long Heim was the camp doctor in Mauthausen is not known for certain. According to Heim's own statements, he had been transferred to an SS hospital in Vienna on November 24, 1941; later he was a medical examiner at various SS supplementary offices. According to Hans Maršálek , a prisoner in Mauthausen from September 1942, Heim was still a doctor in the Gusen subcamp in Mauthausen in the summer of 1942 .

From October 20, 1942 Heim was a doctor in the 6th SS Mountain Division "North" , which took part in the continuing war against the Soviet Union on the Finnish side . Details of Heim's activity in Finland are largely unknown; At times he was a doctor in the divisional hospital in the city of Oulu . In the Waffen-SS, Heim had achieved the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer in 1944 . At the beginning of 1945 Heim and the SS division had been relocated to the Western Front and were taking part in fighting in the Vosges at the time of the Battle of the Bulge .

post war period

On March 15, 1945, Heim was captured by the US military in the Hunsrück. Initially a prisoner of war , Heim was interned in Ludwigsburg and on the Hohenasperg from the end of 1946 . He was released on December 22, 1947 during a Christmas amnesty .

In his denazification process , Heim made an affidavit on March 20, 1948 , according to which he had been drafted into the Waffen SS against his will. "Of the criminal intentions and goals of the SS" he was not aware of anything when he joined the Waffen SS, said Heim. At the same time he assured that he had "never participated in actions that were against human rights or against international law". On March 22, 1948, the tribunal in Neckarsulm closed the denazification process with reference to Heim's information. The chamber had information from the Berlin Document Center , which contained information on the memberships in the NSDAP and SS, which Heim had kept secret, as well as on his activities in concentration camps.

After his release from internment, Heim worked in the Bürgerhospital in Friedberg , Hesse ; at the same time he played ice hockey for VfL Bad Nauheim in the 1947/48 season and became German runner-up. Heim had already played ice hockey for the Vienna club EK Engelmann in 1938 and also during his activity in the Mauthausen concentration camp and had become German champion with the club in 1939 .

In July 1949 Heim married Friedl Bechtold and settled as a doctor in Mannheim . The marriage had two children: Aribert Christian geb. 1949 and Rüdiger born 1955. In 1953 Heim passed his specialist examination ; the following year he moved to Baden-Baden, where he opened a practice as a gynecologist in November 1955 . Between August 1960 and December 1961 Heim was licensed as a statutory health insurance doctor . According to police investigations, Heim is said to have also worked as a pharmaceutical representative during his time in Baden-Baden. In December 1956, after several efforts, he gave up his Austrian citizenship and took on German citizenship .

Arrest warrants and escape

The first indications of Heim's involvement in crimes in Mauthausen concentration camp came in January 1946 when a liberated prisoner was interrogated by US investigators in Vienna. In February 1948 a witness turned to the Vienna Ice Hockey Association with the name Heim; In March, the Vienna public prosecutor initiated preliminary investigations. In May 1948, the investigative authorities received a notice that Heim had been seen in Bad Nauheim. After questioning other witnesses, the Austrian authorities issued an arrest warrant against Heim on March 28, 1950, which contained incorrect information with the first name Heribert and the place of birth Ingstfeld . In May 1951, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior decided that, contrary to the request of the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office , Heim should not be advertised for a search in West Germany. When Heim wanted to take on German citizenship in 1956, the Mannheim police headquarters were in contact with Austrian authorities without this leading to Heim's arrest. A second arrest warrant issued by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court in July 1957 was limited to Austria and still contained the incorrect information from the 1950 arrest warrant. In October 1961, the central office of the regional justice administrations in Ludwigsburg contacted the Austrian authorities to get Heim on the basis of photographs to be identified. Two witnesses recognized Heim.

Heim went into hiding on September 14, 1962. The day before, the Baden-Baden District Court had issued an arrest warrant, according to which Heim is "urgently suspicious",

“As an SS camp doctor in the former Mauthausen / Austria concentration camp in 1941 and 1942, he deliberately killed a large number of prisoners in this camp - including Jews - that had not yet been determined by giving them petrol (petroleum ether) or Magnesium chlorine was injected directly into the heart, which resulted in the death of the inmates immediately. In addition to injections, he also carried out operations on individual inmates, although he had not yet had sufficient training and experience in this regard. He repeatedly opened the abdominal cavity and took out internal organs and then killed the prisoners by injections. "

Before he fled, Heim had given the Frankfurt lawyer Fritz Steinacker a power of attorney in May 1962 . Steinacker announced in April 1977 that the income from a tenement house acquired by Heim in 1958 in the Berlin district of Moabit would flow to the fugitive. After information from Simon Wiesenthal and the Jewish community in Berlin, the Berlin Senator for Justice Peter Ulrich initiated proceedings against Heim. The legal basis was the second law to conclude the denazification of 1955 , which was only valid in Berlin. The tenants of the house supported the demand for expropriation by means of a rent strike and refused to pay the rent to the home representative. In June 1979 a Berlin judging chamber sentenced Heim to a fine of 510,000 DM for having promoted the rule of National Socialism in a special way by murdering at least 100 prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The verdict chamber saw the murder criterion of the treachery as fulfilled, since Heim had deceived the prisoners about his intentions. The enforcement of the fine confirmed in the appeal was initially impossible because the Baden-Baden Regional Court had also ordered the seizure of Heim's assets. After lengthy negotiations between the authorities involved, the house was sold in 1988. The fine was paid from the proceeds of the sale; the additional proceeds achieved through increases in value that occurred in the meantime were paid into a notary trust account that was confiscated. On January 17, 1986, a public search for Aribert Heim was carried out in the program Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved (episode 182, case 7). The Baden-Baden jury had put him out to be wanted for a murder trial. The LKA Stuttgart was responsible at the time. The Ministry of Justice of Baden-Württemberg also offered a reward of DM 30,000.

International search

Heim was wanted internationally based on the 1962 arrest warrant. In 1995 , the German Attorney General offered a reward of the equivalent of 130,000 euros for his arrest, and an American businessman an additional 130,000 euros. In 2007, the Austrian Ministry of Justice also offered 50,000 euros for the first time for information that led to Heim's investigation, apprehension and conviction.

In January 2005 the Simon Wiesenthal Center presented Operation Last Chance , with which the last surviving Nazi war criminals are to be caught, in Germany. The head of the center in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff , also went into the unexplained whereabouts of Heim. According to the historian Stefan Klemp , who was involved in the search for a home for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, officials from the Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Police Office asked the Simon Wiesenthal Center in November 2004 to "support the search for home with the largest possible media campaign" . Klemp is ambivalent about the role of the media in the search for a home: On the one hand, publications such as the Spiegel article in August 2005 had created the desired public. On the other hand, reports, some of which assumed that Heim's arrest was imminent, had made it difficult or impossible to carry out searches.

The unsuccessful search for a home in 2005 concentrated on Spain, as it was suspected that the person sought lived on the Costa Blanca . From 2006, homes were sought in South America. He was suspected there because Heim's daughter lives in Chile . The daughter denied having ever had contact with her father. In October 2007, Operation Last Chance held press conferences in Argentina , Chile, Brazil and Uruguay to raise awareness of the home manhunt. In April 2008, the Simon Wiesenthal Center presented a new list on which Heim was listed as the world's most wanted National Socialist war criminal.

Official declaration of death

According to ZDF and New York Times publications on February 4, 2009, Heim died of colon cancer on August 10, 1992 in Cairo . Heim had been in Egypt since February 1963, converted to Islam in the early 1980s and since then has been called Tarek Hussein Farid. Before that he lived there under his middle name as Ferdinand Heim. During his time in Egypt, Heim had repeated contact with relatives in Europe, for the first time in 1976 with his son Rüdiger. In an interview with ZDF, the son stated that he only found out in detail about the allegations against his father in 1979 as part of the atonement process in Berlin . Rüdiger Heim explained that after 1979 he had visited his father several times in Egypt; most recently he looked after his father in Cairo for six months before his death. In the course of the research, the journalists were given a briefcase containing, among other things, Heim's personal documents, defenses for the 1979 Berlin trial, and anti-Semitic writings written by Heim .

Heim's son denied knowing his father's whereabouts in 2008. Heims lawyers had stated in a tax court case in June 2001 that there was still contact with the fugitive. A criminal complaint filed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in March 2009 on suspicion of a false, insulting testimony did not lead to an investigation, as the allegations were time-barred.

Officials at the State Criminal Police Office in Baden-Württemberg found Heim's death date plausible, as it coincided with findings from tapped telephone calls that had not been clearly interpretable until then. The LKA's investigations continued because Heim's death had not been proven beyond doubt. In the summer of 2010, a German request for legal assistance to Egypt was still pending.

The Baden-Baden Regional Court closed the criminal proceedings against Heim in September 2012. For the court “there was no doubt” that the person who died in Cairo in 1992 was a home, which constitutes a procedural obstacle according to § 206a StPO .

Literary reception

In her novel Lo que esconde tu nombre ( What your name hides ) , which was published in 2009, the Spanish writer Clara Sánchez refers to home: In the work, which was awarded the Prix ​​Nadal , survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp find out about former concentration camp guards on the Spanish coast find it. Heim is able to leave before his arrest and disappears. In 2011 the WDR produced the radio play Was dein Name hides .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt. Court declares Nazi criminal Heim to be dead. At rp-online.de, September 21, 2012 (last accessed on February 2, 2013).
  2. ↑ Baden-Baden Regional Court: media information from 09/21/2012. Criminal proceedings against Dr. Aribert Heim suspended on suspicion of multiple homicides due to the death of the accused. In: yumpu.com ( press release on the homepage of the Baden-Baden Regional Court, no longer available), accessed on November 1, 2015.
  3. ↑ Biographical information from Klemp, KZ doctor, pp. 71, 329–335.
  4. ↑ In Rostock Matrikelportal undetectable
  5. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 238.
  6. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 73, 329.
  7. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. P. 37f.
  8. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 28.
  9. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 76.
  10. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 78f, 124.
  11. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 44–47.
  12. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 87, 329f.
  13. ^ Heims affidavit of March 20, 1948, quoted in Klemp, KZ-Arzt, p. 82.
  14. ↑ For the judicial chamber procedure, see Klemp, KZ-Arzt, p. 81ff.
  15. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 88ff.
  16. ↑ a b Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 100.
  17. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 119f.
  18. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 25.
  19. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 97ff.
  20. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 120.
  21. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 101f.
  22. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 117.
  23. ^ Arrest warrant from the district court of Baden-Baden, quoted in Klemp, KZ-Arzt, p. 116.
  24. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 161ff.
  25. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, p. 182; Special note . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1979, pp. 98-101 ( online ).
  26. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor, pp. 189–193.
  27. ↑ Aribert Heim: 50,000 euros reward. In: Wiener Zeitung , July 18, 2008 (accessed July 3, 2011)
  28. ↑ Award , Federal Ministry of Justice , Vienna, July 2007 (page accessed on August 20, 2007)
  29. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 218.
  30. ↑ Georg Bönisch, Markus Deggerich, Georg Mascolo, Jörg Schmitt: I'm fine . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 2005, pp. 44-48 ( online ).
  31. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , pp. 221, 239.
  32. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , pp. 222–230.
  33. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 264.
  34. ^ Simon Wiesenthal Center. "Dr. Death ”is the most wanted Nazi criminal. In: Der Spiegel. April 30, 2008.
  35. ↑ Concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim has long been dead. Auf: Welt online. February 4, 2009 (Retrieved July 4, 2011). See also Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 291ff.
  36. ↑ Klemp, KZ-Arzt , pp. 292f, 326. Some of the documents were published by the New York Times : From the Briefcase of Dr. Aribert Heim. (English, accessed July 4, 2011).
  37. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 291ff.
  38. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , pp. 283–289.
  39. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 292.
  40. ^ Nazi criminal: Doubts about the death of Aribert Heim . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 2009, p. 18 ( online ).
  41. ↑ Klemp, concentration camp doctor , p. 325.
  42. ^ Former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt. Court declares Nazi criminal Heim to be dead. At rp-online.de, September 21, 2012 (accessed on September 21, 2012).
  43. ^ Prix ​​Nadal to Clara Sanchez. In: derStandart.at . January 7, 2010, accessed September 21, 2012 .
  44. ↑ Audio play database , in the search mask for title enter: What your name hides .
  45. ↑ Crime on Saturday: What your name is hiding ( Memento from October 31, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Home, Aribert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heim, Aribert Ferdinand (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-German doctor and SS member
DATE OF BIRTH June 28, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Radkersburg , Austria
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1992
Place of death Cairo