He's arguably the most notorious Nazi fugitive of all. Dr. Josef Mengele earned the nickname the Angel of Death for his perverse and sadistic experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau. But after the war, Mengele escaped to Buenos Aires, where he lived in hiding. Nazi Hunters goes insdie the 30-year investigation to find the hardened criminal. By the time German, Israeli and American law enforcement agents finally tracked him down, they were too late Mengele had died six years earlier.
Go inside the remarkable story of how Sam Donaldson and an ABC News crew discovered a fugitive WWII war criminal... in a phone book. Erich Priebke was one of Hitlers highest ranking officers in Rome, and he orchestrated the assassination of innocent civilians in Rome. After the war, he escaped and eluded justice for 50 years. See how the journalists staged an elaborate sting operation, confronted Priebke at a school where he was working with young children and got his confession on camera.
An Israeli secret agent hunts down a Nazi who fled to Brazil after condemning 30,000 Jews to mass graves. NGC follows Agent Kuenzles covert mission to assassinate the infamously sadistic Herbert Cukurs as we see how the agent befriends a murderer and tempts him with a business offer he cant refuse all to lure him into a deadly trap.
Perhaps the greatest scalp claimed by the Nazi hunters was one of the chief architects of Hitlers Final Solution - Adolf Eichmann. After the war, Eichmann disappeared without a trace. But from the start, Nazi hunters were on his heels. In 1960, after receiving a tip from a local, an Israeli Special Operations unit determined that Eichmann was living in Argentina. With unorthodox, even illegal methods, agents like Rafi Eitan and Zvi Aharoni ran a covert campaign that culminated in a dramatic operation to kidnap Eichmann and smuggle him back to Israel where he was tried and finally hanged in 1962.
Klaus Barbie tortured and executed thousands of French citizens before escaping to Bolivia after World War II. Now, NGC tells the story of a couple who risk their lives in a lifelong struggle to bring the notorious Butcher of Lyon to justice, even as he aids the U.S. with anticommunist intelligence and practices his profession of inflicting death and pain for the Bolivian government. Do this husband and wife succeed in bringing a sadistic killer to justice, or is Barbie truly untouchable?
As the Gestapo Chief in Paris, Kurt Lischka orders the largest mass arrest in French history and is responsible for the deportation of 73,000 Jews. But instead of being tried for his crimes, Lischka enjoys a quiet life and successful career after the war thanks to a legal loophole protecting Nazis like him from prosecution. Serge and Beate Klarsfeld are determined to bring him to justice. But can they get a reluctant Germany to face up to its past?
One of France's worst wartime villains, Paul Touvier is an overtly anti-Semitic traitor who terrorizes his own countrymen. As a leader of a pro-Nazi paramilitary police force, he relishes his job of hunting down 'enemies of the state' and, murdering Jews and resistance fighters alike, earns himself the nickname the 'Hangman of Lyon'.
A fervent believer in Hitler's theories on race and Aryan superiority, Franz Stangl is an Austrian career policeman who joins the Nazi party and works his way up the ranks. Proving a knack for mass murder, he eventually finds himself in charge of three Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland where he is responsible for the genocide of 800,000 people. Following a well worn 'ratline', Stangl escapes to Brazil after the war where for nearly two decades he leads a comfortable existence in exile. That is until 1964 when the world's most famous Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, receives an anonymous tip about Stangl's whereabouts. With help from the Brazilian police, and an extradition request from West Germany, Stangl is arrested in 1967. It is a major victory for Holocaust survivors, particularly since Stangl's trial brings the horrifying reality of the extermination camps to light. Thanks to a surprising admission, it also puts Weisenthal on the trail of another notorious Nazi fugitive, his former deputy Gustav Wagner. According to Stangl, the man known as the 'Beast of Sobibor' is also in Brazil. But it will take nearly a decade, a secret birthday party for Hitler, and a Sobibor survivor to put Wagner behind bars.
