Secret documents on Nazis who fled to Argentina after WWII being declassified
The documents will likely include Nazi-linked bank accounts and archival records detailing the use of Nazi "ratlines" which were monetary and logistic pathways Nazis used to escape justice and flee Argentina following the war.
Guillermo Alberto Francos, Argentina's interior minister, made the announcement Tuesday, the Buenos Aires Times reported citing DNEWS.
It is estimated that up to 10,000 Nazis and other fascist war criminals escaped justice for Holocaust atrocities by fleeing to Argentina and other Latin American countries.
Notorious high-level Nazis, including Holocaust mastermind Adolph Eichmann and "angel of death" Josef Mengele, fled to the South American country, while rumors have swirled for years that former Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler also ended up there.
The pending release comes after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, requested their release last month in a letter to Argentinian President Javier Milei. Grassley is investigating Credit Suisse and its historic servicing of the Nazi-linked accounts and ratlines.
In the letter, Grassley wrote that the records would help shine a light on the Nazi planning of the covert escape routes. Grassley recently chaired a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused on stemming the tide of antisemitism in the U.S.
Milei promised officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center his full cooperation in granting access to the documents. The center is famous for tracking down Nazis and is named after the famed Nazi hunter.
In 2017, the CIA declassified a document revealed that the intelligence agency investigated the possibility that Adolf Hitler was alive in South America as late as 1955 — nearly a decade after World War II ended.
The three-page document, which appears on the CIA's website, highlights a former SS soldier who told spies he had regularly met with Hitler in Colombia.
The document suggests that Hitler may have worked as a shipping company employee, prior to potentially fleeing to Argentina. On the second page is a picture of the informant, Phillip Citroen, with a person he claims is Hitler in the mid-1950s.
It is not known if the upcoming declassifications by Argentina will shed any light on the Hitler conspiracy.
Mainstream historians say Hitler committed suicide by taking a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in Berlin in 1945. His body was later discovered by Soviet soldiers and buried in an unmarked spot. A German court declared Hitler dead, but not until 1956, more than a decade after the war ended.
His wife Eva Braun also killed herself by swallowing a cyanide pill.
Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Final Solution, escaped Europe after World War II and was living in Argentina under an assumed name when Israeli agents snatched him off a street in 1960. He was later tried and hung in Israel.
Mengele, meanwhile, was arrested by U.S. forces in 1945 but released shortly after. He then spent years on the run and was infamous for carrying out brutal medical experiments. He arrived in Argentina in 1949 and lived there for a decade before fleeing to Paraguay and later to Brazil, where he died in 1979.
Nazis fled to several countries in the Americas following the war, including to the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
In 2020, a cache of documents appeared to identify more than 12,000 Nazis who lived in Argentina in the 1930s and who had one or more bank accounts at what is now Credit Suisse bank.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center said the files were found in a storeroom at a former Nazi headquarters in Buenos Aires.
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