Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  TODAY, IF YOU VISIT VILLA GENERAL BELGRANO, San Carlos de Bariloche, Villa La Angostura, Santa Rosa de Calamuchita, or any of a hundred other German settlements in Argentina, it is still difficult to believe that you are in Latin America. The architecture and the almost exclusively Caucasian population are very obviously Central European. Each of the larger towns has always had its own German school, cultural institute, beer hall, and restaurants. Even at the time of this writing in 2010, Argentines of German descent account for more than three million of the country’s population of forty-two million, and many of these families arrived in the country decades before National Socialism was born. Of course, not all German-Argentines were Nazi sympathizers, but it is a common phenomenon for overseas settler communities to remain frozen in the conservatism of previous generations—and in the 1930s, a proportion of German-Argentines were fiercely nationalistic Volksdeutsche. When the Allies captured the Nazi Party’s master membership files, they were found to contain nearly eight million names. Among the cards of the Ausland-Organisation (“Overseas Organization”), Nazis were particularly numerous in Argentina. Estimates vary for the membership of the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations in that country, but the combined membership of both the official German NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) and the home-grown equivalent stood at close to 100,000.

  The Nazi sympathizers in Argentina advertised and sought to extend their already widespread support of the party with brash displays on a grand scale. In the spring of 1938, more than 20,000 of them gathered for a “Day of Unity” rally at the Luna Park stadium in Buenos Aires to celebrate the Anschluss—the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich on March 12. German Nazi banners flew alongside the Argentine flag while uniformed children marched past and gave the Hitler salute. The rally spurred citywide anti-German protests. The Argentine Nazi Party was officially dissolved by presidential decree on May 15, 1939, but this ban had little practical effect. In 1941, a report submitted to the Argentine congress by Deputy Raúl Damonte Taborda, chair of a congressional committee investigating Axis activities, stated:

  Do not believe that we are shouting in the dark. 22,000 perfectly disciplined men are ready, plus 8,000 Germans from the Nazi Party, 14,000 members of the German Workers Front, 3,000 Italian Fascists, 15,000 Falangists, many others from the Juventud Germano Argentina [Argentina’s Hitler Youth organization], and many thousands of others affiliated with the Argentine Nationalist Alliance—all are ready to strike.

  In 1943, the American author Allan Chase produced a detailed picture of the groups of Nazi sympathizers across Latin America, centered in the external organization of the Spanish Falange. He summed up:

  Wherever you turn in Latin America, whether in small but strategic Panama or in large and powerful Argentina, the Falange Exterior hits you between the eyes. Upward of a million Falangistas and their dupes—acting on orders dictated by Nazi General Wilhelm von Faupel in Madrid—are actively engaged in warfare against the United Nations, for the Axis. Hitler is not fooling—and the Falanges in Latin America are Hitler’s.

  In 1943, when Germany’s disastrous defeats in Russia and North Africa and the collapse of Fascist Italy convinced the more clear-sighted of the Nazis that ultimate defeat was inevitable, Argentina offered their last best hope for a postwar refuge. Martin Bormann, as always, was entirely clear-sighted, and during that year he put in hand his plan to prepare and fund that refuge—Aktion Feuerland. The Nazi sympathizers in Argentina enjoyed a virtually free rein, continuing to operate schools with Nazi symbols and ideology and meeting regularly (although by 1943 not as publicly as before), but the key conspirators were few—a group limited to people Bormann had reason to trust. These included a clique of powerful, venal bankers and industrialists such as Ludwig Freude; a charismatic, ambitious army officer, Juan Domingo Perón; and a beautiful, intelligent actress, Eva Duarté.

  THE NAZIS’ PENETRATION OF ARGENTINA can be considered in two parts (though they were intimately linked): first, the creation of Bormann’s human network, and second, the infusion of assets, which included the funding of capital projects such as “Hitler’s Valley” and the Hotel Viena, and investment and banking deposits.

  Ludwig Freude, labeled Argentina’s number one Nazi by the U.S. State Department, was to be the power behind the military strongman Juan Perón. From October 1942, the year before Aktion Feuerland moved into gear, he was also the de facto Nazi ambassador in Buenos Aires. Freude had gone to Argentina from Germany in 1913 and built up a construction company that would eventually make him one of Latin America’s ten wealthiest men. (His son Rodolfo, appointed as Juan Perón’s private secretary, was a key Nazi liaison after the spring of 1945.)

  Juan Domingo Perón, born in 1895, was brought up to ride and shoot in the cold, windswept south—“Argentina’s Wild West.” He was not a son of the aristocratic estanciero class—the rancher oligarchy that dominated Argentine politics and society—so he was fired by ambition rather than a sense of entitlement. After joining the army in 1911, Perón excelled in physical activities, but also earned approval as a student of military history (he would go on to publish five books on Napoleonic subjects), and by 1915 this “unusually intelligent, alert professional soldier” was one of the youngest full lieutenants in the service. In 1936, he was sent to Chile as a military attaché, but was expelled for espionage. In 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Perón was posted overseas to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, where—already an expert skier—he was attached to the Italian Alpini mountain troops. On June 10, 1940, as Wehrmacht armor threatened the French capital of Paris, Mussolini finally decided that it was safe for Italy to enter the war on Germany’s side, and Perón was soon in Paris to watch the Germans’ ceremonial parade through the surrendered capital. On his return to Argentina, Perón was to use his firsthand experience of Italian Fascism and German Nazism to build his own political model for a “New Argentina.” By summer 1941, both he and his friend Eva Duarté (an opportunistic twenty-two-year-old actress whose film career had been limited to bit parts but who was becoming very popular on Argentine radio) would be among those Argentine citizens in the direct pay of Berlin—or more precisely, of Reichsleiter Martin Bormann.

  AN FBI DOCUMENT from 1944 details where Hitler would find refuge in Argentina if he lost the war.

  MUCH OF THE CREDIT FOR EXPOSING Nazi links with leading Argentine figures belongs to the one-time Radical Party deputy for the province of Entre Ríos, Silvano Santander. This dedicated anti-Nazi had worked with Raúl Damonte Taborda since 1939, and in 1944 their refusal to be silenced led to a warrant for their arrest, obliging them both to flee the country. Santander went only as far as Montevideo in Uruguay, just across the Río del Plata from Buenos Aires, where he continued to work tirelessly in exile. In November 1952, he and his team traveled to West Germany, following a tip-off about a mass of documentation uncovered by the war crimes commission in Berlin during its hunt for Nazi links with Argentina. Santander subsequently published two books about the background of the Peróns’ rise to become Argentina’s first couple; his work was based on the documents he had studied in Berlin, which had been authenticated by U.S. Department of State foreign service investigator William Sidney and Herbert Sorter, chief of the External Assets Investigation Branch in the U.S. High Commissioner’s Office.

  Among the documents were confidential reports about diplomats and Nazi agents, sent from South America to Bormann, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the spymaster Gen. von Faupel. Among them were handwritten memos that had passed between Bormann and the German ambassador in Buenos Aires, Baron Edmund von Thermann (who, unsurprisingly, held the rank of SS major). In one such memo, Ambassador von Thermann praised the Buenos Aires government as loyal supporters of Nazism and pointed out that the Buenos Aires provincial governor from 1936 to 1940, Dr. Manuel A. Fresco, had installed on his ranch, Estancia Monasterio, “a powerful radio transceiver by which they had a permanent communication system�
�� between Argentina and Germany. This would be a crucial link in Bormann’s plans for Hitler’s escape, allowing for the likely use by Ludwig Freude of a Siemens & Haske T43 encryption machine that would have been delivered to Buenos Aires in 1944.

  AS EARLY AS MAY 1940, many of the Nazis’ Argentine supporters would gather regularly for friendly games of poker at the German embassy in Buenos Aires. The German players included Ambassador von Thermann; Prince Stephan zu Schaumburg-Lippe, a consular officer based in Chile; the naval attaché Capt. Dietrich Niebuhr; the press attaché Gottfried Sandstede; Ricardo von Leute, the general manager of Lahusen; and the multimillionaire banker Ludwig Freude. On the other side of the dealer, the Argentine players included various military and naval officers: Generals von der Becke, Pertiné, Ramírez, and Farrell, and Colonels Perón, Brickman, Heblin, Mittelbach, Tauber, Gilbert, and Gonzalez (the number of German family names is striking). Occasionally Carlos Ibarguren, head of the legal department of the Banco de la Nación, and Miguel Viancarlos, chief of investigations for the Argentine police, would also sit in. The Nazis were “useless” at poker and lost heavily. Allied intelligence reported that the Argentines would leave with smiles on their faces, remarking how innocent their German opponents were, but Thermann would later tell the Allied war crimes commission, “We wanted to make our friends happy—we always let them win.”

  Press attaché Gottfried Sandstede had two other roles: he was also an employee of the Delfino shipping line and Gen. von Faupel’s personal representative. The FBI suspected that Delfino SA was heavily involved in Bormann’s shipments of loot from Europe, at first by surface vessel and aircraft and later by submarine. On September 8, 1941, Time magazine reported:

  In the three months since thirty-two-year-old Deputy Raúl Damonte Taborda began a [congressional] investigation of anti-Argentine activities he has stealthily and steadily crept closer to Argentina’s cuckoo nest: the German Embassy. Last week Deputy Damonte thought he had his hands on the biggest cuckoo in the nest.

  The bird he was after was not Ambassador von Thermann, but Gottfried Sandstede. Damonte believed that Sandstede was the senior Nazi spy in Argentina and that Thermann actually took instructions from him—a suspicion that Thermann would later verify.

  When Damonte came after him, Sandstede claimed diplomatic immunity, but, as an employee of Delfino, he was denied this status by the Argentine Foreign Ministry. Somebody tipped off the German embassy about Sandstede’s imminent arrest, giving him time to arrange his urgent departure. Police were posted outside his house and the German embassy and at checkpoints along the roads leading from the city to the airport. One of these pickets stopped a suspicious-looking car that tried to pass through the cordon, and arrested Karl Sandstede, the fugitive’s brother. Believing they had the wanted man, the police relaxed the cordon, and early the next morning Gottfried Sandstede boarded a plane for Brazil at Buenos Aires airport. Upon Sandstede’s arrival in Rio de Janeiro, Ambassador von Thermann “announced blandly that Herr Sandstede had been recalled to Berlin to report on anti-German activities in Argentina.”

  The truth was more interesting. On the morning of the escape, the Kriegsmarine attaché, Capt. Niebuhr, wrote to Gen. von Faupel, “We had to send our press attaché Gottfried Sandstede from the country in haste. We received information from our Miss Eva Duarté, an Argentinean who is always excellently informed.” The actress was more than simply an informant, however; she had played an active part in the escape by turning up at the German embassy in Col. Perón’s War Ministry staff car with an Argentine military uniform complete with greatcoat and cap: a disguise for Sandstede. Thus disguised as a senior Argentine military officer, with a stunning blonde beside him, Sandstede was simply waved through the police cordon. Three days after Sandstede’s flight, Deputy Damonte submitted to the Argentine congress a report by his investigative committee. Among its major conclusions, the report stated that, despite its official dissolution in May 1939, the Argentine Nazi Party continued to operate cells throughout the country, organized on military lines, and that the German embassy participated directly in the party’s activities.

  The papers studied by Santander in 1952 revealed that Eva Duarté would soon enjoy the trust of the Nazi agents to a remarkable degree. When Niebuhr himself had to leave the country after being “outed” for espionage activities, he wrote to von Faupel, “Luckily, with some exceptions, they did not have news of our most important staff or of our contacts.” Niebuhr reported that he was actually passing over responsibility for parts of the Nazi network in the “Brazil and South Pacific [southern Chile] sections” to Duarté, whom he described as “a devilishly beautiful, intelligent, charming, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman, who has already caught the eye of Colonel Perón.”

  Three months after the flight of Gottfried Sandstede, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II. In January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government summoned a conference of all the nations of the Americas to meet in Rio de Janeiro. The State Department exerted pressure on all Western Hemisphere countries to cut diplomatic relations with Japan, Germany, and Italy. Within two weeks, on January 28, all but two of the twenty-one republics announced their agreement; those that refused were Chile and Argentina. Despite the revelations of the Damonte report, it would be October 23, 1942, before Ambassador von Thermann left Buenos Aires for good. His practical functions passed, unofficially but unequivocally, to the banker and industrialist Ludwig Freude.

  IN APRIL 1943, WHEN THE TIDE OF WAR was obviously beginning to turn in the Allies’ favor, von Faupel traveled to Buenos Aires in person by U-boat. He was accompanied by Sandstede, who had not returned to the country since he had been spirited out with Eva Duarté’s help in September 1941. When they arrived on May 2, they were received by Argentina’s outspokenly pro-fascist and anti-American navy minister, Adm. Leon Scasso. Von Faupel stayed in the German evangelist church on Calle Esmeralda in Buenos Aires. Before they departed on May 8, they held meetings with—among others—Ludwig Freude, Ricardo von Leute of the Lahusen company, and Col. Perón and Eva Duarté. Thermann would later tell the war crimes commission that “the real motive for Faupel’s visit was to make Argentina a safe place for the future, in the certainty of defeat.”

  Von Faupel told Perón that it was now possible that Germany would lose the war. In that case, he warned, Perón and his friends were going to end up facing charges of high treason. The Nazi spymaster told his Argentine contacts that there was only one way to avoid this: they had to seize power and “maintain it at all costs.” It would take less than a month for them to act on his advice.

  On June 4, 1943, Gen. Arturo Rawson and the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (United Officer’s Group, or GOU)—a secret clique of senior military officers in which Col. Perón played a significant part—launched a coup d’état. It took about half a day to overthrow the three-year-old regime of Argentina’s conservative president, Ramón S. Castillo; Rawson himself would preside for less than two days, however, before being replaced by Gen. Pedro Pablo Ramírez. Germany, Italy, and the U.S. State Department immediately recognized the new regime; the United States hoped that Argentina would finally give up its neutrality and join the fight against the Axis. The precedent of the authoritarian Getúlio Vargas regime in Brazil, which had joined the Allies in August 1942, was encouraging. However, the new Argentine government proved even less cooperative than the old one. Ramírez was president in name only; the real power lay with the GOU, known simply as “the Colonels,” and well placed among them was Juan Domingo Perón. (One of the GOU’s early acts was to close down Deputy Damonte’s committee of enquiry into Nazi activities.) Perón became an assistant to the secretary of war and, a short time later, the head of the Department of Labor. This then-insignificant ministry would provide him with an unsuspected power base.

  At the German embassy, Capt. Niebuhr’s replacement in the Nazi network was Erich Otto Meynen (another of the poker players), and he could hardly
contain his triumph when he wrote to his predecessor: “I have spent day and night traveling or receiving Party members; they come from all parts of the country to see me. My efforts have not been in vain. The success of our friends’ revolution has been complete.” Eva Duarté had shown Meynen a letter that outlined Perón’s political philosophy: “The Argentine workers were born animals of the herd, and they will die as such. To rule them it is enough to give them food, work, and laws to follow, which will keep them in line.” Niebuhr thought Perón followed “the good school.”

  AMERICAN ANGER AT ARGENTINA’S REFUSAL to curb Nazi activities, and at the Ramírez government’s stubborn maintenance of an ostensible neutrality in the war, came to a head with the publication of a blistering exchange of letters between Argentine foreign minister Adm. Segundo Storni and U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull in September 1943. The row was deliberately made public by the United States, causing a storm in Buenos Aires; Storni resigned, and anti-American feeling blossomed in Argentina. The press reported one typical young “hothead” as declaring, “To hell with the U.S. We’re looking toward Europe, for now and after the war.”

  Continuing American pressure only made the Colonels more popular, but then Great Britain and the United States threatened to go public with detailed information on the Nazis’ links with members of the Argentine government—which would lead to global ostracization of Argentina. In January 1944, President Ramírez, folding under this threat, suspended diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan. (Italy had already surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943.)