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History’s Deadliest Woman and Other Lesser Known Killers

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2019 54 min

If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women - Ravensbrück concentration camp

Photograph from Josef Mengele’s Argentine identification documents in the 1950s. Wikimedia

27. Mengele Got Away With Genocide

After the war, Josef Mengele was taken prisoner and held in a British POW camp. However, he hid his true identity with an assumed name, so his stint in captivity was relatively brief, before he was released. He then went into hiding, and through a network of Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican, he was able to reach South America, settling in Argentina in 1949. By the early 1950s, he had resumed living under his real name, and made a good living as a salesman for his family’s farm equipment business, Karl Mengele & Sons. He also acquired an interest in a pharmaceutical company.

In 1960, however, Mengele’s deeds in Auschwitz became more publicly known, and West German prosecutors sought to have him arrested and extradited. Between that and fears that the Israelis – who had recently seized Adolf Eichmann in Argentina – might be after him, Mengele went on the lam once again. This time, he headed to Brazil, where with the help of Nazi sympathizers, he settled down and purchased a coffee and cattle farm in Sao Paulo. He was never brought to account for his crimes and died in a swimming accident in 1979.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.