Which high-profile Nazis lived in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, or Chile and what were their fates?
Executive summary
A number of high-profile Nazi officials and collaborators established postwar lives in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Chile; some were later captured, extradited, assassinated or died in hiding while others evaded justice for decades, helped by clandestine “ratlines” and sympathetic officials and clergy [1] [2]. The most documented cases include Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele in Argentina (and later Paraguay/Brazil for Mengele), Franz Stangl in Brazil, Klaus Barbie’s flight through South America and assassinations or prosecutions of certain figures—details that vary by source and remain contested in places [3] [2] [4] [1].
1. Argentina: Eichmann, Mengele, Priebke and the Perón nexus
Argentina became the principal refuge cited by historians and journalists: Adolf Eichmann lived in Buenos Aires under an assumed name until Israeli agents captured him in 1960 and later tried and executed him in Israel for crimes against humanity [3] [2], Josef Mengele fled to Argentina in 1949 before moving on [4] [2], and Erich Priebke escaped to Argentina on falsified documents after a 1946 breakout from a POW camp [5]. Sources repeatedly link Argentine hospitality to President Juan Perón’s government and networks that helped former Nazis find new identities and work—an assertion supported by scholarship on postwar ratlines to Argentina [1] [2].
2. Brazil: Stangl, Cukurs, and later havens
Franz Stangl, the commander of the extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka, is reported to have used false Red Cross papers to flee and ultimately reached Brazil, a country repeatedly named as one of the destinations for senior perpetrators [4]. Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian collaborator, is reported to have fled to Brazil by 1946 and was later assassinated by Mossad agents in Uruguay in 1965—a striking example of extrajudicial tracking of fugitives in South America [1]. Sources emphasize Brazil as both a destination and a place where some fugitives remained until they were discovered or died [4] [1].
3. Paraguay: a waypoint for Mengele and others
Paraguay appears in multiple accounts as a transit or temporary hideout: Josef Mengele reportedly moved from Argentina to Paraguay in 1959 before relocating to Brazil a year later, illustrating the mobility of fugitives seeking safer havens as attention mounted [2]. Beyond Mengele, Paraguay served for some as an intermediary stop on the ratlines, though claims about large, permanent communities of top-ranking Nazis there are less consistently documented in the provided reporting [2] [1].
4. Chile: Colonia Dignidad, former SS men and local protégés
Chile hosted a number of German expatriates with Nazi or fascist ties—Walter Rauff is cited as settling around Santiago in 1949 after earlier flights, and Chilean cases such as Miguel Krassnoff and Paul Schäfer are named as having Nazi connections or familial links; Colonia Dignidad is repeatedly flagged as a notorious German-founded enclave with long-term abuses and protection of former Nazis [6] [7] [8]. Sources caution that the nature and scale of official Chilean complicity varied, and documentation is uneven across individual cases [6] [8].
5. Who helped them and how justice caught up in some cases
Escape networks—“ratlines”—that routed fugitives through Italy and Spain to South America are widely discussed, with aid from some Catholic clergy, elements of the Red Cross, and sympathetic officials in destination countries cited in multiple reports [1] [9] [10]. Accountability showed a patchwork pattern: some fugitives like Eichmann were abducted and tried abroad, others such as Klaus Barbie were eventually extradited and convicted, while some (Mengele, Stangl, others) eluded capture for long periods or died before prosecution; targeted assassinations (e.g., Cukurs) also occurred [2] [1] [4].
6. Limits of the record and competing narratives
Estimates of how many Nazis reached South America vary widely across sources and decades—figures like "thousands" or up to 9,000 are reported but are contested and derived from fragmentary archives and declassified files [1] [11]. Scholarly caution is urged: while high-profile cases are well documented (Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl, Barbie, Cukurs), many other names and fates remain poorly recorded, and some popular claims (including sensational assertions about Hitler) lack convincing evidence in the provided reporting [12] [1].