'No doubt' Nazi war criminal Heim dead: German court

A handout delivered by German police in 2009 and dated 1959 shows Aribert Heim, a former Austrian doctor, also known as "Dr. Death", who is wanted for killing and torturing hundreds of victims in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen with his horrific medical experiments.

German judicial authorities today officially said for the first time that Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, known as "Doctor Death", had died in Egypt in 1992 as reported.

A regional court in the southwestern town of Baden-Baden said it was abandoning an investigation because there was "no doubt" the body found in Cairo was that of Heim, who had changed his identity and converted to Islam.

"The criminal case against Dr Aribert Heim on suspicion of multiple murders has been abandoned because of the death of the accused," the court said in a written statement.

Heim, one of the world's most wanted war criminals, became known as "Doctor Death" and the "Butcher of Mauthausen" after performing medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

Besides Mauthausen in Austria, he also served at the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald camps in Germany.

In February 2009, German public television channel ZDF and the New York Times said that Heim, a former member of the Nazi SS, had died of bowel cancer in 1992 at the age of 78, citing his son and acquaintances in Cairo.

But his death was never confirmed and a report by Der Spiegel news weekly several months later said investigators believed the ZDF and NYT report did not provide "any proof of his death" and they were continuing to examine "every lead" on the Austrian-born Nazi.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem also said it did not believe the story.

The Baden-Baden court however said on Friday that it no longer doubted that Heim was in fact a man named Tarek Hussein Farid who died of cancer in August 1992 in Cairo.

The court said it had reached the conclusion after, among other things, the defence for the accused had presented it with documents, including a certificate showing his conversion to Islam.

Together with information provided by his son, there remained "no doubt that the accused is identical to the person Tarek Hussein Farid and died in 1992 after suffering from cancer", it said.

German authorities charged him in 1979 with having "cruelly killed prisoners through injections or unnecessary operations" at the Mauthausen camp in 1941, the court said in its statement.

The court had announced in August that it aimed to establish in the coming months whether Heim was dead after receiving the initial results of the analysis of original documents from Egypt.

In 1945 at the end of World War II Heim was arrested by the US military but he was let go after two and a half years, and he went on to work as a gynaecologist in Baden-Baden.

He pursued his profession in the picturesque spa town for around 15 years but fled in 1962 as the West German authorities were about to arrest him.

German ministry ordered neo-Nazi file 'cleaning'

In this 2011 photo, police search in the debris of a house that was set on fire and partially exploded in Zwickau related to neo-Nazi killings of eight Turks and one Greek.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has admitted to destroying additional files related to investigations on the suspected neo-Nazi murders of eight Turks and one Greek, this time on orders from the Interior Ministry in Berlin.

Although the ministry had denied that the files contained any clues about the far-right trio calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU), a new agency report discloses that six files from secret wiretapping operations were destroyed in response to a Nov. 14, 2011, order from the Federal Interior Ministry in Berlin, according to Der Spiegel.

The order came just days after revelations that NSU was responsible for the murders of the nine small businessmen of Turkish and Greek origin.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the spy agency, has been under heavy criticism after it became known that a senior agency official had shredded several files on his own initiative relating to informants in the right-wing scene just days after the NSU cell was discovered.

The BfV has said the two incidents are unrelated and that the deleted files were of no great importance.

Germany’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the BfV, claimed that the destruction of the files was routine and justified the act as being in adherence to rules governing the length of time that surveillance files are allowed to be kept.

A Turkish parliamentary committee has accused several levels of the German state of indirectly aiding the murders of eight Turks in a scathing new report

In this Nov. 16, 2011 file picture a police van stands in front of a burnt-out house in Zwickau, eastern Germany that was destroyed by a supposed member of a far-right terror gang. For years, authorities suspected organized crime. 

The neo-Nazi group responsible for the murders of eight of people of Turkish origin and one of Greek origin were indirectly supported by German police, armed forces and the country’s intelligence agency, according to a report released by the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission.

The report, titled “The neo-Nazi murders in Germany between 2000 and 2006,” said a German paramilitary force called the Reserve Army trained neo-Nazi groups and members of the extreme far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP) to use weapons.

A team from the Turkish Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, consisting of ruling Justice and Development (AKP) deputy Münevver Çiğdem Ökten, Tunca Toskay of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Şafak Pavey of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and Nazmi Gür of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) prepared the report following their May 9 visit to Germany to examine the legal process in the investigation of the racially motivated killings.

Germany was shocked by the scandal in Dec. 2011 when it was revealed that a previously unknown neo-Nazi group, calling itself the National Socialist Underground, was behind hate murders in various cities between 2000 and 2006. The case has left the impression that the police were blind to the threat of far-right violence and did not investigate the murders properly because they involved immigrants.

The series of murders began in Nuremberg, where Adolf Hitler made an appearance before the Holocaust, the report read. The victims all worked in small shops, stalls and kiosks, with two having worked in döner kebab restaurants, leading the German media to describe the murders as the “Döner Killings.” The report denounced the German media for its role in the underestimation of the racist motives behind the murders, which influenced German public opinion.

The report strongly criticized the German state for not investigating the murders properly, and said the “murderers received professional help.”

“The lack of coordination between the German military, security forces and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution caused the murders to continue. In some cases the intelligence agency did not cooperate with the police, and in some cases military officials ignored intelligence,” the report read.

The commission accused the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution of direct involvement in the murders.

“[The commission has] determined that the office participated in the murders directly or indirectly. Some informants provided guns, fake IDs and passports to the terrorist group, as well as supporting them by renting vans or hotel rooms,” the report read.

The head of German intelligence, Heinz Fromm, was forced to resign on July 2 amid explosive revelations that his agents deliberately destroyed and manipulated files containing information about the case.

The report also criticized the German judiciary for insulting the families of the Turkish victims. “Victims were treated as criminals and their families were treated as suspects,” the report said. According to the report, underage relatives of the victims were forced to take repeated DNA tests and were photographed as if they were suspects.

The report acknowledged the efforts of the German president and federal government to shed light on the murders, but said the compensations paid to the families of the victims were not enough to cover even material damages, and fell far short of covering psychological damage.

97-yr-old 'Most Wanted' Nazi war criminal arrested in Hungary

Activists and sympathizers of the European Union of Jewish Students stand in front of Laszlo Csatary's hideaway building, on July 16, 2012 (AFP Photo/Attila Kisbenedek)

Hungarian prosecutors have taken into custody the Nazi-era war crimes suspect Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, 97, who reportedly helped organizing the 1944 deportation of 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz.

He worked as a police commander in a Slovakian ghetto, at the helm of a brutal regime in the city of Kosice, where 140 people were allegedly driven to suicide to escape his torture in 1941-45.

Csizsik-Csatary fled to Canada under a new identity after being sentenced to death in absentia in 1948. He spent almost half a century in Canada, selling works of art. But his true identity was revealed in 1997 and he went on the run again, where he managed to evade capture for fifteen more years.

In April 2012, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a human rights organization, listed Csizsik-Csatary as the most wanted war crimes suspect.

He was eventually tracked down by journalists from the British tabloid ‘The Sun’, who collaborated their efforts with the Wiesenthal Centre. Csizsik-Csatary opened the door in his socks and underpants. Once asked if he could justify his past, he stammered, ‘No, no. Go away’, and slammed the door in the face of the correspondents.

The tabloid raised publicity of the case on Sunday, passing the information on to the city’s prosecution office. The following day saw Jewish students staging protests outside Csizsik-Csatary’s apartment block, demanding his detention. The suspect is currently under house arrest, and his passport was confiscated.

"It was important for us to cooperate so that it gets wide media coverage, more than we can ever achieve," Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Wiesenthal Centre, told AFP. He added that he had hoped “the coverage would increase the pressure on the courts and public opinion in Hungary, as well as the world at large."

However, French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld doubts any legal action will be taken “with this conservative government” in Hungary. He added that the only reason Csizsik-Csatary would be at the top of the list is because so few Nazi war criminals remain. 

"In my opinion he did not have major responsibilities, he must have been a stooge," Klarsfeld told AFP, "Thirty years ago, he would have been 3,500th on the list."

French Nazi-hunter doubts suspect Csatary will face courts

Photo taken on July 16, 2012 shows the balcony of Dr Csatary L., alias Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, on the last floor of a Budapest building. The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed on July 15, 2012 that Laszlo Csatary, accused of complicity in the killings of 15,700 Jews, had been tracked down to the Hungarian capital.

Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld said today he doubted Hungarian authorities would prosecute Laszlo Csatary, a 97-year-old accused of complicity in the killings of 15,700 Jews and tracked down in Budapest.

"I am not sure there will be legal action taken with this conservative government" of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Klarsfeld, a French lawyer and Nazi hunter, told AFP.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed Sunday that Csatary, who in 1948 was condemned to death by a Czech court after a trial held in his absence, had been tracked to the Hungarian capital.

Hungarian authorities said they were conducting an investigation.

The centre identified Csatary as its "No. 1 Most Wanted suspect", but Klarsfeld said he had "never heard" of him.

"In my opinion he did not have major responsibilities, he must have been a stooge," Klarsfeld said, adding that the only reason he would be at the top of the list is because so few Nazi war criminals remain.

"Thirty years ago, he would have been 3,500th on the list," he said.

The Wiesenthal Centre has urged Hungarian prosecutors to put Csatary on trial, saying he served during World War II as a senior Hungarian police officer in the Slovakian city of Kosice, then under Hungarian rule.

He is accused of being complicit in the deportations of thousands of Jews from Kosice and its environs to the Auschwitz death camp in the spring of 1944.

He had earlier fled to Canada and had worked as an art dealer using a false identity, before being unmasked in 1995 and forced to flee.

'UFO' at bottom of Baltic Sea may be Nazi anti-submarine device

A former Swedish naval oficer and World War II expert Anders Autellus has said that sonar scans suggest that the "UFO" at the bottom of the Baltic Ocean could be part of a World War II Nazi anti-submarine device.

According to Autellus, the object could be the base of a device the Nazis developed as part of the war effort. Autellus said the Nazis built anti-submarine device using wire mesh to confuse submarine radar and lead the enemy craft to crash.

Autellus explains that the "UFO" structure could be an anchor or base of one of the German Nazi military devices for blocking British and Russian submarines in the area.

The Daily Mail reports that Autellus says the steel and concrete structure could be a very important World War II history find. An expert said: "The area was vital to the German war machine because most of the ball bearings for its tanks and trucks came from here. Without them the German army would have ground to a halt. This device dwarfs anything ever found before and is an important weapons discovery."

Autellus told the Swedish newspaper Expressen, that the Germans built anti-submarine devices to make navigation more difficult for Soviet submarines during World War II. He said the British also built similar structures during World War II.

Autellus said the object was possibly constructed using "double-skinned" concrete which serve as anchor for holding steel wire mesh structures designed to interfere with radar signals. He said that the wire mesh structures might have have eroded away over the years leaving the holes shown on the images provided by the Ocean X team.

Stefan Hogeborn, a professional diver and member of the Ocean X team, agrees with Autellus. He said: "It is a good candidate for the answer to this mystery. The object lies directly underneath a shipping route. It would be of enormous weight in steel and concrete." He notes, however, that the known "Nazi anti-sub anchoring devices were nowhere near as large."

According to Guerrilla Explorer, during World War II, the Nazis were in control of the Baltic Sea. But Soviet submarines would sneak into it from the Gulf of Finland. The Soviets had destroyed more than 20 German ships by 1942. In March 1943, the Nazis installed a 30 nautical mile long anti-submarine net across the Gulf of Finland, using two layers of steel mesh.

Guerrilla Explorer explains that what Autellus is saying is that the circle of the Baltic UFO was an old anchor for one of these nets with the actual net either removed or rusted away. The website says that according to Autellus's theory, "The strange 'egg shaped' hole found on the Circle could be an old attachment for the net... Also, the net could've caused the tracks... it might've dragged along the seabed at one point. Or it might've just sank and spread out."

Although Hogeborn thinks Autellus's theory is credible, Peter Lindberg, a member of the Ocean X team, expressed doubt in an interview, saying that he was 99% certain the "Circle" was a natural formation. He says the anti-submarine anchor theory doesn't explain the blackened interior of the "Circle," nor does it explain the lack of silt in the area.

Guerilla Explorer also points out that the major difficulty in Autellus's theory is that the circular anchors the Germans used were very small (see video above, at 0.33) compared with the "Circle" in the Ocean X object which is about 200 feet in diameter

Digital Journal reported that the Ocean X team investigating the underwater object say they have had difficulty conducting a close scrutiny of the object because their electrical equipment stop working when they approach within 200m.

The Daily Mail reports that according to the professional diver Hogeborn, some of the team's cameras and the team's satellite phone stop working when they are directly above or close to the object, and start working only after they have sailed away. Hogeborn said: "Anything electric out there - and the satellite phone as well - stopped working when we were above the object. And then we got away about 200 meters and it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work."

It is uncertain, however, why an anchor for a wire mesh anti-submarine device should disable electrical equipment.