Argentina declassifies thousands of secret files on Nazis and intelligence operations
The country's National Archive has posted previously classified information online, including on Nazi war criminals who fled to Argentina
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The Argentinian government, on Monday April 28, released a series of secret documents related to Nazi criminals who fled to Argentina following World War II. The files include information about Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of Nazi death camps, and Josef Mengele, the infamous concentration camp “Angel of Death”, among others.
Previously, the documentation could only be consulted in person at the National Archives and under security regulations preventing their digital dissemination. Among the material released are government reports on Nazi activities in Argentina, classified presidential decrees and confidential files from intelligence and law enforcement.
In total, there are around 1,850 documentary pieces on operations linked to Nazism, organized in seven files that can now be freely consulted on the agency's web page. The AGN, which reports to the Vice-Chief of the Interior Cabinet, informed that this work is part of a process of restoration, digitalization and description carried out in the last months after the request of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"The Nation General Archive has made public declassified documents on Nazi activities in Argentina and secret presidential decrees. Thanks to extensive restoration and digitalization work, more than 1,850 reports and almost 1,300 classified decrees can now be accessed," Argentina's Vice-Chief of the Interior Cabinet announced Monday.
In addition to the material on Nazism and escaped Nazi war criminals, the AGN released another 1,300 secret presidential decrees, issued between 1957 and 2005, which includes the period of the Argentine dictatorship.
The documents cover a variety of topics that allow reconstructing less known aspects of Argentine history, including reorganizations of intelligence services and strategies against communism during the 1960s and 1970s.
In March, our compatriots at the Buenos Aires Herald reported that Argentina’s president Javier Milei had ordered for the documents to be declassified, following a request from U.S. Jewish human rights organization, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Milei received a letter from Charles Grassley, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and a copy was also sent to President Donald Trump. The letter requested the Argentine president’s “assistance and support with the Committee’s ongoing investigation into previously undisclosed and unknown Nazi assets at Credit Suisse and its predecessor banks.”
The documents, in Spanish, can be downloaded here.
