Random Famous Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Punishment (13 items)

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  (#2) Josef Mengele

  • Dec. at 68 (1911-1979)

  Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death," spent most of his life committing vicious acts in the name of fake science and the eradication of people he believed to be a subspecies. After WWII, he fled Germany through a series of ratlines and made his way to South America, where he became a suspiciously humble country doctor.

  Mengele was almost apprehended in the '60s by the Mossad (the Israeli National Intelligence Agency), but they had to call off their hunt for Mengele in order to detain Adolf Eichmann. 
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  (#10) Friedrich Buchardt

   

  Friedrich Buchardt was an intellectual of astounding proportions. In another lifetime, he could have helped the world achieve something truly great, but instead, he was a Nazi who developed a scale for determining the "German-ness" of Polish and Russian Jews. But he didn't just work behind a desk, Buchardt also led a notorious squad that came in behind the front line of German military conquests in the Soviet Union to round up and slaughter tens of thousands of Jews and communists.

  After WWII, rather than facing prosecution for the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, he was hired by Britain's MI6 as a spy. After a couple of years, he was traded off to the Americans, who used him for their own shady purposes. He perished never having faced punishment for his misdeeds.

   

   
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  (#12) Kurt Becher

  • Dec. at 86 (1909-1995)

  Kurt Becher's story is, at best, morally cloudy. He spent most of WWII extorting money from Hungarian Jewish leaders in exchange for their freedom, and while he kept thousands of people from losing their lives in a concentration camp, he wasn't doing anything out of the goodness of his heart.

  Still, he was backed by members of the Jewish community during the Nuremberg Trials and that allowed him to go free. After WWII, he moved to West Germany, where he lived a relatively normal life. 
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  (#3) Horst Wagner

  • 87

  Horst Wagner was one of the worst Nazis to walk the face of the Earth - not because he was performing medical experiments or operating a gas chamber, but because he made sure the bureaucracy that kept track of the demise of 350,000 Jewish people ran like clockwork.

  After WWII, Wagner escaped from a Nuremberg jail in 1948 and made his way to Rome through the Kloster Line, a ratline made up of convents and churches that housed German fugitives, before fleeing to Argentina to join his pals Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. 
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  (#8) Michael Karkoc

  • 100

  During WWII, this Ukrainian military officer worked his way up from the USDL to being a full-on member of the SS just before they surrendered to the Allies. 

  From there, things get murky. US Immigration reports show that a Ukrainian man name Michael Karkoc came to America in 1949 and claimed to have had no military experience; he said that he was a farmer and camp laborer throughout WWII. Karkoc became a naturalized US citizen 10 years after arriving in the US and set down roots in Minnesota. It wasn't until 2013 that the Associated Press received a tip stating that the Karkoc who was living in Minnesota was actually the same man who dutifully fought for the Third Reich towards the end of WWII. When asked about his service during the conflict, Karkoc said, "I don't think I can explain."
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  (#4) Paul Schäfer

  • Dec. at 89 (1921-2010)

  It's hard to quantify which member of the Third Reich is the worst, but Paul Schäfer makes a very good case for the title.

  After WWII, Schäfer fled child mistreatment allegations in Europe and ended up in Chile and Argentina. By the late '90s, Schäfer had a litany of abuse claims surrounding him, and he disappeared for almost a decade until he was discovered by Argentinean authorities. In 2006, Schäfer was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for inappropriate relations with 25 children and was ordered to pay 770 million pesos (approximately $1.5 million) to some of his victims. In 2010, he perished while in custody.

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