Some of the Most Wanted Who Got Away

Martin Bormann heads any list of Most Wanted Nazis. Some others:

Walter Rauff, 68, a former SS colonel, prefigured the gas chamber by channeling exhaust fumes into trucks filled with victims. Vienna Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal claims that Rauff was responsible for the deaths of 97,000 people in such a manner in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Poland and Yugoslavia. Rauff reportedly lives today in Punta Arenas, Chile. West Germany requested Rauff's extradition in 1963, but the Chilean supreme court denied the request because the statute of limitations had taken effect.

Klaus Barbie, 59, was the Gestapo chief in Lyon. In 1954, a French military court sentenced him to death in absentia for the torture and murder of Jean Moulin, the martyred leader of the French Resistance. Today Barbie lives as a wealthy, naturalized businessman under the name of Klaus Altmann in La Paz, Bolivia. France's request for his extradition has been ignored by the Bolivian government.

Heinrich Mueller, 72, was chief of the Gestapo in the Third Reich and Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior. For years it was assumed that Mueller was killed when the Red Army encircled Berlin. But in 1963 the West Berlin district attorney's office opened his supposed grave and found the bones of three different men, none of them Mueller. In recent years, Mueller has been reported in Brazil and Argentina, where, some investigators believe, he acts as "enforcer" among escaped SS criminals.

Dr. Josef Mengele, 61, whom Anne Frank called the "angel of extermination," became notorious for his medical experiments at Auschwitz. It was he who separated those who would go to the gas chamber from those who would go to labor camps. Mengele slipped through the hands of the Allies after the war and lived in relative peace in his home town of Guenzburg, Bavaria, until 1953, when hints of his crimes began to surface. He fled to Argentina and openly practiced medicine in Buenos Aires. In 1959, when the West German government obtained an indictment and moved to extradite him, Mengele slipped into Paraguay.

There, under the protection of Dictator General Alfredo Stroessner, he holds Paraguayan citizenship in his own name and is reputed to live on a tightly guarded estate said to be a haunt for former Nazis near the Brazilian border. He frequently slips out of the country for rendezvous with his wealthy family, despite a $70,000 Israeli-German reward for his capture.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.