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Nazi Dr Death escaped to Egypt vs Argentina
Converted to Islam
updated 2/6/2009 4:50:28 PM ET
CAIRO — Nazi hunters urged Egypt on Friday to come clean about how much it knew about a fugitive dubbed "Dr. Death," who reportedly lived here for decades until he died in 1992. But Egypt has long kept a strict silence about former Nazis reported to have taken refuge on its soil.
The discovery of Aribert Heim's secret life throws light on how the Arab world took in members of the Nazi regime after World War II, said Efraim Zuroff, head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The region's role as a haven has gone little examined while researchers focused on the larger, better known influx of Nazis to Latin America.
A number of Nazis are believed to have been welcomed in the 1950s by the Egyptian regime of then-President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who was locked in an intense rivalry with Israel that erupted into wars in 1956 and 1967. Nasser enlisted some Nazis to train Egypt's military or produce anti-Israel propaganda — and Israel feared they were involved in building a rocket program.
So far there is no indication that the Austrian-born Heim, a former concentration camp doctor accused of carrying out gruesome, deadly experiments on Jewish prisoners, played any role with the Egyptian government.
Instead, it appears he lived a quiet life in downtown Cairo since the early 1960s. A later convert to Islam, he bought sweets for friends from a famed confectionery and was known for playing pingpong and taking long walks for exercise, said Egyptians who knew him.
The only hint of his past — besides a constant refusal to be photographed — was the personal "research" that he wrote purporting to prove that the Jews of Israel are not true Semites, according to the son of Heim's Egyptian dentist, who saw the paper.
Keeping silent
The Egyptian government has been silent since Heim's presence in Egypt was first reported by The New York Times and Germany's ZPF television Thursday. Government officials and several former Nasser-era officials approached by The Associated Press refused to comment on any aspect of the reports.
Former Nazi concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim is said to have converted to Islam before reportedly dying in Cairo in 1992.
One current security official would say only that if Heim was in Egypt, he was let in under a previous government. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Egypt would look into the reports.
The silence reflects a reluctance to acknowledge an era that is potentially embarrassing now, three decades after Egypt's peace accords with Israel.
German investigators say they want to search in Egypt for definitive proof of Heim's death and are preparing a request to Egypt for permission.
It remains unknown whether the Egyptian government knew who Heim was when he first entered the country in 1963 and, if not, whether it subsequently found out. He entered using his real last name and middle name, Ferdinand Heim, which appear on a 1964 residency permit found in a satchel of Heim's documents in a Cairo hotel where he lived his last years.
Hunting for Nazis
Zuroff said Heim's name was on a 1967 list of 26 former Nazis believed to be hiding in Egypt at that time, drawn up by Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became the most prominent Nazi hunter.
Zuroff said he didn't know why the lead on Heim was never pursued. It appears to have been forgotten: Most reports on Heim over the past decade speculated he was living in Latin America.
Also on the list was Alois Brunner, long one of the most wanted Nazi fugitives as commander of a camp that processed Jews for deportation from occupied France. Brunner is believed to have later moved to Damascus and worked for the Syrian government. He is widely thought to have died in Syria in the 1990s, though the Damascus regime has never confirmed he was there.
Of the 26 on Wiesenthal's list, Zuroff said, "I don't think any of them are alive — or are in Egypt, for that matter — because they have either left the country or died in Egypt." He said no pressure was ever put "on Egypt in any way to cooperate in investigation and prosecution of Nazi war crimes."