Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death," spent years living in relative comfort in South America while being hunted by Nazi hunters. His crimes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his escape from justice, and the long effort to track him down form one of the most enduring manhunts of the twentieth century.
Mengele was obsessed with genetics and the idea of improving the Aryan race. He wanted to study how to propagate a so-called superior race. Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of his nightmarish medical laboratory.
Part of his experimentation centered on sterilization. He wanted to learn how to sterilize Eastern peoples, Slavs, Roma, and others he considered inferior at a faster rate. He held the power of life and death.
Most victims of his human experiments died. But the experiments grew progressively worse, and by the time he left Auschwitz, he had become the monster the world remembers.
Mengele was assigned to Auschwitz in May 1943, just two months after turning thirty-two. He stood on the ramps when the trains arrived, conducting selections. He decided who would live and who would die.
The strongest were selected for forced labor. Young children, the elderly, and the sick were sent directly to the gas chambers. Everyone realized there was no escape.
Mengele searched the crowds for victims of his experiments. What he wanted most were twins. Studying identical twins is one of the best ways to understand how genes work. One twin is experimented on while the other remains an untreated control, allowing changes to be seen and measured by comparison.
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 had happened.
He was not merely a surgical killer. He was also a monster.
One survivor recalled how her mother grabbed her hand and the hand of her twin sister, hoping to protect them as long as she held on. The child looked around trying to understand what the place was, and realized her father and older sister had disappeared into the crowds.
A Nazi ran by shouting in German: "Twins, twins." The girls were wearing matching clothes, as they always did, in that case burgundy dresses. The man demanded to know whether they were twins. Their mother did not know what to say.
She asked her daughter whether that was a good thing. The girl nodded yes. So the mother said yes. The survivor 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.
By 1958, Buenos Aires had become a magnet for European expatriates. The charm of the old world and the capital's famous nightlife drew them in. It was also a magnet for Nazi war criminals.
Fugitives like Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, 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. Mengele remained a passionate Nazi. This was not a miserable life on the run. It was a thoroughly luxurious life.
In 1958, the man considered the Angel of Death, the most hunted man in the world, was listed in the Argentine telephone directory. Then in 1959, West Germany charged him. The Auschwitz-Birkenau doctor was wanted for mass murder and for 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. That was good, because he deserved to live in fear.
What Mengele did not know was that something more frightening than an extradition order was already in motion. Israeli agents were hunting Nazis in Argentina and had already captured one.
They stripped the man to make sure he had no weapon or razor blade to kill himself. They told him who they were and what they wanted. Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's "Final Solution," was in Israeli hands.
After Eichmann's abduction, Zvi Aharoni interrogated him: "Where is Mengele? Where is Mengele?" Eichmann refused to answer any question on the subject. He 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 met at the ABC cafe and had not gotten along well. Mengele viewed Eichmann as a lower-class officer living in a dreary suburb of Buenos Aires.
Mengele seemed more refined. He mixed with intellectuals. He belonged to the elite of the right-wing wing. Eichmann was just a working-class employee at a Mercedes plant.
Mossad investigators pressed Eichmann harder. Eventually he 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's. He was a real butcher.
Three days after Eichmann's abduction, agent Zvi Aharoni met Isser Harel. The Mossad chief had good news. Harel had found Mengele's address in Buenos Aires.
Harel was excited at the thought: "I can bring two. I can catch Mengele too." He wanted to launch a full commando raid on the address. He wanted to carry out a second operation while the first was not yet finished.
Aharoni thought this was wrong. Running two operations at the same time doubles the risk of failure. He advised against 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. Israelis walked around Buenos Aires during the period when Eichmann was held in the safe house. They watched a boarding house where they suspected Mengele was living.
It was genuinely dangerous. They all traveled on forged passports and in languages they did not speak well. If you were 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 the 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 made fairly open 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?" They hoped someone might say: "Oh, you mean Mengele? Yes, he lives there."
The risks lay in the German community of Buenos Aires. There was a German community of a quarter of a million people at the time. It was this large German community that drew Nazis like Eichmann and Mengele to Argentina.
The country's authoritarian regime under Juan Peron made them feel entirely at home. Everyone wonders why South America, and Argentina in particular, became the place Nazis came to after the war. The truth is that there were already links between the Nazis and Argentina during the war.
During the war, Peron 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.
The search came up empty. Mengele was not at home. The truth is they could not find him. That 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 stage, the Mossad was at a complete dead end, and Mengele had long since fled.
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 remained insistent that Mengele was someone they wanted to catch. He was a notorious figure.
Aharoni was ordered to organize an operation and try to find him. The veteran Mossad agent returned to South America to track the Nazi doctor. The idea was to go and try to find Mengele.
He posed 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 harder than the capture of 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 had been a former drinking companion of Mengele.
They told him: "We will send you back for trial for war crimes unless you give us something better." He said: "I will give you 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 Sao 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 on a farm about 50 kilometers from Sao 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 the farm and kept it under surveillance. Zvi Aharoni, the head of the Mossad team, said these men passed in front of 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. "I am sure we really saw Mengele," one said.
For the moment, the team's mission was surveillance only. They returned to Israel to plan their next step. Aharoni submitted his report to Mossad chief Isser Harel.
Harel did not believe their intelligence. Aharoni said as a field agent 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 man in the SS taken in 1938. I need more evidence.
Harel said the operation was cancelled. They had something else to do, and there were bigger problems at home. Egypt's 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 disbanded. 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 of him. He remained terrified that, like Adolf Eichmann, he would be abducted and hanged for his crimes.
He ended up on remote farms in the Brazilian wilderness. On one of these farms he built a watchtower and used it to monitor the farmland and kilometers around him, since it was a strategic location. He also kept a whole pack of dogs with him. He was a very paranoid and very anxious figure.
Israel may have given up the chase, 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, put Hans Sedlmeier under oath, and question him about whether he was supporting Mengele, whether the family was sending him money, or anything else.
Sedlmeier lied brazenly, saying he had never seen him, knew nothing about him, that he was probably 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 flee. He escaped 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 who anyone was. He fled with a suitcase full of his scientific results.
He was finally captured by the Americans in June 1945. What saved him was Mengele's vanity. When he joined the SS, one of the conditions was tattooing a blood type under the armpit, so that if soldiers were wounded and lost consciousness, medics would know the blood type for transfusions.
He was extremely precise, narcissistic, and apparently did not want to be tattooed. Mengele did not want his body marked, so he did not carry the distinctive mark of SS men or officers, which helped him greatly.
So in the last days of the war, there was a very simple test. Take off your shirts, raise your arms. If they found a tattoo, you were set aside for interrogation. If there was no tattoo and you had a plausible story, you were released. That is what happened to him.
Mengele traveled back to his homeland through 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 her: "Do you know what happened to your husband?" She replied: "I 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. He belonged to a very wealthy family. The Mengele family manufactured agricultural machinery in Germany. They ran the largest business in Gunzburg. Gunzburg 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 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 Gunzburg. Sedlmeier put him in touch with various people who could help him. If you had enough money, you could flee.
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 afterward, 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 abduction 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 on a farm in Brazil, there was a calf suffering from a hernia. Mengele took out his surgical instruments and performed a very precise and successful operation to remove the hernia.
The farm workers realized he was not just the Swiss farm manager he claimed to be. He was someone else entirely. Although the Mossad failed to catch him, Mengele's comfortable life was gone forever.
Mengele became increasingly isolated and depressed, and ended up in a very modest hut on the outskirts of Sao 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. It was fed in part 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. "We knew Mengele was living in Paraguay, which is why I posed before the Justice Ministry to get information about his fate," one investigator recalled.
Klaus Barbie tried to find him, but perhaps too late. Many remained completely convinced Mengele was in Paraguay throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, while in fact he had already left.
Everyone had an image of Mengele living in some castle in the forest with dogs barking at his feet, speedboats on the river, and followers trailing him everywhere. You had Mengele in popular culture, in the film "The Boys from Brazil," the white suit, the powerful Nazi hiding in the jungle, real material for legend.
"We thought Hollywood was making documentaries instead of fiction films," one observer said. It turned out he lived a rather miserable life. He had a terrible nervous habit of chewing the ends of his mustache. He chewed it 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 vast estate. He was a little old man suffering from 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, on an island in Greece, in the Paraguayan jungle with a very large factory.
Frankly, he was everywhere except on the surface of 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, locate, and arrest them.
This was a Nazi war criminal living in South America, in regular contact with his family and receiving money from them. All they had to do was watch the mail, but they never did. "I trusted the world's governments to do the right thing until I realized they were covering everything up," one investigator said.
In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Eva Kor led a small group of survivors back to the 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. "I would say it was perhaps the closest thing to making a person feel like an animal, like nothing, like a piece of garbage or a piece of meat," one survivor said.
"He came every morning dressed extremely elegantly. I remember his shiny black shoes. He wore a white coat, and he was handsome, and he wore a uniform. He was a figure of enormous influence."
"I was injected with something that made me very sick. He deliberately infected them to see how long the infection took in one and not the other. I got a very high fever. My arms and legs swelled to twice their size with huge red spots everywhere. Painful, very painful."
Mengele's twisted desire to create a superior Aryan race led to torture experiments on more than 3,000 twins. Only 200 survived.
"When Mengele entered with the other four doctors and looked at the fever chart and announced, laughing sarcastically: 'Too small, too small, too weak to work. What a pity. She is too small. She has only two weeks to live.' That much I understood in German."
Against all odds, Eva and her sister Miriam lived to witness the Red Army's liberation of Auschwitz. The rest of their family perished. "For me, it seemed like a nightmare. I thought somehow that if I closed my eyes and opened them again, this 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 the mock trial. Rewards of millions of dollars began to be 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 heavily 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 Frankfurt prosecutor obtained a search warrant for Sedlmeier's house. Sedlmeier had always been considered a possible link to Mengele in South America. The hunt 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 who could warn them and make sure 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 it out. 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 stash of envelopes. There they found the letters Mengele had sent. They found everything. All the letters, and all the addresses of his helpers.
Rumors had long circulated that Sedlmeier's wife had been fond of Josef Mengele early on. Mengele wrote letters to her directly 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 Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979.
Sedlmeier was arrested. A search of his address book linked Mengele to a residence in Sao Paulo. David Marwell, an investigator with the U.S. Department of Justice, was part of the international force now hunting Mengele.
After the documents were discovered at Sedlmeier's house, the Germans went directly to Sao Paulo. The Brazilian police were brought in. 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 the Sao Paulo address. A German family called the Bossert family. They were not treated gently when it came to 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, he is not Mengele. That is not true." They lied and denied it.
But Tuma quickly found Mengele's makeshift farm and a hiding place for his personal writings and photographs. The truth behind one of the most enduring mysteries of the era was finally revealed.
In the end, they admitted everything. The family acknowledged 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 in the ground 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 it. Because of his diabolical reputation, and because of the image of him as a cunning scientist who surpassed any form of natural justice, the whole thing seemed like a clever 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 the exhumed body was indeed the Nazi doctor's.
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 with a photo of Mengele's face, merging the two images together. It was very eerie, but very compelling evidence. "We spent a long time examining the bones discovered in this grave, and I am completely confident these bones belong to Josef Mengele."
But for incontrovertible proof, they had to wait for a new forensic technology to emerge. There was ample room for skeptics to believe he might still be alive. Perhaps the 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. They were ground down, and a tiny amount of DNA sufficient for analysis was collected. 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 the beach at Bertioga, about 20 or 30 miles south of Sao Paulo. They sat at their small beach house.
They persuaded him: "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: "All right, I will." The current is very strong in that area. On that hot summer day, Mengele swam a little farther from the beach than he should have. Within minutes it became completely clear 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 discussed whether they should cremate his body. They could not get anyone from the Mengele family to agree. They wanted to cremate the remains. If they had, no one today, including me, would believe he 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 it, and it was frustrating for the Mossad.
Isser Harel sometimes apologized for failing to bring Mengele to trial. "When I write my memoirs, I will not apologize. There is no sufficient punishment for a person like Mengele. Even if he had been caught and executed, the moment that ends at the end of a rope is not justice for what he did."
"But there is some justice in the fact that after Eichmann's abduction, he became a bitter, depressed, and truly unhappy man. That gives me great comfort."
"I think in many ways I pity people like Josef Mengele. Because they have a distorted perception of what is right and what is wrong. I do not think they escaped punishment without a price. I think they lived miserable lives full of guilt. And if you are looking for specks of justice in all this, he did not live the life many imagined. It was not a comfortable life."
Mengele died an old man. To hell with him.