Alfred Buediger lived in the hotel Kasr el-Madina on Port Said Street in Cairo. He was a European expatriate who chose the Egyptian capital because the climate was perfect for his back pains and he found the people very congenial. The locals admired him greatly as he adored children and organized various sporting events including ping pong competitions on the roof of his hotel. He became so thoroughly integrated into his new world that he eventually converted to Islam at the famed Al-Azar mosque and assumed the name of Tarek Hussein Farid.
His real name, however, was Aribert Heim, known as the “Butcher of Mauthausen” or “Doctor Death.”
Heim was the most wanted Nazi war criminal after Mengele and Eichmann and he managed to evade Simon Wiesenthal, Israelis and German authorities. He faithfully responded to Himmler’s exhortation to “always try” and perfect “medical” experiments on prisoners and children. He tried and tried as he infected his victims with bacteria, diseases, viruses as well as conducting experiments on kids where axillary lymph nodes were surgically removed after they were deliberately infected with tuberculosis: a procedure “perfected” at the Neuengamme concentration camp.
Michel’s Cymes’ book Hippocrate aux enfers (Hippocrates in Hell) details not only Heim’s savage experiments but casts light on a little known chapter of the Nuremberg trials. He finds the clemency of judges in acquitting mass murdering physicians including Heim inexplicable.
“Dr. Death” even practised medicine in Germany after the war and lived with his family in bucolic surroundings. But the hunt was on; and this is why he moved to Egypt in 1963. According to Francois-Guillaume Lorrain, writing in Le Point, an Israeli officer named Danny Baz attempted to assassinate him in the early ’70s. The full story was finally told by two journalists, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulich in their book The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim.
The tale of “Dr. Death’s” double life ended with the discovery of a worn and dusty suitcase filled with his letters, records, eye glasses, personal belongings and last will after he died of cancer in 1992. Kafka was right: shame finds you even in the grave.
When I visited Mauthausen a few years ago, I witnessed an event that has stayed with me ever since. After touring the camp, I stopped at the visitor’s centre looking at the pictures of Jews who had perished in that inferno. Names like Sonsino, Albukrek and Castro belonging to Turkish Jews who had moved to Italy before the war struck a chord: they may well have been distant relatives as my aunts married into other Sephardi families bearing such names.
I sat in the corner of the hall, on the floor, next to a podium, trying to compose my emotions. A group of Jewish students entered the hall; the boys were wearing yarmulkes. They loitered silently for a while and filed out. But one young woman, obviously deeply affected by the experience and the last to leave – who did not notice me – did something extraordinary: she went to the wall of flags, embraced the Star of David and wiped her tears with the white and blue.
With enough spiritual turmoil to last a lifetime, I gathered myself and rushed back to Salzburg to bathe my soul in Mozart. By an amazing coincidence, that evening, the Israeli musician Gil Sharon, with the Amati Ensemble, was performing, among other works, Mozart’s Piano Quartet: my favourite, the K 493. As I closed my eyes to savour the music, the image of the young lady seeking consolation in the flag of our eternal hope filled the vision of my mind.
The effect was simply sublime.