10 Nazi War Criminals Who Fled to Latin America After WWII

At the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, there were plenty of Nazis who had cause to fear retribution from the Allies because of their appalling war crimes. But all too many of them avoided justice by fleeing to Latin America, in many cases helped to abscond by the rogue Catholic bishop Alois Hudal, an avowed Nazi sympathizer.

Some of the Nazi criminals were extradited and tried for their crimes, but a depressing number were able to live out their lives in countries such as Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Read on to find out more about what happened to some of the worst Nazi thugs at WWII’s end.

Related: 10 Facts You Might Not Know about the Nazi’s Atomic Bomb Program

10 The Beast of Lyon

Born in Germany in 1913, at one point in his youth, it seems that Klaus Barbie had aspirations to enter the clergy. However, his career took a very different turn indeed after he joined the Hitler Youth in 1935 and then enrolled with the SD, an SS intelligence unit. He was posted to the Netherlands in 1940, where he hunted down Jews and German dissidents who’d fled the Nazis. But it was in France where he carried out his most prolific and brutal crimes against humanity.

From 1942, Barbie was the Gestapo boss in the city of Lyon, where he arrested, mercilessly tortured, and executed French resistance fighters, earning the title of “The Beast of Lyon.” Barbie also rounded up Jews for transportation to death camps such as Auschwitz. And Barbie didn’t just delegate torture duties to underlings. With apparent relish, he often carried out hideous acts of cruelty himself.

When the war ended, Barbie actually worked with the British and then the Americans in counterintelligence against Communists. American authorities even helped him to flee to Bolivia with his family in 1950 when prosecution threatened in France. He lived under a false identity in Bolivia until 1983 when he was finally extradited to France, where he was tried and sentenced to Life imprisonment. He died in jail in 1991, aged 77.^[1]

9 “White Death”

Austrian by birth, Franz Stangl seemed to be on track for a productive life by becoming the youngest master weaver in his home nation. An abrupt change of direction saw him join the Austrian Police and become a Nazi Party member in 1935 when it was still a banned organization in the country. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Stangl moved over to the Nazi Gestapo. He now participated in the barbaric T4 Euthanasia project, which targeted and murdered people with disabilities.

That gruesome job experience meant Stangl was perfectly suited for his next position: boss of the Sobibór concentration camp in Poland. It was a long way from a life as a master weaver. Prisoners at Sobibór called Stangl “White Death,” a sobriquet earned because of his distinctive white uniform. From Sobibór, he went on to run the equally horrific Treblinka death camp.

Interned by the Americans at the war’s end, he escaped from prison and made his way to Italy, where the notorious Nazi-sympathizing Bishop Hudal helped him to travel to the safe haven of Syria. But 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. Tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, Stangl died in jail in 1971.^[2]

8 Gerhard Bohne

A lawyer and an SS officer, Gerhard Bohne was the director of the innocent-sounding Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing in Germany. But this organization was actually formed to run the sinister and deadly Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. This was a product of the Nazi obsession with racial purity, which held that it was best to murder those with mental or physical disabilities to protect the status of the Aryan race. This ruthless killing project was responsible for the deaths by gassing of some 200,000 innocent Germans.

Apparently, with the support of Argentinean President Juan Perón, Bohne escaped to Argentina in 1949. However, Perón was overthrown in a coup in 1963, and Bohne then returned to Germany, where he was charged with his crimes and released on bail. He took the opportunity to flee to Argentina again, but he was extradited from there in 1966. But he was deemed unfit to stand trial and lived on until 1981 without ever facing justice.^[3]

7 Erich Priebke

In March 1944, a pre-planned operation saw members of the Italian resistance in Rome set off a bomb in a garbage cart that killed 28 Nazi police and wounded another 100, with more dying later of their injuries. Hitler personally ordered a reprisal, and 335 men were rounded up, taken to Rome’s Ardeatine Caves, and murdered in cold blood by gunshots to the back of the head. One of the Nazis who carried out the killings was an SS captain, Erich Priebke.

When WWII ended, Priebke was incarcerated at a British prisoner-of-war camp, but he escaped. He then made his way to Argentina, helped as he later attested by the notorious Bishop Alois Hudal. He lived with his family in his adopted country unmolested until an ABC TV investigation unmasked him in 1994. Extradition to Italy followed, and in 1998, he was sentenced to life in prison. To the anger of many, pleading age and infirmity, he was allowed to serve his time under house arrest. He died aged 100 in 2013.^[4]

6 Holocaust Architect

Perhaps the most notorious of Nazis who escaped justice for decades after WWII, Adolf Eichmann played an absolutely key role in the planning and implementation of the Holocaust. Before he became a high-ranking Nazi, Eichmann’s life was nondescript, working as a traveling salesman in Austria. After joining the Nazi Party in 1932, he rose through the ranks to a senior position in the Reich Security Central Office’s Jewish affairs department.

Eichmann’s role, Britannica tells us, involved organizing “the identification, assembly, and transportation of Jews from all over occupied Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.” Hence, he became known as the “Holocaust architect.”

After WWII’s end, Eichmann was taken prisoner by the Americans but escaped in 1946 and lived for several years under an assumed identity in Germany before fleeing to Argentina in 1948. But the Israelis got wind of his whereabouts, and in 1960, Mossad agents kidnapped him and spirited him off to Israel. There he stood trial, all the time denying his guilt. But the court sentenced him to death, and he was hanged in 1962, the only instance of capital punishment ever carried out in Israel.^[5]

5 Gustav Wagner

We met the boss of Sobibór’s death camp earlier, and now it’s time to hear the story of his deputy, Gustav Wagner. Wagner was there right at the start of the Sobibór camp, supervising its construction in 1942, a job that included the building of gas chambers for the murder of Jews. Sobibór was specifically commissioned to relieve SS personnel from the onerous task of murdering Jews by shooting them. Some 250,000 souls were transported in railroad cattle trucks to Sobibór; of those, just 34 survived. But not all of the victims died in the gas chambers since the sadistic Wagner killed many with his own hands.

In 1945, Wagner had a short stay in the American POW camp but was released. In 1948, accompanied by his old boss, Stangl, he fled to Syria, and four years later, he moved on to a new life in Brazil, living under his real name. But he was tracked down to Brazil by the relentless Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1978, and he was imprisoned while German and Israeli applications for extradition were considered. But in the end, Wagner cheated justice by taking his own life in 1980.^[6]

4 Josef Schwammberger

Austrian Josef Schwammberger held the rank of lieutenant in the SS and ran three forced labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII. Survivors of the camps remembered him as an exceptionally cruel man who arbitrarily killed inmates on a whim. At the end of the war, he was arrested in the French-occupied sector of Austria. But as he was being transferred by train to the custody of the Americans, who planned to put him on trial, he escaped. Odessa, an underground organization dedicated to helping Nazis escape justice, then helped Schwammberger to flee to Argentina.

In Argentina, Schwammberger was able to live quite openly under his real name and even became an Argentinean citizen in 1965. As early as 1973, the West German government applied to extradite the Nazi criminal, but it wasn’t until 1990 that he was handed over to the German authorities. At his trial, he was first charged with 3,377 murders, with 40 of the killings personally committed by him. Eventually, he was convicted of seven murders as lack of evidence nullified the other charges. He was sentenced to life in jail and died in prison in 2004, aged 92.^[7]

3 Angel of Death

Certainly, one of the best-known Nazi criminals, Dr. Josef “Angel of Death” Mengele, is notorious for the perverted medical experiments he carried out on Jews and Roma interned in the Auschwitz death camp. The well-qualified medic worked at the concentration camp from 1943, carrying out what Britannica describes as “pseudoscientific racial studies.”

As well as his gruesomely cruel experiments, Mengele played an active part in the “selections,” which involved sending those too weak or too ill to work to the gas chambers. Mengele’s grim medical interventions included deliberately infecting wounds, murdering people so their bodies could be dissected, and sterilization procedures.

After the war, Mengele posed as an ordinary German army officer and was Imprisoned for a time in an American POW camp. But he was released as his true background was unknown, and under a false name, he spent four years as a farm laborer in Germany. Fearing arrest, he traveled to Argentina in 1949 and, in 1959, actually took Argentinean citizenship under his real name. But he discovered that West German and Israeli authorities were on his trail, so he moved on to Paraguay and then Brazil. Evading justice, Mengele lived there until he drowned when he had a stroke while swimming in 1979.^[8]

2 Ludolf von Alvensleben

Born into an aristocratic Prussian family Ludolf-Hermann Emmanuel Georg Kurt Werner von Alvensleben-Schochwitz joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and the SS in 1934. After Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, von Alvensleben became a regional commander there and took an active role in the massacre of Polish Jews and others. At one point, he actually wrote to top Nazi Heinrich Himmler complaining that some of his army colleagues were not ruthless enough when it came to mass executions of Poles.

The British arrested von Alvensleben and imprisoned him in a camp near the city of Hamburg. But he escaped in late 1945 and, early in the following year, made his way with his family to Argentina. In 1952, while Juan Perón was president of the country, von Alvensleben was given Argentinean citizenship under the name of Carlos Lücke. In 1964, a West German court issued an arrest warrant for von Alvensleben, accusing him of responsibility for the murder of 4,247 Poles. But the Nazi thug was able to live on in Brazil until his death in 1970 without paying any price for his atrocities.^[9]

1 Walter Rauff

Walter Rauff was an SS colonel and deputy to Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader described by Britannica as “the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.” Rauff was a senior officer of an innocuous-sounding organization, the Criminal Technical Institute. But his work there was very far from innocuous. He was responsible for designing and deploying mobile gas chambers that were housed in vans and marked with Red Cross symbols. The Nazis used these vehicles to murder Jews, people with disabilities, and anyone else they didn’t like.

In 1945, the Americans captured Rauff in Italy, where he’d been the SS commandant of Milan. Rauff admitted the part he’d played in the mobile gassing van program, but he escaped from custody. Extraordinarily, he was recruited by Israeli intelligence to spy on Syria and was given Italian papers. He spent time in Syria, ostensibly advising the government there, and it seems that he also worked with British and American spy agencies. Expelled from Syria in 1949, Rauff headed to Ecuador, then Argentina, and finally Chile. Despite later efforts by Israel and West Germany to extradite him, Rauff never stood trial for his crimes and died in Chile in 1984.^[10]