Aribert Ferdinand Heim was an Austrian SS doctor, also known as "Dr Death". He studied medicine in Graz, and received his diploma in Vienna. He joined the SS after the Anschluss and volunteered for the Waffen-SS in the spring of 1940, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmführer (Captain). He worked in Mauthausen for six weeks as a doctor starting in October 1941 at the age of 26. The prisoners at Mauthausen called Heim "Dr. Death", or the "Butcher of Mauthausen" for his cruelty. He was known for performing operations without anaesthesia. For about two months, October to December 1941, he was stationed at the Ebensee concentration camp near Linz, Austria, where he carried out experiments on Jews and others similar to those performed at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele. According to Holocaust survivors, Jewish prisoners were poisoned with various injections directly into the heart, including petrol, phenol, available poisons or even water, to induce death. He is reported to have removed organs from living prisoners without anesthesia, killing hundreds. A prisoner by the name of Karl Lotter also worked in the Mauthausen hospital at the time Heim was there and testified that in 1941, he witnessed Heim butcher a prisoner who came to him with an inflamed foot. Lotter stated that Heim gave the prisoner anesthetic and then proceeded to cut him open, castrate him, and take out one of his kidneys. The prisoner died, and his head was cut off, boiled and stripped of its flesh, and the skull was allegedly used as a paperweight on Heim's desk. Other survivors of the Holocaust referred to Heim removing tattooed flesh from prisoners and using the skin to make seat coverings, which he gave to the commandant of the camp. From February to October 1942, Heim served in the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord in northern Finland, in Oulu's hospitals as an SS doctor. On March 15, 1945, Heim was captured by US soldiers and sent to a camp for prisoners of war. He was released and worked as a gynecologist at Baden-Baden until his disappearance in 1962. He telephoned his home and was told that the police were waiting for him. Having been questioned on previous occasions, he surmised the an international warrant for his arrest had issued and went into hiding. According to his son, Heim drove through France and Spain onward to Morocco, moving finally to Egypt via Libya. After Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's senior assistant, Heim was the second most wanted Nazi officer and was the target of a rapidly escalating manhunt and ever-increasing rewards for his capture. After years of apparently false sightings, the circumstances surrounding Heim's escape, life in hiding and death were jointly reported by the German broadcaster ZDF and the New York Times in February 2009. They reported that he lived under a false name, Tarek Farid Hussein, in Egypt and that he died of intestinal cancer in Cairo in 1992. In an interview at the family's villa, his son Rüdiger admitted publicly for the first time that he was with his father in Egypt at the time of Heim's death, saying it was during the Olympics, and that he died the day after the games ended. In 2012, a regional court in Baden-Baden confirmed that Heim died under the assumed identity of Tarek Hussein Farid in Egypt in 1992, based on evidence that his family and lawyer had presented.
∼Cause of death was due to rectal cancer.