The 12th of March 1938. German troops cross the border with Austria and invade the country without
firing a single shot. They are not met with armed resistance, but with cheers and flowers. While
thousands of Austrians turn out to greet Adolf Hitler as he travels first to Linz and then on
to Vienna, terrified Jews, leftists and other opponents of the Nazi Regime race towards the
country’s borders, hoping to reach them before they are closed but most would become trapped in
a rapidly nazifying Austria. In the weeks that follow, there is pogrom-like violence across
the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat up, attack, and humiliate the Jews. They force them
to scrub the streets, clean public toilets and perform humiliating exercises. Many decide to try
to leave Austria and lines appear at consulates across the city of Vienna. Several months
later the Nazis begin to operate the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. The conditions at
the camp are even more severe than at most other Nazi concentration camps and are characterized by
systematic abuse, mistreatment, mass killings and medical experiments conducted by SS doctors. The
most notorious of them will become Aribert Heim. Aribert Ferdinand Heim was born on the 28th of
June 1914 in Bad Radkersburg then part of Austria-Hungary. His father was a
policeman by profession and his mother was a housewife. Aribert graduated from
high school in Graz and in 1931 he started to study medicine at the University of Vienna.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and he fully intended to
bring about an Austro-German union. However, Germany was not immediately militarily and
diplomatically ready to carry out Hitler’s foreign policy goals. First, Hitler and other Nazi leaders
focused on establishing a Nazi dictatorship. However, behind the scenes the Nazi leadership
began planning territorial expansion and a European war almost as soon as they took power.
Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign which
was encouraged and funded by Germany. The Nazi goal was to undermine the regime of the Austrian
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent. They staged disruptive protests
and brawled with political opponents and the police. Austrian Nazis set off explosives and
tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish-owned businesses. In June 1933, in response to a fatal
Nazi bombing, the Dollfuss regime banned the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates. Although
the Nazi movement became illegal in Austria, the Austrian Nazis continued to operate illegally
within the country. One such Nazi was Aribert Heim who in 1935 joined the Nazi Party and the SA.
In the spring of 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich.
The Anschluss, as it became known,
took place over three days between the 11th and 13th of March 1938.
On 1. October of the same year, Heim became a member of the SS.
The second world war began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
In January 1940 Heim received his doctorate in medicine in Vienna and in April 1940 he joined
the Waffen-SS which was the military branch of the SS. Before launching his career as a camp doctor
in Mauthausen in July 1941 he had spent a few months in the same position at the concentration
camps in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Mauthausen concentration camp had become
operational from the 8th of August 1938, several months after the German annexation of Austria,
when the SS transferred the first prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp. The site
was chosen because of the nearby granite quarry, and its proximity to Linz. During this phase,
the prisoners, all of them German and Austrian men, had to build their own camp and work in the
quarry. In December 1939 the SS ordered the construction of a second concentration camp
– Gusen - just a few kilometers from Mauthausen. The Gusen camp went into operation in May 1940. In
December 1939, the number had increased to over 2,600 prisoners, primarily convicted criminals,
asocials, political opponents, and religious conscientious objectors, such
as Jehovah Witnesses. During the war, the SS also incarcerated more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of
war at Mauthausen, including 3,000 held at the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen. Nationals of virtually
every German-occupied country in World War II came through Mauthausen. These included, among those
prisoners who were registered, more than 37,000 non-Jewish Poles, nearly 23,000 Soviet civilians
as well as members of the International Brigades, most of them Communists of various nationalities,
who had fought the Franco forces in Spain. Among the Spanish prisoners was Francisco Boix,
a photographer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who was imprisoned at the camp
for four years. During his time working in the photography lab of the camp, he was able
to hide and preserve until liberation about 2,000 negatives taken by the SS head of the department,
Paul Ricken, as well as by himself. Those photos depicted the conditions in which the
prisoners lived and were murdered in that camp, and they were also proof that the camp was known
and visited by high leaders of the Third Reich, such as Ernst Kaltenbrunner or August Eigruber,
who appeared visiting both the Mauthausen camp proper, and the quarry adjacent to the camp.
Following the start of World War II, the number of prisoners arriving in Mauthausen
increased dramatically. Mauthausen and Gusen were the concentration camps with the harshest
imprisonment conditions and the highest mortality. Those who were ill or deemed ‘useless’ by the SS
lived in constant fear for their lives. Living and working conditions in both camps led to the death
by murder, mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
In addition, German doctors subjected Mauthausen prisoners to pseudoscientific medical experiments,
including testing levels of testosterone, experimenting with delousing chemicals, medicines
for tuberculosis, and nutrition experiments. Aribert Heim soon built his reputation for
conducting often-fatal operations and experiments, which led to inmates calling
him ‘’Butcher of Mauthausen’’ and ''Dr. Death''. According to witnesses, Heim worked closely with
SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky. The two performed a number of experiments together, such as injecting
various solutions into the hearts of Jewish prisoners to see which killed them the fastest.
Heim reportedly removed organs from living prisoners,
often without anesthesia, killing hundreds. Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the
hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, in 1950 testified and described in detail how Heim
was performing a medical experiment on a prisoner. According to Lotter, an 18-year-old Jew had been
sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was
so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer. Then, instead of treating the
prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and
removed the second. The victim's head was removed, and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep
it on display. The reason why Heim needed the victim's head was because of its perfect teeth.
Heim then allegedly used this young man's skull as a paperweight on his desk.
According to Holocaust survivors, Jewish prisoners were poisoned with various injections
directly into the heart, including petrol, phenol, available poisons, or even water, to induce death.
Mauthausen survivor, Marcelino Bilbao, testified how he had been given benzene
injections by Heim over a six-week period and almost died. As a result of the injections,
his body was paralyzed, his urine was red, and blood was coming from his face.
On a different occasion Heim would remove the appendices of two young
Dutch Jews and let them die after a long agony. Afterwards, he personally decapitated them,
boiled their heads and cleaned their skulls. In another case, Heim removed the tattooed
flesh of a prisoner to make seat coverings for the camp commandant's private flat.
Heim was also known for performing operations without anesthesia.
One of the prisoners, who survived Heim’s operation was
Otto Peltzer, a successful German middle-distance runner and sportswriter,
who was sent to Mauthausen due to his alleged Homosexuality.
On the 5th of May 1945 the 11th Armored Division of the United States Army,
led by General George S. Patton, reached Gusen and Mauthausen. The sight that awaited them was
one of immense suffering, as they discovered thousands of emaciated and exhausted prisoners
who had been subjected to horrific treatment. After the liberation, some prisoners were in
such a weakened state that many still died in the days and weeks that followed the liberation.
Though by the time of its liberation, most of the guards in Mauthausen had fled,
around 30 of those who remained were brutally killed by the prisoners. A similar number were
also killed in Gusen. Those SS guards who were not killed, were forced to break stones in the quarry
thus finding themselves under the direction of the prisoners they had once mistreated.
The former SS guards were also submitted to punitive physical exercises such as calisthenics
or crawling on the ground. While survivors and American soldiers were watching, the former SS
guards had to perform the same exercises to which they had been submitting the prisoners for years.
An estimated 197,000 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps
between August 1938 and May 1945. At least 95,000 died there, more than 14,000 of them Jewish.
When the US forces liberated Mauthausen, Aribert Heim was not in the camp.
From February 1942, he served in the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord in northern
Finland as a doctor and his service continued until at least October 1942.
On 15 March 1945, Heim was captured by US soldiers and sent to a camp for prisoners
of war. He would remain imprisoned for a two-and-a-half-year period. But while
Heim's former colleague, Erich Wasicky, and dozens of others were tried and executed
in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, Heim was never prosecuted. Due to a clerical oversight,
he was released, later settled in Bad Nauheim in Germany, established a gynecology practice,
married into a rich family, had 2 sons, and moved into a luxurious villa. He also
played in a professional ice hockey team ironically called the Red Devils. In 1962
he received a phone call asking him if he was the doctor who worked in Mauthausen.
Because in the early 1960’s there was a renewed interest in Germany to punish Nazi criminals,
in 1962 Heim borrowed his brother-in-law’s Mercedes and basically hightailed from Germany
into France and from there into Spain. Then he ditched the car before moving on to Morocco.
Unlike many other Nazis Heim did not escape to South America but instead settled in Cairo in
Egypt. He was very good at hiding and in Egypt he converted to Islam and became Tarek Hussein Farid.
During his whole time in Egypt Heim was in touch with his family and his German
lawyer and in the family’s correspondence, the code name for Aribert Heim was Gretl.
His elder son knew and remembered his father but due to all the questions and
police investigations he had to go though he wanted to have nothing to do with his
father. The younger one, Rüdiger , however, was six years old when his father disappeared
and barely had the faintest memory of him. In December 1975 Rüdiger Heim arrived in Egypt
to meet his father for the first time since he was six years old. They did not talk about the
condition of the inmates brought to the infirmary from the stone quarry. They did not discuss how
the patients were treated. One point that Aribert Heim expressed to his son unequivocally was that
he did everything he could to get out of this concentration camp as quickly as possible. Rüdiger
did not believe that his father was wholly blameless after working in a concentration
camp. But he also could not believe that he was guilty of the atrocities he was alleged to
have committed. The last time Rüdiger visited his father in Egypt was in the summer of 1992
because he was dying of colorectal cancer. Aribert Heim’s pain was compounded by a return bout with
kidney stones. At one point, his pain was so great that Heim could no longer roll over to
urinate and Rüdiger had to help him pee every two or three hours. When Rüdiger made a mistake, the
bed would be soaked in urine, and it became very difficult to move his father to change the sheets.
On August 9, 1992, Aribert and Rüdiger Heim watched the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. At
around 10 PM Aribert Heim fell asleep but Rüdiger noticed that his father's breathing was slowing.
Aribert Heim never faced justice for his crimes and was 78 years old when he died
on August 10, 1992, in Cairo in Egypt. Rüdiger, convinced of his father’s innocence, was sure that
in Europe no one would have to die like that. There were no tears shed for Aribert Heim.
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