Argentina publishes files on notorious Nazi fugitives
The Argentinean government has made public almost 2,000 declassified secret service files on hundreds of Nazi war criminals who fled to the Latin American country after the Third Reich's defeat in the Second World War.
According to estimates, as many as 10,000 Nazis utilized so-called 'ratlines' to escape as the Axis powers collapsed. Infamously, around half of them are believed to have chosen Argentina –known for its reluctance to grant extradition requests — as their refuge.
The 1,850 files uploaded online by the Argentinian National Archives (AGN) on Monday included intelligence reports, photographs, and police records. The documents on 'Nazi activities in Argentina' are now available to all 'thanks to extensive restoration and digitization work,' the AGN said in a statement.
Among other things, the papers depict how the likes of Josef Mengele, Erich Priebke and Adolf Eichmann were able to make it to Argentina and what they did in the country.
Mengele was a physician and Nazi SS officer, nicknamed the 'Angel of Death' for his inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The published records show he entered Argentina in 1949 under the name of Gregor Helmut and then openly lived in the country.
'References obtained from different sectors of the German community allowed us to learn that he was commander of the Assault Guards and, at the same time, doctor in the German extermination camp of Auschwitz,' one of the files on Mengele read.
The newly-published papers also included the 1995 extradition documents for Priebke, a mid-level SS commander, who had been in charge of a unit responsible for the massacre of 335 Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944.
They also shed light on the time that Eichmann, a high-ranking SS official often described as the logistics chief of the Holocaust, spent in Argentina. He was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1960 by Mossad agents and hanged for his crimes by Israel two years later.
The files in question were declassified in 1992 under a decree from then-Argentine President Carlos Menem, but they could only be viewed in a specially designated room at the AGN.
The country's current leader Javier Milei ordered that the Nazi papers be released to the general public in March on a request from the US Jewish human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is currently investigating links between Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, and Nazi Germany.
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