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The evil doctor who gestured "right" or "left" at Auschwitz tried to get away with his unspeakable crimes, but lived for years in fear of being snatched for his own execution.

So we learn in this documentary about Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" at World War II's most notorious concentration camp.

Mengele seemed to enjoy playing God -- prisoners often saw him smiling or whistling as he worked, we learn here. Never quite abandoning his doctor's coat, he conducted experiments on twins as he sought the key to their conception -- with a goal "to replenish war dead at a rapid rate." As one miraculous survivor observes, "the children cried day and night."

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, and American troops arrested Mengele twice, but without the telltale underarm SS tattoo he'd refused years earlier, he was able to slither from apprehension, aided by false identities, unobtrusive jobs, and protection in parts of South America where an ex-Nazi could blend in. At one point, he replaced his German passport, using his real name. (For a time, "it was a taboo question to ask, 'What did you do during the war?'" explains author/journalist Gerald Posner.)

But the hunt went on for Nazi war criminals, and, in 1960, agents of Israel's Mossad captured Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, smuggling him from Buenos Aires to Israel, ultimately to be tried, and hanged in 1962.

Mengele "lived in fear all the time about being captured," we're told. "He felt increasingly hunted," and kept 13 or 14 dogs.

Finally, a justice of sorts arrived in February 1979, when Mengele had a heart attack in surf off the Brazilian coast, dying shortly after, being buried in an unmarked grave, and having his remains identified in the 1980s.

Today the villain's bones lie in a drawer of the Sao Paolo Medical Legal Institute. Even his family wanted no part of a decent burial.

This stirring documentary taught me much, but says surprisingly little about Mengele's actual activities at Auschwitz. In my quest to learn more about war and the Holocaust, I know I'll find other sources.