The Nazi Hunters (44 page)

Such accounts provided plenty of fodder for the tabloids and sometimes even serious newspapers, but there was just one problem: they were all products of their authors’ fervid imaginations, instead of the “true stories” they were always billed as.
In Heim’s case,
The New York Times
and the German television station ZDF produced convincing evidence that Dr. Death had lived in Cairo after the war, converted to Islam, and taken the name of Tarek Hussein Farid. The evidence consisted of a briefcaseful of his correspondence, medical and financial records, and an article about the search for him. Both names—Heim and Farid—appeared on these documents, and the birthday listed was June 28, 1914, matching Heim’s. A death certificate showed that Farid died in 1992, a decade after he was supposedly executed by Baz’s group of avengers.

In an interview with the
Times
, Rüdiger Heim, Aribert’s son, not only confirmed his father’s identity (“Tarek Hussein Farid is the name my father took when he converted to Islam,” he said), but revealed that he was visiting him in Cairo when he died of rectal cancer. The two
Times
reporters on the story, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet, subsequently wrote a book providing a detailed account of Heim’s postwar existence in Germany, where he continued to work as a doctor in the spa town of Baden-Baden until 1962, and then his flight to Egypt when it looked like the authorities were finally about to arrest him. The authors benefited from the cooperation of his son, other relatives, and the Egyptians who knew him by his new name.

Among Heim’s writings, they found repeated references to Wiesenthal, whom the fugitive saw as the orchestrator of the Zionist plot to track him down. The Nazi hunter failed in that quest, but as far as Heim was concerned, he was the “
absolute dominator of all German agencies.” If nothing else, this demonstrated that Heim—and, more than likely, other fugitive war criminals—feared Wiesenthal and believed in his popular
image as an almost all-powerful avenger. This was certainly an exaggeration, but it illustrated one of Wiesenthal’s key strengths: he was able to fulfill part of his mission, instilling fear in the hunted, by playing on such inflated views of his role.

As for Bormann, Gray’s tale of shooting him and Farago’s claim that he had visited him in Bolivia were also fully discredited.
The purported remains of Bormann had been found at a Berlin construction site in 1972, but it was only in 1998 that DNA testing provided a clear match with a relative of the once powerful Nazi. The conclusion was that he had died on May 2, 1945, shortly after leaving Hitler’s bunker as Red Army troops were taking the city. In the intervening years, there had been even more claims of Bormann sightings, usually in South America.

Baz had been right that in some cases the Nazi hunters had been chasing ghosts, but that was usually the result of a lack of reliable information combined with guesswork. At least they had not concocted tall tales of vengeance killings. But in terms of the popular culture, such tales left their mark, contributing to the popular misconception that the script for every Nazi hunting adventure could have been written in Hollywood.

• • •

Normally, the hunt for Nazi war criminals—whether it was by government or private investigators—proceeded according to much slower-paced scripts, especially when seemingly interminable legal battles were involved. And they certainly did not feature the kind of dramatic shootouts or other violent confrontations that were the staple of the fabricated “true stories.” But there were the rare exceptions. In those cases, life appeared to imitate fiction, with avengers striking from the shadows.

One of the villains in Howard Blum’s 1977 groundbreaking book
Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America
was Tscherim Soobzokov, who had grown up as part of the Circassian minority in the Soviet Union’s North Caucasus. At first glance, “Tom” Soobzokov, as he was known in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, was a typical American success story.
According to an article in the
The Paterson News
, when the Germans captured the Caucasus in 1942, he was shipped “as a semi-forced laborer to Rumania.” At the end of the war, he joined other Circassian
exiles in Jordan, before coming to the United States in 1955. Settling in Paterson, he started working at a car wash, but quickly graduated to organizing for the Teamsters Union and then the local Democratic Party, and landing a job as Passaic County’s chief purchasing inspector. He was the go-to guy to get things done, especially among his fellow immigrants from the Caucasus. He was smooth, well connected, and increasingly prosperous.

But some of his fellow Circassian immigrants were not buying either his life story or his claims to represent them. His name had appeared on the list of Nazi war criminals in the United States that ended up in the hands of Immigration and Naturalization Service investigator Anthony DeVito in the early 1970s, and his neighbors in Paterson were eager to explain why. Kassim Chuako, one of the Circassians quoted by Blum, said that Soobzokov had immediately offered his services to the German troops when they arrived in their part of the Caucasus. “
We saw him going into the villages with the Germans and rounding up people—Communists and Jews,” he declared. “I saw him with the SS troops that took people away.” Others added that they saw him wearing an SS uniform in Romania, where he tried to recruit refugees for an SS-sponsored Caucasian military unit.

Although he served in the Waffen SS, the fighting arm of the SS, as late as 1945, Soobzokov had no problem presenting himself as a normal war refugee once the conflict ended. In 1947, he was part of a group of Circassians who emigrated from Italy to Jordan, where he worked as an agricultural engineer. Soon, he had a new employer: the CIA. The agency was eager to use him to identify fellow Circassians who could be sent undercover into the Soviet Union, and he was happy to oblige.

Soobzokov’s new bosses were under few illusions about his background. “Subject has consistent and pronounced reactions to all questions regarding war crimes, and is, no doubt, hiding a number of activities from us at this point,” one CIA official reported in 1953. Still, it was clear that the agency’s priority was to make the best use of his services, whatever he was hiding. After Soobzokov arrived in the United States in 1955, he kept doing part-time jobs for the CIA. But his wildly inconsistent stories
led another CIA official to conclude that he was “an incorrigible fabricator,” and he was dropped by the agency in 1960.

Nonetheless, when the INS began investigating his background in the 1970s, a senior CIA official claimed that, while there were “unresolved doubts” about him, he had performed “useful service” for the United States, and the agency had never found any concrete evidence that he was involved in war crimes. This led the INS to drop the investigation. When the Justice Department’s newly formed Office of Special Investigations tried to take up his case in 1980, its investigators discovered that Soobzokov had listed some of his Nazi affiliations when he applied for a U.S. visa. Since OSI’s strategy was to seek denaturalization of alleged war criminals by demonstrating that they had lied to gain admission to the country, they reluctantly backed off. His admissions, however incomplete, were enough to undercut any effort to argue that he had covered up his past.

Despite all the controversy surrounding him, it looked like Soobzokov had emerged battered but victorious.
He even pursued a libel suit against Howard Blum for what he had written about him in
Wanted!,
and the author felt compelled to settle out of court—although he did not retract anything he had written.

On August 15, 1985, a pipe bomb exploded outside Soobzokov’s house in Paterson. The man who had been at the center of so much controversy was severely injured and died of his wounds on September 6.
The FBI later claimed that the Jewish Defense League may have been responsible, but the case was never solved.

Eight years later, there was another killing that could have been ripped from the pages of a thriller. This time the setting was a Parisian apartment in the chic 16th arrondissement, and the victim was René Bousquet, the eighty-four-year-old former police chief who had orchestrated the deportation of Jews from occupied France, including thousands of children. Although Bousquet had been tried after the war, he only received a suspended sentence, which was justified on the grounds that he had supposedly helped the Resistance. He went on to a successful career in business, and his enthusiastic participation in the Holocaust appeared to be largely
forgotten. Even after his past was dug up again as part of France’s efforts to confront its legacy of collaboration and there were efforts to bring new charges against him, he remained unapologetic and seemingly confident that he had nothing to fear. He continued to walk his dog twice a day in the Bois de Boulogne.

On June 8, 1993, a man called Christian Didier arrived at Bousquet’s apartment, claiming that he was about to serve him court documents. When the former police chief opened the door, as Didier told French TV crews later, he “pulled out the revolver and fired at point-blank range.” Although he hit his target, Bousquet ran toward him. “The guy had incredible energy,” he continued. “I fired a second time and he kept coming at me. I fired a third time and he started to stagger. The fourth time I got him in the head or the neck and he fell with blood falling out of him.”

Didier escaped and then convened the TV crews to make his confession. But he was anything but apologetic. Bousquet “incarnated evil” and his act was “like killing a serpent,” he declared; he added that he “incarnated good.” In reality, the self-described frustrated author appeared to be motivated by the desire to achieve fame at any price. He had tried earlier to kill Klaus Barbie, broken into the gardens of the French presidential palace, and sought to force his way into TV studios. He had spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and, after killing Bousquet was sentenced to ten years in prison. When he was released after serving half of that sentence, he expressed regret for his deed, but added: “
If I had killed him fifty years ago, I would have received a medal.” He also altered his explanation of his motive, offering a new twisted logic. “I thought that by killing Bousquet, I would kill the evil in me,” he said.

For Serge Klarsfeld and others who had hoped to make Bousquet face a new trial, the assassination was a major setback. “
Jews wanted justice not vengeance,” he said. Although Klarsfeld had once considered killing Barbie, his preference was always to bring him to trial and convict him, which was exactly what happened. This served the cause of justice, and helped educate the public further about the Holocaust. A trial of Bousquet would have had the added benefit of offering an object lesson on how French collaborators had actively participated in the crimes
of the Germans. All of which meant that, unlike in Hollywood movies, when the gunslinger shot the bad guy no one applauded. In this case, justice had been denied.

• • •

In 1985, the on-again, off-again hunt for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz SS doctor known as “the Angel of Death” who had been implanted firmly in the popular imagination as the embodiment of evil by the bestselling novel and hit movie
The Boys from Brazil
, suddenly revived with new urgency. The fugitive had become a Paraguayan citizen a quarter of a century earlier, but his exact whereabouts were a source of constant speculation amid reported sightings in several Latin American and European countries, including West Germany. Under mounting international pressure, Paraguay had stripped Mengele of his citizenship in 1979, and President Alfredo Stroessner, the country’s right-wing dictator, claimed that his regime did not know anything more about him. But none of Mengele’s pursuers believed him—and they shared one key assumption. When I filed my first report about his case from Bonn to my editors in New York on April 16, 1985, I wrote: “That Mengele is still alive is not disputed by anyone.”

Wiesenthal was constantly reporting new alleged leads and near misses at tracking him down. While he was sometimes accused of indiscriminately spreading rumors, he was hardly alone in his eagerness to keep Mengele in the news—or to see the clues as presenting clear evidence to justify an intensified search. In May, Fritz Steinacker, a lawyer in Frankfurt, went beyond his usual “no comment” to declare: “Yes, I have represented Mengele and I still do represent him.” Despite the denials of Mengele’s son Rolf and other relatives in his Bavarian hometown of Günzburg where the family farm machinery business still prospered, Wiesenthal was convinced they were fully aware “all the time where he was, even today,” as he told me. Pointing out that the family continued to say “no comment” to all the reports about Mengele, he insisted that this meant that he was still alive and on the run. “When they can say the man is dead, the embarrassment will be finished,” he said.

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were similarly convinced, and Beate traveled
to Paraguay to protest the government’s role there. “Mengele is in Paraguay under the protection of President Stroessner,” Serge flatly asserted. Wiesenthal, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the Klarsfelds, the West German and Israeli governments, and others offered numerous rewards for the Auschwitz doctor’s capture that totaled more than $3.4 million by May 1985. Hans-Eberhard Klein, the Frankfurt prosecutor who was in charge of West Germany’s search for Mengele, explained that “we have folders and folders of tips” from people who claimed to have seen him, but “none of them have produced success.” That was why West Germany and others were upping the rewards they were offering, he explained. Also in May, Klein and members of his team met with U.S. and Israeli officials in Frankfurt to coordinate the efforts of their three countries.

But as everyone involved in the chase would learn a month later, at that point they, too, had all been chasing a ghost for six years:
Mengele had drowned while swimming off a beach in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979, probably after suffering a stroke. His remains had been found in a grave near São Paulo, and a forensic team had made what was widely accepted as conclusive identification. Rolf Mengele finally admitted what Wiesenthal and others had suspected all along: the family had not only been in touch with his father, he had visited him in Brazil in 1977. He also said he returned to Brazil two years later “to confirm the circumstances of his death.” In 1992, DNA testing offered final confirmation. Mengele, who was sixty-seven at the time he drowned, had managed to elude justice and deceive his pursuers even in death.