Argentina

Argentina is the first durable refuge in Josef Mengele’s South American flight and a central hub in the postwar movement of Nazi fugitives. The country’s welcome is not merely a matter of hiding individuals: under Juan Perón, it becomes a political project supported by escape networks and influential intermediaries. Later, the fall of Perón, a West German arrest warrant, and the capture of Adolf Eichmann make Argentina’s role increasingly difficult to conceal, even as delays and divided jurisdictions impede prosecution.

Arrival and the Peronist refuge

On 22 June 1949, Mengele, travelling under the name Helmut Gregor, finds sanctuary in Argentina. His arrival follows a difficult journey through postwar Europe and Italy, but the country he reaches is not simply a place to disappear. Juan Perón has opened Argentina’s borders to thousands of Nazis, Fascists, and collaborators, including soldiers, engineers, scientists, technicians, and doctors. He imagines that their expertise can help build dams, missiles, and nuclear power plants, and make Argentina a future superpower. In his political vision, defeated European regimes leave behind resources and people that Argentina can put to use.

That welcome has an administrative and clandestine infrastructure. Perón personally oversees the escape operation and establishes an Information Office in Buenos Aires, headed by Rudi Freude. He sends former SS captain Carlos Fuldner to Spain, Switzerland, Rome, and Genoa. Freude and Fuldner help coordinate the Nazi Ratlines: linked routes and intermediaries that carry fugitives through diplomats, officials, intelligence contacts, and clergy. The system connects European departure points to South American shelter, making the movement of people and identities part of a larger political undertaking.

Buenos Aires in the late 1940s gathers the remnants of defeated authoritarian movements into a new center of expatriate life. The city hosts Nazis alongside Ustaše, Serbian ultra-nationalists, Italian Fascists, Hungarian Arrow Cross Party members, and other far-right exiles. Their presence gives Argentina’s refuge a collective character: it is not only the concealment of particular suspects but a place where former political networks can meet and persist. At one December gathering aboard the Falken, Gregor and Willem Sassen enter after giving a password and being searched. Among the people Sassen identifies are Ante Pavelić, former Fascist officials, and other prominent exiles. The scene places Gregor inside a crowded social world of fugitives and sympathizers rather than outside it as an isolated newcomer.

Shelter through private networks

State policy is reinforced by personal hospitality and contacts. After meeting Malbranc aboard the Falken, Gregor moves into his host’s residence. Malbranc is a former Nazi spy and wartime arms dealer, and his home is a meeting place for people connected to Nazi society in Buenos Aires. Regular visitors include former diplomats and other exiles; Willem Sassen and Eberhard Fritsch come to play poker, and the architect Frederico Haase becomes devoted to Gregor. These relationships turn private homes into places of accommodation, sociability, and continued connection.

The wider network depends on more than one host. Hans Sedlmeier, Mengele’s childhood friend and confidant of his father, supports contact between the fugitive and his family. When the German authorities eventually issue an arrest warrant, Sedlmeier passes the news to him. Uli Rudel later helps arrange a route into Paraguay and supports his application for citizenship there. Argentina’s role is therefore part of a cross-border structure: refuge within the country is sustained by personal ties that can transmit money and warnings, while allies beyond its borders offer alternatives when political circumstances change.

The book also connects Mengele’s concealment to the protection and silence of his family. In 1971, Sedlmeier lies under oath about Mengele’s relationship with the family and the company. The family’s support continues despite the danger that public knowledge of its bond with the fugitive could damage a large, successful business. Argentina is not the sole location of that complicity, but it is the setting in which Mengele first rebuilds a life under an assumed identity and benefits from the networks that help keep him beyond the reach of justice.

Perón’s fall and the limits of political shelter

Argentina’s political upheaval in 1955 changes the conditions of refuge. After the bombing of the presidential palace and May Square, military opposition grows and Perón resigns. He escapes to Paraguay as a new military government takes power, followed by Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, who promises to purge the country of Peronism. The incoming regime bans public expressions and symbols associated with Perón and his deceased wife, and dismisses officials connected to the fallen government. The reversal makes clear that the political order on which the expatriate community had relied is not secure.

Mengele considers leaving for Paraguay but decides against it. He believes he has kept clear of politics and was not part of Perón’s inner circle; he presents himself, in his own assessment, as an ordinary entrepreneur. He stops performing illegal abortions and waits for the political storm to pass. He obtains a three-month passport and leaves Argentina on 22 March 1956, flying to Geneva by way of New York. His departure shows the difference between the removal of a protector and the immediate end of a refuge: the political change prompts him to move, but does not itself bring him before a court.

Arrest warrants, delay, and cross-border pursuit

The legal pursuit takes shape through evidence assembled outside Argentina. Hermann Langbein, a survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz and a co-founder of the International Auschwitz Committee, investigates Mengele and passes case files to the German authorities. After jurisdictional disagreements and refusals by many judges, a prosecutor in Freiburg im Breisgau issues an arrest warrant on 25 February 1959, citing multiple cases of premeditated murder and attempted murder. Langbein urges the West German government to seek Mengele’s extradition from Argentina, where he believes the fugitive lives.

The request encounters delay at several levels. It moves through Argentine and West German offices and legal institutions, while the German ambassador hesitates and the process becomes tangled in procedure. The book emphasizes the contrast between evidence that points toward a suspect and the difficulty of making governments act across borders. When a new extradition request is being prepared, Mengele’s associates warn him, and he leaves Argentina for Paraguay. There he acquires citizenship in November 1959, despite not having met the normal five-year residence requirement. The move turns citizenship and national sovereignty into further obstacles to extradition.

The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 intensifies the pursuit and transforms public attention. Isser Harel, the director of Mossad, plans to seize Mengele after the Eichmann operation, working from limited information that identifies Gregor and places him in Buenos Aires. The plan fails to secure Mengele, but Eichmann’s capture signals a new phase: journalists arrive, Nazi groups in Buenos Aires fragment, and Argentina faces pressure to show that it is not a Nazi sanctuary. On 20 June, an arrest warrant for Mengele is issued. The book also records the injustice of Lothar Hermann being wrongly accused of being the Auschwitz doctor, a consequence of a manhunt in which incomplete information and public pressure could distort identification.

Memory, publicity, and Argentina’s significance

In 1964, while the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials draw attention to Nazi crimes, West Germany publicly states that Mengele is a Paraguayan citizen who resides in the tri-border region and often travels to Brazil. Its ambassador asks Paraguay to revoke the citizenship on the grounds that it was obtained through false statements. Paraguay rejects the pressure and invokes its sovereignty. At a press conference, Bauer offers a reward for Mengele’s capture and says that the fugitive is living freely under his real identity, protected by friends in high places. The official denials do not resolve the question of his whereabouts; instead, they expose how competing state claims and political interests can frustrate accountability.

Argentina remains important to the story even after Mengele leaves it. It is his first refuge, the setting for his adoption of the Gregor identity, and a hub of the political and social networks that help him evade capture. The country also becomes a stage for the pursuit of Eichmann and for the widening public demand to confront Nazi crimes. Simon Wiesenthal’s campaign keeps attention on Mengele, though the book distinguishes the public narrative of the solitary Nazi hunter from the less visible investigative work of Bauer and the Mossad agents bound by secrecy. The contrast shows how the chase is shaped both by legal evidence and by the stories that make fugitives impossible to forget.

The pursuit reaches a new scale in 1985, when survivors testify at a mock trial in Jerusalem and the testimony is broadcast internationally. The resulting pressure prompts renewed investigations and coordinated efforts by the United States, Israel, and West Germany. The book’s account of Argentina thus belongs to a wider history of postwar impunity and delayed reckoning: the country’s welcome and its networks help explain how Mengele escaped, while the later pursuit reveals how difficult it was for courts and governments to overcome borders, political reluctance, and years of concealment. The book itself draws on research conducted in Günzburg, Argentina, and Brazil, and presents this transnational route as central to understanding Mengele’s South American life.