opinion

OPINION Since the end of the Second World War the image of South America as a haven for Nazis and war criminals has become one of the most enduring myths in popular opinion and expert milieus alike, but as with all legends, these accounts were based on an element of fact [GALLO/GETTY]

A MURDERER’S SANCTUARY? Examining the myths and realities of the Nazi escape to South America.

OPINION

A MURDERER’S SANCTUARY?

Since the end of the Second World War the image of South America as a haven for Nazis and war criminals has become one of the most enduring myths in popular opinion and expert milieus alike. Half-truths such as the stories of German submarines approaching the Patagonian shores in moonless nights to land their ominous cargo of Nazi leaders Hitler included - and Europe’s looted treasures have enjoyed wide circulation, forming, over the decades, a literary genre of their own. As with all legends, these accounts were based on an element of fact. After all, some of the most infamous war criminals did find in the continent a place to hide and live a normal life - at least for a while. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for organising the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, lived in Argentina under a false name for more than a decade, until he was kidnapped, brought to trial and executed by the Israelis in the early 1960s. Dr Josef Mengele, known as Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ for the lethal experiments he conducted on the camp’s inmates, lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, where he drowned in 1979. Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Lyon’ for his brutal treatment of resistance fighters while he headed the Gestapo in the French city, was smuggled by the CIA into Bolivia, where he lived protected by the military until his extradition to France in 1987.

Andrés Horacio Reggiani chair of the department of history at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella

OPINION


Dr Josef Mengele, known as Auschwitz’s ‘Angel of Death’ for the lethal experiments he conducted on the camp’s inmates, lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, where he drowned in 1979 [GALLO/GETTY]

OPINION


In the late 1940s and early 1950s South America seemed an ideal choice for those who needed to start a new life far away from home. The region’s geography offered unlimited possibilities to settle in areas poorly connected to the outside world, while the existence of fairly large populations of people with European ancestry and deep roots in their host countries facilitated the gradual assimilation of the newcomers. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s, the German-speaking population in northern Cordoba and the Patagonian Andes increased from five percent to more than 20 percent. Moreover, with the exception of Brazil and Mexico - which committed combat units to the European and Far Eastern battlefields - the continent’s mostly formal adherence to the Allies meant that nationals from enemy countries were able to move more or less freely. Likewise, the international context played to their advantage: on the one hand, the Cold War singled out communism rather than Nazism as the main threat to Western democracy. On the other, the buildup of Western Europe placed the South American economies in a favourable position as providers of raw materials.

The Argentine Case After the war German citizens were forbidden from leaving their country unless they had an ‘exit permit’ issued by the occupying powers. Unsurprisingly, however, in the chaos of the early postwar period (1945-1949) some 200,000 to 400,000 of them found their way out illegally. Roughly 10 percent (30,000 to 40,000) went to Argentina once travel restrictions were gradually lifted after 1949. This group comprised, in addition to Germans living within the country’s 1937 borders, Austrians and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

OPINION


After World War II, many Europeans fled to Argentina once travel restrictions were gradually lifted. This group comprised Germans, Austrians and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the Balkans [GALLO/GETTY]

According to the most reliable statistics, one to two percent of these refugees (300 to 400) had political reasons for leaving their country, with war criminals accounting for 30 to 50 of them. There were also some 200 technicians and scientists with specialisms in aeronautical and rocket research, of whom some 35 had been members of the Nazi party. While not negligible, these figures hardly support the myth of a South American ‘Fourth Reich’, particularly if one takes into account the fact that in the period from 1930 to 1945 Argentina received the second-highest number of European Jews fleeing the continent 25,000 to 40,000 entered owing to the efforts of relief organisations as well as bureaucratic corruption and inefficient border control.

OPINION


To understand why war criminals and members of Nazi organisations as well as French, Belgian, Croatian, Slovak and Romanian collaborators were able to escape Europe, enter South America and live a quiet life we need to consider several factors. To begin with, the collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 was followed by a movement of deportees, prisoners of war and refugees on an unprecedented scale. In central Europe chaos was the rule as a result of the millions trying to reach their homelands, those fleeing the advance of the Red Army, and Holocaust survivors heading for Mediterranean ports on their way to Palestine. With national borders in a state of flux, population control was further complicated by the division of Germany and Austria into US, British, Soviet and French occupation zones. The sheer mass of people that flooded roads, border checkpoints and ports made it an impossible task for the Allied military authorities to spot those with a political past, particularly at a time when most criminals did not yet figure in any list. Political émigrés were thus part of a huge human drama which Europe had already seen from 1918 to 1923, albeit this time on a far larger scale. Why did refugees choose Argentina as a destination? The South American country offered not only geographical and climatic features similar to the temperate regions of Europe but also has one of the largest European populations in the hemisphere - four million, most of them of Spanish and Italian descent. GermanArgentines ranked as the third-largest immigrant collective, with some 250,000 members and a host of prestigious economic and cultural institutions. And while the expatriate community was as ideologically divided as their fellow nationals in Europe, distance and the optimistic mood in Argentina rendered those cleavages less relevant.

OPINION


A practical or ideological union? After the war the newly-elected government of Colonel Juan Perón (1946-1955) started an industrialisation drive based on a policy of import substitution to make the country less dependent on foreign manufacture and capital. As an army officer, Perón was also concerned with the modernisation of the armed forces, both to maintain a military balance with Argentina’s neighbours – particularly Brazil and Chile - as well as to ensure the country’s defensive capabilities at the onset of the Cold War. However, Argentina lacked both the know-how and the human resources to undertake these ambitious programmes. The country’s stubborn adherence to neutrality for most of the war had enraged Washington, as a consequence of which Argentina was excluded from US programmes of technical and military assistance. The solution lay in tapping the qualified manpower available in Europe, which was eager to leave. Finding and organising the journey of refugees deemed in bureaucratic jargon to be ‘of public interest’ was planned at the highest levels of government. To that effect President Perón created the Division of Information (DIPN), an ad-hoc bureau accountable only to him and headed by the German-Argentine Roberto Freude. This office coordinated the recruitment of immigrants with refugee relief and Catholic organisations working on the ground in Austria, Italy and Spain. Once candidates were furnished with International Red Cross Passports - a document which, according to Allied sources, Argentine authorities seemed to have issued with suspicious generosity - Freude’s office gave special directives to the Immigration Bureau and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so that certain persons could be admitted into the country without following normal administrative procedures - showing proof of a relative living in the country or an employment offer, a valid visa, and a ‘landing permit’. In other cases they were given false identities.

OPINION


Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Lyon’ for his brutal treatment of resistance fighters while he headed the Gestapo in the French city, was smuggled by the CIA into Bolivia, where he lived protected by the military until his extradition to France in 1987 [GALLO/GETTY]

OPINION


The opacity of this system was further complicated by the competition of state bureaucracies and ad hoc government agencies. After 1946 the Immigration Bureau and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saw their jurisdictions systematically interfered with by the special envoys of the DIPN, the armed forces, and the Italian-based Argentine Bureau for Immigration in Europe (DAIE). This highly decentralised policy made it all the more difficult to follow the escape routes, or ‘ratlines’, followed by many war criminals. The motives behind this policy are still a matter of dispute. Some historians posit a direct link between the authoritarian inclinations of Peron’s government and the officials involved in immigration policy - in particular the racist director of the Immigration Bureau between 1946 and 1949, and the ideological profile of those they helped bring into the country, with anti-communist credentials being a more relevant consideration than a fascist past. This thesis is borne out by the Church’s active efforts to help former fascists, Nazis and other collaborationist groups in Eastern Europe once Moscow began cracking down on Catholics. Others, without denying a measure of ideological connivance, argue that some officials followed more ‘pragmatic’ criteria when deciding on a candidate’s eligibility, such as work experience and technical competences. This second view is supported by the conspicuous role played by émigré technicians, such as Kurt Tank and Émile Dewoitine, in the early stages of the Argentine airspace industry and nuclear research.

OPINION


President Peron created the Division of Information (DIPN), an ad-hoc bureau accountable only to him and headed by the German-Argentine Roberto Freude. This office coordinated the recruitment of immigrants with refugee relief and Catholic organisations working on the ground in Austria, Italy and Spain. Freude’s office gave special directives to the Immigration Bureau and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so that certain persons could be admitted into the country without following normal administrative procedures [GALLO/GETTY]

A conspiracy of silence What happened once international organisations and Nazi hunters revealed the whereabouts of the likes of Eichmann, Mengele, and others? Why were only an insignificant number of them extradited and tried? And why did it happen so late? To start with, most people with a political past simply vanished into the anonymity of a conventional existence, working as lower rank bureaucrats, office clerks, salesmen, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and technicians. How well they were able to do so depended on their connections. A few joined the esoteric but politically harmless network of the right-wing underground press. In all likelihood German embassies in South America knew who and where these people were given the tightly-knit character of the Germanspeaking community. Most diplomatic officials tried to avoid keeping such embarrassing company. This live-and-let-live attitude was the unofficial policy followed by West Germany under Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949-1963). As a result, no serious efforts to investigate the expatriated criminals were made until the late 1950s.

OPINION


In 2011, Germany’s intelligence service (BND) revealed that Eichmann’s location had been known since 1952 - nine years before he was kidnapped by the Israelis. This news only confirmed what historians had known all along: at a time when the young Federal Republic sought to break with the past it was in no one’s interest to relive the Nazi years, not least because most Germans, including the judges who would have tried Eichmann, had themselves served under Hitler - up to 10 percent of BND personnel in the early post-war years had worked in some capacity under SS head Heinrich Himmler. Extraditions only moved forward from the 1960s, as a new generation became aware of the need to come to terms with the country’s Nazi past. The conspiracy of silence was echoed on the other side of the Atlantic by the unwillingness or incapacity of governments to act upon extradition requests. On the one hand, the decentralised and informal functioning of post-war immigration policy made it difficult to locate and cross-check the identity of alleged war criminals. On the other, these persons enjoyed the solidarity of their community - of which they had become respectable members - as well as the complicity of governments who saw Nazi hunters and human rights activists as tools of leftist subversion.

OPINION


Of the 29 identified war criminals of various nationalities living in Argentina, 11 were never requested for extradition; 10 such requests were rejected, and only four were approved - the last one, in 1995, being Erich Priebke, who was tried and convicted in Italy for the murder of 335 Italian civilians. The record of other countries in the region is no better. Based on an administrative mistake, the Brazilian Supreme Court refused to extradite Gustav Wagner to stand trial for the murder of 152,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp. Walter Rauff had lived in Chile since the early 1950s. In 1961, the German embassy in Santiago received a request to extradite him. He faced 100,000 counts of murder for his role in developing mobile gas vans. However, the German ambassador allegedly deliberately sabotaged the petition allowing the process to drag on for months. When Rauff was finally arrested in 1962 the Chilean Supreme Court overruled the extradition request on the grounds that the deeds came under the statute of limitations.

Collective amnesia By way of conclusion we may ask how different this story is from similar ones elsewhere. By the time mass murderers and their acolytes were landing on this side of the Atlantic the Cold War in Europe had led the Western Allies to put on top of their priorities the containment of communism. The first victim of this shift was the policy of de-Nazification. In West Germany, Austria, France, and Italy, amnesties and the rhetoric of ‘national reconciliation’ paved the way for the reintegration of former Nazis, fascists and collaborators into mainstream society, as well as the open justification of their old anti-communist commitments in the light of the new conflict with the Soviet Union. Europeans, including the victims of genocide, simply did not want to dwell on their tragic past. ‘Return to normalcy’ and ‘turning the page’ became the motto of the day.

OPINION


The history of the murderers’ escape to South America cannot be separated from Europe’s own ‘collective amnesia’, that is, its unwillingness to confront massive abuses of human rights on the grounds that doing so would prolong the suffering of the victims and, worse, reignite old political divisions. With regards to this, it is worth recalling that until the 1970s many influential positions in the public and private sector in Western Europe were held by people who had willfully served under totalitarian dictatorships. In some cases they enjoyed the explicit protection of the highest authorities, even after human rights organisations had exposed their crimes as happened when France’s Socialist President Francois Mitterrand blocked attempts to bring to trial the mayor of Bordeaux during the German occupation of France, Maurice Papon. In Germany the conspicuous presence of officials who had served under Hitler was one of the elements that radicalised the student movement in the mid-1960s. This in no way diminishes the responsibility of South American governments in providing protection to people who had perpetrated hideous crimes. On the contrary, it seeks to understand why this was possible and when it became morally untenable - or simply a political liability. Andrés Horacio Reggiani is the chair of the department of history at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.