The Manhunt For The Angel Of Death | Nazi Hunters | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video mengele was known as the angel of death [Music] he wanted to improve the stock of the aryan race the idea was that i should go now and try to find mangala he was living in fear of being arrested there are sightings everywhere at 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 believe that he could have staged a death and there still are people who think that he's alive [Music] [Music] 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 joseph mengele the angel of death [Music] 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 he met hans rudel hitler's most decorated pilot he met bill himself who was a wanted war criminal uh from belgium 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 of the world was in the telephone book in argentina of the things that happens that changes everything for mengele is that in 1959 he's indicted by the west german government 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 because he deserved to live in fear what megala 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 he took off his clothes to make sure that he doesn't cut any weapon or raise the blade to kill himself i told him who we are and what we demand from him adolf eichmann the architect of hitler's final solution is in israeli hands after kidnapped eichmann's interrogated him and said where's mengele where's mengele and he refused to answer about any question about this and eichmann was absolutely you know loyal and and said i have no idea where he is in fact the two had shared cake and coffee several times in buenos aires eichmann and mangley actually meet each other at the abc cafe and they don't get on very well hebrew eichmann is a lower class officer who lived in this terrible area of argentina in the suburb of buenos aires mengele was more regal he associated with intellectuals he had the top end of the reich eichmann was on the he was a working class stiff at the mercedes factory the mossad interrogators apply more pressure finally eichmann cracks he knew that mengele was somewhere in the argentine maybe in buenos aires but he had no contact with maintenance he met him before but he had no idea of his address when what he's doing now for the mossad mengele is right up there with eichmann on their most wanted list mengele the worst name in israel the nightmare he was a real butcher [Music] anglaise 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 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 the eastern races the slavs the gypsies those less the inferior races at a faster rate and he had power of life and death 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 know him for [Music] three days after the eichmann abduction agent aitan meets with issa harel the mossad chief has some good news isarahel found the address of mengele in buenos aires isa was very keen to think i can bring back two i could get mengele as well the mossad boss wants to mount a full-blown commando raid on the address he wanted to do a second operation while the first one wasn't finished and this is bad thinking if you involve two things at the same time you you multiply the risk for failure so i suggest not to do it 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 the israelis actually went looking around buenos aires during that period in which they were holding eichmann in the safe house 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 if you were caught in argentina in 1960 as a known foreign spy you wouldn't be executed but you would have been the guest of the argentine government for a very very long time [Music] mossad agents have tracked nazi war criminal joseph mengele to what they hope is his hideout in buenos aires [Music] he sent few people to check this 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 meneler lives hoping that maybe they'd say oh don't you mean mengele yes he's he lives over there the risks were definitely the german community of buenos aires there is a german community of a quarter million people then 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 everybody wonders you know why did south america and argentina 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 perron and the argentine government had secret agreements with himmler's uh foreign espionage service when the war ended it was a natural extension of washington's world during the war to it for it to receive nazis afterwards [Music] but he was not in the house practice that we couldn't find him that much that means that he was dug in better than eichmann [Music] with no sign of the nazi doctor harrell decides to cut his losses and return to israel with eichmann alone i'm afraid at that stage the mossad were on a very cold trail indeed and 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 in december 1961 an israeli court convicts adolf eichmann and hangs him for his crimes but mossad chief is not given up on joseph mengele haraldo was still determined that mengele was someone they wanted to catch he he was a notorious figure so aharoni was ordered to mount an operation and to try and find him [Music] senior massage agents zv aharoni returns to south america to track down the nazi doctor the idea was that i should go now and try to find manga he goes undercover as a historian writing a book about the ss v and his agents calm argentina uruguay bolivia and chile some information pointed the way to paraguay but when we were there he had already left [Music] 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 [Music] they had picked up this belgian war criminal he was a former dutch ss officer called the lamb satan is a former drinking buddy of mangala and they said to him we're going to take you back for war crimes unless you give us something better he said i'll give you a mengele assassin was very much plugged into the network and and he suggested that mengele was in brazil and so aharoni and his team went there [Music] he he said he might been hiding in the house near sao paulo but identifying the future of 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 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 we were looking for mangale in a farm about 50 kilometers from sao paulo the israeli spies spend days watching the ranch the information provided by sassen is beginning to look like another dead end and then i saw a man with a mustache and two people like bodyguards watching him [Music] and one of them for sure was mengele [Music] mengele was posted to auschwitz in may of 1943 it was only a couple of months after he turned just 32 years old [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 under the right and to the left those who would live and those who would die 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 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 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 he'd inject different colored 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 my mother grabbed my twin sister and me by the hand hoping that as long as she could hold on to us that she could protect us i in my childish curiosity looked around trying to figure out what on earth is that place then i realized that my father and my two older sisters have disappeared in the crowd and nazi was running yelling in german twins twins we were bearing 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 and nathan added yes and my mother said yes i remember looking back and seeing her arm stretched out in despair and she was pulled away i never got to say goodbye to her the israelis went out and they looked at that farm they staked it out and zviyaroni the head of the mossad team told me these men walked past him and one of them he was convinced was mingler after 18 years on the run it appears the angel of death is in the crosshairs of the mossad mossad operatives believe they have cited the world's most notorious nazi fugitive i'm sure that we did see actually mengele for now the team's mission is limited to surveillance they return to israel to plan their next move agent zv aharoni reports to mossad chief isser harrell parrell didn't believe their intelligence irony 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 herrera 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 harold says the operation's cancelled we've got something else to do and there were greater problems back at home because nassar head of egypt had just fired rockets capable of hitting israel and german rocket scientists were down there working on them and israel spent the next year on an assassination plot of killing off the rocket scientists operation mengele is shelved the mossad's nazi hunting unit is quietly disbanded and uh mengele lived but the nazi doctor is no longer enjoying the good life after 1959 when he had to flee argentina because the extraditional request his life went into a very sharp decline mengele was growing increasingly paranoid that he was going to be caught he's living a very nervous life joseph mengele has no idea that the mossad have given up their chase he remains terrified that like adolf hikeman 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 his very commanding position and he also had this whole pack of dogs with him so he was a very very paranoid very edgy figure israel may have given up the hunt but in west germany prosecutors continue to build a case against mengele there's a very loyal retainer of the mangalay a family called sadelmeyer prosecutors suspect hans settlemyer has provided mengele support since his flight from europe a judge who was then running the the office that would investigate mengele decided to go ahead and swear han settlemyre in under sworn oath and question him about whether he was supporting mengala the family was money was going to him or anything else settlemeyer 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 and they never went out to find out anything else they accepted his word [Music] mangala's long flight is now nearly 20 years in the making outfits is liberated in in january 45 but before that happens mengele has made goodies 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 a suitcase full of his scientific findings and he was picked up finally by the americans in june of 1945 what saved him was that 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 want to marr his body so he never had that distinguishing feature of an sas man or officer and that really helped him so in the days at the end of the war and they had a quite a simple litmus test take off your shirts raise your hands if they found a tattoo that 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 as what which is what happened with him 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 uh in bavaria 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's dead on the eastern front and they close the file but mengele's family knows that he is alive and well they even sent him money via hans settlemeyer he came from a very rich family the mengele family were a family who produced farm machinery and in germany the mengele family ran the largest business in queensbury gunsberg was a company town 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 a former ushers doctor that that this could very probably be his fate if he was caught so he contacts his family back in goonsburg and uh and sadelma puts him in touch with various people who can help him if you had enough money you could flee so he crossed into austria from austria he crossed into italy and like many other nazis he reaches genoa he got an argentine landing permit in the name of helm mcgregor he boarded a ship called the north king to buenos aires arrived in argentina in august 1949. before long he begins selling farm machinery across south america his business thrives from 49 to 59 those 10 years he spent in argentina were actually very good years 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 especially ruined mengeles he's just going from a succession of farms being an itinerant farm manager effectively in paraguay in brazil and at one point when he was on a farm in brazil there was a young calf had a hernia and mengele got out his surgical tools and performed this incredibly delicate and 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 though the mossad has failed to capture him mengele's carefree life is gone for good so mengele grows increasingly isolated depressed and he's ends up in a very modest bungalow on the outskirts of sao paulo ironically as mengele's fortunes dwindle his legend grows increasingly outlandish throughout the late 60s and early 70s the the reputation of mengele grows out of all proportion it's partly fueled by simon wiesenthal who was kind of made joseph mengele he's sort of poster boy you know this is the nazi we all want to capture this is the really bad one this is this is angel of death private individuals such as simon vicente you know the clarksvilles in 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 the klaus felts 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 70s and in fact he had left paraguay 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 uh minions following him around you've got the mengele of popular culture boys from brazil the white suit all powerful nazi hiding in the jungle the real stuff of myth we thought hollywood was doing documentaries instead of films it turns out he lived a fairly squalid life and uh he's got this terrible nervous habit of chewing the ends of his moustache and he chews his mustache so much that um he ends up with a hairball 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 forty years have passed since the fall of the third reich but joseph 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 an island in greece he was in a paraguayan jungle with a great big factory he was everywhere but the moon frankly but uh 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 have been extremely easy to find them and locate them and have them arrested this was a 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 world to do the right thing until i realized that they were covering up on right left and right in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz-birkenau eva core 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 nothing like a piece of garbage or a piece of meat 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 i was injected with something that made me very ill he would deliberately infect them to see how long the infection would take in one another i had extremely high fever my arms my legs were swollen to twice the size with huge red patches all over painful very painful 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 to swear too young why walked to labor too bad she's so young she has only two weeks to live that much i understood in german 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 in 1985 campaigning by eva core and others converges with political will the pressure is building on the german government on the americans and the israelis because of this mock trial there started to be multi-million dollar rewards offered from mengele law enforcement officials from three nations meet to coordinate their efforts the germans were the hosts there were several people from different agencies in israel and the us marshal service was there days later the international team decides to act on a promising tip after drinking heavily at a restaurant mengele's fixer hans settlemeyer let it slip to a friend that he's been supporting mengele for years the friend alerted authorities the chief prosecutor in frankfurt secures a search warrant for settlemyer's home [Music] zettelmeier was always considered to be um a potential link to mengele in south america the hunt for the nazi doctor moves into high gear [Music] may 31 1985 german special agents raid the home of mengele family fixer hans settlemyer they knew that if they told the local bavarian police there was bound to be an informer for the mengale family who would then tip them off and you know make sure they hit everything so they got a different police force from another part of the country to go and raid said omar's property [Music] the search was conducted by the the bundes criminal opt 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 behind the furniture investigators under the secret stash of envelopes there they found these letters that had been sent from mengela they found everything all the letters all the addresses of his helpers long had been rumored the fact that settlemyre's wife had had a crush on joseph mengele early on and mengele had letters to her directly as well as to hans settlemyre 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. settlemeyer is arrested a search of his address book links mengele to a residence in sao paulo [Music] david marwell an investigator with the u.s justice department is part of the international force now hunting mangala the germans after the discovery of the documentation in the xenomorph home went directly to sao paulo [Music] brazilian police are brought on board romeo tuma was the uh the captain who ran the brazilian investigation for the federal police he received the material from the germans tuma quickly determines who lives at the sao paulo address a german family called the bossarts [Music] there they're not quite so genteel about a search warrant they really do come in with full force [Music] police questioned them about their suspected link to mengele and they refused to give anything up they said no it's not mengele it's not true they lied they denied it but tuma soon finds a makeshift shrine to mengele and a stash of his personal writing and photographs the truth about one of the era's most enduring mysteries is finally revealed and finally they gave it up the family admit to sheltering mengele during the last four years of his life and then they said where he was dead and then where they had buried him [Music] mengele is buried at just outside on the outskirts of a common cemetery where paupers are generally buried and they dug up a six-year-old corpse news of mengele's death attracts a media throng to the gravesite [Music] and there was mengele skull for everybody to see and was kind of held up for the cameras in a rather grizzly way and snap snap snap but questions linger there were many who believe that he would could have staged a death and he had the requisite medical knowledge and clearly the motive to stage a death 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 [Music] even though mengele's bones have been dug up a lot of people thought that manga they were still alive [Music] an international task force from germany brazil israel and america believe they have found joseph mengele 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 pathologists of the israeli defense force the forensic experts set out to uh compare what they knew about the living mangala with what evidence could be derived from the skeletonized remains 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 for joseph mengele is 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 still around maybe this is all a fix and it did take uh really um 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 to collect a tiny amount of dna enough to analyze it the results are definitive the bones are joseph mengeles there he was he was dead the hunt for joseph 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 [Music] with some friends he was taken down to bertioga beach which is about 20 or 30 miles just south of sao paulo and uh they sat in there 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 maybe and also he thought he might be spotted by someone and he eventually said okay i will [Music] cut very very strong as it is around there on this hot summer day mengele swam out from the beach a little bit further than he should have [Music] and uh it came quite apparent within a few minutes that he was in trouble [Music] so [Music] and tried to resuscitate him [Music] he'd had a stroke and if you have a stroke while you're swimming the combination isn't great [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 mengler 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 the world's most notorious nazi fugitive would never answer for his crimes they would have loved to have had that trial for the historical record for mengela the victims deserved that and that was frustrating for the mossad israel sometimes apologized why he didn't succeed to bring mengele into 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 news 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 [Music] i think in many ways i feel sorry for people like joseph 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 if you're looking for shards of justice and all this um he didn't lead the life that many fantasized he did this was not a comfortable life mengele died an old man in the hell with him you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 411,542

Keywords: Adolf Hitler, Buenos Aires, Dark secrets, Escaped Nazis, Ethical dilemmas, Government prosecution, Historical crimes, Historical horror, History documentaries, Infamous individuals, Nazi fugitive, Nazi hunters, Nazi war criminals, Notorious criminals, Post-WWII justice, Post-war life, Pursuit of justice, Pursuit of truth, Pursuit of war criminals, Timeline - World History Documentaries, World history

Id: pdUdr172yGU

Length: 41min 57sec (2517 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021