Vicente López

Vicente López, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires, serves first as a precarious home for Josef Mengele and later as the focus of a Mossad search that arrives too late. Its rented rooms and secluded guesthouse place private refuge and public pursuit within the same suburban setting.

Work and Lodging

In mid-September 1949, after obtaining a residence permit, Mengele found carpentry work in Vicente López and moved into a shabby lodging with filthy windows. He shared it with an engineer and the engineer’s young daughter, while hiding that he was a doctor. One night, the child woke with a burning forehead, a pale face, and convulsions. Her father, whom Mengele had barely spoken to, begged him to find a doctor. Mengele instead offered to treat her himself, demanding secrecy and warning that the child would die if the engineer refused or later betrayed him.

The neighborhood formed part of Mengele’s constrained, solitary routine in Buenos Aires. He changed his route to work every day and avoided approaching German speakers, afraid that an encounter might expose him. The carpenter’s job and shabby accommodation sharply contrasted with his former life as a university-trained scholar: in exile, physical labor and concealment shaped his daily existence.

The Guesthouse and the Search

At the beginning of 1960, while Mossad was preparing to seize Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Mengele spent several days at a guesthouse in Vicente López, where his wife Martha was staying with Karl-Heinz. After Eichmann was captured on May 11, Israeli agents questioned him about Mengele. Though he initially refused to betray his former comrade, he eventually gave them the address of the guesthouse in Vicente López.

Two agents went to investigate an isolated villa at the end of a narrow street, enclosed by a palisade. Its position made it difficult to observe without attracting attention. The manageress said she knew no one called Gregor or Mengele. A postman supplied the crucial detail: a Mengele family had lived there but had left several weeks earlier without giving a forwarding address. The furniture factory the agents also checked yielded no trace of a German named Gregor.

A Refuge Already Vacated

By the time the agents reached Vicente López, Mengele had gone into exile in Paraguay. The guesthouse address therefore led to evidence of his recent presence, not to the fugitive himself. Its isolated setting hindered surveillance, while the family’s departure without a forwarding address left the investigators with no immediate lead. Vicente López thus marks a narrow intersection between Mengele’s family life and the manhunt: the address was real, but the opportunity to find him there had passed.