German justice on Friday made official the death in 1992 of one of the world’s most wanted Nazi criminals, Aribert Heim, who lived in Cairo under the identity of an Egyptian Muslim.
The court of great instance of Baden-Baden (south-west) announced the abandonment of the pending judicial cases considering that there was “no doubt” that the man who died in Egypt in 1992 under the name of Tarek Hussein Farid was indeed the ” Mauthausen butcher”, who would have tortured and murdered hundreds of detainees, mainly Jews, in the Nazi concentration camp of that name, in Austria.
Among other things, Heim would have performed lethal injections into the hearts of his victims and performed eviscerations without anesthesia.
“The legal proceedings against Dr. Aribert Heim, a suspect in several murders, have been abandoned due to the death of the suspect,” the court said in a statement. The accusation dated back to 1979.
In February 2009, an investigation carried out by the German television channel ZDF and the New York Times newspaper revealed that the torturer, a former member of the Waffen SS, died at the age of 78, in 1992, in Egypt.
That death could never be confirmed until now, and, according to the German press, the police had doubts.
But the Baden-Baden court assured on Friday that Heim was in fact no longer in doubt, Hussein Farim, who died of cancer on August 10, 1992. The criminal’s defender handed over a certificate of Heim’s conversion to Islam under his new name.
With these documents and the audience as his son’s witness, “no more doubts remain that the defendant is Tarek Hussein Farid and that he died in 1992 of cancer,” the court underlined.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, specialized in the persecution of Nazi criminals, had said in 2009 that they did not believe his death.
Considered one of the most sadistic Nazis, “the doctor of death” also passed through the camps of Sachsenshausen and Buchenwald (Germany).
He was for a time the most wanted Nazi in the world after Alois Brunner, one of the architects of the “final solution”, who would have died in Syria.
After the war, he quietly practiced as a gynecologist in Baden-Baden, according to the media. He fled in 1962, following an international arrest warrant.
Over the years, its trail was recovered in Argentina, Uruguay and Spain, according to the Wiesenthal Center.
His son had explained in a 2009 interview that he had settled in Cairo in the mid-1970s, under the name Ferdinand Heim, and became Tarek Hussein Farid after his conversion to Islam in 1980.
He was hiding in a small hotel next to the old Islamic Cairo, under the name “Dr. Tarek”, according to testimonies collected by AFP in 2009. “They found him dead one morning in his room. An ambulance came to look for his body and then they put him in a communal grave,” said Gamal Abu Ahmad, who was staying in his former hotel room.
The German courts, which were slow to try Nazi criminals after the Allied trials in Nuremberg in 1945-46, formally accused him in 1979, 34 years after the end of World War II, for having “cruelly murdered detainees with injections and operations that were not necessary, between October and November 1941 in the Austrian camp of Manthausen,” according to the statement from the Baden-Baden court.
Born on June 28, 1914 in Bad Radkersburg, Austria, Heim had joined the NSDAP Nazi party even before Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. He joined the SS in 1940.
The world’s most wanted living Nazi war criminal, 97-year-old Hungarian Laszlo Csatary, was arrested in July in Budapest.
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