1960s

The 1960s in the account are shaped by a widening gap between the pursuit of Josef Mengele and the stories told about him. Efforts to bring him to justice crossed borders and stalled in bureaucracies, while his refuge in South America became the setting for competing accounts: the documented flight of a fugitive, and the expanding legend of an elusive, almost omnipotent Nazi. By the decade’s end, the legend’s apparent invulnerability stands against Mengele’s own fear and sense of dislocation.

Pursuit and jurisdiction

The pursuit had gathered force before the decade began. Hermann Langbein, a survivor of Dachau and Auschwitz and co-founder of the International Auschwitz Committee, had investigated Mengele after finding notice of his divorce in 1954. On 25 February 1959, a prosecutor in Freiburg im Breisgau, Mengele’s last registered address, issued an arrest warrant charging him with multiple cases of premeditated murder and attempted murder. Langbein pressed for an extradition request to Argentina, believing Mengele was living in Buenos Aires.

In December 1959, as Mossad prepared to kidnap Adolf Eichmann, its director, Isser Harel, also considered a plan to capture Mengele. The available intelligence was fragmentary: it placed him in Buenos Aires under the name Gregor and associated him with a furniture factory. Harel’s proposed timetable depended on Eichmann’s planned capture on 11 May 1960; after that operation, his agents would have nine days to find Mengele before the plane carrying Eichmann returned to Israel. The plan did not resolve the larger problem of locating him, and the account presents the pursuit as divided among imperfect information, competing operations, and uncertain leads.

Borders, citizenship, and stalled extradition

Mengele’s protection depended in part on the way legal and political authority operated across borders. In 1962, West Germany requested his extradition from Paraguay. President Stroessner refused to cooperate, despite knowing that Mengele had left the country for Brazil, and maintained that Paraguay would defend its citizens. In 1963, Konrad Adenauer offered ten million US dollars in aid if Paraguay surrendered him; Stroessner rejected the offer. West German officials came to believe that the highest Paraguayan authorities were protecting the fugitive.

The following year, while the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials drew international attention, West Germany publicly identified Mengele as a Paraguayan citizen living in the tri-border region and travelling frequently to Brazil. Its ambassador asked Paraguay to revoke his citizenship on the grounds that he had obtained it by lying. Stroessner instead invoked national sovereignty and insisted that Mengele had long since left. Fritz Bauer then announced a reward of 50,000 marks for his capture, stating that Mengele was free under his own identity in Paraguay and protected by influential friends. Paraguay’s interior minister disputed that account, but a former SS officer arrested there the next year claimed to have encountered Mengele repeatedly.

Diplomatic pressure nevertheless receded. West Germany sent a new ambassador to Asunción in 1965 with a mandate to improve relations. Paraguay’s strategic importance in Western policy, as well as its substantial German-descended population, competed with the effort to pursue Mengele. The federal government eased the pressure rather than risk those wider relations. The resulting pattern was not simply a failure to locate one man: extradition requests, citizenship, diplomatic procedure, and national interest repeatedly impeded one another.

The fugitive and the public myth

As governments hesitated, journalists and Nazi hunters searched Paraguay for a story that could bring fame, a major scoop, or money. Their reports multiplied into portraits of Mengele as a wealthy and ingenious fugitive who could evade every pursuer. A brief appearance in a Czech documentary, sightings near the border, accounts of a boat on the Paraná River, and reports of cosmetic surgery or service as a Paraguayan army doctor circulated alongside one another. In 1966, a man taken into custody as Mengele proved to be a German tourist; in another report, an old policeman claimed to have shot Mengele from a boat. Such stories enlarged his public legend without establishing where he was.

Simon Wiesenthal became a central figure in that legend. After Adolf Eichmann’s trial and execution, he devoted much of his effort to finding Mengele. The account distinguishes his tireless public campaign from the limits of his information: his network was failing, and he had little reliable knowledge of the doctor’s location. Yet Wiesenthal kept the public’s attention fixed on Mengele through dramatic accounts. In 1967, his book The Murderers Among Us devoted a chapter to him and withheld until its end a detailed claim about his whereabouts: a secluded hut in a guarded military zone in Paraguay. The book’s revelation, like the other reports surrounding Mengele, made the hunt part of a larger story about the fugitive’s supposed power and elusiveness.

Isolation and a changing world

The public image of an untouchable fugitive contrasts with the account of Mengele in September 1967. Living in Serra Negra, where he had remained since arriving five years earlier, he became anxious after reading an old copy of Der Spiegel that Gerhard had found at a petrol station. An interview with Albert Speer, recently released from Spandau after twenty years, angered him: Mengele regarded Speer as a criminal and rejected his account of ignorance about the extermination of the Jews. Unable to sleep, he went to his watchtower.

That night and through the austral winter, the changes he saw around him reinforced his estrangement. Television showed young Germans challenging inherited discipline, hierarchy, and authority; he also watched countercultural movements in the United States and encountered news of white Americans defending Black people. He rejected contemporary German art and music, whose challenges to national traditions and inherited cultural forms signalled a world he could neither accept nor understand. Against the public stories of an all-powerful fugitive, the decade’s closing portrait is of a man who felt out of place in the present and increasingly confined by the life he had made in exile.