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From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim
Doubleday
April 2014
On Sale: March 25, 2014
320 pages ISBN: 0385532431 EAN: 9780385532433 Kindle: B00FIN0UVI Hardcover / e-Book
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True Crime | Suspense
From the New York Times reporters who first
uncovered S.S. officer Aribert Heim’s secret life in Egypt
comes the never-before-told story of the most hunted Nazi
war criminal in the world.
Dr. Aribert Heim
worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few
months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the
testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with
injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed
surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled
prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect
sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim
was able to slip away from his dark past and establish
himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort
town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but
for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war
criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator
named Alfred Aedtner. After Heim fled on a tip that he was
about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an
overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and
across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a
powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the
sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see
justice done at almost any cost.
As late as 2009,
the mystery of Heim’s disappearance remained unsolved. Now,
in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad
Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded
capture--living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo,
praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim
family--while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many
years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that
illuminates a nation’s dramatic reckoning with the crimes of
the Holocaust.
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