In June 1985, Brazilian police exhumed a grave marked Wolfgang Gerhard and confirmed the remains belonged to Josef Mengele, a fugitive who had evaded capture for four decades. Born in 1911 into a wealthy Bavarian manufacturing family, he was an elite academic who earned a doctorate in anthropology and a medical degree, absorbing the era's racial pseudoscience under the geneticist Otmar von Verschuer before joining the SS.

Assigned to Auschwitz from 1943, he conducted selections on the ramp and pursued lethal experiments, most infamously on twins, treating prisoners as disposable research material. After the war he slipped through Allied custody, escaped via the ratlines to Argentina under a false name, and lived with family support. Mossad tracked him but called off an operation, and he drowned after a stroke in Brazil in 1979, unrepentant  ...