Josef Mengele, AKA ' The Angel of Death', did a pretty smart thing—he did not try to leave Germany right away, as other highly placed Nazis were doing. The border patrol caught most of those people right away. He began to wear his hair differently, grew facial hair and wore rough clothing—as though he was a farmer. He got a job on a farm and for almost 3 years he worked on the farm as a laborer. He mentioned later to friends that he did not know if the farm couple recognized him or not. They did not let on that they did, and they seemed to trust him to be responsible with the crops and the animals. And he was. The whole point was to hide in plain sight until he could arrange to get out of Germany and Europe all together under the name he was using while being a farm-hand.
His goal was Argentina, which had a government that was pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic. There were many German ex-patriots living in Argentina, and he knew he could make friends there and probably live quietly. There was some thought that he wanted to be a part of a strong neo-Nazi group so that Germany could ‘rise again’. This did not happen. After about 3 years on the farm, he had money to leave—his father and grandfather were owners of a big farm-machinery plant in Northern Germany, and they were probably sending him money. He walked a great deal to get to train-stations, and kept his clothing simple and his hair arranged the way it was on the farm. He used a rural German dialect—not proper German.
He did not relate to anyone in a social or educated manner while working his way west. Over a period of weeks, using the train system and walking when he had to, he was able to board a ship for Argentina. Argentina changed over the years that he lived comfortably there—it became less anti-simitic and began to help the organizations who were trying to find escaped Nazi officers.
Thus, with his family’s money and contacts dwindling away, himself aging, he moved to Paraguay. I believe he was living in Paraguay but visiting the beach in Brazil when he drowned in 1979. He was a strong swimmer but it is believed he had a stroke while some distance from shore. He was buried, under the name Wolfgang Gerhard, in the Nossa Senhora do Rosario cemetery in Embu.
Older Mengele ... The eyes of purest evil
Bounty hunters and Nazi hunters continued searching for the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp doctor for many years after his death. Even after his skeleton was found in grave number 321 in Embu, the hunt continued. Skeptics suspected that the Mengele clan in his hometown of Günzburg had invented the story to detract from Mengele's real whereabouts. It is now clear that this is almost impossible, after a DNA analysis of genetic samples taken from Mengele's remains produced a 99 percent match with samples taken from his son Rolf.
"Angel of Death" Diary Shows No Regrets
A diary and letters written by Mengele that recently surfaced in police archives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, show that the infamous concentration camp mass murderer remained a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi until his death. He regretted nothing.
He treated prisoners like laboratory rats during the Nazi era, and surgically removed people's hearts while they were still alive and sliced newborns into pieces --
The diary, as well as 84 other documents and a hand-written life history, were found in two cardboard boxes in the records department of the Brazilian federal police in Sao Paulo. Investigators found the documents in 1985, together with books and personal mementos, in the Sao Paulo home of the German couple Lieselotte and Wolfram Bossert, as well as in their beach house at Bertioga. At the time, however, they paid little attention to their find.
Almost everything was still in perfect condition: the library that included works by Goethe, Goebbels, Erich Fromm und Siegfried Lenz, medical literature about soft tissue rheumatism, an Olympic souvenir placard, a package of "Olla" brand condoms.
In some respects, the find from the eleventh floor of the federal police headquarters building in Sao Paulo is sensational. The letters and diary contain many new details about the life in exile of Auschwitz's "angel of death." They provide sudden insight into Mengele's paradoxically bourgeois character, into his ability to repress memories, into the incomprehensible contradiction between his bestial approach to science and his weakness for the beauty of art.
The letters are addressed to Mengele's son, Rolf, and Wolfgang Gerhard, an Austrian former Nazi who took in Mengele for a few years and moved from Brazil back to Austria in 1971. When he left Brazil, Gerhard gave his friend Josef his identification papers and his identity.
Mengele may have escaped justice in the eyes of his surviving prisoners and most people of scruples and conscience...but he lived the life of a fugitive, always running, always looking over his shoulder.
He had almost no friends and trusted very few people. I doubt he slept well and he probably saw Nazi hunters around every corner. He knew that, if caught, he would be executed for the atrocities, carnage and crimes against humanity that he was responsible for. Not a very enviable life and if there is a hell, he is burning there, eternally.
All that is left of Josef Mengele, disinterred with his false dentures in place
