German investigators accept Nazi criminal died in Egypt

GERMAN investigators who have hunted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim for decades said yesterday that new information indicating the former concentration camp doctor died in Egypt in 1992 appears credible and that they will attempt to find his body.

The Baden-Wuerttemberg state police unit that investigates Nazi-era crimes is preparing a request that Egyptian authorities allow them to pursue the case in Cairo, spokesman Horst Haug said.

Heim was accused of taking part in experiments on Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen camp in Austria, such as injecting various solutions into their hearts to see which killed them fastest. He was indicted in Germany in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979.

Heim’s son Ruediger told Germany’s ZDF television that his father fled to Egypt after authorities tried to arrest him at his Baden-Baden home in 1962. The younger Heim contradicted previous statements that he had never had any contact with his father since that time, telling ZDF that he had met with him several times in Cairo, starting in the mid-1970s. Heim would not say why he decided to speak now.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s head Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said Aribert Heim has previously been linked to Egypt, but the story raises “more questions than it answers”.

“There’s no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave — we can’t sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation,” Zuroff said.

“Keep in mind these people have a vested interested in being declared dead — it’s a perfectly crafted story; that’s the problem, it’s too perfect.”

ZDF said that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo where graves are reused, so it is unlikely remains will be found.

Last summer, Ruediger Heim tried to have his father declared legally dead so he could take control of an estimated €1.2 million in investments in his name.