Son of 'Dr Death' Aribert Heim to escape charges for concealing Nazi father's existence
The son of Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal known as Dr Death, will escape prosecution despite concealing his father's secret life in Cairo from investigators.
By David Wroe in Berlin
Last Updated: 3:02PM GMT 05 Feb 2009
Dr. Aribert Heim, a former Nazi concentration camp doctor Photo: AP
Rudiger Heim will avoid criminal charges for sheltering his father from the police because of a German law that excuses people from giving evidence against their family members.
Dr Aribert Ferdinand Heim, the world's most wanted Nazi fugitive, performed horrific experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
He eluded a global manhunt for nearly half a century,
living in Cairo as a Muslim convert before his death from cancer in 1992.
His son has now admitted that he knew his father's location in Egypt and was with him when he died.
Mr Heim has told the German media that he sheltered his Nazi fugitive father because he did not want to bring trouble to the war criminal's Egyptian friends.
Heinz Heister, a judge at the regional court of Baden Baden, where Rudiger Heim lives, told The Daily Telegraph that the son of a Nazi war criminal could not be prosecuted because he was under no obligation to speak out.
"He was within his rights to say nothing because he is the son. That is the law in Germany: you can say nothing if it is about a family member," he said.
Horst Haug, spokesman for the Baden-Wuerttemberg State Police, has confirmed the substance of news reports that Dr Heim had been living in a hotel in Cairo,
had converted to Islam and had died of rectal cancer 15 years ago.
Mr Haug said the police had independently received information from someone who knew Dr Heim, but he refused to say who this person was, or whether the person was in Egypt or Germany.
The Baden-Wuerttemberg authorities will now apply to the Egyptian authorities to send police to investigate and confirm Dr Heim's death.
The new German police investigation will to study Egyptian records and try find Dr Heim's grave so dental or DNA techniques can be used to verify the identity of the remains.
"We do not have the corpse so we need to go and work closely with the Egyptians to be 100 per cent sure," said Mr Haug.
Mr Haug also confirmed that Dr Heim had owned an apartment building in Berlin that provided him with income but that the German authorities had frozen this asset in the late 1970s, cutting off Dr Heim's income from the property.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's head Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said the latest development in the Dr Heim story has raised "more questions than it answers".
"There's no body, no corpse, no DNA, no grave – we can't sign off on a story like this because of some semi-plausible explanation," he told AP in Jerusalem.
"Keep in mind these people have a vested interested in being declared dead – it's a perfectly crafted story; that's the problem, it's too perfect."
Last summer, Rudiger Heim tried to have his father declared legally dead so that he could take control of an estimated €1.2 million (£1 million) in investments in his name, saying that he would donate the money to charity.
He indicated on Thursday that he might now try again to have his father declared dead so that he can access the money – though not immediately.
"I'm going to wait and see how the case develops," he said.
German state broadcaster ZDF, in a joint investigation with The New York Times,
has claimed to have discovered that Dr Heim became a Muslim in the early 1980s and renamed himself Tarek Fared Hussein.
After the war, Dr Heim practised in West Germany as a gynaecologist but went missing in 1962 as police prepared to prosecute him.
In Cairo, Dr 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.
Dr 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.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...existence.html