Documents revealing how the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Menge, known as the “Angel of Death,” led an open post-war life in Argentina were found in a large trove of declassified evidence released by President Xavier Maille earlier this year.
Mengele was infamous for his role as a commander at Auschwitz, where he conducted cruel medical experiments on prisoners, especially twins, under the guise of scientific research. Eyewitnesses – including some in declassified Argentine files – describe his extremely cold and vicious, sadistic nature, including torturing and testing the twins in front of each other after sending them to the gas chambers.
An entire binder is devoted exclusively to following in the footsteps of the infamous Auschwitz doctor and SS commander Mengele.
Argentina reveals secret Wwii files on Hitler’s henchmen who escaped before, after the war
Declassified records show that Argentina clearly understood who Mengele was in the mid-1950s and that he was actually present in the country. Authorities learned that he entered the country in 1949 using an Italian passport under the name Helmut Gregor, which he used as the basis for obtaining an official immigrant ID card in the 1950s.
Argentinian archival material sheds light on the networks that sheltered Mengele. Although highly fragmented and multilingual – including documents in Spanish, German, Portuguese and English – the archive provides a snapshot of how authorities tracked, archived, mismanaged and often took no action on information they had about one of the world’s most wanted war criminals.
Read on the Fox News app
The collection contains photographs, intelligence notes, immigration records, surveillance reports and correspondence, reflecting decades of research and efforts to understand the network that helped move him to Argentina, Paraguay and eventually Brazil. The presence of German-language documents indicates that they contain material recovered from foreign intelligence or immigrant communities; Portuguese elements suggest cross-border coordination with Brazilian sources; English notes indicate communications with US or British agencies.
The files include an unsolicited press clipping showing Argentinian intelligence aware of charges against the Nazi criminal, Jose Furmanski, a Polish-born citizen who was Mengele’s victim.
“I met Mengele. I knew him very well. I saw him in the Auschwitz camp many times in the SS colonel’s uniform and, on top of that, the white doctor’s coat,” Furmansky said in the interview.
The interview goes on to explain that Furmanski, who had a twin, They gave clear testimony of the experiences they had. 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. Among children, the elderly and women…what a horror. I saw him separate a mother from her daughter and send one to certain death. We will never forget,” Furmansky said.
Dozens of scanned images without embedded text and hundreds of pages of internal labeling indicate a systematic effort by Argentine intelligence to compile Mengele’s complete personal file, including copies of foreign passports under pseudonyms, photographs of suspected collaborators, handwritten operational notes, immigration ledgers or superlogs and supermarkets prepared for political investors. Correspondence between Argentine officials and international investigators.
The files confirm Argentina’s ambiguous postwar position on cooperation with Western democracies, a highly disorganized bureaucracy, a lack of will or understanding regarding the serious nature of crimes committed by former Nazis in their territory, and a reluctance by high-ranking officials to confront how deeply embedded the Nazi fugitives and political geography were.
101-year-old Kristallnacht survivor warns current era ‘equivalent to 1938’ on anniversary of Nazi riots
In 1956, trying to expand his business partnership, he obtained a valid copy of his original birth certificate from the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires, requested that his identity card be judicially amended to reflect his true biographical data and – in effect – began using his original legal name, a sign of how safe he felt in Argentina.
At this point the Argentine agencies not only knew who he was, where he lived, and the fact that he married his brother’s widow and was raising their son, but 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 financially, investing in a medical laboratory business in Buenos Aires.
This file photo from 1956 shows WWII war criminal Josef Mengele. Archaeologists in Berlin have unearthed a large number of human bones from a site near where Nazi scientists researched the body parts of death camp victims sent by the sadistic SS doctor Mengele.
The apparent nature of his life in the country prompted West Germany to issue an arrest warrant and request his extradition in 1959, a request that was informally denied without action by a local judge, who said it was based on “political persecution” of Mengele, who did not allow the case to be taken.
Despite all the hard evidence gathered, it is clear that information was fragmented between different agencies that did not fully communicate with each other. There was also a lack of direct communication with the country’s president and executive branches. This led to proceedings to decide the case in a disjointed manner, and often too late – or after press leaks had already alerted Menzel to potential concerns by the authorities – to produce fruitful results. Arrest warrants, searches, and surveillance requests are often made or decided after the fact, resulting in death.
Daughter of Nazi officer charged after stealing WWII painting from real estate listing
After a 1959 extradition request and mounting international pressure on Argentina, Menge left the country for Paraguay, while his wife and stepson went to Switzerland.
This is evident from a memo from the Federal Coordination Directorate that was marked as strictly confidential and confidential that Mengele and his business interests were searched on July 12, 1960 — Mengele had already left Argentina for Paraguay.
“I bring to the knowledge of the chief that from the research carried out to complete the referenced OB, it follows that José Mengele served as a partner of the medical laboratory ‘Fadro-Farm’ located at Drysdale 3573 Street in the district of Carapache, Vicente López, and has offices at St. 10,000 pesos was entered into the capital as a contributing partner, and was withdrawn from the partnership in April of 1959,” the report said.
Sign up for the Antisemitism Exposed newsletter
“Since entering Argentina, the subject has lived at Mengele’s property using the name Dr. Gregor. […]The subject revealed that he had arrived in Argentina using a name different from his profession. […]. Thus, it appears that, while retaining his real name, the subject belonged to the SS society […] At the time he demonstrated nervousness, he said that during the war he worked as a medic with the German SS in Czechoslovakia, where the Red Cross labeled him a ‘war criminal’. “He had studied anthropology and was known for justice at the Nuremberg tribunals, especially with regard to the study of skulls and bones, but that association was considered a crime in National Socialist Germany,” the report says of Mengele, as the Nazis “clarified” when changing his name from his fake nickname to his real identity, not using his originality.
Argentina’s intelligence community continued to follow Mengele, mostly through press reports and contacts with foreign agencies. Mengele received Paraguayan citizenship and was protected by the government of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose family, like his, originated in the Bavarian city.
Records reveal that Menge secretly entered Brazil at some point in the 1960s through the tri-border region near the state of Paraná. He was helped by German Brazilian farmers who were Nazi sympathizers and provided several rural safehouses for many years.
Although Argentina’s files are thin on details and rely heavily on media clippings at this point, Argentina knew that Mengele adopted the pseudonym Peter Hochbichler, although he sometimes used the Portuguese version of his real name – José Mengele. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he lived on property belonging to the German Bossert and Stammer families in São Paulo state, Brazil.
A police officer stands in front of a cache of Nazi artifacts found in 2017 during a press conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 2, 2019.
Click here to download the Fox News app
In 1979, Mengele died of a stroke while swimming in the sea in the coastal town of Bertioga. He was buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhardt, but due to several leads his body was exhumed and his remains were positively identified by Brazilian authorities in 1985. DNA testing further confirmed the findings in 1992.
Original article source: How Nazi war criminal Josef Menge evaded capture in Latin America, declassified files reveal
