Latin America, Nazis in
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of European Fascists fled to South America after World War II to escape prosecution for war crimes. They included such notorious figures as Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, who fled to Argentina; Josef Mengele, the sadistic doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who died in Brazil; and Klaus Barbie, responsible for thousands of killings in occupied France, who found sanctuary in Bolivia.
Many lesser-known criminals from Nazi Germany and Fascist organizations in Croatia, Ukraine, Belgium, and elsewhere entered South American countries secretly or, in some cases, with the connivance of authoritarian governments. Although the Soviet Union, the United States, and other countries also welcomed fleeing Fascists who had technical skills or intelligence to offer, South America played an especially prominent role as a haven for Nazis.European Fascists who went this route could exploit links of ideological, religious, and ethnic affinity. Some Latin American dictators such as Juan Domingo Peron, who drew on Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement as a model for political mobilization, were sympathetic to Nazi officials during the war and sought to assist them afterward. A network of anti-Communist Catholic priests and a few cardinals helped right-wing Catholics implicated in war crimes flee via Austria and Italy to Argentina. Once in South America, Nazis could often find asylum among communities of German expatriates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay, where the Nazi Party had built local organizations during the 1930s.
The Argentine government of Peron was unusually active. After the war, Argentine officials set up offices in Europe to encourage immigration as part of a crash industrialization program. These overt efforts provided cover for a more concentrated covert program of assisting Fascists, run by officials who worked in Peron’s immigration ministry and intelligence agencies.
However, the goal was not so much to provide asylum for criminals as to seek out skilled labor and advanced technology. It was apparently successful: in 1947 Argentina produced its own jet fighter with the help of imported Nazi engineers.Latin America was not the only region to take advantage of the decommissioned human resources of the Third Reich. The United States space program is indebted to Wernher von Braun, who helped build Hitler’s V-2 rockets using slave laborers from concentration camps in the underground factories at Peenemunde. Von Braun arrived in the United States via Operation Paperclip, a once-secret program that eventually brought, by one count, 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, who worked for and was sheltered by the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) after the war. The CIC also protected Otto von Bolschwing, a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. France likewise enlisted former Waffen-SS into the Foreign Legion to fight against national liberation movements in its colonies.
The presence of high-ranking Nazis in Latin America drew worldwide attention because of the investigations of Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld. In 1960 Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann from his home in Argentina and brought him to stand trial in Jerusalem, where he was convicted of mass murder and executed. Mengele eluded capture for
years in Paraguay and southern Brazil, sparking rumors of sightings across the region and skepticism when his body was found in 1985. Forensic tests, however, confirmed Mengele had died in 1979. Barbie, whose American handlers sent him to South America after his cover was blown in 1951, ran an intelligence network for a series of Bolivian dictatorships until a leftist government came to power and extradited him to France in 1983, where he was convicted and died in prison in 1991.
Such high-profile cases fueled a widespread image of all of South America as a Nazi haven and a launchpad for a Fourth Reich organized by aging Nazis. Hollywood productions of conspiratorial novels such as The Boys from Brazil (1978) and The Odessa File (1974) fueled this impression, as did exaggerated estimates that as many as 50,000 Nazis were hiding in South America. The most thorough recent investigation, by Uki Goni, identified 300 war criminals admitted to Argentina after the war, most of them Croatian Fascists.
Max Paul Friedman
See also Argentina; Barbie, Klaus; Braun, Wernher von; Eichmann, Karl Adolf; Latin America, Nazi Party in; Nuremberg Trials; Paraguay
References and Further Reading
Goni, Uki. The Real Odessa: Smuggling the
Nazis to Perons Argentina. London: Granta, 2002.
Gurevich, Beatriz, and Paul Warzawski. Proyecto testimonio. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1998.
Hunt, Linda. Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991.
Loftus, John, and Mark Aarons. Unholy Trinity. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
Meding, Holger. Flucht vor Nurnberg? Koln: Bohlau, 1992.