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

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  (#1) Nazi Labor Camp Guard Jakiw Palij Lived In New York Until He Was 95

  95 year-old Jakiw Palij - the last Nazi collaborator living in the US - was deported overnight to Germany from his Jackson Heights home. @ABC has exclusive video as he was removed. @ABC7NY pic.twitter.com/BevJiMQA1Z

  — Candace McCowan (@CandaceMcCowan7) August 21, 2018

   

  Jakiw Palij lived in the United States for decades after WWII. He immigrated to the US in 1949 and became a citizen eight years later. When asked what he did for a living in Europe during WWII, Palij told officials he worked in a factory and on a farm. 

  But Palij didn't work on a farm or a factory - he was a guard at the Trawniki Labor Camp, where over 6,000 Jewish inmates were slain in "one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust," according to a White House press release. Palij repeatedly denied any responsibility, saying he and other Polish citizens were forced to work for the Third Reich. 

  Palij's US citizenship was revoked back in 2003, but no European country would have him. For years after the confession, Palij existed quietly in a duplex in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens. On August 21, 2018, he was finally deported to Germany. Even though Palij was technically caught, he lived a relatively normal life up until the age of 95. Immigration authorities sent him to Düsseldorf. Officials then took him to a nursing home near Münster to live out the rest of his days. 
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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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#5) Klaus Barbie

  • Dec. at 78 (1913-1991)

  During WWII, Barbie personally tortured French captives while he was stationed in Lyon, France. After WWII, the United States military caught Barbie and gave him a job. He helped the US further their anti-Marxist and anti-communism efforts in Europe, and when France found out that Barbie was living it up, they applied to have him extradited to their country so they could put him trial. Instead of doing the right thing, the US military helped Barbie escape to Bolivia, where he lived under the alias Klaus Altmann and joined the Bolivian Armed Forces. 

  Things were going great for Altmann (AKA Barbie) until Nazi hunters from France identified him and brought him back to their country in 1983 to stand trial. After a lengthy trial, he received a life sentence and perished of cancer while serving time.
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  (#6) Adolf Eichmann

  • Dec. at 56 (1906-1962)

  One of the means that fugitives utilized for fleeing Germany during the post-WWII chaos was the overwhelming amount of people applying for refugee status with the Red Cross. Directly after WWII ended, it seems like the people in charge of approving visas and passports threw up their hands and gave everyone the paperwork they needed to leave Europe. Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of working out the game plan for the mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps, used the Red Cross and his connections at the Vatican to escape to South America, where he was captured in 1960 by Israeli forces.

  He was hanged in a correctional facility near Tel Aviv.
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  (#7) Otto Skorzeny

  • Dec. at 67 (1908-1975)

  Otto Skorzeny was kind of the James Bond of the SS. He saved Mussolini from a castle during WWII. He escaped to Argentina where he became Eva Peron's personal bodyguard (the two were rumored to have had an affair), and Hitler had a big ol' man-crush on Skorzeny. So in 1959, when the six-foot-plus German showed up in Ireland and bought a farm, everyone knew who he was. So why didn't Ireland chop him up and bury him in a potato field? In 1947, Skorzeny actually went on trial at Dachau, but the case fell apart and he was acquitted. Before he could be put on trial by another country, he fled.

  For a while, it seemed like Skorzeny was going to become a wee Irish lad. He was granted temporary residency as long as he never entered England, and people genuinely liked him - but then the Irish parliament finally came to their senses and canceled Skorzeny's Irish visa. Afterward, he moved to Spain, where he set up an import/export business and perished of cancer in 1975.
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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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  (#9) Martin Bormann

  • Dec. at 45 (1900-1945)

  Martin Bormann worked as Hitler's personal secretary and used his power in the Third Reich to control the flow of information to the Führer and include himself in every decision made by the German dictator. At the end of WWII, a Hitler Youth member claims to have seen Bormann's remains outside of the Führerbunker, but he admits that he didn't actually check the bodies, so it could have been a different officer. Adding to the confusion, Bormann was tried in absentia at Nuremberg.

  In 1972, a construction crew discovered the skeletal remains of Bormann and one of his buddies, lending credence to the Hitler Youth's story. 
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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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  (#11) Heinrich Müller

  • Dec. at 45 (1900-1945)

  Heinrich Müller rose to prominence as the chief of the Gestapo (the German secret police) at the height of WWII, and was present in Hitler's bunker when the German dictator took his own life - but that's the last time anyone saw him. Hans Baur, Hitler's pilot, later quoted Müller as saying, "We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians."

  And then he vanished. There are a few theories surrounding Müller's post-WWII life (or lack thereof). The most obvious possibility is that he either took his own life or perished in the post-WWII chaos and his passing went unrecorded. But it's also just as possible that he used one of the many ratlines to flee to South America and live out the rest of his life in secrecy. Mengele and plenty of other high-profile officials proved that this was completely possible. However, his remains were uncovered in 2013, and it was determined that he perished in 1945.
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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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  (#13) Franz Stangl

  • Dec. at 63 (1908-1971)

  Stangl was an Austrian-born Nazi officer who was one of the SS commanders in charge of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during Operation Reinhard - the code name for the extermination of Polish Jews. In 1948, Stangl was able to escape to Italy and then to Syria thanks to a ratline run by Roman Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal. Afterward, he moved to Brazil in 1951 and took a job at a Volkswagen plant near Sao Paulo.

  Because he never changed his name, Stangl was tracked down by Nazi hunters in Brazil and extradited to West Germany, where he was tried for the demise of around 900,000 people. Stangl argued that he was just doing his job.

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