Argentina releases declassified Nazi documents showing Mengele lived openly

Multiple documents show some of the worst Nazi war criminals They were released and declassified earlier this year by Argentine President Javier Miley. The documents show how one of the Nazi leaders, nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, Josef Mengele, lived an open life in Argentina and escaped arrest due to a lack of coordinated action.

Mengele was a Nazi doctor best known for his role as a commandant at Auschwitz, where he conducted brutal medical experiments on prisoners, especially twins, under the guise of scientific research. Eyewitnesses – including some in the declassified Argentine files – describe his cold and horrific sadistic nature, including torturing and testing the twins in front of each other after sending their parents to the gas chambers.

An entire volume is devoted exclusively to following in the footsteps of the notorious 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 actually present in the country. Authorities learned that he entered the country in 1949 using an Italian passport issued in the name of Helmut Gregor, which he used as the basis for obtaining an official immigrant ID card in 1950.

Argentine archival materials It sheds light on the networks that protected Mengele. Although the archive is fragmented and multilingual—featuring documents in Spanish, German, Portuguese, and English—it provides a snapshot of how authorities tracked, archived, mishandled, and often took no action regarding the information they had about one of the world’s most wanted war criminals.

The collection contains photographs, intelligence memos, immigration records, surveillance reports, and correspondence, reflecting decades of investigation and efforts to understand the network that helped him move through Argentina, Paraguay, and ultimately Brazil. The presence of German-language documents indicates the presence of foreign intelligence or materials seized from immigrant communities; Portuguese elements indicate cross-border coordination with Brazilian sources; Notes in English indicate communication with American or British agencies.

The files contain an undated newspaper clipping of Polish-born Argentine citizen, José Furmanski, who was Mengele’s victim, showing that Argentine intelligence was aware of the accusations against the Nazi criminal.

“I met Mengele. I knew him well. I saw him several times at Auschwitz, dressed as an SS colonel, with a white doctor’s coat over him,” Furmansky says in the interview.

An Argentine file on Josef Mengele (left) and a photo taken by a police photographer in 1956 in Buenos Aires of Mengele’s Argentine identity document. (General Archive of the Government of Argentina/World History Archive/Global Image Collection via Getty Images)

The interview goes on to explain that Furmansky, Who had twins, He gave his live testimony about the experiments conducted on them. The report described Mengele as a pathological sadist.

“He gathered twins of all ages in the camp and subjected them to experiments that always ended in death,” Furmansky said. “Among children, old people, women… What horrors. I saw him separate a mother from her daughter and send one to certain death. We will never forget.”

Dozens of scanned images without embedded text and internal labeling of hundreds of pages indicate a systematic effort by Argentine intelligence to compile a complete dossier. Mengele’s profile, incl Copies of foreign passports with assumed names, photographs of suspected accomplices, handwritten operational notes, immigration books or border crossing records, summaries of investigations prepared for political superiors, and correspondence between Argentine officers and international investigators.

The files underscore Argentina’s ambiguous post-war position of cooperation with Western democracies, its highly disjointed bureaucracy, its lack of will or understanding regarding the serious nature of the crimes committed by former Nazis on its territory, and the reluctance of authorities higher up in the hierarchy to confront how deeply embedded Nazi fugitives were in the country’s social and political landscape.

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In 1956, in an attempt to expand his business partnership, he obtained a legal 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 began—surrealistically—to use 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 had married his brother’s widow and was raising their son, but they also had full details regarding his business interests in the country. Reports in the files indicate a possible visit by Mengele’s father to Argentina to help him financially, and to invest in a medical laboratory business in Buenos Aires.

This 1956 archive photo shows World War II war criminal Josef Mengele. Archaeologists in Berlin have unearthed a large number of human bones from a site close to where Nazi scientists researched body parts of death camp victims sent to them by the sadistic SS doctor Mengele. (AP photo, file)

The public nature of his life in the country prompted West Germany to issue an arrest warrant and request his extradition in 1959, which a local judge rejected without further action, stating that the request was informally based on Mengele’s “political persecution”, which did not allow the case to proceed.

Despite all the strong evidence accumulating, it is clear that information was fragmented among 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 authorities. This led to the case being decided in a detached manner, often too late – or after press leaks had already alerted Mengele to potential concerns by the authorities – to achieve fruitful results. Arrest and search warrants and surveillance requests are often executed or decided upon after the fact, leading to dead ends.

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Josef Mengele is shown with two other SS officers socializing on the grounds of an SS retreat outside Auschwitz, in Sollahute, in 1944. From left to right are: Richard Baer (commander of Auschwitz), Dr. Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess (former commandant of Auschwitz) (World History Archive/World Image Collection via Getty Images)

After the extradition request in 1959, however Increasing international pressure In Argentina, Mengele fled the country to Paraguay, while his wife and stepson moved to Switzerland.

This is evident from a memorandum from the Federal Coordination Directorate classified as strictly confidential detailing the search for Mengele and his business interests dated 12 July 1960 – the point at which Mengele had already left Argentina for Paraguay.

“The President informed that from the investigations carried out in order to fulfill the indicated OB, it follows that José Menguel, worked as a partner in the medical laboratories “FADRO-FARM” located at 3573 Drysdale Street, in Carapachay, Vicente López District, and with offices, since July of this year, at Cramer 860 Street, Capital. The subject, listed as a doctor, was listed in the company The report stated: “On July 10 1958, as a contributing partner with a capital of 10,000 pesos, and withdrew from the partnership in April 1959.”

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“Since entering Argentina, the subject has been residing on the property of the Menglis family, using the name Dr. Gregor […]The subject showed that he arrived in Argentina using a name different and distinct from his profession […]. Thus, while retaining his real name, the person appears to belong to the SS […] During which he showed his nervousness, after mentioning that during the war he worked as a doctor in the German SS, in Czechoslovakia, where the Red Cross described him as a “war criminal.” “He studied anthropology and was well known to the justices at the Nuremberg courts, especially in connection with the study of skulls and bones, but this union was considered a crime in National Socialist Germany,” the report said of Mengele when the Nazi, while changing his name from his false pseudonym to his real identity, “explained” his motives for not using his real identity in the first place.

The Argentine intelligence community continued to follow Mengele mostly through press reports and contacts with foreign agencies. Mengele obtained Paraguayan citizenship and was protected by the government of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose family grew up in the same Bavarian city as them.

Archives reveal that Mengele secretly entered Brazil sometime in 1960 through the tri-border area near Paraná state. He was helped by German Brazilian farmers who were sympathetic to the Nazis and provided him with many rural safe havens for several years.

Although the Argentine files are sparse in detail and rely largely on media clippings at this point, Argentina was aware that Mengele had adopted the pseudonym Peter Hochbichler, although he sometimes used a Portuguese version of his real name – José Mengele. In the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he began living on estates owned by 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 news conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, October 2, 2019. Argentine authorities found the cache in a secret room behind a bookcase, and the collection was discovered in the context of a broader investigation into artworks of suspicious origin found in a gallery in Buenos Aires. (Natasha Pisarenko/AP Photo)

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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 assumed name of Wolfgang Gerhard, but several leads led to his body being exhumed and his remains positively identified by Brazilian authorities in 1985. DNA testing confirmed the results in 1992.