Josef Mengele (fugitive)

Case background and investigation

Josef Mengele was a German SS officer and physician who served at the Auschwitz camp complex in occupied Poland. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he was assigned to Auschwitz on May 30, 1943, and in November 1943 became chief camp physician of Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Historical accounts describe him taking part in the selection of arriving prisoners and carrying out medical experiments on inmates, including studies of twins. He left the camp in January 1945 as Soviet forces approached.

After the war Mengele avoided prosecution. The museum's account states that he worked under a false name as a farmhand near Rosenheim in Bavaria until 1949, and that in July 1949 he emigrated to Argentina under an assumed identity with financial help from his family. He later obtained Argentine citizenship under the name José Mengele. A court in Freiburg, West Germany, issued a warrant for his arrest in 1959, and he moved to Paraguay that year after learning that prosecutors were looking for him. Around 1960 he relocated to Brazil and settled in the São Paulo area, where he lived under other names.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library's account, Mengele's health declined during the 1970s and he suffered a stroke in 1976. On February 7, 1979, while visiting friends at the coastal resort of Bertioga, he had another stroke while swimming and drowned. He was 67. He was buried in Embu das Artes under the name Wolfgang Gerhard, an identity he had been using for several years. His death was not made public, and reported sightings of him continued in various countries for years afterward.

In 1985 the governments of West Germany, Israel and the United States began a coordinated effort to find him. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, West German police searched the home of Hans Sedlmeier, a family friend and employee of the Mengele family firm in Günzburg, on May 31, 1985, and found correspondence that included a letter reporting Mengele's death. Brazilian police then questioned the couple who had hosted him in Bertioga, who disclosed the location of the grave. The remains were exhumed on June 6, 1985.

An international group of forensic specialists examined the skeleton and concluded with a high degree of probability that it was Mengele's. His son, Rolf Mengele, issued a statement days after the exhumation saying the body was his father's and that the family had kept the death secret. Some doubts were voiced publicly until DNA analysis in 1992 confirmed the identification.

Mengele was never arrested or tried. The museum notes that he evaded capture for 34 years. The case is recorded here as resolved because the fugitive's fate and identity were established after his death, not because any court ruled on his conduct.