3 – Josef Mengele
If Alois Brunner lasted the longest of any of the major Nazi fugitives, Josef Mengele might well be known as the most notorious. His reputation for depravity, cruelty and outright disregard for his victims was his calling card: it was not for no reason that he was known as the Todesengel, the Angel of Death. Josef Mengele gained this moniker because of the experiments that he carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz, centreing specifically on identical twins, dwarves, people with two different eye colours and disabled people.
Mengele’s background was in anthropology and genetics, so when the virulently racist and supremacist Nazi Party came to power, he thrived. He joined in 1937 and graduated to the SS in 1938, taking a medical role befitting his training as a doctor. He was wounded in 1942 while fighting in the Soviet Union and, unable to continue at the front lines, moved back to Germany. Mengele applied for a transfer to concentration camps with the express desire of performing human experimentations and in 1943, he got his wish.
Mengele’s first posting at Auschwitz was to the Zigeunerfamilienlager, the Gypsy Families Camp. Romani and Sinti people also fell into the “enemies of the race-based state” alongside Jews, homosexuals, black people and others that had been declared under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and an estimated 200-500,000 would die during the Nazi period. Mengele would take a hands on role in his job, selecting subjects personally from the masses that arrived at the camp, separating those he deemed most interesting. He was known to whistle and smile as he performed this gruesome task. He also was one of the doctors assigned with handling the Zyklon B that would go to the gas chambers.
His experiments on twins included deliberately infecting one twin with a virus such as typhoid and taking blood from one twin and injecting it into the other. Should one die, the other was always killed to compare their autopsies. One eyewitness later claimed that he stitched two Romani children together with the goal of creating conjoined twins. Despite his macabre experiments, Mengele was known to be pleasant to children, having them call him “Uncle Mengele” – before he sent them to their deaths. As the Soviets approached Auschwitz, hordes of documents were burned by panicked SS troops.
After the war, Mengele was, like Brunner, incredibly lucky. He was captured by the Americans but his name was not on any of their most wanted lists. He also lacked the identifying SS tattoo and was released, even heading back into the Soviet zone to Auschwitz, where he tried to collect the records that he had kept. Fearing identification, he used an established ratline from Genoa to reach South America, eventually settling in Buenos Aires. He would live legitimately there, even gaining a West German passport under his real name and traveling to Europe in 1956.
He was known to the Allies, but none suspected that he was still alive, let alone living under his real name. It took until 1959 for Simon Wiesenthal, the most celebrated Nazi hunter, to discover his location. By the time an extradition order with Argentina was finalized, Mengele had fled to Paraguay. He later move on to Brazil. The Mossad agents involved in the arrest of Eichmann knew where he was, but could not square it diplomatically to capture him. Josef Mengele died in 1976, free and unrepentant for his crimes, a Nazi to the last.