How did the infamous Josef Mengele escape punishment?

The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that Auschwitz could exist in modern Europe. The history of the camp is a comparatively recent one: construction began in April 1940, less than 80 years ago, and the first victims died there, or were killed, not long after. Some of the people who were transported to the camp managed somehow to survive the war and a few of them are still alive today. Perhaps we shy away from knowing too much about what they suffered because the totality of awfulness is beyond description and the world is still contemplating that.

There is one particular matter of which we have all heard, but on which we choose to look away for fear of what we shall be told, and that is the exact nature of the career of Josef Mengele, and how he escaped.

Mengele was camp doctor in Ausch-witz. Although sometimes described as the camp doctor, as if he were acting alone or in charge, he was not. There were about 15 medics of different pseudo-scientific ‘specialisations’ in the camp, some of them women. Mengele was not even the longest-serving. But he was by far the worst, and all the victims who passed through the camp between July 1943 and January 1945 knew him. Everyone who survived the inhuman selection process at the railhead on arrival remembered his immaculate appearance in his SS uniform. If they were still alive after that, they recognised and feared him as the Angel of Death, always in his spotless white coat, intent on his mission to inflict the most sadistic and horrific experiments on the hapless inmates.

In pursuit of his racist beliefs in eugenics and the perfectibility of the Aryan race, he was especially interested in what he saw as anomalies: identical twins, those with giantism or dwarfism, people with heterochromia iridis (differently coloured eyes) and, in the case of Roma people, those who suffered from a form of bacterial gangrene called noma.