In 1960, a German factory worker kissed his wife  goodbye in Buenos Cyrus. He never came home. His   real name wasn’t Ricardo Clement. It was Adolf  Ikeman. He organized the Holocaust’s trains.   3,000 m away in Moscow, a Soviet agent crossed a  name off a list. The list had 20,000 names, all   SS officers, all marked for death.

 You know about  Israeli agents catching Ikeman, but here’s what   you don’t know. The Soviets had been hunting him  for 15 years. They had files on every SS man who   ever held a gun. They tracked them from Berlin’s  ashes to jungle hideouts in Brazil. They turned   Holocaust survivors into hunters. They infiltrated  the Vatican. They blackmailed American spies.

 This   is the story nobody tells. The story of history’s  longest manhunt. May 8th, 1945. Berlin burns.   Hitler is dead. The Red Army controls the city.  But Soviet soldiers keep finding mass graves.   Hundreds of them. Thousands of bodies in each  one. Women, children, entire villages. Therefore,   Stalin gives a new order. Find every SS officer.  make them pay.

 A special unit called Smeh takes   charge. The name means death to spies. Their new  mission, hunt the SS, not arrest them, hunt them.   Victor Abakumoff leads Smursh. He’s Stalin’s  executioner. He starts making lists. They raid   Nazi headquarters. They find membership files,  photos, home addresses. They interrogate prisoners   for 12 hours straight. No sleep, no food, just  names. By June, they have 250,000 names.

 Major   Anatoli Novikov finds a mass grave outside Minsk.  3,000 bodies. He recognizes his sister’s dress.   She was 14. That night, he writes to Moscow. Every  name we cross off brings relief to our dead. I   will not stop until the list is empty. The Soviets  lost 27 million people in the war. That’s one   person every 2 seconds for 4 years. Whole cities  vanished.

 In some villages, not a single man came   home. The Americans want to rebuild Germany.  The British want to go home, but the Soviets   want blood. Therefore, while the West celebrates  victory, Soviet hunters spread across Europe. They   carry photos. They memorize faces. They begin the  hunt. Here’s what makes them different from every   other Nazi hunter. They don’t care about trials.  They don’t need evidence. They just need names.  

The SSmen aren’t stupid. They know what’s coming.  Within days of Hitler’s death, they start running.   They burn their uniforms. They steal dead men’s  papers. They grow beards. They become farmers,   mechanics, priests. But they need help to truly  disappear. Therefore, a Catholic bishop named   Aloise Hudal creates an escape network. He calls  it mercy for the defeated.

 The Vatican gives him   rooms, money, blank passports. The escape route  runs like this. SSmen reach Rome. Hudal hides them   in monasteries. He gives them Red Cross papers  with fake names. Ships take them to Argentina.   The Catholic Church pays for everything. They call  these roots rat lines.

 Like rats fleeing a sinking   ship. Soviet agent Pavl Gishine infiltrates  a Red Cross camp in Austria. He’s pretending   to be a refugee. He watches SS officers get new  identities. He memorizes their faces, their new   names, where they’re going. He radios Moscow every  night from a hidden transmitter in a barn. But   here’s where it gets complicated. The Americans  are also in these camps.

 And they’re not arresting   SS men. They’re recruiting them. Operation  Paperclip, that’s what the Americans call   it. They want German scientists for their rocket  program. They want SS intelligence officers to   spy on the Soviets. Over 1,600 Nazis get American  protection. New names, new lives, good salaries.   Fran Stangle ran Trebinka death camp. He killed  900,000 Jews.

 The Americans know who he is,   but they need his friend’s rocket expertise.  Therefore, they let Steel walk free. He escapes   to Brazil. The Soviets are furious. These are the  same Americans who were allies 6 months ago. Now   they’re protecting mass murderers. Ivon Sarof,  Soviet intelligence chief, sends an encrypted   message to all agents. The West has chosen sides.  They protect fascists.

 We are alone in seeking   justice. Act accordingly. The gloves come off.  Soviet agents start kidnapping SSmen from Western   zones. They drag them across borders at night. No  one ever sees them again. The Soviets realize they   need help. They can’t watch every port, every  border, every monastery. But there are people   who will never forget an SS face. People who saw  those faces every day in hell.

 Therefore, they   recruit the survivors. Alexander Peterski led the  only successful death camp uprising. At Soibore,   he helped 300 Jews escape. He killed 11 SS guards  with an axe. Now, the Soviets give him a new job.   Identify every guard who survived. Pacherski  never sleeps well. He sees faces when he closes   his eyes. But now those nightmares have purpose.  He looks at thousands of photos.

 He remembers   everything. The guard who loved his dog more  than Jewish children. The officer who made people   sing while digging their own graves. That one. He  points. Carl Frenzel. He made my friend carry her   dead daughter for 3 hours. He’s calling himself  Carlos Freeman now living in S. Paulo. The Soviets   create a new system. They show survivors photos  of suspected SS men. They record every detail.  

Survivors remember. Scars, walks with a limp,  missing finger, stutters when angry, smell of   specific cigarette brand. But some survivors want  more than identification. They want revenge. Enter   Nakam. The Hebrew word means vengeance. Jewish  partisans who lost everything form this secret   group. Their plan, kill 6 million Germans, one  for every murdered Jew. Aba leads them.

 The Nazis   killed his entire family. He obtains poison from  a chemist. In April to 1946, his team infiltrates   a bakery that supplies bread to an SS prisoner  camp. They paint poison on 3,000 loaves. 2,000 SS   men get sick. None die. The poison wasn’t strong  enough.

 Kar flees to Palestine, but his message is   clear. The survivors aren’t just victims anymore.  They’re hunters, too. The Soviets see opportunity.   They secretly fund survivor groups. They share  intelligence. They provide weapons. An underground   network forms from Moscow to Munich to Buenos  are information flows through hidden channels.   A Holocaust survivor named Helena works as a  secretary in Hamburg.

 She seems like a war widow,   but she’s a Soviet agent. One day, she sees her  former guard buying groceries, the same man who   killed her baby. She follows him home. That night,  Soviet agents knock on his door. He’s never seen   again. Stalin is dead. The KGB replaces Smursh.  The Cold War freezes Europe in two, but the hunt   continues. It just gets more complicated. The  KGB discovers something useful.

 SS officers make   excellent double agents. They’re already living  fake lives. They’re terrified of exposure, perfect   for blackmail. Edward Rashman murdered 35,000  Jews in Ria. The Soviets find him in Austria   working for American intelligence. They give him  a choice. Work for us or we tell everyone who you   really are, including the Israelis. Rashman  chooses to live. He becomes a triple agent.  

He feeds the Americans fake intelligence. He tells  the Soviets about CIA operations. He helps track   down other SS officers, all to save his own skin.  East Germany creates the Stacey in 1950. Their   surveillance network becomes the most complete in  history.

 One in three East Germans spies on their   neighbors. Every letter is opened, every phone  call recorded, every visitor photographed. Marcus   Wolf runs Stazzy Foreign Intelligence. His agents  infiltrate West German government. They discover   something shocking.

 Hans Globka, adviser to the  West German Chancellor, wrote the legal commentary   for Hitler’s race laws. He helped design  the Holocaust’s legal framework. The Soviets   turned this into propaganda gold. They published  Glokia’s Nazi documents worldwide. The message is   clear. The West protects war criminals. The East  brings justice. But the biggest propaganda victory   comes with Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lion,  tortured and killed thousands of French resistance   fighters. He personally murdered Jewish children.

  The Americans hire him to hunt communists in   Bolivia. They pay him taxpayer money. They  know exactly who he is. In 1971, the KGB   leaks Barbie’s location and American protection  to French journalists. The scandal explodes.   The Americans are humiliated. The Soviets score a  massive victory without firing a shot. Therefore,   the hunt becomes more than justice. It’s a  weapon in the Cold War.

 Every exposed Nazi in   the West damages American credibility. Every  captured SS man in the east proves communist   superiority. The real challenge isn’t in Europe  anymore. It’s 7,000 m away in South America.   Juan Peron loves Germans. His Argentina welcomes  10,000 Nazis. They get new identities, government   jobs, police protection.

 They build German  schools, German hospitals, German neighborhoods   where Spanish is never spoken. Joseph Mangallay  lives openly in Buenosire. He uses his real name.   He’s listed in the phone book. The angel of  death, who experimented on twins at Avitz,   now practices medicine again. The Soviets can’t  invade Argentina, but they have communist parties   throughout South America. Therefore, they  turn local communists into spy networks.  

Miguel Santos runs a taxi in Buenosiris.  He’s also a communist party member. And now   he’s a Soviet asset. He drives through German  neighborhoods. He photographs license plates.   He records addresses. He notes routines.  Who leaves for work when, who meets whom,   which children attend which schools. In 1960,  Santos spots something interesting.

 A bland man   named Ricardo Clement never has visitors, never  goes to German clubs, never drinks in German bars,   too careful for a normal immigrant. Santos reports  to his handler. The handler cables Moscow. Moscow   checks their files. Ricardo Clement matches the  description of Adolf Ikeman.

 The Soviets face a   choice. Grab Ikeman themselves or let others know.  They choose to leak the information to MSAD. Why?   Because an Israeli kidnapping in Argentina will  damage US Argentine relations. The Soviets win   either way, but not every hunt goes smoothly.  Paraguay’s dictator Alfredo Stroer actively   protects Nazis. He gives them ranches, government  contracts, new identities whenever they need them.  

Soviet agent Victor Koff infiltrates Stroer’s  government. He spends 3 years as a forestry   inspector. He maps Nazi colonies. He identifies  67 SS officers. He’s 2 days from extraction when   someone betrays him. They find Kosoff’s body  in a river. His fingernails are missing. His   handler receives Kosoff’s final report written in  invisible ink on a cigarette pack.

 Mangallay left   for Brazil. Following the Soviets and Israelis  sometimes cooperate, sometimes compete. Often they   ruin each other’s operations. S. Paulo. Soviet  agents track Mangallay to a pharmacy. They’re   ready to grab him, but Mossad is also watching.  The two teams spot each other. In the confusion,   someone alerts Mangallay. He vanishes. Both teams  blame each other.

 Mangallay dies in 1979 swimming   at a beach. He drowns alone. No justice, no  trial, just an old Nazi dying of a stroke in   warm water. Both the Soviets and Israelis had  tracked him for 34 years. Neither got him. The   1970s bring computers. Everything changes. Before  the Soviets kept paper files, millions of them.   Finding one name took weeks. Now they digitize  everything. 20 million documents.

 Every SS member,   every sighting, every alias, every contact. Search  time drops from weeks to seconds. They share data   with unlikely partners. The Simon Visenthal Center  in Los Angeles. Jewish documentation centers in   Paris. Even some CIA officers who hate Nazis more  than communists. The results are immediate.

 Johan   Voss, former SS guard at Mounten, lived quietly  in Cleveland for 25 years. The computer links his   immigration papers to his SS file. He’s deported  to Germany in 1978, dies in prison. Gustaf Vagner,   Soior’s deputy commander, hid in Brazil since  1950. The computer connects witness testimonies   to recent photos. Brazilian police arrest him  in 1980. He dies before trial.

 Some say suicide,   others say Mossad. But the biggest breakthrough  comes from an unexpected source. The Berlin Wall   falls. Suddenly, the Stazzy’s files are available.  14,000 garbage bags of shredded documents,   600 million pieces of paper, but also intact files  on 12,000 SS officers the West never knew about.   Carl Linis ran a concentration camp in Estonia.  He personally shot Jews into ditches.

 He’s been   living in Long Island, New York since 1951,  working as a land surveyor, attending church,   raising grandchildren. The opened files prove  everything. The Americans can’t ignore it. They   deport him to the Soviet Union in 1987.  He’s the last Nazi the Soviets ever try.   He dies in prison 2 months later, insisting he’s  innocent. The Soviet Union collapses in 1991.

 The   KGB becomes the FSB. Russia inherits the files.  The hunt officially ends. Or does it? 70 years,   three generations of hunters, a quarter million  names on the original list. The Soviets captured   thousands, executed hundreds, turned dozens  into double agents, exposed Western hypocrisy,   used Nazi hunting as a cold war weapon. But here’s  the bitter truth. Most SS men died free.

 They   became grandfathers, respected citizens. They went  to church. They forgot what they did or pretended   to. In dusty Moscow basement, filing cabinets  hold yellowing folders. Names never crossed off.   Faces never found. Crimes never punished. The last  Soviet agent who worked these cases died in 2012.  

He was 93. He kept searching until the end. Today,  historians estimate fewer than 10 SS war criminals   are still alive. All over 95, all beyond justice.  But their files remain open. Somewhere in Russia,   in Israel, in Germany, someone still watches,  still waits. Because some hunts never end.

 They   just pass to the next generation. The hunters  taught us something. Evil men can run. They   can hide. They can change their names. They can  fool governments. But they can’t escape memory.   And memory, it turns out, is the ultimate hunter.  What began as Stalin’s revenge became humanity’s   longest manhunt. It outlived the Soviet Union.  It outlived most of the criminals.

 It outlived   the hunters themselves. But it never outlived  the need for justice. If you enjoyed this story,   hit subscribe for more fascinating World  War II historical deep dives every week.