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The International Auschwitz Committee has welcomed Monday’s announcement of the opening of the file on Nazi criminal Josef Mengele at the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA).
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The Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) has reconsidered its decision after rejecting applications for consultation so far.
For Auschwitz survivors, Josef Mengele remains, even after several decades, a name that makes one shudder, wrote Christoph Heubner, executive vice-president of the committee, in a statement.
It is a bitter reality that these documents are being made public at a time when Nazi criminals are presented as “war heroes” on social media, he added. Mengele’s name, associated with the ideology of hatred and anti-Semitism, is acquiring “a bizarre fascination” for right-wing extremists in many countries, Heubner said.
The FIS announced on Monday that it had changed its position on access to the Mengele file. Following an appeal to the Federal Administrative Court (FAC), the legal situation has been reassessed and this will be possible in future. Since the dossier contains information worthy of protection, there will still be conditions.
Until now, the FIS had rejected the requests for consultation, citing a protection period of 80 years. According to media reports, historian Gérard Wettstein has challenged this decision. He wants to ascertain whether Mengele was in Kloten, canton Zurich, in 1961 and whether the Swiss authorities let this internationally wanted war criminal escape.
+ The Swiss return of Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele
In its note, the International Auschwitz Committee thanked Wettstein. This body, based in Berlin, brings together concentration camp survivors and their organisations from 19 countries. More than one million people, mostly Jews, were murdered in Auschwitz alone.
Born in 1911, Mengele was head doctor at Auschwitz, conducting inhuman and often fatal experiments on prisoners. Considered one of the most heinous Nazi criminals, and nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, he managed to escape the Nuremberg trials after the war. Assuming a false identity, he embarked for Argentina and managed to disappear until his death, which occurred in Brazil in 1979 by drowning and was only discovered in 1985, thanks to a DNA test.
Adapted from Italian by AI/ts
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