_The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Per�n's Argentina_

Sun May 9 12:04:12 CDT 2004

Uki Goñi. The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to
Perón's Argentina. London: Granta Books, 2002. xxx +
410 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
$27.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-86207-581-6.

[...

"In those days Argentina was a kind of paradise to
us," reminisced Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke in
1991, thinking back to the warm welcome he and some of
his comrades found when they fled postwar Europe for
the country ruled by Juan Domingo Perón (p. 263).
Priebke, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Mengele were only
the most notorious of a rogue's gallery of several
hundred European fascists who made their way to Buenos
Aires in the late 1940s and 1950s.[...]

If the flight of Nazi fugitives down the ratlines to
Argentina is well known and has already been the
subject of a number of investigations, never before
have the mechanisms of the escape routes been laid out
in such detail as in this painstaking study by
Argentine journalist Uki Goñi. [...]

Goñi's principal contribution is his in-depth look at
the Argentine side of an organized smuggling operation
that had its genesis in German-Argentine cooperation
during the war and eventually involved Allied
intelligence services, the Vatican, and top Argentine
officials in a network stretching from Sweden to
Italy. Among the key players in Goñi's account are two
Argentines of German descent: former SS captain Carlos
Fuldner, who ran "rescue" efforts from bases in
Madrid, Genoa, and Berne; and Rodolfo Freude, head of
Perón's Information Bureau, who coordinated the work
of intelligence and immigration officials from his
office in the Casa Rosada, Argentina's White House.
Many of the Argentines involved, as well as a
multinational cast of Vichy French, Belgian Rexists,
Croatian Ustashi, and cardinals from several
countries, seem to have been motivated by the vision
of an international brotherhood of Catholic
anti-Communists.

Goñi has gone to great lengths to document information
about individual members of the operation and those it
abetted. We learn, for instance, about SS Captain
Walter Kutschmann, frequent wartime travel companion
of fashion designer Coco Chanel and himself
responsible for thousands of killings in Poland, who
escaped to Argentina in the plain robes of a Carmelite
monk. Goñi found documentary evidence of Kutschmann's
support from the Casa Rosada in a place few people
would have thought to look: Kutschmann's early
application for a taxi license, Goñi discovered, was
backed by Fernando Imperatrice, a member of Perón's
presidential staff. Kutschmann retained friends in
high places almost until the end of his life. During a
trial held by the Argentine military regime in the
early 1980s, the former SS man went free "when the
court lost the case dossier. It was found five years
later ... in the judge's safe" (p. 243).

In an extraordinary tale from the archives, Goñi
describes spending five months posing as a genealogist
to look unobtrusively for crucial evidence in the
records of the Argentine Immigration Office. From 1920
to 1970, the government routinely opened individual
immigration files for every applicant for a landing
permit, whether job seeker, refugee, or war criminal.
Goñi eventually worked through "a couple of city
blocks of shelves stacked with tightly packed cards,"
indexing the files to find ones he wished to order (p.
117). He discovered entries corresponding to files for
Eichmann, Priebke, Mengele, and other lesser-known
fascists. But when he broke his cover and tried to
order the relevant files, the archivists turned nasty
and sullen, and terminated their cooperation. One of
them then met him furtively in a park across the
street to confess that in 1996, Peronists, fearing
exposure, had carted most of the key documents down to
the riverbank and burned them.

But not all of them were burned. By entering the data
from the index cards alone into a computer
spreadsheet, Goñi found that the files for Erich
Priebke and Josef Mengele were numbered consecutively,
even though they arrived in Argentina seven months
apart. At the time of their applications, the
Immigration Office was opening new files at a rate of
over five hundred per day. Thus a single person must
have applied on behalf of both war criminals at once
or processed them together, prima facie evidence of an
organized effort on behalf of Nazi fugitives.

Goñi made other important finds. He draws effectively
on the revealing unpublished diary of a Belgian
fascist involved in the smuggling network in Buenos
Aires, Pierre Daye, whose papers were repatriated
after his death and thus escaped the Argentine
bonfires. Historian Beatriz Gurevich, a member of
CEANA (Comisión de Esclarecimiento de Actividades
Nazis en la Argentina), the Argentine government
commission investigating Nazi links, who resigned in
the late 1990s because the commission did not dig deep
enough, shared her files with Goñi. He also worked in
Chile, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland,
and the United States. In the end he was able to
identify nearly three hundred war criminals who
entered Argentina beginning in August 1946. (The
entire staff of CEANA came up with only 180.) This
research, presented in such detail that at times the
narrative of events gears down into a register of
names and places, is itself a great achievement.
Goñi's interpretations of causality, however, are more
porous. At the center of the image of Argentina as a
fascist paradise, and looming in the background
throughout the story told here, is the highly disputed
figure of Perón himself. Did he, as Goñi argues, turn
his country into an asylum for the blood-spattered
losers of the Second World War out of ideological
sympathy for European fascism? Or were other motives
more important?

Goñi takes a clear stand: if Perón was not himself a
Nazi, he liked Nazis, cooperated with them before,
during, and after the war, and sought to save them
from the "victor's justice" he saw at work at the
Nuremberg tribunal because it offended his soldier's
sense of honor. "It was Perón's intention to rescue as
many Nazis as possible from the war crimes trials in
Europe," Goñi writes (p. 108). [...] 

Argentina was hardly the only country to take
advantage of the decommissioned human resources of the
Third Reich. The United States is famously indebted to
rocketry expert Werner von Braun, who literally got
NASA off the ground thanks to his experience building
Hitler's V-2 rockets using slave labor in the
underground factories at Peenemunde. Von Braun arrived
via Operation Paperclip, a once-secret program that
eventually brought 765 German scientists, engineers,
and technicians into the United States; between half
and three-quarters were former Nazi Party members or
SS men, and more than a few of them were guilty of war
crimes. The Soviet Union carried off German
technicians and laborers in large numbers after the
war, and the intelligence agencies of both superpowers
recruited well-informed Nazis into their ranks.
Perhaps the most notorious was Klaus Barbie, the
"Butcher of Lyon," who worked for and was sheltered by
the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps after the
war. The CIC also protected Otto von Bolschwing, a
senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. France likewise
enlisted ex-Waffen SS in the Foreign Legion to fight
against national liberation movements in its colonies.
[...] 

Citation: Max Paul Friedman. "Review of Uki Goñi, The
Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's
Argentina," H-German, H-Net Reviews, April, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=160051084077522.

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