The desire for advance information is no doubt rooted in the instinct for survival.
—ALLEN DULLES, The Craft of Intelligence, 1963
Allen Dulles, who became the first civilian director of the CIA and America’s longest-serving spymaster, spent World War II as the OSS chief in Berne in an enchanting fourteenth-century home with a commanding view of the Alps and the sinuous Aare River. Along with Stockholm, Madrid, Lisbon, and Istanbul, the Swiss capital was considered an “intelligence metropolis” for the amount of espionage and counterespionage that went on there. Disaffected Nazis found their way to Dulles’s mansion, sometimes entering by a partially hidden back door. The American spy spoke fluent German and squeezed out pertinent information. Sometimes the intelligence he received also helped his clients at Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York law firm where Allen and his brother Foster, later secretary of state, were partners.
The OSS cultivated certain Nazis, bringing them onto the payroll to fight postwar communism. In the spring of 1945, Walter Rauff, then the Nazi chief of intelligence in northern Italy, participated in Operation Sunrise, Dulles’s secret scheme to negotiate a separate surrender of German soldiers and Mussolini’s troops in that part of the country, just days before the official end of the war. Friedrich Schwend of Operation Bernhard also took part. Later Rauff worked for the CIC, and Schwend collaborated with the OSS.
When U.S. intelligence agencies discovered the Ratline routes, they began to use them to move agents and valuable contacts, fascist or not, to safety. Just as anyone with money for a ticket could take a train, so too it seemed that anyone with the right contacts could travel a Ratline. Among Friedrich Schwend’s lieutenants in his shady business were several Jews who, after the war, used the old routes of Operation Bernhard to shepherd Holocaust survivors illegally to Palestine. At one time, Schloss Labers housed Jews on one floor and fugitive Nazis on another.
From the perspective of Dulles and the likes of Draganović, Hudal, and Rauff, in the wake of the Axis defeat, the next war was looming between the civilized West and the forces of the East represented by the Soviet Union. SS captain Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon for the torture he inflicted personally on Gestapo prisoners, once asked Draganović why he was going to such efforts to help him escape to Bolivia. Draganović replied, “We have to maintain a sort of moral reserve on which we can draw in the future.”
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More fascists and collaborators took the Ratlines to Argentina than to any other country in Latin America. In general, President Juan Perón agreed with their politics. At the same time, he wanted the immigrants to help modernize the country and to support his nuclear and aviation programs. He valued military and industrial experience and admired the political systems of Hitler and Mussolini. He knew Fascist Italy especially well.
In 1939, forty-four-year-old army lieutenant Juan Domingo Perón lived in Merano, learning mountain warfare while attached to a crack Alpini combat unit and becoming familiar with Mussolini’s armed forces. He skied on the slopes that encircled the city. He rode fine horses in the hippodrome near the barracks. Tall and athletic and with a dazzling smile, the vigorous Argentine cut a dashing figure in uniform.
From Merano, Perón went to Rome to serve as adjutant to the defense attaché at the Argentine embassy. He saw the efficiency of Mussolini’s police state and the effectiveness of his cult of personality, and he recognized the power of Il Duce’s grand public displays. In Mussolini’s Italy, Perón said later, ordinary people—workers—had a part in national life that they never had before, and the same happened in Hitler’s Germany, “an organized state for a perfectly ordered community, and a perfectly ordered population, where the state was the instrument of the people. I thought that this ought to be the political form of the future, the true people’s democracy, the true social democracy.”
Perón was not a notably devout Catholic, but in Rome he cultivated Argentina’s representatives to the Holy See. Unusually for a man of his relatively low rank, he was received by the pope in a private audience. The visit was almost certainly approved by the Vatican’s sharp intelligence agents, who knew a rising star when they saw one.
After two years in Europe, Juan Perón returned to Buenos Aires “at a moment when the [political] battles, as usual, were being rigged,” he said in a 1960s interview. “I asked myself, ‘What would happen if someone began to fight for real and announced “I’m going to play to win”’?”
Perón became one of a circle of officers who ousted the Argentine president in a popular coup in 1943. Now a colonel, he exuded a magnetism born of physical prowess and self-confidence. J. Edgar Hoover sent the State Department a description of Perón’s manner provided by the FBI’s spy network.
“He improvises,” said Hoover’s report. “He does not boast about his physical power, but he shows it. He takes off his jacket and walks up and down with his regulation Kahki [sic] shirt, exhibiting the pistol in his belt. He bangs the table and does not hesitate when referring to other chiefs and officers, or in stating that he will fix that situation ‘by blows.’ But he does all this laughing. If he becomes flustered over a discussion, it only lasts a second.”
Perón made no secret of his admiration for Il Duce, Franco, and the Fuehrer. When he left Rome in 1941, Germany was at its high point of wartime strength. He wanted to ensure that Argentina would play a part in the new world order to come.
* * *
In 1943, Perón was a central player in a secret plan that proposed Argentina as a broker, in collaboration with the Vatican, to end the war. In the audacious scheme, a victorious Germany would get a formal bridge to the Western Hemisphere through Argentina. The pope would be assured of protection for the Eternal City and the Vatican would govern Jerusalem, keeping the Holy Places safe from Zionists and Moslems. Argentina would reclaim the Falkland Islands and acquire a powerful ally—the Reich—against “Bolshevist penetration” of Latin America.
Perón covertly sent a personal envoy to the Vatican and the Reich to propose a postwar “triangle of peace,” tethered at its points by Germany, the Vatican, and Argentina. Part of the inspiration was General Francisco Franco’s interpretation of hispanidad, the idea that Spanish and Portuguese speakers the world over were united in their Catholic faith and support of the Reich, especially in the face of British and U.S. imperialism. Mostly, however, Perón’s idea centered on the concept of Argentina as a natural leader of the region. He believed that alongside the Vatican, Latin America with Spain and Portugal could create a new global sphere of political influence.
As the Argentine journalist and historian Uki Goñi has written, “The country’s powerful nationalist military officers and Church dignitaries dreamt of converting Argentina from a secular republic into a Hispanic ‘Catholic Nation’ that could act as a counterweight to its ‘materialistic’ northern cousin, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ United States.”
Perón’s envoy, a well-connected Catholic nationalist named Juan Carlos Goyeneche, traveled to the Reich to pledge Argentina’s support. There are conflicting versions about whether he met with Hitler, but it has been confirmed that he met with SS chief Himmler and with Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop at the minister’s Westphalia estate, where he sat through an extended rant against “international Jewry.” But Goyeneche received assurances that Argentina would be rewarded commercially for its loyalty when the Reich won the war. “We could take everything that Argentina produced no matter how much it might be,” Ribbentrop said.
Then Goyeneche raised the issue more important than any other to Argentine national pride—the Falkland Islands, claimed by the British. Seldom has such an apparently insignificant bit of land weighed so heavily in the history of a country.
The Falklands—Las Malvinas in Spanish—are three hundred miles from the Argentine coast off Patagonia and scarcely populated even today. For much of their history, the islands were notable principally for scrubby hills, penguins, and albatross, a convenient re
pair stop for ships rounding the Horn or engaged in the “wrecking trade,” recovering cargo and timbers from disabled ships.
For Britain, however, the Falklands are an imperial outpost in reach of Antarctica. During World War I, the British successfully defended the Falklands from an attack by German admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee, who died along with his two sons and more than two thousand other men. The bitter memory of the defeat of their national hero gave Germans, too, a stake in liberating Las Malvinas from the British.
Would the victorious Reich support the Argentine claim to the Falklands? The answer pleased Perón’s envoy.
The clear-eyed, stern-looking Ribbentrop, formerly the ambassador to the Court of St. James, compared the Falklands to that “grotesque example” of British Gibraltar, which lies “without question … on the Iberian peninsula,” thus rightfully belonging to Spain. He warned that “unless Argentina takes care,” the United States might take over the Falklands. Ribbentrop said the islands were “nearer Argentina than to England,” and expressed “great sympathy” for the Argentine claim.
It must have been music to Goyeneche’s ears then, to hear Mussolini also express support for Argentina’s claim at a meeting in Rome. At another location in the city, in an office of polished mahogany walls, Vatican secretary of state Luigi Cardinal Maglione made a discreet but pointed inquiry of another Argentine diplomat, its ambassador to the Holy See. Was Argentina willing “to apply its immigration law generously in order to encourage at the opportune moment European immigrants to seek the necessary land and capital in your country?” Yes.
In February 1946, the same month that Juan Perón was elected president, Argentine bishop Antonio Caggiano traveled to Rome carrying another diplomatic message: Argentina was “willing to receive French persons, whose political attitude during the recent war would expose them, should they return to France, to harsh measures and private revenge”—that is, onetime Nazi collaborators.
Caggiano was accompanied by an Argentine bishop with strong ties to Action Française, an ultranationalist movement that disdained the French Revolution and modern democracy. They met with the Vatican’s Russia expert, Eugène Cardinal Tisserant, who believed the Russians were on the verge of taking control over Europe. Soon visas stamped on ICRC passports were forthcoming for French and Belgian Nazi collaborators hiding in Italy and Spain.
The three clerics who met in the Vatican may have been presuming that the men they helped to escape would form an anticommunist political brain trust upon which Argentina might draw. Nevertheless, the ship that carried the Argentine bishops home also carried the first officially documented wanted Nazi collaborator to disembark in Buenos Aires, and he was not an intelligence agent, secret police veteran, or professional intellectual. He was an aviation industry genius.
The Frenchman Émile Dewoitine, one of Europe’s most important jet plane designers, had worked for the Reich, Japan, and Spain. Within a year in Argentina, collaborating with Perón’s aviation team, he built the IA-27 Pulqui, the first combat jet fighter in Latin America, making the country only the fifth in the world to develop a jet fighter on its own. In 1947, aviation expert Kurt Tank, the aeronautical engineer and test pilot who flew the prototype of the first landplane to cross the Atlantic and created warplanes for the Luftwaffe, arrived and proceeded to devise an Argentine jet fighter along the lines of the Soviet MiG-15. The resulting Pulqui II, however, was a casualty of an Argentine economic crisis in the early 1950s, with just five prototypes built. The only one that saw combat flew in support of rebels that brought down Perón’s government in 1955.
Perón wanted to import as many German and other refugee technicians as he could to further industrialization. The Americans and the Russians had already claimed thousands, but Perón wanted his share, too, even though he had less money and international standing with which to work. It was not a bad idea, a British Foreign Office memorandum noted, for Argentina to profit from trained specialists so that industrialization would not be dominated by North Americans. For the first time in the country’s history, industrial production became greater than agricultural production, with arms production greater than any other branch.
For all the emphasis on bringing in trained experts to promote development, Perón’s Ratline system was in the hands of some of the most unsavory men in Argentina: Rodolfo Freude, Perón’s spy chief and head of his propaganda apparatus; Pierre Daye, who wrote for an anti-Semitic, ultra-collaborationist review in France; René Lagrou, once leader of the Flemish SS in Belgium; and Carlos Fuldner, an Argentine who grew up in Germany, joined the SS, and translated for the Blue Division, a unit of Spanish and Latin American volunteers who fought for Germany on the Soviet front. The Ratline agents had their own covert headquarters in the presidential Information Bureau and Central State Intelligence office located in the Casa Rosada, the pink-colored White House in Buenos Aires.
Pierre Daye later exulted about a two-day meeting that Perón held with this team, remarking on the president’s “courage” in receiving the men in the “national official palace.” There should have been no surprise. In the 1960s, Perón gave his opinion of the Nuremberg trials, calling them “an infamy, unworthy of the conquerors.” Perón was a military man who seemed to consider that demanding justice for certain acts in wartime was a weakness. “Now we realize that [the Allies] deserved to lose the war,” he said.
* * *
It is difficult to say for certain how many refugees came on the Ratline escape routes to Latin America. Argentina, for instance, has a European face, with a small indigenous population and strong historical immigration from Italy, England, Germany, and Spain. Newcomers blended into the ordinary flow of immigrants; arrival records of the period that might have told us more were destroyed. What is clear is that the arrivals came from many countries, not only Germany. Thirty thousand Croatians went to Argentina. Some newcomers were fortunate to get jobs in branches of the Reich’s businesses—IG Farben, Volkswagen, Hoechst, Bayer, Krupp. Others scraped out a modest living.
Friedrich Schwend of Operation Bernhard made his way to Peru, probably in 1946, some reports say with a good deal of Operation Bernhard treasure. Schwend became a successful businessman, an experience he shared with many other new arrivals. “Life here is much easier,” he wrote to a brother-in-law in Genoa in 1959. “A shame you didn’t make tracks over here immediately after the end of the war.”
Others who traveled the Ratlines to Latin America were among the era’s most wanted war criminals.
• Ante Pavelić, the Ustashi founder helped by Krunoslav Draganović, became a security advisor to Juan Perón. In Buenos Aires, he declared a Croatian state in exile, tried to breathe new life into Nazism among followers, and railed against the Yugoslav Communist regime of Josip Broz Tito. After Perón’s fall in 1955, Pavelić took refuge in Paraguay, where he worked as a security advisor to the ruthless dictator Alfredo Stroessner. He died in Spain in 1959 from wounds suffered in a 1957 assassination attempt by a Serbian patriot in Buenos Aires.
• Joseph Mengele, the gap-toothed “Angel of Death,” was a physician at Auschwitz who condemned those he judged unfit for work to immediate extermination in the gas chambers. He performed cruel experiments on the living. Mengele had an obsession with developing a method of producing twins, believing German women might offset war losses with multiple births. With Bishop Hudal’s help, Mengele escaped to Bolivia. He lived for a time in Paraguay and then migrated to Brazil, where he drowned in 1979 at age sixty-seven after suffering a stroke while swimming off the coast near São Paulo.
• Adolf Eichmann, who managed the transportation logistics for moving hundreds of thousands of Jews for elimination in deaths camps, went to Argentina with Hudal’s help. There he lived quietly for fifteen years until 1960, when an Israeli team of security and intelligence agents kidnapped him and brought him to Jerusalem, where he was tried and hanged in 1962. (Hudal also helped Eichmann’s deputy, Alois Brunner, go to Syria, where he worked as a co
nsultant on Nazi torture and interrogation methods.)
• Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief with the penchant for personally involving himself in the torture of his victims, signed a 1944 order sending forty-four Jewish children and their seven caregivers from a home near Nice to the death camps. Barbie noted dutifully that the home had been “cleaned out” but that “neither cash nor other valuables could be secured.” After the war, the U.S. CIC hired Barbie as an informer. When the French demanded him for trial, U.S. agents and Draganović arranged for his escape to Bolivia. There he worked for West German intelligence and may have continued to work for U.S. intelligence, as he boasted of aiding in the capture of Che Guevara, a CIA-advised operation, although the boast has never been proven. Extradited to France, Barbie died in prison in 1991 at age seventy-seven.
• Eduard Roschmann, the “Butcher of Riga,” oversaw the murders of twenty-four thousand Jews in a Latvian forest and presided over the murders of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews who had been delivered to a Latvian ghetto. Arrested in Graz, Roschmann escaped from Dachau, which had been turned into a prison camp, got in touch with Hudal, and traveled safely to Argentina, where he became a citizen. An unclaimed body found in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1977 may have been that of Roschmann, but its identity was never confirmed.
• Franz Stangl oversaw the death camps at Sobibór and Treblinka and a facility of the “euthanasia” network that killed disabled children and the gravely ill. Stangl went to Brazil. In 1969, at age fifty-seven, he was extradited to Germany and died three years later in jail.
• Gustav Wagner, known as “The Beast” for his personal brutality, was Stangl’s deputy commander at the Sobibór camp in German-occupied Poland where more than two hundred thousand died. In 1948, Hudal gave Wagner a Red Cross passport. He sailed for Brazil, where he lived for thirty years. In October 1980, he was found at home in São Paulo with a knife in his chest, an apparent suicide.
The Tango War Page 30
