Imagine a world where a murderer who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, or even thousands
of innocent people, was never brought to justice.
That is the world we actually live in.
After World War II a number of high profile Nazis escaped being caught.
Their crimes were not just against Allied forces, but against humanity.
Who were these murderers and how did they get away?
Let’s find out.
Josef Mengele was a physician who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World
War II.
However, many people knew him better by another name: the “Angel of Death.”
He sent countless people to die in gas chambers, but this was only one of his heinous crimes.
Mengele was known for conducting gruesome medical experiments on Jews at the concentration
camps he worked at.
These experiments weren’t just to learn more about the human body or for medical advancement,
instead Mengele experimented on living people to find out the best ways to kill them.
He then implemented these finding in the mass murders of Jewish people across Nazi controlled
territories.
Mengele’s atrocities didn’t just stop with adults either.
In fact, he exposed approximately 3,000 children to different diseases, disfigurement, and
torture.
He claimed this was all to help cure certain illnesses and to improve the human species.
The more likely reason for Mengele’s actions was because he was a deranged lunatic.
His goal was to create a superior Nazi master race.
To do this he also favored experimenting on twins, pregnant women, and the disabled to
see how they differed in terms of his nightmarish experiments.
As the war came to an end Mengele must have known he would be tried for his war crimes
and sentenced to death, so he fled Europe.
He remained hidden in Germany until 1949 when members of the Catholic clergy helped him
escape from Italy to Argentina.
Once in South America he opened a mechanical equipment shop and eventually remarried.
The crazy thing is he used his real name at the time.
But at the end of the1950’s Nazi war criminals in South America were being rounded up and
sent back to Europe to stand trial.
When one of Mengele’s associates was captured, the Angel of Death decided it was time to
go back into hiding.
It was reported he traveled to Paraguay, and then to Brazil, where he eluded capture.
The messed up thing was that Germany had asked Argentina to extradite Mengele so he could
stand trial, but the government said they needed to look into the case against him themselves.
By that time the Argentinian government had finished their investigation, Mengele had
fled the country and went underground.
He was never captured or tried for his heinous crimes.
He died by drowning off the Brazilian coast due to a heart attack in 1979.
It wasn’t until a forensics team tested his remains in 1985 that his death was confirmed.
Josef Mengele was never caught and never punished for some of the worst atrocities committed
during World War II.
Another uncaught Nazi war criminal who fled to South America was Walter Rauff.
His war crimes included being an integral part of the construction and implementation
of the mobile gas chambers that were used to kill an estimated 100,000 people.
This is about to get really messed up, so prepare yourself.
Rauff’s main responsibility was to oversee the modifications of transport trucks to divert
their exhaust fumes into the carrying chamber at the back of the vehicles.
These chambers would be airtight and could contain as many as 60 people.
This meant that Rauff’s modifications allowed Nazis to drive from one location to the next
while killing innocent people in the back of their trucks.
The victims would be poisoned from carbon monoxide in the exhaust, which would eventually
lead to death by asphyxiation.
After the war Rauff was arrested by Allied troops.
While in a POW camp Rauff found a means of escape and quickly fled to Italian convents
that harbored him as he made plans to flee to South America.
However, in1948 Rauff found himself in Syria where he served as a military advisor to the
president of the country.
He eventually returned to Italy and found passage to Ecuador in 1949 and then traveled
to Chile.
Like Mengele, Rauff continued living under his own name even though he was a wanted war
criminal.
While in Chili Rauff worked at a king crab cannery where he doubled as a spy for West
Germany in the late 50’s and early 60’s.
It seemed that Rauff was no longer afraid of being captured as he sent a letter to the
German government requesting that his naval pension be sent to him in Chile.
After this he was arrested by the Chilean authorities due to pressure from other countries
who wanted the war criminal caught.
However, only a year after being arrested, he was released by Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet.
Germany continually tried to have Rauff extradited so that he could be tried for his war crimes,
but the Chilean government refused.
He eventually died in 1984 without answering for any of his transgressions.
It was reported that at his funeral German and Chilean mourners gave his coffin a Nazi
salute and chanted “Heil Hitler.”
Apparently even in 1984 Nazi support was still alive and well in some parts of the world.
Less is known about other escaped Nazi war criminals, but there were many who evaded
justice and may have lived out the remainder of their lives in relative peace.
One such Nazi is Josef Schwammerger who was an SS captain and commander of the Rozwadowo
ghetto.
Later in the war he was promoted to be the commander of the Przemysl concentration camp
in Poland.
His war crimes include the mass shooting of Jewish people, and the deportation of Jews
to other concentration camps in Europe.
He was arrested by Allied forces in 1947 in Austria, but escaped with the help of the
Nazi Odessa underground organization.
It is believed the organization aided him in reaching Argentina, but after his escape,
reports on Schwammerger become a bit fuzzy.
Nazi hunters lost his trail for a long time, but recently it was uncovered that he may
have been caught again in 1987.
Either way, he remained free of his crimes for entirely too long.
A similar case happened with Walter Kutschmann who was an SS officer at the Drohobycz concentration
camp near Lemberg, Poland.
His crimes are slightly different from other Nazis as he is wanted for the shooting of
20 university professors, as well as killing of hundreds of Jewish people.
It is unclear why the university professors needed to be brutally murdered, but then again
Nazi war criminals seem to kill indiscriminately.
After the war, reports suggested that Kutschmann fled to Argentina as well, but no clues to
his whereabouts were found until he died of a heartattack in 1986.
Not all Nazi war criminals fled to South America.
For example, Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, and one of the most wanted war
criminals of World War II, was said to have fled to Albania.
He then may have continued further east to evade capture.
Not only is Mueller wanted for the deaths of countless Jews, but also several other
crimes as well.
Mueller had helped plan the phony Polish attack on the Gleiwitz radio station in 1939, which
was used to justify Germany's attack on Poland at the beginning of the war.
He also signed the "Bullet Order” which authorized the shooting of escaped prisoners
of war and supported the torture of officers who had conspired to kill Hitler in 1944.
When interviewed, Muller's family said he died during the war and was buried in Berlin.
However, when the grave was exhumed and the corpse examined, the results were inconclusive.
The body may have belonged to Heinrich Muller, or may have been someone else.
Either way, the head of the Gestapo was never caught, and never tried for his crimes.
Anton Burger was a wanted war criminal for his involvement at the Theresienstadt concentration
camp in Czechoslovakia.
He was the commander of the camp and ordered the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
When Allied forces reached Czechoslovakia they arrested Burger, but he escaped in 1948.
After his escape he seems to have disappeared completely.
There is no evidence to where he went, or who helped him leave the country.
Anyone who contributed to the Nazi plan of exterminating the Jewish people should have
been tried for their crimes.
However, there should be a special cell where doctors who contributed to the genocide should
reside.
A place where they should be tormented by their demons for eternity.
Aribert Heim would be one of the people who belonged in that cell.
He was a doctor at Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp.
Like other physicians at the camps, he was accused of experimenting on the prisoners.
He was said to have done unethical surgeries while also experimenting with different poisonous
substances to see how it would affect the human body.
His experiments lead to the death and suffering of countless people at the concentration camp.
After the war it is believed that Heim assumed a false identity and spent a decent amount
of time in Egypt where he converted to Islam.
He eventually moved back to Europe where he lived out the rest of his life peacefully
when he should have been rotting in a jail cell for his crimes.
There were many other Nazi war criminals that evaded capture, but not all of them were so
lucky.
One person of particular note was John Demjanjuk.
After the war he fled to the United States.
That’s right, the Nazi war criminal fled to the U.S. and became a naturalized citizen
in the 1950’s.
He got a job working at the Ford automotive plant in Ohio until he retired.
In 2011 he was convicted of being an accessory to more than 28,000 counts of murder while
being a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland.
He was extradited to Germany in 2012 where he was tried and found guilty.
This court case set a new precedent that suspected Nazi war criminals could still be tried over
50 years after the end of the war.
Following this case other Nazis were extradited and tried for their crimes as well.
Before his final sentencing Demjanjuk died in the German nursing home he was placed in.
It should go without saying that the worst war criminal during World War II was Adolf
Hitler himself.
And like so many other Nazi war criminals, he too escaped justice.
All evidence points to Hitler taking his own life, along with the life of his wife Eva
Braun, in a Berlin bunker towards the end of World War II.
However, this means that Hitler was never actually caught.
He knew he would be tried and found guilty for countless war crimes, so instead of facing
his punishment, he decided to shoot himself instead.
Whether this was a fit ending for Hitler can be debated.
But it just goes to show that Hitler was too much of a coward to stand trial for being
one of the worst war criminals in all of history.
Through the dedicated work of Nazi hunters and investigators many Nazi war criminals
have been brought to justice—even decades after the end of World War II.
However, many Nazis were never caught, and were able to live out the rest of their lives
even though they were mass murderers.
Now watch “What Actually Happened to Nazi Leaders After World War 2?”
Or check out “The Nazi Psycho Doctor - Josef Mengele.”