SS-Hauptsturmführer Aribert Ferdinand Heim was born on 28 June 1914 in the Austrian town of Radkersburg. His father Josef Ferdinand Heim, a gendarmerie commander, passed away from a heart condition in 1929, so his mother Anna Heim was left with four children with only a modest widow’s pension to support them. Aribert Heim had two sisters, Hilda and Herta, and a brother named Josef, who died of infantry fire during a failed Nazi paratroopers mission near Chania in 1941.

Heim moved to Vienna in the fall of 1931, when he was just seventeen years old, to begin studying Latin at the university. He was very good in languages and he worked as a tutor to earn extra money and also played professional ice hockey for the Eissport Klub Engelmann with increasing success. Sports were his passion. He was a very talented defenseman and he was invited to join the Austrian national ice hockey team. Heim was very tall and broad build and he was more than a foot taller than his teammates. One day during ice hockey he suffered a gash to the corner of his mouth, which left a distinctive V-shaped scar.

From 1 January 1935 he was a member of the SA until 1 October 1938 when he joined the SS. In the spring of 1940 he became a member of the Waffen-SS and in October 1941 he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he carried out gruesome medical experiments on prisoners. For example, prisoners were injected with gasoline into the heart or lungs. In others, the appendix or limbs were amputated without anesthesia.

Under Heim, the Mauthausen camp grew into a center for medical experiments. Because he and his fellow scientists were working on a program to manufacture a narcotic painkiller, he wanted to understand the deeper dynamics of the feeling of pain and the endurance of the organism. To him, people were just guinea pigs. Heim had his victims tied up on an operating table and began his scientific experiments, a zeiss chronometer in the hand to determine how long it took the test object to die, and how spastic and loudly its agony was.

Josef Kohl, an Austrian communist who was incarcerated in concentration camp Mauthausen, was an eyewitness of the cruelty Dr. Heim committed on the prisoners. Kohl was a clerk in the sick quarters from April 1940 to June 1941. As a result he was present at the first killings by syringe injections. The people unfit for work, the weak and the sick were selected for Heim’s experiments. Dr. Heim had the habit of looking in the mouths of the inmates to determine whether their teeth were in flawless condition. If this was the case, then he would kill the inmate by injection, cut off his head, and let it cook for hours in the crematorium until the naked skull was bared of all flesh and this skull prepared for him or his friends as decoration for their desks.

Heim also performed operations on healthy people, according to Kohl. The doctor convinced the inmates through figures of speech that he would do a small, harmless operation and that once they were recovered they would immediately be let go. Then he performed the most difficult, complicated operations such as stomach, liver and even heart operations on these people that had to lead to their deaths.

Karl Kaufman, an inmate of concentration camp Mauthausen who had spent there for six years, alleged that Heim took part in regular corporal punishments of inmates with twenty-five to a hundred blows with a cane, but instead of beating them across the buttocks as was usual, Heim aimed always for the kidneys, so that many died as a result of internal bleeding. He also said that Dr. Heim had once cut a young Jew from Praque’s stomach open from top to bottom while he was completely conscious. Ruport Sommer, a fellow inmate, confirmed this. Kaufman described Heim’s physical appearance as “very tall, somewhat smaller than two meters, he was sturdy, had blond, combed-back hair, beautiful teeth and a long face.

After working at Mauthausen Heim went to work in a field hospital in Vienna and he was also a doctor at the 6. SS-Gebirgs-Division Nord in Finland, where he was wounded on the eastern front and received therefor the Iron Cross. For his role in World War II, he was nicknamed Doktor Tod (Dr. Death).

After the war on 15 March 1945 he was captured by American soldiers and was transferred into German custody in December 1946, in a detention camp. He worked there hauling salt and awaiting a final judgement in his case. He was detained for nearly three years and was released in December 1947 as part of a Christmas Amnestry.

After his release in November 1948 he began working as an assistant doctor in Friedberg at the Bürgerhospital. He worked for six months in internal medicine and six months on the surgical ward. Around this time the cruelties he committed came to light because of accusations of camp survivors, therefor the prosecutors started a search for Aribert Heim.

On 30 July 1949 Heim got married to Friedl Bechtold, also a medical doctor, and later they had 2 sons, Aribert Christian and Rolf Rüdiger. Heim also had an illegitimate daughter Waltraut Böser, who was born on 1 May 1942. Her mother Gertrud was a beautiful, dark-haired actress and opera singer, who met Aribert Heim during his student days in Graz. Although Waltraut never met her father, she inherited his blond hair, love of sports, aptitude for languages and around the age of 35 she was a pharmacist in Geneva, a city in Switzerland.  

In 1953 Heim had a gynecology practice in the posh spa town of Baden-Baden, until he disappeared in 1962, when the prosecutors were on his heels. With the help of his family and his attorney Fritz Steinacker, who also helped Josef Mengele during his escape in South America, Heim managed to flee to Egypt. Heim is said to have lived out the rest of his life in an inexpensive hotel in Cairo, converted to the Islam and living out his days quietly, playing games with the neighbourhood children, reading books, and taking long walks around the city. He supposedly have died of colon cancer on 10 August 1992. He is said to have been buried in a poor cemetery, after the Egyptian authorities found out that Heim’s son Rüdiger wanted to make his father’s body available to science. Since Heim would have already converted to the Islam in the eighties, under the pseudonym Tarek Hussein Farid, this would be forbidden; presumably his body was buried in a mass grave.

After 50 years of the relentless pursuit of Aribert Heim, he was officially declared dead by a German court on 21 September 2012. 

Sources: The Eternal Nazi by Nicholas Kulish & Souad Mekhennet / Wikipedia