Tracking down the Angel of Death
"I have a compact with the dead. But if I could get this man, my soul would finally be at peace." So says Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter of Vienna. Since his liberation from Mauthausen death camp in 1945, Wiesenthal, now 68, has dedicated his life to avenging the victims of Hitler's Holocaust by tracking down more than 1,100 of their murderers. Yet the most sadistic Nazi war criminal of all has eluded his grasp.
For more than 20 years, Wiesenthal has been stalking Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS physician, known as the Angel of Death, who sent millions to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and killed thousands more in mad genetic experiments. Wiesenthal has long suspected—as have others—that Mengele was hiding in Paraguay. Despite firm denials from the Asunción government, Wiesenthal believes that Mengele is now living in the village of San Antonio, in a remote area southeast of the Paraguayan capital. But the evil physician of Auschwitz, frustratingly, remains beyond his reach.
To 2.5 million or more Jews who perished at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, Mengele personified the insane, systematic brutality of Hitler's Third Reich.* As the shocked, uprooted prisoners arrived by rail at Auschwitz, Mengele, always impeccably turned out in a dress SS uniform, was the first person they saw. Placing himself between the rows of incoming prisoners, he decided their fate; a flick of a thin metal rod, held by a white-gloved hand, to the left meant immediate death in the gas ovens; to the right meant life—but what a life. Most of the prisoners would survive for only a few more weeks, doing hard labor on starvation rations or serving as guinea pigs in his ghoulish experiments. He tried, for example, to turn the eyes of children blue by painfully injecting them with dye.
As the Soviet armies neared Auschwitz in late 1944, Mengele disappeared. His crimes were prominently mentioned at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Meanwhile, Mengele was living comfortably—under his own name —in the Bavarian town of Günzberg, where his family owned (and still owns) the town's only industry, a farm-equipment plant. In 1949 West German legal authorities were tipped about Mengele's whereabouts. He got away, using the secret escape routes established by ODESSA (an acronym in German for the Organization of Former Members of the SS).
Through his informer network—composed of former concentration camp inmates—Wiesenthal learned that Mengele had settled in Argentina and alerted the Israelis and West Germans. The West Germans requested Mengele's extradition, but the Argentines refused. Dispensing with legal niceties, the Israelis planned to kidnap him at the same time that they seized SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. But the doctor got away. Under questioning in Israel, Eichmann admitted that he had received money from Mengele, whose family is wealthy.
Although Paraguayan authorities deny it, Wiesenthal believes that Mengele entered Paraguay in May 1959. Thanks to German settlers there, Mengele was promptly granted citizenship and given naturalization card No. 809.