At the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, many Nazis feared retribution from the Allies for their appalling war crimes. Shockingly, a significant number of them avoided justice by fleeing to Latin America, often aided by figures like the Nazi sympathizer bishop Alois Hudal.
While some Nazi criminals were eventually extradited and tried, a depressing number lived out their lives in countries like Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Let’s delve into what happened to some of the worst Nazi perpetrators after the war.
10. The Beast of Lyon
Klaus Barbie, born in Germany in 1913, initially seemed destined for the clergy. However, he joined the Hitler Youth in 1935 and later the SD, an SS intelligence unit. Posted to the Netherlands in 1940, he hunted down Jews and German dissidents. His most brutal crimes occurred in Lyon, France.
From 1942, as the Gestapo boss in Lyon, Barbie arrested, tortured, and executed French resistance fighters, earning the moniker “The Beast of Lyon.” He also deported Jews to death camps like Auschwitz. Barbie personally engaged in acts of extreme cruelty.
After the war, Barbie worked with British and American counterintelligence against Communists. American authorities even helped him escape to Bolivia in 1950. He lived under a false identity until 1983, when he was extradited to France, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail in 1991, aged 77.
9. “White Death”
Franz Stangl, an Austrian, initially seemed on track for a normal life, becoming the youngest master weaver in Austria. However, he joined the Austrian Police and the Nazi Party in 1935. After Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Stangl joined the Gestapo and participated in the T4 Euthanasia project, which murdered people with disabilities.
This experience made Stangl the ideal candidate to run the Sobibór concentration camp in Poland. Prisoners at Sobibór called Stangl “White Death” because of his distinctive white uniform. He later ran the Treblinka death camp.
Interned by the Americans after the war, he escaped to Italy, where Bishop Hudal helped him to Syria. In 1951, he moved to Brazil with his family. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down, and in 1967, Stangl was extradited to West Germany. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in jail in 1971.
8. Gerhard Bohne
Gerhard Bohne, a lawyer and SS officer, directed the Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing in Germany, which ran the deadly Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. This program, driven by Nazi obsession with racial purity, murdered individuals with mental or physical disabilities, resulting in approximately 200,000 deaths.
Bohne escaped to Argentina in 1949 with support from President Juan Perón. After Perón’s overthrow in 1963, Bohne returned to Germany, where he was charged but released on bail. He fled to Argentina again but was extradited in 1966. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he lived until 1981 without facing justice.
7. Erich Priebke
In March 1944, Italian resistance members in Rome detonated a bomb that killed 28 Nazi police officers. Hitler ordered a reprisal, resulting in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre, where 335 men were murdered. Erich Priebke, an SS captain, participated in these killings.
After WWII, Priebke escaped from a British prisoner-of-war camp and fled to Argentina, aided by Bishop Alois Hudal. He lived there undisturbed until an ABC TV investigation exposed him in 1994. Extradited to Italy, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1998 but was allowed to serve under house arrest due to age and infirmity. He died in 2013 at the age of 100.
6. Holocaust Architect
Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in planning and implementing the Holocaust, was perhaps the most notorious Nazi to evade justice for decades. He organized the identification, assembly, and transportation of Jews from occupied Europe to extermination camps, earning him the title “Holocaust Architect.”
After WWII, Eichmann escaped from an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 and lived under an assumed identity in Germany before fleeing to Argentina in 1948. In 1960, Mossad agents kidnapped him and took him to Israel, where he was tried, convicted, and hanged in 1962 – the only instance of capital punishment in Israel.
5. Gustav Wagner
Gustav Wagner, the deputy commander of the Sobibór death camp, supervised its construction in 1942, including the gas chambers. Sobibór was created to relieve SS personnel from directly shooting Jews. Approximately 250,000 people were transported to Sobibór, with only 34 surviving. Wagner personally killed many victims.
In 1945, Wagner was briefly held in an American POW camp but was released. In 1948, he fled to Syria with Stangl, and in 1952, he moved to Brazil, living under his real name. Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down in 1978, and he was imprisoned while extradition requests from Germany and Israel were considered. Wagner cheated justice by committing suicide in 1980.
4. Josef Schwammberger
Josef Schwammberger, an Austrian SS lieutenant, ran three forced labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Survivors remembered him as exceptionally cruel, arbitrarily killing inmates. At the end of the war, he escaped while being transferred to American custody.
Odessa helped Schwammberger flee to Argentina, where he lived openly and became an Argentinean citizen in 1965. In 1990, he was extradited to Germany and charged with 3,377 murders, with 40 personally committed by him. He was convicted of seven murders due to a lack of evidence for the other charges. Schwammberger was sentenced to life in jail and died in prison in 2004 at the age of 92.
3. Angel of Death
Dr. Josef “Angel of Death” Mengele is infamous for his horrific medical experiments on Jews and Roma at Auschwitz. As a well-qualified medic, he conducted pseudoscientific racial studies and played an active role in the “selections,” sending the weak and ill to the gas chambers.
Mengele’s experiments included deliberately infecting wounds, dissecting murdered individuals, and performing sterilization procedures.
After the war, Mengele posed as a regular German army officer and was briefly imprisoned in an American POW camp. Released without his true identity being known, he worked as a farm laborer for four years. In 1949, he fled to Argentina and, in 1959, became an Argentinean citizen under his real name. Facing pursuit from West German and Israeli authorities, he moved to Paraguay and then Brazil, where he drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming.
2. Ludolf von Alvensleben
Ludolf von Alvensleben, born into an aristocratic Prussian family, joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and the SS in 1934. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, he became a regional commander, actively participating in the massacre of Polish Jews and others. He even complained about colleagues not being ruthless enough in mass executions.
The British arrested von Alvensleben but he escaped in late 1945 and fled to Argentina in 1946. In 1952, he was granted Argentinean citizenship under the name Carlos Lücke. Despite a West German arrest warrant in 1964 for the murder of 4,247 Poles, von Alvensleben lived in Brazil until his death in 1970 without facing justice.
1. Walter Rauff
Walter Rauff, an SS colonel and deputy to Heinrich Himmler, designed and deployed mobile gas chambers housed in vans marked with Red Cross symbols. These vehicles were used to murder Jews, people with disabilities, and others deemed undesirable.
Captured by the Americans in Italy in 1945, Rauff admitted his role in the mobile gassing van program but escaped custody. He was later recruited by Israeli intelligence to spy on Syria and was given Italian papers. After working with British and American spy agencies, he was expelled from Syria in 1949 and fled to Ecuador, then Argentina, and finally Chile. Despite extradition efforts, Rauff never stood trial and died in Chile in 1984.
These stories of Nazi war criminals escaping to Latin America highlight a dark chapter in history, marked by the evasion of justice and the long shadows of WWII. Despite efforts to bring them to account, many perpetrators lived out their lives in relative freedom, a stark reminder of the challenges in prosecuting such heinous crimes.
What are your thoughts on these escapes? Leave your comment below!
