The government of Argentine President Javier Milei on Monday declassified over 1,850 official documents detailing the arrival of Nazi German officials to Argentina and their actions in the South American nation following World War II.
The files, which can be freely accessed on an Argentine government website, most notably contain documentation detailing the actions of Josef Mengele, the German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer dubbed the “Angel of Death” due to the cruel and inhumane medical experiments he conducted on Jews imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp, especially on twins.
The Argentine government explained that the declassified records are the result of investigations carried out by the Foreign Affairs Directorate of the Federal Police, the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE), and the National Gendarmerie between the 1950s and 1980s. The over 1,850 documents are organized into seven different groups.
Mengele — who died in Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979 — fled to Argentina in 1949 following the fall of Nazi Germany and never faced justice for his crimes. The local outlet Infobae reported that the declassified documents contain Argentine police reports from November 1956 detailing Mengele’s request for a correction on the name on his identity card, noting that until that moment, Mengele moved around the country with an identity card that listed him as “Gregor Helmut” from Trento, Italy.
Subsequent Argentine federal police investigations confirmed that Mengele entered Argentina on June 20, 1949, using a passport issued by the International Red Cross bearing the purported “Helmut” Italian identification. Mengele successfully changed his identity after he presented a birth certificate certified by the German embassy.
According to the documents, Mengele, a widower, resided in Buenos Aires at the time, and remarried Marta María Will, the German ex-wife of his deceased younger brother. He also adopted his nephew Karl-Heinz as his son. The family asked for a certificate of good conduct from Argentine authorities to travel to Chile in 1956.
The newspaper Clarín detailed that declassified file sheets listed Mengele’s profession as “manufacturer.” Two years after he requested the required certificate to travel to Chile, Mengele issued a similar request to be able to travel to West Germany.
Another declassified document, addressed to the head of the Foreign Affairs Division, stated that Germany had requested Mengele’s extradition so that he could serve a life sentence, but the request “had been denied” and the Argentine government “had not taken any action in this respect, alleging formal and procedural flaws.”
The documents also contain records of an investigation into a German man suspected of being Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, who disappeared without a trace until his body was found in Germany in the 1970s. Bormann’s remains were finally confirmed via DNA testing in 1998.
Additionally, the Argentine declassified documents contain information on Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust and the logistics of the “Final Solution” for the mass imprisonment of Jewish people in concentration camps and their subsequent extermination. Bormann was apprehended by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960 and sentenced to death in Jerusalem in 1962.
“There is also a folder referring to Gestapo officer Walter Kutschmann, responsible for the death of thousands of Jews in Poland, who took refuge in [the city of] Miramar under the name of Pedro Ricardo Olmo,” Clarín reported.
The Argentine news channel Todo Noticias reported that copies of the now-declassified documents were delivered to the Simon Wiesenthal Center for its ongoing investigation into links between the Zurich-based bank Credit Suisse and Nazism as agreed to by President Milei in February after he met with representatives of the Center in Buenos Aires.
Todo Noticias pointed out that until Monday, documentation related to the activities of Nazi officials in Argentina could only be consulted in a specially equipped room of the General Archive of the Nation, but that they can now be freely accessed through the Internet and downloaded from anywhere in the world.
“President Milei gave the instruction to release all documentation [on Nazis who fled to Argentina after World War II] that exists in any State agency, because there is no reason to continue safeguarding that information,” Argentine Chief of Staff Guillermo Francos said in March.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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