- Hello, I'm James Holland and I'm a historian of
the Second World War. History Hit is a bit like Netflix, but purely for history. We've got hundreds of hours
of historical documentaries going all the way back to classical times right through to the Cold War and beyond. Use the word WARSTORIES, all one word, for a massive discount when you join up. (ominous music) - Mengele was known as the Angel of Death. He wanted to improve the
stock of the Aryan race. (ominous music) - The idea was that I should
go now and try to find Mengele. - He was living in fear of being arrested. - [Guy] There are sightings
everywhere of Mengele. - They refused to give anything up. They said, no, it's not Mengele. It's not true. They lied. They denied it. - There were many who believed that he could have staged a death. - And there still are people
who think that he's alive. (dramatic music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Buenos Aires, 1958. The Argentinian capital's Old World charm and famed nightlife have made it a magnet for European expatriates. It is also a magnet
for Nazi war criminals. Fugitives, like Dr. Josef
Mengele, the Angel of Death. (eerie music) (people chattering) - He liked Buenos Aires. And there was a large German community, some of whom were Nazis. - He had a bit of cash. He was a man about town. And certainly, he was very well connected. - [Gerald] He met Hans Rudel,
Hitler's most decorated pilot. He met Willem Sassen, who was a wanted war
criminal from Belgium. - [Guy] He was still very
much a passionate Nazi. - This was not a life on
the run that was terrible. It was quite luxurious. And in 1958, the man that we
think of as the Angel of Death, the most hunted man in the world, was in the telephone book in Argentina. (suspenseful music) One of the things that happens
that changes everything for Mengele is that, in 1959, he's indicted by the
West German government. - [Narrator] The
Auschwitz-Birkenau doctor is wanted for mass murder and also for performing unspeakably cruel medical experiments on
children as young as five. Germany demands Argentina
hand him over to face justice. - And that scared him. It made him feel unsafe in Buenos Aires. And that was good 'cause he
deserved to live in fear. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] What Mengele doesn't know is that there is more to fear
than just an extradition order. Israeli agents are on the
hunt for Nazis in Argentina and they've already caught one. - They took off his clothes to make sure that he
doesn't got any weapon or razor blade to kill himself. I told him who we are and
what we demand from him. - [Narrator] Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's Final Solution, is in Israeli hands. - After they kidnapped Eichmann, Zvi Aharoni interrogated him and said where's Mengele? Where's Mengele? - And he refused to answer
any question about this. - And Eichmann was
absolutely, you know, loyal and said, I have no idea where he is. - [Narrator] In fact,
the two had shared cake and coffee several times in Buenos Aires. - [Guy] Eichmann and Mengele
actually meet each other at the A.B.C. Cafe. And they don't get on very well. - He viewed Eichmann as
a lower class officer who lived in this
terrible area of Argentina in this suburb of Buenos Aires. Mengele was more regal. He associated with intellectuals. He had the top end of the Reich. Eichmann, he was a working class stiff at the Mercedes factory. - [Narrator] The Mossad
interrogators apply more pressure. (suspenseful music) Finally, Eichmann cracks. - He knew that Mengele was
somewhere in the Argentine, maybe in Buenos Aires. But he had no contact with Mengele. - He met him before, but he
didn't know of his address, what he's doing now. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] For the Mossad, Mengele is right up there with Eichmann on their most wanted list. - Mengele, the worst name
in Israel than Eichmann. He was a real butcher. (suspenseful music) - Mengele's big interest was in genetics. And he wanted to look at how you could improve the
stock of the Aryan race, and therefore propagate a master race. - [Narrator] The Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp was the site of Mengele's
nightmarish medical lab. - Part of his experiments
were about sterilization. So to find out how they could sterilize the Eastern races, the Slavs, the gypsies, those less, the inferior
races at a faster rate. - [Guy] And he had
power of life and death. - [Narrator] Most of Mengele's
human guinea pigs perished. - The experiments get progressively worse. And by the time he leaves there, he is the monster that we've
all come to known him for. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Three days
after the Eichmann abduction, Agent Eitan meets with is Isser Harel. The Mossad chief has some good news. - Isser Harel found the address
of Mengele in Buenos Aires. - Isser Harel was very keen
to think I can bring back two. I could get Mengele as well. - [Narrator] The Mossad boss wants to mount a full-blown
commando raid on the address. - He wanted to do an second operation while the first one wasn't finished. And this is bad thinking. (suspenseful music) - If you involve two
things at the same time, you multiply the risk for failure. So I suggest not to do it. - [Narrator] But Harel
doesn't want to miss what may be their only chance to capture the notorious doctor. He overrules his agents. Operation Mengele is on. (suspenseful music) - [Guy] The Israelis actually went looking around Buenos Aires during that period in which
they were holding Eichmann in the safe house. (suspenseful music) (dog barks) - [Narrator] They stake
out a boarding house where they suspect Mengele is living. - That was really risky because we all traveled on false passports on languages we didn't master. (suspenseful music) - If you were caught in Argentina in 1960 as a known foreign spy, you wouldn't have been executed, but you would've been the guest
of the Argentine government for a very, very long time. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Mossad agents
have tracked Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele to what
they hope is his hideout in Buenos Aires.
(suspenseful music) - He sent few people to
check these apartment. - And they were making pretty
sort of blatant inquiries as to where he was. And they were going up
to the boarding house where they thought he had lived and said, is this where Dr. Menele lives? Hoping that maybe they'd say, oh, don't you mean Mengele? Yes. He lives over there. (suspenseful music) - The risks were definitely the German community of Buenos Aires. There's a German community of
a quarter million people then. - [Narrator] It is the
large German community that has drawn Nazis like
Eichmann and Mengele to Argentina. The country's totalitarian regime, led by Juan Peron, has made
them feel right at home. - And everybody wonders, you
know, why did South America, and Argentina in particular, become the place where the
Nazis came to after the war? And the truth is that
there were already links between the Nazis and
Argentina during the war. During the war, Peron and
the Argentine government had secret agreements with Himmler's foreign espionage service. When the war ended, it was a natural extension
of Argentina's role during the war for it to
receive Nazis afterwards. (suspenseful music) - But he was not in the house. Fact is that we couldn't find him. That means that he was dug
in better than Eichmann. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] With no
sign of the Nazi doctor, Harel decides to cut his losses and return to Israel with Eichmann alone. - I'm afraid at that stage that the Mossad were on a very cold trail indeed. Mengele had long flown the coop. - Mengele moved, not
because of the Israelis, but by sheer luck to Paraguay and wouldn't be in Buenos Aires. They would miss him. - [Narrator] In December, 1961, an Israeli court convicts Adolf Eichmann and hangs him for his crimes. But Mossad chief, Isser Harel, has not given up on Josef Mengele. - Harel though was still determined that Mengele was someone
when they wanted to catch. He was a notorious figure. So Aharoni was ordered
to mount an operation and to try and find him. - [Narrator] Senior
Mossad agent, Zvi Aharoni, returns to south America to
track down the Nazi doctor. - [Zvi] The idea was that I should go now and try to find Mengele. - [Narrator] He goes
undercover as a historian, writing a book about the SS. Zvi and his agents comb
Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile. (car rumbling) - Some information pointed
the way to Paraguay. But when we were there,
he had already left. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The mission
proves more challenging than even the Eichmann capture. It pushes the team to the limit. Finally, after two years of
searching, they catch a break. (suspenseful music) - [Gerald] They had picked
up this Belgian war criminal. - [Guy] He was a former Dutch SS officer called Willem Sassen. - [Narrator] Sassen is a former
drinking buddy of Mengele. - And they said to him, we're gonna take you back for war crimes unless you give us something better. He said, I'll give you Mengele. (suspenseful music) - Sassen was very much
plugged into the network. And he suggested that
Mengele was in Brazil. And so Aharoni and his team went there. (suspenseful music) - [Zvi] He said he might be in hiding in the house near Sao Paulo. - [Narrator] But identifying
the fugitive Nazi won't be easy. - He changed his name more than once and had a relatively low profile. One of his distinguishing features was this gap between his teeth. And he was nervous about that, knowing that it was an
identifying feature. He grew a big bushy mustache that effectively covered the front teeth and made it difficult for
anyone to see this gap. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The team narrows their search to a ranch on the outskirts of the city. For the stakeout, Aharoni is joined by
fellow agent Rafi Eitan, the man who led the Eichmann mission. - [Rafi] We were looking
for Mengele in the farm about 50 kilometers from Sao Paulo. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The Israeli spies spend days watching the ranch. The information provided by Sassen is beginning to look
like another dead end. And then... (suspenseful music) - I saw a man with a mustache and two people like
bodyguards, watching him. (suspenseful music) - And one of them for sure was Mengele. (suspenseful music) - Mengele was posted to
Auschwitz in May of 1943. It was only a couple of months after he turned just 32 years old. (eerie music) - We were loaded into cattle cars. People were praying, crying. - He's standing at the ramps when the trains pull in. He wanted to be there to select the people and to right and to the left. Those who would live,
and those who would die. - [Narrator] The strongest
would be chosen for slave labor. Young children, the old, and the infirm would be sent
straight to the gas chambers. - And everybody understood that there was no longer any escape. - [Gerald] He was looking
for his experiment victims. What Mengele wanted were twins. - One of the best ways of
establishing how genes work is to look at identical twins. (eerie music) - [Gerald] One, you do the experiments on, the other is the control
you do nothing on. And you can see the changes and measure them one against the other. - [Guy] He'd inject
different color pigments into their eyes. - He would use the twins to try to unlock this secret of what he viewed as the twin birth. And that involved, in some cases, the shooting of twins
in the back of the head, and then dissecting them as the corpses to see what was going on. - It's not like, you know, he was just the sort of surgical murderer. He was also a brute as well. (melancholy music) - My mother grabbed my twin
sister and me by the hand, hoping that as long as
she could hold onto us, that she could protect us. I, in my childish curiosity, looked around trying to figure out what on earth is that place. When I realized that my father and my two older sisters had
disappeared in the crowd. (melancholy music) A Nazi was running, yelling in German, "Twins, twins." We were wearing, as
always, matching outfit. In this case, it was burgundy dresses. He demanded to know from my mother if we were twins. And my mother didn't know what to say. She asked if that was good. The Nazi nodded yes. And my mother said, yes. I remember looking back and
seeing her arms stretched out in despair as she was pulled away. I never got to say goodbye to her. (melancholy music) (suspenseful music) - The Israelis went out and
they looked at that farm. They staked it out. And Zvi Aharoni, the
head of the Mossad team, told me these men walked past him. And one of them, he was
convinced, was Mengele. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] After 18 years on the run, it appears the Angel of
Death is in the cross hairs of the Mossad. (suspenseful music) Mossad operatives
believe they have sighted the world's most notorious Nazi fugitive. - I am sure that we did
see actually Mengele. - [Narrator] For now, the team's mission is limited to surveillance. They returned to Israel
to plan their next move. Agent Zvi Aharoni reports to
Mossad chief, Isser Harel. - Harel didn't believe their intelligence. Aharoni said as a field agent that he felt as though the
man he saw was Mengele. And that, that was
enough, therefore, to go. But what Harel was saying
to him is, guess what? This is 1961. It's now 16 years after
the end of the war. You're making a visual
identification based upon somebody's SS photograph, which was taken in 1938. I need more evidence. - Harel says the operation's canceled. (dramatic music) We've got something else to do. And there were greater
problems back at home. - Cause Nasser, head of
Egypt, had just fired rockets, capable of hitting Israel. And German rocket
scientists were down there working on them. And Isser Harel spent the next year on an assassination plot of killing off the rocket scientists. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Operation Mengele is shelved. The Mossad's Nazi hunting
unit is quietly disbanded. - And Mengele lived. - [Narrator] But the Nazi doctor is no longer enjoying the good life. - After 1959, when he
had to flee to Argentina because of the extradition request, his life went into a very sharp decline. - [Guy] Mengele was growing
increasingly paranoid that he was going to be caught. He's living a very nervous life. - [Narrator] Josef Mengele has no idea that the Mossad have given up their chase. He remains terrified
that, like Adolf Eichmann, he will be kidnapped and
hanged for his crimes. - He ended up on these
little outback farms in the wilds of Brazil. - He does build a watchtower in one of these farms he lives in. And he uses it to sort
of survey, you know, the surrounding acres
and kilometers around. That's this very commanding position. And he also had this whole
pack of dogs with him. (suspenseful music) (dog barking) So he was a very, very
paranoid, very edgy figure. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Israel may
have given up the hunt, but in West Germany, prosecutors continue to
build a case against Mengele. - [Guy] There's a very loyal retainer of the Mengele family called Sedlmeier. - [Narrator] Prosecutors
suspect Hans Sedlmeier has provided Mengele support
since his flight from Europe. - A judge, who was then running the office that would investigate Mengele, decided to go ahead and
swear Hans Sedlmeier in under sworn oath and question him about whether
he was supporting Mengele, the family was, money was
going to him, or anything else. Sedlmeier lied just through his teeth. Said, we've never seen him. Don't know anything about him. Probably dead. Don't send him a penny. (suspenseful music) And they never went out
to find out anything else. They accepted his word. (eerie music) - [Narrator] Mengele's long flight is now nearly 20 years in the making. - Auschwitz is liberated in January '45. But before that happens,
Mengele's made good his escape. - But he got away 10 days before the Red Army liberated the camp. It was complete and utter chaos. Tens of thousands of prisoners
moving through the camps at the same time. Nobody quite sure of who was anybody. - He fled with the suitcase
full of his scientific findings. - And he was picked up
finally by the Americans in June of 1945. What saved him was Mengele's vanity. When he had joined the SS, one of the things you had to do was have a blood type
tattoo put under your arms. - So that if they were
wounded and unconscious, they would know what kind
of blood for transfusions. He was fastidious, narcissistic, and he didn't want a tattoo, apparently. - Mengele didn't wanna mar his body. - So he never had that
distinguishing feature of an SS man or officer. And that really helped him. - So in the days at the end of the war, and they had quite a simple litmus test. Take off your shirts, raise your hands. If they found a tattoo, they put you to one side and
they would interrogate you. If there was no tattoo and you had some kind of reasonable story, then you were released, which is what happened with him. (eerie music) - [Narrator] Mengele drifted
homeward through Germany. - Mengele did not go back and live openly under his own name in his hometown. He lived under an assumed
name on a farm in Bavaria. - [Guy] Where he works for,
you know, two, three years. - American investigators
show up at his wife's home and say, do you know what
happened to your husband? And she says, I hear he is
dead on the Eastern Front. And they close the file. (eerie music) - [Narrator] But Mengele's family knows that he is alive and well. They even send him money
via Hans Sedlmeier. - He came from a very rich family. The Mengele family were a family who produced farm machinery in Germany. - [Gerald] The Mengele family ran the largest business in Günzburg. Günzburg was a company town. - [Narrator] But as long as
Dr. Mengele stays in Germany, he remains at risk. - He was living in fear of being arrested. He saw what happened to, you know, the Nazis in the Nuremberg Trials, where all the Nazi leaders
were tried, convicted, and executed by hanging. He knew as an former Auschwitz doctor that this could very probably
be his fate if he was caught. - So he contacts his
family back in Günzburg. And Sedlmeier puts him in touch with various people who can help him. - [Gerald] If you had enough
money, you could flee. - [Uki] So he crossed into Austria. From Austria, he crossed into Italy. - And, like many other
Nazis, he reaches Genoa. - [Uki] He got an Argentine landing permit in the name of Helmut Gregor. He boarded a ship called the
North King to Buenos Aires. - [Narrator] Mengele arrived
in Argentina in August, 1949. (suspenseful music) Before long, he begins
selling farm machinery across South America. His business thrives. - From '49 till '59, those 10 years he spent in Argentina, were actually very good years. - [Narrator] But after fellow
SS officer Adolf Eichmann is kidnapped and indicted, Mengele's world begins to crumble. - And let me tell you, there is nothing that scared
the Nazi war criminals in South America more
than that indictment. It ruined everybody's day. And it especially ruined Mengele's. - He's just going from
a succession of farms, being itinerant farm manager, effectively, in Paraguay in Brazil. And, at one point when he
was on a farm in Brazil, a young calf had a hernia. And Mengele got out his surgical tools and performed this incredibly delicate and successful operation
on removing this hernia. And the farm workers realized that actually, you're not
just some Swiss farm manager you claim to be, you know? You're something else. - [Narrator] Though the Mossad
has failed to capture him, Mengele's carefree life has gone for good. - So Mengele grows increasingly
isolated, depressed. And he ends up in a very modest bungalow on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. - [Narrator] Ironically, as
Mengele's fortunes dwindle, his legend grows increasingly outlandish. - Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, the reputation of Mengele
grows out of all proportion. It's partly fueled by Simon Wiesenthal, who has kind of made Josef Mengele his sort of poster boy. You know, this is the
Nazi we all wanna capture. This is the really bad one. This is Angel of Death. - Private individuals,
such as Simon Wiesenthal, you know, the Klarsfelds in Paris, they were the ones who were
keeping the flame alive. - We had known that Mengele
was living in Paraguay. And that's the reason I demonstrated it in front of the Ministry of Justice in order to get informations
about the fate of Mengele. - But the Klarsfelds
did try to look for him, but probably a bit too late in the day. And a lot of people remained
absolutely convinced that Mengele was in Paraguay all the way through the
late 60s and the 70s. And in fact, he had left Paraguay. (suspenseful music) - Everyone had this
notion of Mengele living in some jungle fortress with, you know, dogs yapping at his boots and cigarette boats out on the river and minions following him around. - You've got the Mengele
of popular culture. Always in Brazil, the white suit, the all-powerful Nazi
hiding in the jungle. The real stuff of myth. - We thought Hollywood
was doing documentaries instead of films. - [Uki] It turns out, he
lived a fairly squalid life. - And he's got this terrible nervous habit of chewing the ends of his mustache. And he chews his mustache so much that he ends up with a hairball. (suspenseful music) His paranoid nature gets worse and worse. He's not a Nazi hiding in the
jungle with a huge estate. He's a little old man with a hairball. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] 40 years have passed since the fall of the Third Reich. But Josef Mengele, doctor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp, remains at large. - There are sightings
everywhere of Mengele. Saying that he was in Southern Spain. He was in Ireland and Greece. He was in a Paraguayan jungle
with a great big factory. He was everywhere but the moon, frankly. (suspenseful music) But no one was really hunting for him. - If there had been any serious effort, particularly by the German government, to find these criminals, it would've been extremely easy
to find them and locate them and have them arrested.
(suspenseful music) - This was an Nazi war criminal
living in South America, communicating regularly with his family and getting money from them. And all they had to do
was look at the mail and they never did it. - I trusted the government of
the war to do the right thing until I realized that
they were covering up on left and the right. - [Narrator] In 1985,
on the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Eva Kor leads a small group of survivors to the concentration camp
they were sent to as children. From Auschwitz, they traveled to Jerusalem where they hold a three-day
mock trial of Dr. Mengele. 106 victims line up to testify
against their Nazi tormentor. - I would say that it's probably the closest thing to making
feel a person like an animal, like a nothing, like a piece
of garbage or a piece of meat. (eerie music) He would come every morning,
immaculately dressed. I remember his black gleaming boots. - He had this white coat and he was handsome and
he wore the uniform. He was this immensely powerful figure. (eerie music) - [Eva] I was injected with
something that made me very ill. - [Guy] He would deliberately infect them to see how long the
infection would take in one and not the other. - I had extremely high fever. My arms, my legs were swollen to twice the size with huge red patches all over. Painful, very painful. - [Narrator] Mengele's twisted desire to create an Aryan master race
led to torturous experiments on more than 3,000 twins. 200 survived. - So when Mengele came in
with the four other doctors, and he looked at the fever chart and he declared, laughing sarcastically, (Eva speaking in German) Too bad. She's so young. She has only two weeks to live. That much I understood in German. - [Narrator] Against the odds,
Eva and her sister, Miriam, lived to see the Red Army's
liberation of Auschwitz. The rest of their family perished. - To me, it seemed like a nightmare. That somehow, if I could close my eyes and open them up again, the whole nightmare would disappear. But the nightmare did not disappear. - [Narrator] In 1985,
campaigning by Eva Kor and others converges with political will. - The pressure is building
on the German government, on the Americans, on the Israelis because of this mock trial. There started to be
multimillion dollar rewards offered for Mengele. - [Narrator] Law enforcement
officials from three nations meet to coordinate their efforts. - And the Germans were the hosts. There were several people
from different agencies in Israel and the U.S.
Marshals Service was there. (dramatic music)
(train rattling) - [Narrator] Days later, the international team decides
to act on a promising tip. After drinking heavily at a restaurant, Mengele's fixer, Hans Sedlmeier, let it slip to a friend that he's been supporting
Mengele for years. The friend alerted authorities. (dramatic music) The chief prosecutor in Frankfurt
secures a search warrant for Sedlmeier's home. (dramatic music) (suspenseful music) - Sedlmeier was always considered to be a potential link to
Mengele in South America. - [Narrator] The hunt for the Nazi doctor moves into high gear. (suspenseful music) May 31st, 1985. German special agents raid the home of Mengele family fixer, Hans Sedlmeier. - They knew that if they told
the local Bavarian police, there was bound to be an
informer for the Mengele family who would then tip them off and, you know, make sure they hid everything. So they got a different police force from another part of the country to go and raid Sedlmeier's property. - The search was conducted
by the Bundeskriminalamt, which is the German federal police. - They do this search. He thinks he's safe. It's only by luck when they move this large sort of armoire or cabinet that they find something. - [Narrator] Behind the furniture, investigators unearth a
secret stash of envelopes. - [Gerald] There they found these letters that had been sent from Mengele. - They found everything. All the letters, all the
addresses of his helpers. - Long had been rumored the
fact that Sedlmeier's wife had had a crush on Josef Mengele early on. And Mengele had letters to her directly, as well as to Hans Sedlmeier. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Among the cache of letters, investigators find one that
includes a stunning revelation. With deep sorrow, I tell you of the death
of our common friend. - That led the Germans to believe that Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979. - [Narrator] Sedlmeier is arrested. A search of his address book links Mengele to a residence in Sao Paulo. (suspenseful music) David Marwell, an investigator with the U.S. Justice Department, is part of the international
force now hunting Mengele. - The Germans, after the
discovery of the documentation in the Sedlmeier home,
went directly to Sao Paulo. (suspenseful music)
(birds shrieking) - [Narrator] Brazilian
police are brought on board. - Romeu Tuma was the captain who ran the Brazilian investigation
for the federal police. He received the material from the Germans. - [Narrator] Tuma quickly determines who lives at the Sao Paulo address, a German family called the Bosserts. (suspenseful music) (dramatic music) - [Gerald] There, they're
not quite so genteel about a search warrant. They really do come in with full force. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Police question them about their suspected link to Mengele. - And they refuse to give anything up. They said, no, it's not Mengele. It's not true. They lied. They denied it. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] But Tuma soon finds a makeshift shrine to Mengele and a stash of his personal
writing and photographs. (eerie music) The truth about one of the
era's most enduring mysteries is finally revealed. - [Gerald] And finally, they gave it up. - [Narrator] The family
admit to sheltering Mengele during the last four years of his life. - But then they said where he was dead and then where they had buried him. (eerie music) Mengele is buried just outside on the outskirts of a common cemetery, where paupers are generally buried. - And they dug up a six-year-old corpse. - [Narrator] News of Mengele's
death attracts a media throng to the grave site. (suspenseful music) - [Guy] And there was Mengele's
skull, for everybody to see. And it was kind of held up for the cameras in a rather grisly way. And snap, snap, snap. - [Narrator] But questions linger. - There were many who believed that he could have staged a death. And he had the requisite medical knowledge and clearly the motive to stage a death. (suspenseful music) - Because he had this
diabolical reputation, because he had this image that he was this cunning scientist beyond, you know, any form of natural justice. He was, you know, this was
all just some cunning thing. (suspenseful music) Even though Mengele's
bones have been dug up, a lot of people thought that
Mengele was still alive. - [Narrator] An international task force from Germany, Brazil, Israel, and America believe they have found Josef Mengele. (suspenseful music) Forensic scientists must now prove the exhumed corpse really
is the Nazi doctor. - We put together a top flight team of pathologists and of
radiologists and dental experts. The Israelis sent down
the chief pathologist of the Israeli Defense Force. The forensic experts set out to compare what they knew about the living Mengele with what evidence could be derived from the skeletonized remains. (suspenseful music) - They had compared the skull
to a picture of Mengele's face and they blended the two together. So it's very eerie, but very compelling as a piece of evidence. - We spent a great deal of
time examining the bones that were discovered in this grave. And I am absolutely confident that the bones were Josef Mengele's. - [Narrator] But for undeniable proof, they would have to wait for the advent of a new forensic technology. - There was a lot of room for the doubters to think that, actually, maybe
he's, you know, still around. Maybe this is all a fix. And it did take really genetic testing in the early 90s to
fundamentally prove to people that these were indeed Mengele's bones. - Science caught up with the Mengele case. Bones from Brazil were sent
to a laboratory in England. They were ground, and they were able to collect a tiny amount of DNA. Enough to analyze it. - [Narrator] The results are definitive. The bones are Josef Mengele's. - There he was. He was dead. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The hunt for
Josef Mengele is over. The full details of how
he died are revealed. - Mengele's death was,
in many ways, pitiful. And it was kind of the pitiful
death that he deserved. (eerie music) With some friends, he was
taken down to Bertioga Beach, which is about 20 or 30 miles,
just south of Sao Paulo. And they sat in their sort of beach house. They had a little beach house. They persuaded him, look, you know, why don't you go out for a swim? Mengele always refused to go outside because, oh, I don't like the sun. And also he thought he
might be spotted by someone. And he eventually said, okay, I will. (eerie music) Current was very, very
strong, as it is around there. - [Gerald] On this hot summer day, Mengele swam out from the
beach a little bit further than he should have. (eerie music) - And it became quite
apparent within a few minutes that he was in trouble. (suspenseful music) They tried to resuscitate him. He had had a stroke. And if you have a stroke
while you're swimming, the combination isn't great. (eerie music) - And he dies in the water, either from drowning or
from the stroke itself. - The interesting thing is that, after his death, they had wanted, they talked about whether
they should cremate him. They couldn't get anyone
in the Mengele family to sign off on it. They wanted to cremate the remains. If they had done that, nobody today, including me, would think he's dead. - [Narrator] The world's
most notorious Nazi fugitive would never answer for his crimes. - They would've loved
to have had that trial for the historical record for Mengele. The victims deserved that. And that was frustrating for the Mossad. (eerie music) - He said, well, sometimes apologize why he didn't succeed to
bring Mengele to trial. When I write my memory,
I'm not going to apologize. - There's no punishment
for a fellow like Mengele. Even if he's caught and he's executed, the second at the end
of the hangman's noose isn't justice for what he did. But there is some justice in that, after the Eichmann kidnapping, he is really a bitter,
depressed, unhappy man. That gives me great satisfaction. (suspenseful music) - I think, in many ways, I feel sorry for people
like Josef Mengele. Because they had a twisted
idea of what is right and what is wrong. I don't believe that the
perpetrators escaped scot-free. I think they lived a miserable
life, filled with guilt. - [Gerald] And if you're
looking for shards of justice in all of this, he didn't lead the life
that many fantasized he did. And this was not a comfortable life. - Mengele died an old man. And to hell with him. (dramatic music)
