The Nazi War Criminal Who Lived Freely for 34 Years

[00:00:00]He was the most wanted Nazi war criminal alive and for 34 years the world knew roughly where he was. Josef Mengele ran medical experiments on thousands [music] of prisoners at Auschwitz. He selected who lived and who died on the arrival platform. He was known, documented, photographed. Survivors could describe his face, his voice, the way he whistled while he worked. After the war he fled to Argentina, then Paraguay, then Brazil. [music] Mossad tracked him. The CIA had files on him. West Germany issued warrants and still every single time he slipped through. He spent his final years in a beach town outside São Paulo swimming in the ocean every morning like a retired [music] grandfather. No disguise, no bunker, just a man living quietly while his victims' families waited for a trial that never came. In 1979 he had a stroke in the water and drowned. Buried under a fake name in a small Brazilian cemetery, never arrested, never charged, never forced to answer for a single death.

[00:01:00]History looked directly at him and looked away.