Uki Goñi’s 2022 book is sub-titled ‘How Nazi War Criminals Escaped Europe’ and is an updated version of a book of the same title published in 2002. He has been relentless in delving into old archives in Argentina and Europe, and even the CIA. This testament reveals the people ‘co-mingling in a common cause: a bitter and shared hatred of communism that united the unlikely combination of capitalists, fascists and Catholics into the project known by Nazi sympathisers as the ‘Reich migratory route’.
While it is probably common knowledge that a number of war criminals escaped to Argentina, I for one was surprised at how many succeeded and escaped censure, later dying of old age. There were literally thousands who got away with mass murder.
In the 1970s, Goñi’s newspaper office was inundated with concerned citizens: ‘Daily, mothers of the victims would come in to report their tragedies. Men in green uniforms had broken into their homes in the middle of the night and taken their children from their beds to an unknown destination. They were never to be seen again’ (pxxxii).
Before the war, all nationalities were welcome to Argentina as immigrants. That changed in July 1938: Directive 11 was sent out to all consuls, ordering them to deny visas to Jews trying to reach Argentina. The order only fell into disuse in the mid-1950s and was only repealed in 2005.
Goñi states: ‘I realised that the problem was not the bad guys: the problem was the good guys who out of fear or affinity protected them (the war criminals)’ (pxli)
During the war the Argentine embassy in Madrid served as a transit point for Nazi arms purchased by Argentina. It had the secret support of Franco’s regime, which provided cover for the overland transport of guns and munitions through occupied France to Spanish ports and their conveyance from there in Spanish ships to Argentina’ (p5).
Franco’s Spain was not quite as neutral as it appeared. ‘During the last days of the war neutral Spain became the main safe haven for fugitive Nazis and their French and Belgian collaborators...’ (p65). Spain and Italy aided and abetted by functionaries of the Vatican. Virtually every false passport of the Nazi criminals had the religion stated as ‘Catholic’. In fact, a good number of Jewish passports declared the same religion...
A good number of those who escaped did so with funds, some of which was doubtless passed on to them by Swiss banks. Funds pilfered from their countless victims. The sequestered money was meant to finance a post-war Fourth Reich (p248). Using their ill-gotten gains, many Nazi immigrants contributed to Perón’s election campaign in 1946. Perón dreamed of turning Argentina into a military-industrial power and utilising the many escapees’ expertise in munitions and aircraft-design and build... (p138). The argument went that if Argentina didn’t get the German technicians then the Soviets would (not to mention the Americans and British) (p151). There were many reasons for this: one was that Perón and his Nazi pals believed a Third World War was imminent – against the Russians, probably in 1948.
Moral blindness: the Vatican and Allied intelligence conspired to look the other way regarding the whereabouts of the majority of Nazi war criminals – because they were anti-Communist, against International Marxism...
Goñi provides several biographies of escapees. It is remarkable how many Nazi war criminals were held in prisoner of war camps yet managed not only to escape but also to identify and use appropriate ‘ratlines’ to get them to Argentina.
Compulsive
and gripping, these revelations, even at this time, are still deeply shocking.
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