10 War Criminals Who Escaped Justice

WatchMojo

Justice eluded these perpetrators of history's darkest chapters... Join us as we examine notorious war criminals who managed to escape punishment for their heinous acts. From Josef Mengele's ghastly experiments to Alois Brunner's Holocaust architecture, these individuals fled to sympathetic nations and lived out their days in relative freedom while their victims never saw closure.

Transcript

00:00Alois Brunner remains one of the principal unpunished Nazi criminals.

00:05A stain on our history.

00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we'll be discussing individuals that were accused or convicted of crimes,

00:12yet ultimately managed to avoid proper fitting punishment.

00:15The world's most notorious Nazi fugitive would never answer for his crimes.

00:22Shandor Kepiro.

00:23The business of hunting down Nazis and their former collaborators is a complicated one,

00:27with lots of moving parts that don't always land in simple patterns.

00:30The accused war criminal, aged 96, is the target of Nazi hunters worldwide.

00:35Shandor Kepiro was ultimately found not guilty in his native Hungary,

00:39in the face of allegations that he took an active part in the killing of civilians during World War II.

00:43The former police captain is charged with personally ordering the execution of 36 people

00:48in a Hungarian raid on Novi Sad, a Serbian city then occupied by Hungary.

00:54Kepiro's admission that he was part of the round-up efforts ultimately wasn't enough

00:58for the accusations of war crimes to stick, despite efforts to the contrary by Ephraim Zoroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

01:05The latter remained unrepentant in the wake of Kepiro's death in 2011,

01:09celebrating in a Facebook post about how the trial negatively affected Kepiro's health.

01:13Lyon de Grel.

01:14The Rexxist Party was founded by the Belgian politician and Nazi collaborator Lyon de Grel in 1935,

01:20a far-right organization that ran parallel to Germany's Nazi ideologies.

01:25Lyon de Grel was also a Belgian fascist,

01:28and he fell in love with Nazi Germany.

01:32De Grel was sentenced to death by his own country for fighting alongside German forces in the Walloon Legion,

01:37but fled to fascist Spain in order to escape his fate.

01:40In the end, it was typical de Grel.

01:43He requisitioned a Heinkel bomber and took off for Spain,

01:46the last friend of fascism in Europe.

01:48Lyon de Grel was unapologetic in exile,

01:51and continued to actively work within the sectors of Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi support.

01:56Meanwhile, de Grel's personal life was one of financial success and comfort,

01:59thanks to a lucrative construction business that funded his endeavors until his death in 1994.

02:04In the end, Lyon de Grel died aged 87 in 1994 in Malaga, Spain.

02:12Ante Pavelic.

02:13The Ustache was yet another example of rising fascist sentiment in the years leading up to the Second World War.

02:19At the time, Croatia was an ally of the Nazis,

02:22and its leader Ante Pavelic modeled himself on Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

02:27Ante Pavelic was the leader of the Ustache,

02:30founded in fascist Italy after Pavelic departed his native Croatia back in 1929.

02:36Pavelic and the Ustache were accused not only of plotting multiple political assassinations,

02:41but also of the systematic executions of Serbs and Jews within Croatia's puppet state concentration camps.

02:46Pavelic's regime was staunchly Roman Catholic.

02:49And Pavelic wanted to create an exclusively Catholic state

02:56and cleanse his native land of all alien elements.

02:59Ante Pavelic spent his post-Ustache years on the run,

03:03receiving assistance from the Vatican for an escape to Argentina.

03:06He remained firmly unrepentant through it all and was never brought to trial for his crimes.

03:10Although an assassination attempt did eventually lead to Ante Pavelic's death in Francoist Spain in 1959.

03:16A year later, Pavelic was murdered, the victim of an assassin.

03:21Laszlo Csatady.

03:23It's common for those accused war criminals who are elderly to pass away while awaiting the results of their trials.

03:28A man who was once the world's most wanted Nazi war crime suspect has died in Hungary while waiting to go on trial.

03:34Laszlo Csatady was actually sentenced to death by a Czech court for allegedly taking an active part

03:39in brutal camp deportation efforts during World War II.

03:42And he was actually sentenced by a Czechoslovak court in 1948 to death himself for those crimes, but he escaped.

03:49He fled to Canada and successfully avoided capture until efforts from the Simon Wiesenthal Center

03:54saw Csatady being held under house arrest while new charges were being filed.

03:58Csatady's Canadian citizenship was revoked,

04:00but his trial eventually came to an end after this former Hungarian officer died while awaiting trial.

04:05Now, Laszlo Csatady has always denied the crimes that he was accused of,

04:09but he is also a man who never hid his anti-Semitism.

04:13Gustav Wagner.

04:14He was known as both the Beast and the Wolf during his tenure at the SS.

04:17People like Wagner who were introduced into this murder machine were tested.

04:25Wagner passed the test.

04:28He was a good student.

04:30It was during this service where Wagner was accused of overseeing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews

04:35in the Sobibor death camps.

04:37Wagner's life after World War II is spent in exile living in Brazil

04:40until he was discovered by noted Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

04:44Wiesenthal makes an announcement to the world

04:47that one particular man in that photograph is Gustav Wagner,

04:53the wanted murderer from Sobibor, and he should be arrested.

04:57It's been surmised that one of the survivors from Sobibor, Stanisław Schmeisner,

05:01was responsible for the knife that was found lodged in Wagner's chest at the time of his death in 1980.

05:06The official cause of his death, however, is listed as self-destruction.

05:09One theory about how Wagner was killed

05:11was that maybe it had been a vengeful survivor who had done so,

05:14maybe someone who had survived Sobibor.

05:17Ludolf von Alvinsleben.

05:19This SS officer was never even properly put on trial,

05:22despite indictments being levied at his feet.

05:24Soldiers under the command of von Alvinsleben were accused of being responsible

05:28for the deaths of thousands of Polish nationals.

05:30He escaped from the custody of British officials in 1945

05:33and fled to a fascist haven in Argentina.

05:35Von Alvinsleben was sentenced to death by a Polish court in absentia,

05:39but this mattered little when he was already living a new life abroad.

05:42Ludolf von Alvinsleben died without ever paying the price

05:45for the atrocities that occurred under his watch.

05:47Erebert Heim.

05:48Historical horror stories have long been told

05:50about the inconceivable medical experiments conducted during World War II.

06:02Erebert Heim was an Austrian medical professional

06:05who was accused of torturing captives

06:08who were being held in Austria's Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.

06:12Erebert Heim only stayed at Mauthausen for six weeks,

06:16but his cruelty would mark those who survived the camp forever.

06:19This real-life doctor death was taken into custody by U.S. soldiers in 1945,

06:24but clerical alterations to his files resulted in Heim escaping prosecution.

06:28Heim continued to live life on the run

06:29as authorities attempted to bring him to justice,

06:32living in Egypt until finally being declared legally dead in 1992.

06:35Erebert Heim finally succumbed to his illness on the 10th of August 1992

06:40without ever having been arrested by the police.

06:44Walter Ralf.

06:45If one needed any further proof how evil never truly dies,

06:48then all it might take is a viewing of Walter Ralf's public funeral from 1984.

06:53In a bold gesture of defiance,

06:55Walter Ralf's German comrades, in true Nazi fashion,

06:59openly saluted him at his funeral in Santiago.

07:02That's because this reprehensible Nazi commander was responsible

07:05for carrying out Germany's systematic orders against the Jewish people,

07:09particularly between the years 1942 and 1943.

07:13Ralf had every reason to hide.

07:15Ralf died in Chile after a post-war life that included protection

07:18by a Nazi-sympathetic Catholic bishop in Italy,

07:21as well as working as an advisor for Syrian intelligence.

07:24Walter Ralf's Chilean funeral featured a number of unrepentant Nazi visitors,

07:28some of whom saluted and uttered vile anti-Semitic maxims before Ralf's coffin.

07:33Alois Bruner.

07:34This SS captain holds the ignoble distinction of being one of the architects of the Holocaust,

07:38a historical villain that tragically escaped paying the ultimate price for his sins.

07:43Bruner's mission was simple, to revive the final solution.

07:47Alois Bruner's name was similar to another Axis prisoner,

07:50and he took advantage of the mistaken identity to escape custody.

07:53Hiding behind a false identity, Bruner returned to an ordinary civilian life

07:58without a worry in the world about his criminal past.

08:01He even worked for the United States military under a false name before fleeing abroad.

08:05Bruner lived for a long time in Syria,

08:07and it was during this time when multiple attempts on his life via letter bomb

08:10cost Bruner some appendages.

08:12Two separate death sentences in absentia couldn't bring Alois Bruner to justice.

08:16He allegedly died in Syria around 2010.

08:18Justice never caught up with Bruner,

08:20except for the inconvenience of a few letter bombs.

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08:40Yosef Mengele.

08:41He's on a short and vile list of history's most infamous war criminals.

08:45Mengele was known as the angel of death.

08:50He wanted to improve the stock of the Aryan race.

08:54An angel of death whose experiments on the captives of the Auschwitz II Birkenau

08:59were truly the stuff of nightmares.

09:01Yet Yosef Mengele apparently died while swimming,

09:03away from courts, trials, and more importantly, the face of justice.

09:06That led the Germans to believe that Mengele had died in Brazil in 1979.

09:13Mengele lived in Brazil after falsifying his identity

09:15while in custody of the American allies.

09:17Yosef Mengele eventually made his escape using what were known as rat lines.

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