Iranian News, Views, resources and music





Nazi's death in Egypt backed up by German inquiry

By Nicholas Kulish

BERLIN: German investigators say that they have independent information corroborating reports that the most-wanted Nazi fugitive in the world, the concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim, died in Egypt.
Horst Haug, a spokesman for the police in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, said that they had information from Heim's "personal circle" indicating that he died of cancer in Egypt in 1992. In a separate, joint statement by the state police and the regional court in Baden-Baden, Heim's last known address in Germany, the authorities said they would work with the Egyptian authorities to attempt to locate and identify the remains of the fugitive and alleged war criminal.
The New York Times and the German television station ZDF first reported Wednesday that Heim, who would have been 94 on Thursday, had died in Cairo in summer 1992. Haug said that the police's information came from a separate source and was received at the beginning of the week. He declined to reveal the source.
Austrian officials said that they were following the case and also wanted to confirm whether Heim had indeed died there. "As far as I'm aware, the German prosecutors have begun to examine the documents," said Victor Eggert, head of the political crime unit in the Austrian Ministry of Justice. "Certainly the prosecutors in Linz will be in consultation with Baden-Württemberg, but the Germans are out in front."
Heim, who was born in Austria and later joined the Waffen-SS, stands accused of killing hundreds of people, mainly Jews, while working at Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria, earning him the nickname "Dr. Death." He fled Germany in 1962 just as a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Witnesses, including Heim's son Rüdiger Heim, said that he died of rectal cancer. The Egyptian authorities issued a certified copy of a death certificate and documents left behind in a briefcase included records related to his cancer treatment. But they said that his body had been taken by the authorities after a failed attempt to donate it to science, and interred in a mass grave.
Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who is based in Jerusalem, said in an interview by telephone that he had no doubt that Heim had lived in Egypt, but "had serious doubts" whether he had died there.
"There are too many question marks here. The scenario is almost too perfect to be believed, in terms of his death," said Zuroff. "No body, no grave, no DNA, the most important test there is," Zuroff said in a telephone interview.
In an interview in his Cairo office last month, Dr. Mohsen Barsoum, one of the doctors whose names appeared on the medical files, said that he remembered treating Heim, who he said spent a year under his observation and that the cancer was advanced. After looking at a copy of a prescription he had written he said, "I'm sure he was Stage 4. It was not an early case."
When asked how he could remember so clearly one patient from close to two decades before, Barsoum replied, "He was a peculiar case. In your career, some people have special features."

Bottom of Form 1


Original Article: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/05/europe/nazi.4-423978.php