Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death," spent his final years as a hunted man. He was the most wanted Nazi fugitive in the world, yet he died in obscurity in Brazil in 1979, never facing justice for his crimes at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Mengele arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in May 1943, just two months after turning 32. He stood at the ramps where trains arrived, deciding who would live and who would die. The strongest were selected for slave labor. Young children, the elderly, and the sick were sent directly to the gas chambers.
His primary interest was genetics and the goal of improving what he considered the Aryan race. He wanted to study how to propagate a superior race. Part of his experiments centered on sterilization, seeking ways to sterilize Eastern peoples, Slavs, Roma, and others he deemed inferior at a faster rate.
Mengele's twisted desire to create a superior Aryan race led to torture experiments on more than 3,000 twins. Only 200 survived. He injected different colored dyes into their eyes. He used twins to try to unlock what he considered the mystery of twin births. In some cases, this involved shooting twins in the back of the head and then dissecting their bodies to see what was happening.
Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam were among those selected. A Nazi ran toward them shouting "Twins, twins" in German. They were wearing matching burgundy dresses. Their mother was asked if they were twins. She did not know what to say. She asked Eva if this was a good thing, and Eva nodded yes. Their mother said yes. Eva remembered looking back and seeing her mother's arms stretched out in despair as they pulled her away. She never had the chance to say goodbye.
Mengele deliberately infected one twin to see how long the infection would take compared to the other. Eva became very ill with a high fever. Her arms and legs swelled to twice their size with huge red spots everywhere. It was painful, very painful. When Mengele entered with four other doctors and looked at her fever chart, he announced with a sarcastic laugh that she was "too small, too small, too weak to work" and had only two weeks to live. Despite everything, Eva and Miriam survived to see the Red Army liberate Auschwitz. The rest of their family perished.
Mengele escaped Auschwitz just 10 days before the Red Army liberated the camp in January 1945. He fled with a suitcase full of his scientific results. In the chaos of the war's end, tens of thousands of prisoners were moving through camps, and no one was certain of anyone's identity.
He was eventually captured by the Americans in June 1945. What saved him was his own vanity. When he joined the SS, one condition was having his blood type tattooed under his arm. Mengele was meticulous and narcissistic and apparently did not want to be tattooed. So he did not carry the distinctive mark of SS men. In the final days of the war, the Americans had a simple test. They had men remove their shirts and raise their arms. If they found a tattoo, the person was isolated for questioning. If there was no tattoo and the person had a plausible story, they were released. That is what happened to Mengele.
He made his way back to Germany. He did not return to live openly under his real name in his hometown. He lived under an assumed name on a farm in Bavaria, where he worked for two or three years. American investigators appeared at his wife's house and asked if she knew what had happened to her husband. She said she had heard he was killed on the Eastern Front. They closed the file.
But Mengele's family knew he was alive and well. They even sent him money through Hans Sedlmeier, a loyal family associate. The Mengele family was very wealthy, involved in agricultural machinery manufacturing in Günzburg. As long as he remained in Germany, he was in danger. He had seen what happened to Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, where leaders were tried, convicted, and hanged. He knew that as a former Auschwitz doctor, that would likely be his fate if caught.
He contacted his family, and Sedlmeier connected him with people who could help. With enough money, escape was possible. He crossed into Austria, then into Italy, and like many other Nazis, reached Genoa. He obtained an entry permit for Argentina under the name Helmut Gregor. He boarded a ship called the North King bound for Buenos Aires. Mengele arrived in Argentina in August 1949.
Shortly after, he began selling agricultural machinery in South America. His business thrived. From 1949 to 1959, his ten years in Argentina were actually very good years.
Buenos Aires in 1958 was a magnet for European expatriates, drawn by the charm of the old world and the capital's famous nightlife. It was also a magnet for Nazi war criminals. Fugitives like Dr. Josef Mengele loved Buenos Aires. There was a large German community, some of them Nazis. He had money. He was a social figure and certainly well-connected.
He met Hans Ulrich Rudel, Hitler's most highly decorated pilot. He met Wilhelm Sassen, a war criminal wanted by Belgium. He remained a passionate Nazi. This was not a terrible life on the run. It was quite a luxurious life. In 1958, the man considered the Angel of Death, the most hunted man in the world, was in the telephone directory in Argentina.
One thing that changed everything for Mengele was that in 1959, he was indicted by the West German government. The Auschwitz-Birkenau doctor was wanted for mass murder and for conducting unspeakable medical experiments on children as young as five. Germany demanded that Argentina extradite him to face justice. This frightened him and made him feel unsafe in Buenos Aires. This was good, because he deserved to live in fear.
What Mengele did not know was that there was something more frightening than an extradition order. Israeli agents were hunting Nazis in Argentina and had already captured one. They stripped him to make sure he had no weapon or razor blade to kill himself. They told him who they were and what they wanted from him. Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's "Final Solution," was in Israeli hands.
After Eichmann's capture, Zvi Aharoni interrogated him, asking, "Where is Mengele? Where is Mengele?" He refused to answer any question on the subject. Eichmann was completely loyal and said he had no idea where Mengele was. In fact, the two had eaten cake and coffee together several times in Buenos Aires. Eichmann and Mengele had actually met at the ABC café and had not gotten along well. Mengele viewed Eichmann as a lower-class officer living in a terrible area on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Mengele seemed more refined. He mixed with intellectuals. He belonged to the right-wing elite. Eichmann was just a working-class employee at a Mercedes plant.
Mossad investigators pressed Eichmann further. Finally, Eichmann broke. He knew Mengele was somewhere in Argentina, perhaps in Buenos Aires, but he was not in contact with him. He had met him before but had no idea of his address or what he was doing now.
For the Mossad, Mengele ranked first alongside Eichmann on the wanted list. Mengele's name was the worst in Israel, even more than Eichmann. He was a real butcher.
Three days after Eichmann's capture, agent Zvi Aharoni met with Isser Harel. The Mossad chief had good news. Harel had found Mengele's address in Buenos Aires. Harel was very excited, thinking he could bring two in. He could catch Mengele too. He wanted to launch a full commando raid on that address. He wanted to carry out a second operation while the first was not yet finished. This was wrong thinking. Doing two operations at once doubles the risk of failure. Aharoni suggested not doing it. But Harel did not want to miss what might be their only chance to catch the notorious doctor. He overruled his agents.
The Mengele operation began. In fact, the Israelis were moving around Buenos Aires during the period they were holding Eichmann in the safe house. They were watching a boarding house where they suspected Mengele was living. It was truly risky because they all traveled with forged passports and in languages they did not master well. If caught in Argentina in 1960 as a known foreign spy, you would not be executed, but you would become a guest of the Argentine government for a very long time.
Mossad agents tracked Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele to what they hoped was his hiding place in Buenos Aires. They sent a few people to check the apartment. They were making fairly obvious inquiries about where he was. They went to the boarding house where they believed he was living and asked, "Is this where Dr. Mengele lives?" Hoping perhaps someone would say, "Oh, you mean Mengele? Yes, he lives there."
The risks lay in the German community in Buenos Aires. There was a German community of a quarter million people at the time. It was this large German community that attracted Nazis like Eichmann and Mengele to Argentina. The country's authoritarian regime under Juan Perón made them feel completely at home.
Everyone wonders why South America, and Argentina in particular, became the place Nazis came to after the war. The truth is there were already links between the Nazis and Argentina during the war. During the war, Perón and the Argentine government had secret agreements with Himmler's foreign intelligence service. When the war ended, it was a natural extension of Argentina's wartime role to receive Nazis afterward.
Mengele was not at home. The truth is they could not find him. This meant he was hiding better than Eichmann. With no trace of the Nazi doctor, Harel decided to cut his losses and return to Israel with Eichmann alone. At that point, the Mossad was at a complete dead end, and Mengele had fled long ago. Mengele moved not because of the Israelis but by pure luck. A Paraguayan would not have been in Buenos Aires, and they would have missed him.
In December 1961, an Israeli court convicted Adolf Eichmann and hanged him for his crimes. But Mossad chief Isser Harel did not give up on Josef Mengele. Harel still insisted that Mengele was someone they wanted to catch. He was a notorious figure. So Aharoni was ordered to organize an operation and try to find him.
Veteran Mossad agent Zvi Aharoni returned to South America to track the Nazi doctor. He disguised himself as a historian writing a book about the Nazi SS. Zvi and his agents combed Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile. Some information pointed to Paraguay. But when they arrived there, he had already left. The mission proved even more difficult than capturing Eichmann. It pushed the team to its limits.
Finally, after two years of searching, they found a break. They had captured a Belgian war criminal. He was a former Dutch SS officer named Willem Sassen. Sassen was a former drinking companion of Mengele. They told him they would send him back for trial on war crimes unless he gave them something better. He said he would give them Mengele. Sassen was deeply connected to the network and suggested Mengele was in Brazil. So Aharoni and his team went there. He was told Mengele might be hiding in a house near São Paulo.
But identifying the fugitive Nazi would not be easy. He had changed his name more than once. He was living a modest, unremarkable life. One of his distinguishing features was a gap between his teeth, and he was worried about it because he knew it was an identifying mark. He grew a thick mustache that effectively covered his front teeth and made it hard for anyone to see the gap.
The team narrowed their search to a farm on the outskirts of the city. To conduct surveillance, Aharoni was joined by fellow agent Rafi Eitan, the man who had led the Eichmann mission. They were looking for Mengele at a farm about 50 kilometers from São Paulo. The Israeli spies spent days watching the farm. The information Sassen provided began to look like another dead end. Then they saw a man with a mustache and two men who looked like bodyguards watching him. One of them was certainly Mengele.
The Israelis went and checked that farm and kept it under surveillance. Zvi Aharoni, head of the Mossad team, told them these men had walked past him, and he was convinced one of them was Mengele. After 18 years on the run, the Angel of Death appeared to be in the Mossad's sights. Mossad agents believed they had spotted the world's most famous Nazi fugitive. Aharoni was sure they had actually seen Mengele.
At that point, the team's mission was surveillance only. They returned to Israel to plan their next step. Agent Zvi Aharoni submitted his report to Mossad chief Isser Harel. Harel did not believe their intelligence. Aharoni said as a field agent that he felt the man he saw was Mengele and that was enough to act. But Harel told him: guess what, it is 1961, 16 years after the end of the war, and you are making a visual identification based on a photo of a person in the SS taken in 1938. I need more evidence.
Harel said the operation was canceled. They had something else to do, and there were bigger problems at home. Egyptian President Nasser had just launched missiles capable of hitting Israel, and German rocket scientists were working on them there. Isser Harel spent the following year on an assassination plot to kill the rocket scientists. The Mengele operation was frozen. The Mossad's Nazi-hunting unit was quietly dissolved. And Mengele lived.
But the Nazi doctor no longer enjoyed a comfortable life. After 1959, when he was forced to flee Argentina because of the extradition request, his life deteriorated sharply. Mengele developed growing paranoia that he would be caught. He lived a life full of tension. Josef Mengele had no idea the Mossad had abandoned its pursuit. He remained terrified that, like Adolf Eichmann, he would be kidnapped and hanged for his crimes.
He ended up on remote farms in the Brazilian wilderness. He built a watchtower on one of the farms where he lived and used it to monitor the workers and the kilometers around him, as it was a strategic location. He also had a whole pack of dogs with him. He was a very paranoid and very anxious figure.
Israel may have given up the hunt, but in West Germany, prosecutors continued building a case against Mengele. There was a very loyal follower of the Mengele family named Sedlmeier. Prosecutors suspected Hans Sedlmeier had supported Mengele since his escape from Europe. A judge running the office that would investigate Mengele decided to move forward, swear Hans Sedlmeier in and question him about whether he was supporting Mengele, whether the family was sending him money, or anything else. Sedlmeier lied blatantly, saying he had never seen him, knew nothing about him, that he might be dead, and that he did not send him a single penny. They never went to find out anything else. They believed his word.
Nearly 20 years had now passed since Mengele's long escape. Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, but before that happened, Mengele had managed to escape. He fled 10 days before the Red Army liberated the camp. There was absolute chaos. Tens of thousands of prisoners were moving through the camps at the same time. No one was entirely sure of anyone's identity. He fled with a suitcase full of his scientific results.
After the war, he moved back to his homeland through Germany. He did not return to live openly under his real name in his hometown. He lived under an alias on a farm in Bavaria, where he worked for two or three years. American investigators appeared at his wife's house and asked if she knew what had happened to her husband. She said she had heard he was killed on the Eastern Front. They closed the file. But Mengele's family knew he was alive and well. They even sent him money through Hans Sedlmeier.
The Mengele family was very wealthy. They were in agricultural machinery manufacturing in Germany. The Mengele family ran the largest business in Günzburg. Günzburg was a company town. But as long as Dr. Mengele remained in Germany, he remained in danger. He lived in fear of being caught. He had seen what happened to Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, where all the Nazi leaders were tried, convicted, and hanged. He knew that as a former Auschwitz doctor, that would likely be his fate if caught.
So he contacted his family in Günzburg. Sedlmeier connected him with various people who could help him. If you had enough money, you could escape. So he crossed the border into Austria. From Austria, he crossed into Italy. Like many other Nazis, he reached Genoa. He obtained an entry permit for Argentina under the name Helmut Gregor. He boarded a ship called the North King bound for Buenos Aires. Mengele arrived in Argentina in August 1949.
Shortly after, he began selling agricultural machinery in South America. His business thrived. From 1949 to 1959, those ten years in Argentina were actually very good years. But after the capture and indictment of SS officer Adolf Eichmann, Mengele's world began to collapse. Nothing frightened Nazi war criminals in South America more than that indictment. It ruined everyone's day, and it ruined Mengele's day in particular.
He moved between a series of farms, working as a roaming farm manager in Paraguay and Brazil. On one occasion, when he was at a farm in Brazil, there was a young calf suffering from a hernia. Mengele took out his surgical instruments and performed a very delicate and successful operation to remove the hernia. The farm workers realized he was not just a Swiss farm manager as he claimed. He was someone else entirely.
Although the Mossad failed to capture him, Mengele's comfortable life was gone forever. He became increasingly isolated and depressed, ending up in a very modest hut on the outskirts of São Paulo. Ironically, while Mengele's fortune dwindled, his legend grew ever more bizarre.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mengele's reputation grew disproportionately. This reputation was partly fueled by Simon Wiesenthal, who made Josef Mengele his primary face. This was the Nazi everyone wanted to catch. This was the truly evil figure. This was the Angel of Death. People like Simon Wiesenthal and the Klarsfeld family in Paris kept the case alive.
They knew Mengele was living in Paraguay, which is why they pretended before the Justice Ministry to get information about his fate. Klaus Barbie tried to find him but perhaps too late. Many remained completely convinced that Mengele was in Paraguay throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, while he had actually left Paraguay.
Everyone had the idea that Mengele was living in some castle in the forest with dogs barking at his feet, speedboats on the river, and followers trailing him everywhere. You have Mengele in popular culture, in the film "The Boys from Brazil," the white suit, the powerful Nazi hiding in the jungle, real stuff of legend. They thought Hollywood was making documentaries instead of fiction. It turned out he lived a rather miserable life.
He had this terrible nervous habit of chewing the ends of his mustache. He chewed his mustache so much that he ended up with a ball of hair. His paranoid nature worsened day by day. He was not a Nazi hiding in the jungle on a huge estate. He was a little old man with a hairball.
Forty years had passed since the fall of the Third Reich. But Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was still at large. Sightings of Mengele multiplied everywhere. He was said to be in southern Spain. He was on an island in Greece. He was in the Paraguayan jungle with a very large factory. Frankly, he was everywhere except the moon.
But no one was really hunting him. If there had been any serious efforts, especially from the German government to find these criminals, it would have been very easy to find them, locate them, and arrest them. This was a Nazi war criminal living in South America and communicating regularly with his family and receiving money from them. All they had to do was watch the mail, but they never did. People trusted the world's governments to do the right thing until they realized they were covering everything up.
In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Eva Kor led a small group of survivors back to the concentration camp they had been sent to as children. From Auschwitz, they traveled to Jerusalem, where they held a three-day mock trial for Dr. Mengele. One hundred and six victims lined up to testify against their Nazi tormentor.
Eva Kor described how Mengele made people feel like animals, like nothing, like a piece of trash or a piece of meat. He came every morning dressed extremely elegantly. She remembered his shiny black shoes. He wore a white coat, was handsome, and wore a uniform. He was a figure of enormous influence. She was injected with something that made her very sick. He deliberately infected them to see how long the infection would take in one without the other. She developed a very high fever. Her arms and legs swelled to twice their size with huge red spots everywhere. It was painful, very painful.
Despite all odds, Eva and her sister Miriam lived to witness the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz. The rest of their family perished. For Eva, it seemed like a nightmare. She thought somehow that if she closed her eyes and opened them again, the nightmare would disappear entirely. But the nightmare did not disappear.
In 1985, the campaigns of Eva Kor and others combined with political will. Pressure grew on the German government, on the Americans, and on the Israelis because of this mock trial. Rewards of millions of dollars were offered for Mengele's capture. Law enforcement officials from three countries met to coordinate their efforts. The Germans were the hosts. There were several people from different agencies in Israel. The U.S. Marshals Service was present.
Days later, the international team decided to act on a promising lead. After drinking a lot of alcohol in a restaurant, Hans Sedlmeier, the intermediary responsible for protecting Mengele, let slip to a friend that he had been supporting Mengele for years. The friend reported it to the authorities. The prosecutor in Frankfurt obtained a search warrant for Sedlmeier's house. Sedlmeier had always been considered a possible link to Mengele in South America. The search for the Nazi doctor moved to a high level of seriousness.
On May 31, 1985, special German agents raided the home of Hans Sedlmeier, the Mengele family's intermediary. They knew that if they informed the local Bavarian police, there might be an informant for the Mengele family, which could warn them and ensure everything was hidden. So they used a different police force from another part of the country to raid Sedlmeier's property. The search was conducted by the German Federal Criminal Police Office. They carried out this search. He thought he was safe.
By pure chance, when they moved a rather large cabinet, they found something. Behind the furniture, investigators uncovered a secret hiding place for envelopes. There they found the letters Mengele had sent. They found everything. All the letters, all the addresses of his helpers. There had long been rumors that Sedlmeier's wife had been fond of Josef Mengele early on. Mengele wrote letters directly to her in addition to his letters to Hans Sedlmeier.
Among the collection of letters, investigators found one containing a shocking revelation. "With deep sorrow, I inform you of the death of our mutual friend." This led the Germans to believe that Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979. Sedlmeier was arrested. A search of his address book linked Mengele to a residence in São Paulo.
David Marwell, an investigator with the U.S. Department of Justice, was part of the international force now hunting Mengele. After the discovery of the documents at Sedlmeier's house, the Germans went directly to São Paulo. The Brazilian police were involved. Romeo Tuma was the captain who led the Brazilian investigation for the Federal Police. He received the materials from the Germans.
Tuma quickly identified the residents at that São Paulo address. A German family called the Bossert family. They were not treated very gently regarding the search warrant. The place was stormed with full force. Police questioned them about their suspected connection to Mengele. But they refused to say anything. They said, "No, it is not Mengele. This is not true." They lied and denied it.
But Tuma quickly found Mengele's improvised farm and a hiding place for his personal writings and photos. The truth about one of the most enduring mysteries of the era was finally revealed. In the end, they confessed everything. The family admitted they had sheltered Mengele during the last four years of his life. Then they disclosed where he died and where he was buried.
Mengele was buried outside the boundaries of the public cemetery where the poor are usually buried. They exhumed a body that had been buried for six years. News of Mengele's death drew crowds of media to the grave site. There, Mengele's skull was displayed for all to see. It was lifted in front of the cameras in a brutal and horrifying manner, with photographs taken in succession.
But questions remained. Many believed he might have faked his death. He had the medical knowledge and the clear motive to fake his death. Because of his diabolical reputation, and because of the mental image of him as a cunning scientist who surpassed any form of natural justice, the whole thing was, as people knew, just a cunning trick. Despite the exhumation of Mengele's bones, many believed he was still alive.
An international task force from Germany, Brazil, Israel, and America believed they had found Josef Mengele. Now forensic scientists had to prove that the exhumed body was indeed the Nazi doctor. They formed an elite team of anatomists, radiologists, and dental experts. The Israelis sent the chief anatomist of the Israel Defense Forces. Forensic experts set out to compare what they knew about Mengele while alive with the evidence that could be drawn from the skeletal remains.
They compared the skull to a photo of Mengele's face and merged the two images together. It was very frightening but very compelling evidence. They spent a long time examining the bones discovered in that grave, and they were quite confident these bones belonged to Josef Mengele. But to get irrefutable proof, they had to wait for a new forensic technology to emerge.
There was plenty of room for skeptics to believe he might still be alive. Perhaps this whole thing was a hoax. It really took genetic testing in the early 1990s to prove conclusively to people that these were indeed Mengele's bones. Science finally caught up with the Mengele case. The bones were sent from Brazil to a laboratory in England. The bones were ground down, and they were able to collect a tiny amount of DNA sufficient for analysis. The results were conclusive. The bones belonged to Josef Mengele.
There he was. He was dead. The hunt for Josef Mengele was over. The full details of how he died were revealed. Mengele's death was pathetic in many ways. It was a kind of humiliating death that he deserved.
With some friends, he was taken to Bertioga beach, about 20 or 30 miles south of São Paulo. They sat at their beach house, a small beach house they had. They persuaded him, saying, "Look, why don't you go for a little swim?" Mengele always refused to go out because he said, "Oh, I don't like the sun." He may also have feared being seen. In the end, he said, "Alright, I will."
The current is very, very strong in that area. On that hot summer day, Mengele swam a little farther from the beach than he should have. It became completely clear within minutes that he was in trouble. They tried to resuscitate him. He had suffered a stroke. If you have a stroke while swimming, the combination is not good. He died in the water, either by drowning or from the stroke itself.
Interestingly, after his death, they talked about whether they should cremate his body. They could not get anyone from the Mengele family to agree to it. They wanted to cremate the remains. If they had, no one today, including the investigators, would believe he had died.
The world's most famous Nazi fugitive would never face justice for his crimes. They would have liked to hold that trial as part of Mengele's historical record. The victims deserved that, and it was frustrating for the Mossad. Isser Harel sometimes apologized for why he failed to bring Mengele to trial. When he wrote his memoirs, he would not apologize. There is no sufficient punishment for a person like Mengele. Even if he had been caught and executed, the moment at the end of the hangman's rope is not justice for what he did.
But there is some justice in the fact that after Eichmann's capture, Mengele became a bitter, depressed, and truly unhappy man. That gives great comfort. In many ways, one might pity people like Josef Mengele, because they have a distorted perception of what is right and what is wrong. They did not escape punishment without a price. They lived miserable lives full of guilt. If you are looking for atoms of justice in all of this, he did not live the life many imagined. It was not a comfortable life. Mengele died an old man. To hell with him.