Tracking Down Dr. Evil: The Search for Josef Mengele

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, 24 top ranking Nazi officials were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Nuremberg, Germany. The international tribunal acquitted three defendants, four received prison terms ranging between 10 and 20 years, three received life imprisonment, and 12 were sentenced to death by hanging (only 10 of which were actually carried out).

But the highest-ranking Nazis, such as Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler himself, committed suicide rather than face trial and execution. Out of the thousands of German SS soldiers, Gestapo officers, and concentration camp guards who actually committed the genocide against European Jewry, the vast majority escaped any form of justice. While many of them fled Europe with false identities, others remained in Germany, returned to their pre-war professions, and lived out the rest of their natural lives as civilians.

Amongst those who escaped, thousands made it to Argentina who provided safe passage and new identities to the Nazi fugitives. The most famous example is Adolf Eichmann who organized the systematic transportation of millions of Jews from towns and ghettos across occupied Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz and other death camps. He was captured by the Mossad in Buenos Aires in 1960. During the nine days that Eichmann was held captive in a safe house before being smuggled out of the country, the Mossad tried to extract information from him regarding the whereabouts of another high-ranking Nazi war criminal who was thought to be living in Buenos Aires at the time: Dr. Joseph Mengele.

The Angel of Death

Known as the angel of death, Mengele joined the Nazi party in 1937 and enlisted in a medical battalion of the SS in 1938. He was active on the eastern front, but as a result of an injury in 1942, he was transferred back to Berlin for reassignment. Mengele’s mentor, Von Verschuer, who earlier inspired his interest in eugenics, racial hygiene and human heredity, encouraged him to apply for medical service in the concentration camps because of the opportunities it would provide for scientific experimentation on human subjects. Mengele applied and received a position at Auschwitz early in 1943.

The Nazi doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele standing at a train window, ca. 1945.

While in Auschwitz, Mengele quickly rose to the position of chief physician. He took his work of healing inmates seriously (since slave labor was essential for the Nazi war machine) but instituted a rule that anyone not recovered after two weeks in the hospital would be sent to the gas chambers without mercy. Beyond his visits to the hospital barracks, Mengele’s pride and joy was his medical experiments.

He used his position as an opportunity to advance his pre-war hereditary research using human experimentation. He focused on Jews with physical abnormalities, dwarfs, people with two different eye colors, and had a special interest in twins. His goals were twofold; 1) to sift out undesirable traits from the German genome and 2) to discover and replicate a genetic code for twins in order to multiply a new generation of “racially superior” Germans.

In order to accomplish these so-called “scientific” objectives, Mengele and his team subjected his Jewish victims to amputation of healthy limbs, injecting them with diseases, and live operations to remove eyes, hearts, and stomachs without anesthesia. Most of his human subjects died and those who survived were often executed so that autopsies could be performed afterwards.

In order to recruit the right type of qualified individuals for his experiments, Mengele was known for enthusiastically participating in the selection process more than any other Auschwitz official. Every day, at least one train convoy (sometimes more) arrived at the camp carrying between 1000-2000 people, mostly Jews, after travelling for days, sometimes weeks, from all over Europe. Designated SS doctors would need to sift through the crowd. Anyone fit for labor, usually healthy able-bodied men and women without children, would be sent to the left while children, pregnant women, women with babies, the elderly, sick, and weak would be sent to the right, directly to the gas chambers. It was at this time that horrible screams could be heard as family members were forcibly separated from one another.

Eighty percent were sent to the gas chambers, 20% were designated for forced labor, and only a handful from each transport were chosen by Mengele for medical experimentations. The “angel of death” took great pride in this work and even volunteered for this role when not officially on duty.

Escape to Argentina

After escaping to Argentina, Mengele continued to practice medicine but without a license, mostly conducting abortions on young women and teenagers. After one of his female clients died during a procedure, Mengele was temporarily jailed, but then released without charge. Fearing further investigation into his identity might uncover his wartime past, Mengele fled Argentina in 1959 for Paraguay, just one year before the Mossad apprehended Eichmann.

Isser Harel

At the time of Eichmann’s capture, the Mossad had incorrect information that Mengele was still in Buenos Aires. Isser Harel, the agency’s director, originally wanted to bring both Eichmann and Mengele to Israel together on the same plane. While the Mossad agents in Buenos Aires did try to extract some clues about Mengele’s current whereabouts during Eichmann’s interrogation, more investigation would have been needed to verify precise details. Leaving the safe house and conducting further surveillance activities would have likely endangered their primary mission, which was to clandestinely smuggle Eichmann out of Argentina and have him stand trial in Tel Aviv. The Mengele aspect of the case was therefore dropped.

Stop Chasing Ghosts

Two years later, Wilhelm Sassen, a former Nazi and acquaintance of Mengele, tipped off the Mossad that Mengele had found refuge in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Israeli spy agency immediately recruited Zvi Aharoni, the lead investigator who apprehended and interrogated Eichmann just two years earlier.

Assembling a new team in Sao Paulo, Aharoni was surveying a dirt road near a farm where Mengele was said to have been hiding on a hot afternoon in July 1962. All of a sudden, a group of men passed by, one of whom looked exactly like the Nazi fugitive. Analyzing his facial features, height, age, and dress, everything matched perfectly with Mengele’s description. In a 1999 interview, Aharoni said after his identification, he was confident that the agency would soon give its approval to apprehend Mengele in the same way it did Eichmann two years earlier.

But on the same day that this was reported to Jerusalem, the spy agency received urgent information that former Nazi scientists were being recruited by the Egyptians to build an advanced missile system. As a result, the project came to a sudden halt. Isser Harel, the Mossad director, mobilized the entire agency to deal with what seemed to be an urgent crisis at the time.

Amit sent out a famous memo to Mossad agents around the world saying “stop chasing after ghosts from the past.”

A few months later, Harel was replaced by Meir Amit, who went even further, diverting all resources and attention away from Nazi hunting operations to immediate security threats against the State of Israel. He sent out a famous memo to Mossad agents around the world saying “stop chasing after ghosts from the past.” Instead, Amit, with the support of Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, focused on building a new spy network in Arab countries in the years leading up to the Six Day War. As a result of the shifting geopolitical situation in Israel combined with limited resources, Mengele got away again.

Over the years, continuous security threats such as cross border Palestinian terrorism, the Munich massacre, the Yom Kippur War, and the hostage crisis in Entebbe, meant that capturing Nazi war criminals who posed no immediate danger to Israel was at the bottom of the priority list. That all changed in 1977 when Menachem Begin became Israel’s Prime Minister.

The Hunt Is Back On

Unlike previous Israeli prime ministers, Begin personally survived the Nazi invasion of Poland and most of his immediate family (including his parents) were murdered in the Holocaust. He therefore insisted that seeking out Nazi war criminals once again become a top priority for the State of Israel. In a private meeting with Yitzchak Hofi, the director of the Mossad in the late 1970s, Begin’s plan to hunt down every last Nazi was dismissed unfeasible due to limited resources and more pressing needs, but he did concede to one last target…Mengele.

Despite the agreement, it took five years to compile a plan of action. In 1982, the Mossad sent agents back to Sao Paulo assuming Mengele would still be in the area. The plan was to extract the information from Hans Ulrich Rudel who was one of the most successful ground-attack pilots in the German air force during World War II. Rudel was the one who assisted Mengele in crossing the border from Paraguay into Brazil back in 1960. The plan was to kidnap his 12-year-old son and threaten his life unless they would receive information, which would lead the team to Mengele. While the ethics of the plan was being contemplated, Rudel died of natural causes.

Rolf Mengele with his father

Another plan was to go after Mengele’s son Rolf who was living in West Berlin at the time. Both Rolf and Josef Mengele shared a common birthday. The Mossad assumed that the two would call each other on that day and so they installed secret recording equipment on Rolf’s home and office phones. When the day came, nothing was heard but silence. At the time, they didn’t understand why. The reason later became apparent: Mengele had died three years earlier while visiting friends in the coastal resort town of Bertiogo, Brazil. Having a stroke while swimming in the pool, Mengele drowned to death. His death and burial were kept a secret in order to protect those who were sheltering him.

It was only in 1985 that worldwide public interest about bringing Mengele to justice resurfaced. A mock trial in Jerusalem brought in dozens of testimonies from people of whom Mengele conducted experiments on. Subsequently, the governments of Israel, West Germany, and the United States launched a joint investigation to discover Mengele’s current whereabouts. West German police raided the house of a lifelong friend of Mengele, Hans Sedlmeier, and found a letter correspondence between the two of them that seemed to end in 1979. A final letter from the Bosserts, German ex-patriots living in Brazil, informed Sedlmeier of Mengele’s death. German authorities passed the information to the Brazilian government who sent local police to interrogate the Bosserts until they ultimately revealed the location of Mengele’s grave. On June 6, 1985 (exactly 41 years after Allied forces confronted Nazi Germany in the world’s largest seaborne invasion in history), the remains of Josef Mengele, the angel of death, was finally exhumed.

In 1992, advances in forensic DNA testing confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that the body was indeed that of Mengele. His skeleton was acquired by the University of Sao Paulo’s medical school where its various parts and bones continue to be used as educational aids during forensic medical courses. In a strange twist of fate, the man who conducted sadistic medical experiments on humans would spend perpetuity being a medical experiment himself. While Mengele may have escaped legal justice during his lifetime, at least we can be certain that he has finally come to rest in pieces.