Stephen F. Dachi was a consular officer who was born in Hungary in 1933. His father was a dentist, his mother a physician; they both died when he was three years old, leaving him in the care of his grandparents, who lived in Romania. After emigrating, he became a dentist, and then later joined the Foreign Service. His dental background would prove to be quite useful decades later. When serving in Brazil in the midâ?1980s, he helped with the forensic identification of “the Angel of Death,” the doctor infamous for his experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz, including young children.
On the Trail of a Killer
Q: Who was Mengele and how did this happen in your consular district?
DACHI: Josef Mengele was a doctor with the German SS. He was assigned to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, he was the man who conducted the bulk of the medical experiments on the inmates and, in particular, was doing all this research on twins that became so notorious subsequently. He was one of the major Nazi war criminals who was not in custody at the time of the Nuremberg trials. After the war, he hid in Germany for a while but then with the assistance of his family, which owned a farm tool company in Germany, escaped to Argentina, where he lived under an alias for quite a few years during the Peron era without much danger to him. After Peron was deposed in 1955, many of the Nazi war criminals hiding in Argentina began to feel less safe and Mengele for one, moved to Paraguay. He acquired Paraguayan citizenship under his own name. President Alfredo Stroessner the Paraguayan dictator was wellâ? known for hiding Nazi war criminals, although Argentina was the most notorious of them all. They certainly protected a huge number, took their wealth, and so on.
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