IN EVIL’S FOOTSTEPS
Josef Mengele frequently assumed an enthusiastic posture on the railroad platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as trainloads of captives arrived from across German-occupied Europe. Pointing in one direction, the SS physician—nicknamed the “Angel of Death”—sent the healthiest prisoners to factory work as slave laborers; pointing in the opposite direction, he sent countless women, children, the frail, and the elderly to die in gas chambers.
A third group, primarily twin children, were delivered to well-supplied barracks where Mengele conducted grisly and often fatal surgical experiments in a pseudoscientific quest for the secrets of genetics.
In January 1945, as the Soviet army approached Poland from the east, Mengele fled. American soldiers arrested him in Weiden, Germany, more than 400 miles west of Auschwitz, and held him for two months in two prisoner camps. But the Americans released Mengele when they failed to identify him as the same Josef Mengele listed on “wanted” circulars compiled by the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Allied High Command in France. With luck and assistance from a network of friends in Germany, he evaded recapture.
Four years later, according to the most authoritative account, Gerald L. Posner and John Ware’s 1986 book, Mengele: The Complete Story, the fugitive doctor used forged identity papers to slip away from a farm in Rosenheim, about 120 miles southeast of his family’s hometown of Günzburg, and escape to Argentina. Mengele was spotted numerous times in South America but always melted away before he could be apprehended.
With the capture of wanted Nazis Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 and Klaus Barbie in Bolivia in 1983, Mengele’s name rose to the top of any list of the most notorious war criminals still on the loose.
In 1985, 40 years after the end of World War II, I found myself assigned to the search for Mengele. Here’s how it began.
LATE ONE MORNING in February 1985, the phone rang in my office at ABC News in Washington, D.C. “Herr Martin,” said a voice, “I want you to find Josef Mengele.”
“Who is this?” I said,
