SWISS INTELLIGENCE SERVICE TO OPEN FILES ON JOSEF MENGELE

ZURICH, MAY 16 /SRNA/ - Switzerland's federal intelligence service has announced that it will finally open long-sealed files on notorious Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, though it has not specified when this will happen.

Mengele fled Europe after World War II, but it is believed that he spent several years in Switzerland despite an international warrant for his arrest. Although he officially left Europe in 1949, it has been known since the 1980s that Mengele returned in 1956 for a skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps with his son Rolf. Officially, he then spent the rest of his life in South America. However, Swiss historian Regula Bochsler has long questioned whether Mengele may have returned again after an international arrest warrant was issued in 1959. Historians have repeatedly sought access to the files, but Swiss authorities had until now refused those requests. Mengele was a physician who served in Germany's Waffen-SS units. He was stationed at Auschwitz in occupied Poland, where he selected prisoners to be sent to gas chambers, where an estimated 1.1 million people died, including around one million Jews, according to the BBC. Known as the "Angel of Death," he also selected prisoners, primarily children and twins, for sadistic medical experiments before sending many of them to their deaths. After the war, like many high-ranking Nazis, Mengele quickly changed both his identity and appearance. Using a false identity, he obtained Red Cross travel documents at the Swiss consulate in Genoa, northern Italy, which he used to escape to South America. The Red Cross had intended these documents for thousands of displaced or stateless people across Europe after the war, but Nazis seeking to evade prosecution were also able to obtain them, for which the organization later apologized. Despite an international arrest warrant and efforts by Mossad, which pursued Nazi war criminals around the world, Mengele was never captured or brought to trial for his crimes. When he died in Brazil in 1979, he was buried under a false name. His body was exhumed in 1985, and DNA testing finally confirmed his identity in 1992.