Swiss intelligence posts a 200-page Josef Mengele file online

Switzerland's Federal Intelligence Service put a 200-page dossier on Josef Mengele on its website on Thursday, 10 September 2026. The file sits in the Federal Archives in Bern. The service chose a public upload after a historian's inspection request drew many more applications. Officials said individual reading-room appointments could not meet the demand.

Mengele was the SS doctor at Auschwitz who selected prisoners on the ramp and ran experiments on twins, children and people with disabilities. Prisoners called him the Angel of Death. He left Europe after 1945, lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, and drowned in 1979. His remains were identified in Brazil in 1985. German and Israeli services hunted him for decades and never caught him.

The Swiss file is not a trial record. It is an intelligence and police compilation. Swissinfo and the service's own note say it holds press cuttings and police reports that followed a long suspicion: that Mengele entered Switzerland more than once while he was still under an international warrant. Passages that identify sources or private third parties are redacted. Names of current and former officials tied to the service and its predecessors are also blacked out. The service said it redacted "as little as possible."

Archival law had been used to keep the dossier closed until the end of 2071. The service refused inspection as recently as February 2026. A complaint against that refusal showed the legal basis was wrong. In May the service said it would reconsider. A new decision was issued on 8 September. Two days later the PDF went up. The unaltered original remains in the archives.

The publication does not claim that Swiss territory was Mengele's main hideout. It documents how Swiss agencies recorded rumours, sightings and press claims, and how those notes were filed. That is a narrower fact than the headlines. It still matters for a country that has spent 30 years opening Second World War archives on gold, refugees and dormant accounts. A file that sat behind a mistaken 2071 seal is now readable, minus the black bars.

Historians who asked for the dossier will now test the redactions against other services' files in Germany, Argentina and the United States. The Swiss upload is a source dump, not a verdict. What it changes immediately is access. Anyone can download the same pages that, six months ago, the service would only discuss in a refusal letter.