Thursday, February 5, 2009
Aribert Heim, also known as the "Doctor Death" of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen, converted to Islam and lived until his death in 1992 in Cairo.
The Nazi fugitive nicknamed "Dr Death", who was one of the most wanted war criminals, died in Cairo in 1992 after converting to Islam, it has been revealed.
Nazi hunters had believed Aribert Heim, who reportedly killed hundreds of inmates with poison injections to the heart and removed his victims' organs without anaesthetic, was hiding out in Chile, where he was believed to have an illegitimate daughter.
However, the German state broadcaster ZDF announced on Wednesday that it had discovered that Heim spent nearly 30 years in the Egyptian capital before dying of bowel cancer.
In a joint investigation with the New York Times, ZDF said it had discovered that Heim became a Muslim in the early 1980s and renamed himself Tarek Fared Hussein.
After the war, he practised in West Germany as a gynaecologist but went missing in 1962 as police prepared to prosecute him.
In Cairo, Heim lived off rental income from a property he owned in Berlin. The money was transferred to him at irregular intervals by his sister, who has since died.
Heim, an Austrian member of the Waffen SS, presided over the country's Mauthausen concentration camp.
He was accused of conducting various medical experiments on the inmates, removing the organs of healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table, and turning the skull of a man he had decapitated into a souvenir paperweight...
Andy Bostom writes about Heim, here: Another Nazi Convert to Islam Who Found a Haven in Egypt: "Dr. Death," "Uncle Tarek" Hussein Farid, Did Cairo
The number of Nazis who found refuge in the Arab world is extensive. Tell Children the Truth maintains one useful list, here. The table shows the name, what they did under Hitler, and where they ended up. We've met many Nazis in John Roy Carlson's 1948 memoir Cairo to Damascus. Posts collected here.
