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When Soviet troops rolled into Auschwitz in January 1945 and liberated the camp's remaining prisoners, they found no trace of the elusive doctor. By the following year, he is said to have settled in Freiburg. Indeed, he seemed to have already developed Houdini-esque gifts as an escape artist. Last January, former U.S. Army Private Walter Kempthorne told the Wiesenthal Center that in July 1945, he ran across a red-faced, sweating German in the custody of U.S. Army soldiers at a camp near the German town of Trier. Why, Kempthorne asked, was the man being put through such strenuous exertions? "We're getting him in shape to be hung," replied one of the guards. "This here is Mengele, the bastard that sterilized 3,000 women in Auschwitz."
Somehow Mengele managed to slither out of the noose. Even more astonishing, he also apparently slipped out of the hands of U.S. Army counterintelligence agents two years later. Last November the Wiesenthal Center obtained from the U.S. Army a previously confidential report revealing that Mengele had been briefly in the custody of U.S. operatives in Vienna. After being grilled on the abduction of 20 Jewish children from Auschwitz, Mengele was apparently let go, for reasons still unknown.
By 1949, however, the doctor was beginning to feel the pressure of his past. Spotted that year by an Auschwitz survivor, he left Freiburg, making his way to Italy and from there through Spain to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he was assured of a warm reception: President Juan Domingo Peron was known to be tolerant of former Nazis and had promised to protect them.
Soon after, according to published reports, Mengele was living in the well- to-do Buenos Aires suburb of Olivos and practicing medicine with impunity, though without a license. On one occasion, it is said, a patient died while Mengele was performing an abortion on her, and he found himself in jail. Two hours later a friend posted bail, and the "Angel of Death" was free once again. In the late '50s, after Peron had been exiled and the West German government had issued a request for Mengele's extradition, the doctor moved again, this time to Paraguay.
Within a month he had persuaded two prominent members of the influential local German community to swear, falsely, that he had resided in the country for five years and to sponsor him for citizenship. On Nov. 27, 1959, he was issued nationality card No. 293348 and took up residence in Paraguay under the name Jose Mengele. For the most part, he stayed in the lush farm country around Hohenau, near the Brazilian border, where, according to Alejandro von Eckstein, one of the men who sponsored him for citizenship, he remained "very reserved and very melancholy."
MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence agency, had in the meantime been stepping up its pursuit of Nazis scattered across South America. In 1960, in a raid on a house in Buenos Aires, Israeli commandos seized Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of Hitler's "final solution," and took him to Jerusalem to be tried -- and hanged. During the same campaign the Israelis descended on a house in the Vicente Lopez area of the Argentine capital where they were sure they would catch Mengele. They arrived to find that the doctor had vanished.