A lone man on the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires hid Argentina’s largest Nazi bookseller in his family home. The federal police announced his arrest this Wednesday after almost two years of investigation. According to the authorities, the approximately 45-year-old man sold more than 300 titles via websites, including Nazi propaganda, glorification of Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial and reviews of the Second World War. He fell after agents coordinated an undercover purchase that led to his arrest.
The investigation began in mid-2021 following a complaint from the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations (DAIA). “We received a complaint from a website that disseminated anti-Semitic content and sold the material through Mercado Libre,” said Commissioner Fabián Villagra, head of the Argentine Federal Police’s terrorism investigation unit. “The investigation lasted almost two years. Initially we had a username to which we could add a first name, a last name and a document. Then we arrived at the person’s home where the material was printed.” The man, who was not identified by authorities, distributed the books on South America’s largest online trading platform. When his user logged out, he continued with his own page.
“The SS is calling you,” one of the books confiscated from the dealer and printer. BUENOS AIRES POLICE
The prisoner’s site, Librería Argentina, still has a catalog with hundreds of titles. The website is described as “specializing in war themes and relating to the two world wars and the political, philosophical and spiritual movements active therein.” “We make space for all marginalized books from the most popular bookstores, regardless of their trend.” Some of the first books in his catalog are about fascism or Aryan “ethics.”
In the raid in the municipality of San Isidro, in the wealthy northern outskirts of Buenos Aires, authorities confiscated 222 different books, 140 covers of copies the man had not printed, and a few office printers. The federal detectives’ discovery was presented this Wednesday in a room at the headquarters of the Mounted Police Corps in the Argentine capital. They found several different editions of “Mi Lucha” and “Las SS Calling You!”, a Hitler Army pamphlet published in the middle of World War II. But also very different titles under the names of twenty publishers, ranging from the denial of the Nazi genocide or the responsibility of Nazi Germany and the Francisco Franco regime in Spain in the bombing of Guernica to apocryphal biographies of the American automobile magnate Henry Ford Pamphlets against Judaism in Argentina. Many of the books featured symbols such as swastikas, the Reichsadler – the imperial eagle of German National Socialism – or the iron crosses with which the Nazis decorated their officers.
The police used the latter to prosecute the crime as a violation of discrimination law. “The mere display of this type of symbolism constitutes a violation of Law 23,592, as it justifies, justifies and even reveres the atrocities of the Nazi regime against the Jewish community,” it said in a statement.
Some of the titles confiscated from “Librería Argentina” by the Buenos Aires police. BUENOS AIRES POLICE
“It’s impressive that there are people who produce this kind of material and that there are people who consume it. This is the challenge we have to work on,” said Marcos Cohen, first vice president of the DAIA, during the announcement. “We have to work on punitive measures. But we also have a lot to do in the field of education, because the first thing we have to eradicate are the readers of this material.”
Librería Argentina can no longer accept customer orders, but many of its books are still available online. The method is still word of mouth and is now also included in the comments of other, less explicit titles. “Hello! I just bought this book, coincidentally there is also The SS Calling You! “SS-Hauptmat Ediciones Sieghels?” asks a user in a publication on the same shopping site that the prisoner used. The seller replies: “Hello , good afternoon. Yes, we have it, but it cannot be published on MercadoLibre. We will write to you privately later to tell you how. If you have any questions, contact us. Greetings”.