Somewhat NP Argentinians bound for Germany

[Doug Millison]

At 1:41 PM +1000 8/5/00, jbor wrote:
>
>That's "holocaust" with an "h".
>

You make my point. As Pynchon says in the passage quoted from his 
Luddite essay, fears of a nuclear holocaust now can be taken 
seriously in part because of the historical Holocaust (as he says 
here) that took place then.  Three of the things he mentions here  -- 
"the death camps", "the German long-range rocket program" and "the 
Manhattan Project" -- he has brought together in GR, which also 
includes  the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and seems to look forward 
to the sort of small-h holocaust he mentions here.  He showed us in 
GR how the powers-that-be (on both sides, although part of what he 
does in GR is to show that this notion of opposing "sides" was in 
fact a fiction) proved themselves capable of horrible crimes in WWII, 
he says here that they could do it again. This fear was strong enough 
in the mid-60s -- when Pynchon was writing GR -- to defeat a U.S. 
Presidential candidate who spoke openly of such strategic realities; 
the wheel turned and we had a President (Reagan) who brought such 
threats of annhilation to a new peak in the era in which Pynchon 
writes this essay. Yes, Pynchon seems clear on the Holocaust as part 
of the context for the post-war development of strategic theory which 
became part of the "conventional wisdom" that he savages in this 
essay, strategic theory which would justify a small-h holocaust in 
the right set of Cold War circumstances.

Nazis escaping Europe by U-boat -- certainly part of both the 
mythology and the reality of the ratline, as documented by Hollywood 
and historians alike:

"By September 1944, there were several confirmed reports that German 
submarines were taking both people and plundered capital from Spain 
to South America. Self-confessed Nazi spy Angel Alcazar de Velasco 
later acknowledged that several hundred million pounds of gold and 
other assets had passed through ports on the sourthern coast of Spain 
en route to Argentina. ... ODESSA [Organization of Former SS Members] 
-- the fabled postwar Nazi network whose alled exploits have 
generated profuse literary and cinematic embellishments: CIC [U.S. 
Army Counterintelligence Corps] documents confirm that a Nazi 'Brown 
aid' network actually existed. ... Many names have alluded to this 
shadowy Nazi underground -- die Spinne (the Spider), Kamradenwrk 
(Comradeship), der Bruderschaft (the Brotherhood). ...Curious as to 
where the ratlines led, a CIC mole arranged the escape of himself and 
two inmates from Dachau. The experience of this informant provided 
additional corrpoboration of 'an underground movement, bearing the 
codename of ODESSA.' ... The Polish prison guards at Dachau, hired by 
the U.S. Army because of their presumed anti-Communist reliability, 
were small cogs in a far-flung escape mechanism that delivered tens 
of thousands of Nazis to expatriate communities in Latin America and 
the Middle East after the war. Some ODESSA operatives secured jobs 
driving U.S. Army trucks on the Munich-Salzburg autobahn and hid 
people in the backs of these vehicles. Aided by men of the cloth, the 
well-traveled southern escape route consisted of a chain of 
monasteries throughout Austria and Italy. A Vatican-run way station 
in Rome dispensed false papers to fascist fugitives, who were farmed 
out to distant pastures. ...Another major ratline -- ODESSA North -- 
stretched through Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where an underground 
network of SS veterans and Werewolves smuggled Nazi renegades over 
land and sea until they were picked up by ships heading to Spain and 
Argentina. ... Of course, the wholesale emigration of fascist 
collaborators would not have been possible without the tacit approval 
of the U.S. government, whose efforts to bring war criminals to book 
waned as the Cold War intensified."
--Martin A. Lee, _The Beast Reawakens_, 1997, pp. 24, 41

Same folks who did that helped set up the CIA, of course, an 
anachronistic acronym that Pynchon also has fun with in GR.
-- 

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