Aribert Heim — The SS Doctor at Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Known to Prisoners as the “Doctor of Death” — Was the Longest-Hunted War Criminal in History. While the World Searched for Him, He Lived Peacefully in Cairo Under the Name Tarek Farid Hussein, Prayed Five Times a Day, and Died of Intestinal Cancer in 1992 — Unknown to Anyone.
Historical Report Mauthausen, Austria & Cairo, Egypt — 1941–1992
In 2009, a team of investigative journalists from The New York Times and ZDF (German public television) discovered a dusty cardboard box in a room at the El Hussein Hotel in Cairo’s old quarter. Inside were a passport, letters, medical records, and the diary of a man named Tarek Farid Hussein — an Egyptian citizen and devout Muslim who had lived in the hotel for decades and died in 1992. DNA analysis from a son in Germany confirmed it: Tarek Farid Hussein was Aribert Heim, the most heinous SS doctor still wanted after Josef Mengele. He had died a free man 17 years earlier.
Athlete, Doctor, and SS Officer
Aribert Ferdinand Heim was born on June 28, 1914, in Bad Radkersburg, Austria (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). He grew up intelligent and athletic: he was the goalkeeper for the German hockey team at the 1936 Winter Olympics, graduated from medical school with top honors, and joined the SS in 1935 while still a student. His early record showed nothing unusual — a talented, handsome young doctor with a bright future.
In 1941, he was assigned to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria — one of the harshest in the SS system, where prisoners were worked to death in the stone quarries. Heim served at Mauthausen for only about six weeks, from October to November 1941. Those six weeks were enough to etch his name into history in a way he could never erase.
Aribert Heim — Profile Born: June 28, 1914, Bad Radkersburg, Austria
1936 Olympics: Goalkeeper, German hockey team
At Mauthausen: October–November 1941 (6 weeks)
First arrest: 1945 — released due to lack of evidence
Fled: 1962 — just before re-arrest
Reward for capture: Up to €600,000
Conversion to Islam: Took the name Tarek Farid Hussein
Died: August 10, 1992, Cairo — intestinal cancer
World learns the truth: 2009 — 17 years after his death
The “Doctor of Death” of Mauthausen: Six Weeks of Horror
Survivors’ accounts of Aribert Heim at Mauthausen are consistent and irrefutable. Unlike Mengele, who conducted long-term recorded experiments, Heim acted more impulsively and directly — which, in some ways, makes his psychology even harder to comprehend.
Witnesses described how he performed surgery on living prisoners without anesthesia, removing organs — liver, stomach, kidneys — and observing how long the victim could survive. He injected poisons directly into hearts to measure time of death. He decapitated some victims and had their heads boiled to obtain skulls; according to testimony, he used one as a paperweight on his desk. His victims were primarily young, healthy Jewish prisoners selected specifically because he wanted to observe bodies in their best physical condition.
In just six weeks at Mauthausen, he is estimated to have personally killed at least several dozen people in these ways — the exact number was never determined because records were destroyed. But what remains in the memory of survivors cannot be erased.
“He didn’t look like a monster. He was young, handsome, polite. He would talk to you normally — and then kill you to see what would happen next.” — Testimony of a Mauthausen survivor
Slipping Through the Net: Flaws in the Post-War Justice System
In 1945, Heim was arrested by U.S. forces. He was interrogated and his file was recorded — but due to insufficient direct evidence for immediate prosecution, he was released. This was a fatal flaw in the post-war justice system: thousands of lower- and mid-level war criminals were let go because courts prioritized the big names, and resources were too limited to handle everyone at once.
Heim returned to civilian life in Germany with shocking ease. He practiced gynecology in Baden-Baden, got married, had children, and bought property. For more than a decade, he lived as a respected community doctor — while investigators slowly gathered enough survivor testimonies to issue an arrest warrant.
In 1962, he received a tip — from whom is still unclear — that an arrest warrant was imminent. He drove to the bank, withdrew some money, and disappeared. His apartment and properties in Baden-Baden remained in his name — his family continued to collect rent and forward it to him for decades through a network of intermediaries that investigators later took years to trace.
30 Years in Cairo: Prayer, Fasting, and Waiting for a Natural Death
Unlike many other Nazi war criminals who fled to South America, Aribert Heim spent time in Spain before settling in Cairo, Egypt. There he converted to Islam, took the name Tarek Farid Hussein, and lived in a modest room at the El Hussein Hotel in the Al-Hussein district, near Al-Azhar Mosque.
Journalists who later interviewed people who knew him in Cairo described a tall, elderly German man who spoke broken Arabic, attended prayers at the mosque regularly, fasted during Ramadan, and was remembered by neighbors as “a quiet, kind, and very devout man.” No one knew who he really was.
In his final years, he kept a diary in German — pages that the investigative team found in 2009. In it, he wrote about his health, reading the Quran, and philosophical thoughts. Not a single line about Mauthausen. Not a single word about the people who died at his hands. It was as if those years did not exist in his memory — or as if he had learned to erase them completely.
Died a Free Man — and a Question That Was Never Answered
On August 10, 1992, Aribert Heim died of intestinal cancer in his hotel room in Cairo. He was 78 years old. His son came to claim the body and buried him according to Islamic rites in a cemetery in Cairo — the exact location was never publicly disclosed. For the next 17 years, his name remained at the top of Germany’s and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted Nazi war criminal lists, with a reward of up to €600,000. Dozens of investigations were conducted in South America, Spain, and Scandinavia — no one thought to look in Cairo.
When the truth was confirmed in 2009, the reaction of Mauthausen survivors and victims’ families could only be described in one word: exhaustion. Not anger — anger requires energy that, after 64 years of waiting, many no longer had. It was simply the exhaustion of people who had waited for justice and learned that it had never come.
Aribert Heim stands as living proof — or rather, dead proof — of a truth the post-war justice system never wanted to admit: for some war criminals, the world simply was not fast enough, persistent enough, or lucky enough to catch them before natural death did the work of the courts in a way the courts never wanted.