Documents revealing how infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’, led an open post-war life in Argentina have been found in a massive trove of evidence released and declassified earlier this year by President Javier Milei.
Mengele was famous for his role as commandant at Auschwitz, where he conducted brutal medical experiments on prisoners, especially twins, under the guise of scientific research. Eyewitnesses – including some from the declassified Argentine files – describe his extremely gruesome, sadistic and cold-blooded nature, including torturing and testing the twins in front of each other after sending their parents to the gas chambers.
An entire binder is devoted exclusively to following in the footsteps of the infamous Auschwitz doctor and SS commander Mengele.
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Declassified archives show that Argentina clearly understood in the mid-to-late 1950s who Mengele was and that he was in fact present in the country. Authorities knew he entered the country in 1949 using an Italian passport issued under the name Helmut Gregor, which he used as the basis for obtaining an official immigrant identity card in 1950.
Archival material from Argentina sheds light on the networks that harbored Mengele. Although highly fragmented and multilingual – with documents in Spanish, German, Portuguese and English – the archive provides a snapshot of how authorities tracked, archived, mishandled and often failed to act on information they had about one of the world’s most wanted war criminals.
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The collection contains photographs, intelligence notes, immigration records, surveillance reports and correspondence, reflecting decades of investigation and efforts to understand the network that helped him move to Argentina, Paraguay and eventually Brazil. The presence of documents in German indicates the incorporation of foreign information or material seized from émigré communities; The Portuguese elements suggest cross-border coordination with Brazilian sources; Notes in English indicate communication with US or UK agencies.
The files contain an undated press clipping of a Polish-born Argentinian citizen, José Furmanski, who was a victim of Mengele, showing that Argentine intelligence was aware of the allegations against the Nazi murderer.
“I knew Mengele. I knew him well. I saw him many times in the Auschwitz camp, in his SS colonel’s uniform and, on top of that, the doctor’s white coat,” says Furmanski in the interview.
The interview goes on to explain that Furmanski, who had a twin, he gave his living testimony of the experiences passed upon them. The report labeled Mengele a pathological sadist.
“He gathered twins of all ages in the camp and subjected them to experiments that always ended in death. Between children, old people and women … what horrors. I saw him separate a mother from her daughter and send one to certain death. We will never forget,” said Furmanski.
Dozens of scanned images without embedded text and internal labeling of hundreds of pages signal a systematic effort by Argentine intelligence to compile a complete personal file on Mengele, including copies of foreign passports under pseudonyms, photographs of suspected associates, handwritten operational notes, immigration registers or border crossing logs, international investigative summaries and international correspondence prepared between political offices and senior Argentine investigators.
The files corroborate Argentina’s ambiguous post-war position to cooperate with Western democracies, its highly divided bureaucracy, its lack of will or understanding of the serious nature of the crimes committed by former Nazis on its soil, and the reluctance of higher-ranking authorities to confront how deeply embedded Nazi fugitives were in the country’s social and political landscape.
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In 1956, trying to expand his business partnership, he obtained a legalized copy of his original birth certificate from the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires, requested that his identity document be judicially amended to reflect his real biographical data, and – unreal – began using his original legal name, a sign of how safe he felt in Argentina.
Argentine agencies by this time not only knew who he was, where he lived and the fact that he had married his brother’s widow and was raising their son, but they also had full details of his business interests in the country. Reports in the files cite a possible visit by Mengele’s father to Argentina to help him financially by investing in a medical laboratory business in Buenos Aires.
This 1956 file photo shows World War II war criminal Josef Mengele. Archaeologists in Berlin have unearthed a large number of human bones from a site near where Nazi scientists conducted research on the body parts of death camp victims sent by the sadistic SS doctor Mengele.
The open nature of his life in the country led West Germany to issue an arrest warrant and request his extradition in 1959, which was rejected without further action by a local judge, citing that the request was unofficially based on Mengele’s “political persecution”, which prevented the case from being taken up.
Despite all the hard evidence accumulated, it is clear that information was fragmented between various different agencies that did not fully communicate with each other. There was also a lack of direct communication with the country’s presidency and executive. This led to the case being decided in a disconnected manner and often too late – or after press leaks had already alerted Mengele to possible concern by the authorities – to achieve fruitful results. Arrest warrants, searches and surveillance requests were often executed or decided after the fact, leading to dead ends.
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After the 1959 extradition request and with increased international pressure on Argentina, Mengele fled the country to Paraguay, while his wife and stepson moved to Switzerland.
This is evident from a memo from the Federal Directorate of Coordination marked top secret and confidential, which details a search of Mengele and his business interests on July 12, 1960 – a time when Mengele had already left Argentina for Paraguay.
“I bring to the attention of the chief that from the investigations carried out in order to fulfill the reference OB, it appears that JOSÉ MENGELE, served as a partner of the medical laboratories “FADRO-FARM” located at 3573 Drysdale street, in Carapachay, Vicente López district, and with offices, since July of this year, the medical subject, on Cramer street, was registered as 860 Capitală. entered the firm on July 10, 1958, as a contributing partner with a capital of 10,000 pesos and withdrew from the partnership in April 1959,” the report states.
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“Since entering Argentina, the subject lived on the property of the Mengeles family, using the name Dr. GREGOR. […]the subject manifested that he arrived in Argentina using a different name and distinct from his profession […]. Thus, it appears that, while retaining his real name, the subject belonged to the SS Society […] during which he proved nervous after declaring that during the war he had acted as a doctor in the German SS in Czechoslovakia, where the Red Cross labeled him a “war criminal”. He had studied anthropology and was known to the Justice of the Nuremberg Courts, especially in the study of skulls and bones, but that union was considered a crime in National Socialist Germany,” the report says about Mengele, when, in the course of changing his name from his fake pseudonym to his real identity, the Nazi “explained himself”, not using his reasons for the original identity.
Argentina’s intelligence community continued to track Mengele, mostly through press reports and contacts with foreign agencies. Mengele acquired Paraguayan citizenship and was protected by the government of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose family originated in the same Bavarian town as him.
Archives reveal that Mengele smuggled himself into Brazil at some point in 1960 through the tri-border area near the state of Paraná. He was helped by German Brazilian farmers who were Nazi sympathizers and provided several rural safe houses for several years.
Although the Argentine files are thin on detail and rely heavily on media clippings at this point, Argentina knew that Mengele had adopted the pseudonym Peter Hochbichler, although he sometimes also used a Portuguese version of his real name – José Mengele. In the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he began living in properties belonging to the German Bossert and Stammer families in the state of São Paulo, Brazil.
A police officer stands in front of a cache of Nazi artifacts discovered in 2017 during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 2, 2019.
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Mengele died in 1979 when he suffered a stroke while swimming in the sea in the coastal town of Bertioga. He was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhardt, but several clues led to his body being exhumed and his remains identified by Brazilian authorities in 1985. DNA tests further confirmed the findings in 1992.
Source of the original article: How Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele avoided capture in Latin America, revealed in declassified files