Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice; by Gerald Steinacher.

Best to read the chapter titled Conclusion to begin with, although it appears just after half the book is over.

At the outset a couple of things are made clear by Steinacher - one, that this is book form of his degree work thesis; and second, that there never was an organisation named ODESSA, as described by Frederick Forsyth in his novel named after it, and since known even more due to the film based on the book. He repeatedly mentions various people including Simon Wiesenthal accepting existence of this organisation as a fact, and one is supposed to infer this was pretty silly, this author asserting over and over to the contrary.

This assertion is in line with the general denial suitable to nazis in particular, and therefore many Germans in general, but another writer, Alan Levy, on the topic - one who researched extensively, too, and probably being not connected to nazis in existence through twentieth century in Germany, Austria or South America in various nations, had little reason to deny the existence of the organisation - says the following in his book "Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File":-
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October 21, 2016
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Quoted from

Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File by Alan Levy:-


"ODESSA, in capital letters, is not the Soviet seaport where Simon Wiesenthal spent two years apprenticing as an architect and another year designing huts for chicken feathers, but an acronym for Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen: Organization of SS Members. As amorphous as the Mafia, which exists even when one cannot prove it exists, ODESSA, like the Cosa Nostra ‘families’, forms and re-forms to fit the occasion or need. Under such aliases as ‘Spider’, ‘Sluice’, ‘Silent Help’, ‘The Brotherhood’, ‘Association of German Soldiers’, ‘Comradeship’, or even ‘Six-Pointed Star’ (not the Star of David, but an escape network in Austria’s six principal cities), it denies its existence and shrugs off Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling 1972 thriller, The Odessa File, for the fiction it is, even though Forsyth’s novel features such real-life heroes as Simon Wiesenthal and Lord Russell of Liverpool as well as, for a villain, Eduard Roschmann, ‘The Butcher of Riga’ who, as second-in-command of the Latvian capital’s ghetto, was responsible for 35,000 deaths and deportations. In his foreword, Forsyth dissociates fiction from fact by pointing out that ‘many Germans are inclined to say that the ODESSA does not exist. The short answer is: it exists.’

Wiesenthal won’t waste his time or anyone else’s arguing this question. He insists ODESSA was founded in Augsburg or Stuttgart in 1947, when higher-ranking Nazis in the SS and wartime German industry saw that, despite Allied disinterest, the revelation of war crimes and the question of accountability were not going to die a quiet death. With the impending new state of Israel and dedicated survivors like Wiesenthal determined to keep the fires alive, the Fourth Reich wasn’t about to happen very soon. Using just a portion of their plunder, which Wiesenthal values at between $750 million and 1 billion, they were able to set up three escape routes: from the north German seaport of Bremen to the Italian seaport of Genoa, where Christopher Columbus was born and, centuries later, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele set sail for the New World: from Bremen to Rome, where the Vatican and the International Red Cross, wittingly or unwittingly, stood ready to expedite their escapes; and from Austria to Italy, which is the way Franz Stangl went."

"‘ODESSA provides its members with material aid, organizes social activities, and, when necessary, helps ex-Nazis escape to foreign countries,’ said prosecutor Gideon Hausner at the Eichmann trial. ‘It has its headquarters in Munich with branches all over Germany and Austria as well as in South American countries. The German community at Hohenau in Paraguay is dominated by ODESSA.’ 

‘ODESSA was organized as a thorough, efficient network,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Every forty miles was a shelter manned by a minimum of three and maximum of five people. They knew only the two surrounding shelters: the one from which the fugitives came to them and the one to which they were to be delivered safely.’ Ironically, some of the inns and farmhouses along ODESSA’S ‘rat line’, as the escape routes became known, were also used by Jewish refugees making their way illegally to what was still Palestine under an expiring British mandate which sought to maintain the population balance between Arabs and Jews. For some Displaced Persons, it was harder to leave Germany and Austria than it was for their former captors. Wiesenthal says: ‘I know of a small inn near Merano, in the Italian Tyrol, and another place near the Resch Pass between Austria and Italy, where illegal Nazi transports and illegal Jewish transports sometimes spent the night without knowing of each other’s presence. The Jews were hidden on the upper floor and told not to move. The Nazis, on the ground floor, were warned to stay inside.’" 

"There was also substantial two-way commuter traffic of wanted Nazis across the border between Austria and Germany. Wiesenthal says that ODESSA used German drivers, hired in Munich under their own names or aliases, to deliver Stars and Stripes, the US Army’s daily newspaper printed in Germany, to the troops in Austria. Military Police would wave these US army vans through the border crossing on the Munich-Salzburg Autobahn and sometimes the drivers would repay the favour by handing them a few free copies while a Nazi fugitive crouched behind bundles of Stars and Stripes.

The recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, which asked no questions and into which scores of low-ranking SS men fled in the last days of the war, also served ODESSA well. In early 1948, Roschmann, the Graz-born ‘Butcher of Riga’, escaped from Austria into Italy with five other Nazi fugitives in a car with French licence plates and a Foreign Legion chauffeur outfitted with papers enabling the car to cross borders without being searched. " 

"Simon Wiesenthal estimates the value of the wealth that the Nazis smuggled out of Europe at close to a billion dollars. ‘After the war,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘the Nazis sent experts and money to Argentina. Perón himself, according to an investigation made in Buenos Aires after his downfall, was given around $100 million. Buenos Aires became the south terminal port for ODESSA. The Germans took over hotels and boarding houses, gave new SS immigrants jobs and identity papers, and had excellent connections with the highest government officials. At one time, a group of Argentinian Germans plotted to fly to Germany and set free all the Nazi criminals in Landsberg Prison.’"

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However, Steinacher too admits, and it is amply clear anyway, that hundreds, no, thousands, of nazi criminals did not escape without plenty of help, and not just from personal contacts outside the nazi and SS, nor in spontaneous rather than an organised way, and moreover this book is all about describing the routes and the people and more who provided this help, not without systematic organisation - albeit not with a properly registered organisation named ODESSA! But then this much is clear to anyone and is what was the more pertinent of the facts - whether there was a specific ODESSA or whether it was all a bunch of big and small organisations attached to saving nazis from prosecution for war crimes, is a really minor point.

Actually, if he were correct in his assertion which is unlikely to say the least, but if it were the case then in absense of a single organisation and in light of facts being as Steinbacher describes, it is rather a far murkier view, with guilt spread across not only nazis fleeing and helping others to escape, or smugglers doing it for money or nazi sympathisers across board, but also various institutions that one normally doesn't or at least most people don't credit with such actions.

Shockingly or not, depending on how naive or aware one is, such help was provided by the Vatican and the International Red Cross. The former is less surprising all in all, but the latter contributes to the discredit the institution has brought on to itself and explains why it is somewhat in oblivion, albeit without explicit and noisy condemnation.

Other than this the book is about describing general and specific data, about the dates and the escape routes and those that escaped and those that helped, and is not as well edited as one would like - much repetition for one, disorganised writing for another.

Also, unless one is specifically into research about all the small and big cases of those who lived happily forever safe in either Argentina or southern Tyrol just across the border from Austria and not far from their homelands in central or eastern Europe, it gets repetitious soon enough. Whether it is intention of the author to make it look like all routine that happened half a century ago or longer, and nothing much can be done about it now since most criminals are safely finished with their lives lived quite well and long, is unclear, but if one has met Germans who attempt to make one think it is rather bad form to go on about it, since the crime was over and the criminals quite old and not likely to hurt anyone now, one gets a tad suspicious such a thought might have lurked in general surroundings of the author, if not deliberately implanted as a subliminal suggestion made stronger with the tedium of going through this to know just who and how many did so escape.

Funnily enough he does admit to various small but definite organisations who could be bunched under the general label ODESSA, after going on about how it did not exist! Some were or at least one was in fact so labelled by the investigative agencies.

Perhaps after a first few very tedious, repetitious, hard to read, badly written chapters, there might be something that makes it worth going through; but one can't but help think though, that it would have benefited immensely with a good editor pruning it ruthlessly, and cleaning up the phrases where sentences and more make very little sense due to confusion of "but" with "and" and more, so the whole work seems like a conspiracy to exhaust the reader into going "ok, enough already, have it your own way" or something like that.

But a painstaking reading plodding through the headache of all that rewards one  with at the very least about how various agencies related to Vatican, Red Cross and generally nazi friendly, anti semitic states either lied outright or made it sound like a virtue to protect or let go of war criminals, citing amongst other things, impartial treatment of refugees, equality, and so forth. Also, of course, the strange fact of south American states being more accepting of Red Cross identity papers which basically allowed forgery, false names, false pictures and more, at more than one stage, while rejecting the papers provided by IRO, the international agency which did in fact check up about whether someone was giving a false name and was in fact a war criminal.

One of the positive points about reading through is about quite how much Vatican and its associates helped, shielded and argued for sanctuary for nazis, including war criminals, giving various almost believable excuses including blaming Jewish organisations for pointing out such escape routes provided for war criminals and mass murderers, with a reasoning about such political vengeance against criminals is what brings antisemitism about, hence blaming Jews for the hatred against them and massacres including Holocaust. This part is introduced early but is more extensive post first quarter or so of the work.
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Another revelation for those not quite in the know, is the role played by various US men then in authority in Europe, in helping this escape route, chiefly Allen Dulles, and others in the chain. This, in view of other little facts now allowed to escape, is revealing. And this, while

"The Allies were increasingly concerned. Fugitives included prominent perpetrators such as the SS officers Erich Priebke, Walter Rauff, and Willem (Wilhelm) Maria Sassen, as well as the commandant of the Riga Ghetto, Eduard Roschmann."

And yet the escapes were routine.

"The most important escape routes that have so far come to light, including the ones that smuggled National Socialists, were led by church groups. Understanding why and how some proponents of the Catholic Church were involved in Nazi smuggling facilitates a better understanding of the post-war alliances between former Nazis and Western intelligence services. One of the church organizations in particular is worth closer examination: the Catholic group Intermarium. Monsignor Krunoslav Draganović, who took care of the escape routes of Croatian fascists amongst other things, was the most senior Croatian representative in the self-appointed management committee of Intermarium. The organization was, according to American historian Christopher Simpson, hugely involved in Nazi border-crossing. Later Intermarium became an important source for the recruitment of exiled Eastern Europeans for the anti-communist propaganda machine or exile organizations sponsored by the CIA. Leading members of Intermarium ended up in CIA-sponsored media such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN).

"The leadership of the Catholic Church saw the Second World War as an intermezzo in a bigger struggle against ‘atheist Communism’. In this dispute, the Vatican allied itself with a series of Christian conservative and clerical-fascist political movements in Europe. The Vatican saw the National Socialists as the lesser evil. Even before the Second World War, the German counter-intelligence departments used members of Intermarium, who were seen as very effective and valuable because of their contacts. By the time the Wehrmacht overran half of Europe, Intermarium was already an ‘instrument of the German intelligence’, as one US Army report noted.88 With the collapse of the Third Reich in 1944/5, senior Catholic clerics organized humanitarian relief programmes for refugees from Eastern Europe. The members of these organizations barely differentiated between Catholics who were persecuted by the Soviets, deportees, and Nazis. The mass of refugees certainly had nothing to do with Nazi crimes; they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Wehrmacht or the Red Army laid waste their villages. At the same time, however, these channels became the most important escape route for SS members, collaborators, and war criminals. Within the Catholic Church were factions that had long sympathized with the Nazis and their fanatical opposition to communism and that wanted to forge an alliance with them. These groups organized programmes to bring tens of thousands of SS men and collaborators from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European states to safety."

Of course, that the virulent and false propaganda by church that had, has, gone on ever since church made peace with Rome, and switched sides from the persecuted and oppressed Jews to precisely the persecuting agency and oppressors - namely, the then Roman empire - was at the root of the antisemitism of Europe that went beyond mere racism, and produced nazi version of antisemitism that - with typical German efficiency and technology - sought to execute a "final solution" by simply massacring all the Jews, made it all the easier for church to maintain this covert sympathy with nazi escapees, and maintaining silence about knowledge thereof wasn't that far from the code of secrecy of confessional that church strives to hold up in face of law everywhere, defending heinous crminals thereby, even absolving them merely for having confessed and claiming repentence.

"The rescue of an entire division of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS—some 11,000 men and women—was perhaps the most dramatic action of Intermarium. In the Rimini internment camp, these Ukranians faced an uncertain future. Most were members of the Galicia grenadier division, which had been formed in 1943. Some members of this division were veterans of Ukrainian police and militia units who had collaborated with the Germans and taken part in anti-Semitic and anticommunist pogroms in their homeland. Some of these men may have even served as guards in concentration camps. Most of these men (with their families) were, however, private soldiers who had committed no war crimes and only found themselves in this compromising situation as a result of circumstances. These Catholic Ukrainians hoped for an independent, anticommunist Ukrainian state after the final victory of the Third Reich.90 The Ukrainian Waffen-SS soldiers finally surrendered to the Western Allies in May 1945.

"During the soldiers’ interment in Rimini, Ukrainian Archbishop Ivan Buchko now came to their aid. Along with other Ukrainian clerics—and with the blessing of the Pope—Buchko took a leading role in Intermarium. He petitioned the Pope in person for the ‘blossom of the Ukrainian nation’—meaning the Waffen-SS men in Rimini. The result was that the collaborators were ultimately not handed over to Stalin, but allowed to emigrate as ‘free colonists’ to Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth states.92 Thus, thanks to the papal initiative, they escaped safely abroad."

As any reader of the now finally published memoirs of holocaust survivors would know, Ukrainian antisemitism was every bit as vicious and brutal as German, which helped the then German occupation army of the region.

"According to Simon Wiesenthal, Rauff and Hudal organized what was known as the ‘route via Rome’ for escaping senior Nazis. Even in the prisoner-of-war camps, the comrades were told who they could approach in Rome and elsewhere. The political background that made it easier to disguise this enterprise was the seizure of power by communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In all the former Nazi satellite states—Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia—mass arrests were carried out by the new rulers, with former fascists their first targets. As these were all ‘good Catholics’, the Vatican set up relief agencies for this category of refugees. Rauff made contact with these institutions via Bishop Hudal to ensure that his colleagues were not forgotten. Rauff’s comrades included Eugen Dollmann, Hitler’s interpreter in Italy and a confidant of Himmler."

Another Gestapo service was falsifying death.

"As the former SS chief in Milan, Rauff was very well acquainted with Italy because even before the end of the war he had taken numerous precautions and established connections with the Church. Networks like the ones Rauff set up with the assistance of the Church helped serious criminals such as Franz Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka; Josef Schwammberger, who was responsible for thousands of murders in the Przemysl Ghetto; and Adolf Eichmann, who escaped from US imprisonment under the identity SS-Untersturmführer Otto Eckmann in 1945 and arrived in Argentina in 1950 as the South Tyrolean ‘Richard Klement’.130 Fascist solidarity helped people like them to acquire new identities. The last official acts by Gestapo agencies were sometimes to declare the death of colleagues in order to assist their escape. In this way, for example, Gestapo inspector Gustav Jürges became the victim of a bombing raid and fled via Italy to South America as ‘Federico Pahl’."

But

"‘In their favor, it can be argued that, at least after 1949, the Western Allies, as a matter of policy, suspended all war crime prosecutions and consciously allowed former Nazi officials, SS officers, judges, and others to assume senior posts in West German government and industry.’"

And organised it was.

"After their successful escape from Rimini prisoner-of-war camp, SS men were to report to Karl Hass, alias ‘Franco’, in Rome. There he would help them escape to South America, on the instructions of Bishop Hudal. Meanwhile the PCA procured Red Cross travel documents for their travel overseas."

"One curious concluding detail: in the well-known 1969 film The Damned (La caduta degli dei) by Luchino Visconti, the supposedly dead Hass had a part as an extra, playing himself—a Nazi officer. While the war criminal was on the Italian authorities’ wanted list, he was flickering on cinema screens across the length and breadth of Italy. This almost unbelievable detail also reflects the atmosphere in Italy during the Cold War. In 1953, when the CIC shelved its collaboration with Hass, the trained spy had to find another employer because he had also been stonewalled by the Gehlen Organization; most Wehrmacht spies were unwilling to work with former SS men. Hass was then taken on by Italian information services."
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About Argentina as destination for escaping nazis to migrate to:-

"After 1945, Argentina became the most popular refuge for Nazi criminals. Like other countries, Argentina was interested in German scientists and specialists after the collapse of the Third Reich. President Perón wanted to modernize Argentina, particularly its army, but Argentina faced recruitment problems. Unlike the occupying powers, the Argentinians were unable to engage overtly specialists from Germany and Austria, so a plan to exploit the chaotic refugee situation in Europe suggested itself. Because many emigrants wanted to leave Europe via Italian ports, the Argentinians concentrated their efforts on Italy. The Argentinian consular representatives in Genoa and Rome were given the task of recruitment, and special cosmmissions were sent to Italy. Recruiters spoke to the refugees in Italy or smuggled them over the border into the country. Between 1946 and 1955 Argentina and other nations were very busy in northern Italy in what became in some ways ‘Germany’s backyard’.

"The Argentinians concentrated on recruiting mostly the middle level of scientists and military officers, leaving the top people to the Soviets, the British, and the Americans. For practical work related to recruitment, Perón’s diplomats liked to use Argentinians of German origin. Working together with SS men and Italian people-smugglers, they organized an effective system of official, and also illegal, recruitment in Italy. The SS men had the appropriate contacts and often pursued agendas of their own; they were less concerned with recruiting specialists for Perón and more with helping old comrades over the border—including war criminals and SS officers with seriously tainted pasts. For Perón, importing war criminals was not an official policy, but a tolerated fact.

"The particular attractiveness of Argentina for German specialists and emigrants did not emerge overnight. Even during the war Argentina was known for its Germanophile attitude, and it was only after massive pressure from the United States that Argentina declared war on the German Reich in March 1945, making Argentina the last country to enter the war against Nazi Germany. The existence of large German and Italian communities in Argentina meant that there were many links between Argentina and the Axis powers. Simon Wiesenthal consistently saw Argentina as the most important country of refuge for the ‘pro-Nazi world community’, and the Argentinian journalist Uki Goñi has described the role that Argentina (and above all its president, Juan Domingo Perón) played in escape assistance as ‘the real ODESSA’. Most Nazis, however, did not flee overseas, but stayed in Germany and Austria. The often one-sided focus on Argentina as a Nazi refuge has been predominant for decades and has meant that the immigration of German-speakers and the recruitment of specialists by other states after 1945 have been largely overlooked. As discussed previously, apart from Syria, Egypt, Canada, and Spain, the United States itself was also a popular destination for Nazi perpetrators and tainted scientists. But the sheer amount of research that has been done on Argentina makes it a very good case study for the way the system of recycling SS men and war criminals worked."

Argentina was a popular destination for economic migrants from Europe in 19th century, the author informs, particularly southern Europe.

"Between the end of the First World War and the end of the 1920s, many economic migrants arrived in search of a new start. The proportion of Italians in Argentina was particularly high. By the late 1930s two million Italian nationals were living there, forming about one-sixth of the entire Argentinian population. Including those of Italian descent, around 40 per cent of Argentinians had Italian roots.2 But Argentina was also a very popular destination for German and Austrian emigration between the wars, and around 240,000 people of German descent lived in the country. About 45,000 German speakers settled in the capital, Buenos Aires. Around three-quarters of the immigrants were so-called ‘ethnic Germans’, German-speakers from the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. They included many Volga Germans who settled in the interior.

"After Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, a new group of German-speaking immigrants—around 30,000 to 40,000 German refugees fleeing for political or ‘racial’ reasons, most of them Jews—arrived in Argentina.4 In the years after the Anschluss in 1938, an estimated 2,000 Austrian Jews found refuge from Nazi persecution—more than in any other Latin American country.5 This resulted in the first major split in Argentina’s German-speaking community. The official ‘German colony’ adopted the political line of the new rulers in the German Reich.6 The anti-Nazi newcomers remained distant from the German community that aligned itself politically with Hitler’s Reich. But Argentina, or more specifically Greater Buenos Aires, was big enough, with its 13 million inhabitants, for them to stay out of each other’s way. Cultural associations developed that were divided into the ‘Jewish, emigrant’ and the former ‘Reich-German, pro-Nazi’ camps, and no exchanges or common points of contact existed between the two groups.7 From 1933 at least two German-speaking communities in Argentina, the pro- and anti-Hitler groups, existed, in addition to the Jewish community which had its own specific agenda. Thus the country can be understood to have had ‘two or more German-speaking communities’.

"Given its sizeable European population, Argentina was an attractive destination for Nazis after the Axis powers’ defeat. In Europe during the first months after the end of the war in 1945, Germans and Austrians found it nearly impossible to emigrate overseas. Only from 1946 onwards did a large wave of emigration begin again. According to official sources, between 1946 and 1955 66,327 people born in Germany migrated into Argentina. Of these, 51,398 Germans left the Perón republic after a few years. There were 14,929 settlers from Germany who spent a longer time in Argentina.9 For the number of Austrian immigrants, the figures are apparently equally precise. Between 1947 and 1955 the Argentinian immigration authorities recorded 13,895 immigrants born in Austria; 9,710 of them later left Argentina again, which leaves 4,185 people who stayed in the country.10 But the statistics don’t tell the whole story. Ethnic Germans, from Eastern Europe for example, were registered according to their country of birth. Complete statistical data for German-speaking immigration to Argentina is, thus, difficult to determine precisely.11

"Contemporary attempts to estimate more accurately the number of immigrants to Argentina still fall short for a few reasons. According to Holger Meding, some 300 to 800 senior Nazi officials had immigrated to Argentina, including fifty war criminals and mass murderers among them,12 while historian Volker Koop estimated in 2009 that 600 Nazis and military experts from Germany and Austria immigrated to Argentina alone. The Argentinian commission of historians, Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Actividades del Nacionalsocialismo en la Argentina (CEANA), has listed 180 biographies of prominent National Socialists, Nazi perpetrators, fascists, and war criminals from Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, and Yugoslavia who fled to Argentina, sixty-five of them described in brief biographies.14 But this list is only provisional and incomplete. CEANA recorded only the best-known cases, yet thousands of less-prominent Fascists, SS men, and Nazi collaborators from all over Europe resettled in Argentina, too. It is, therefore, also a matter of definition that affects which group to include in the statistics and which not. One major reason why arriving at precise figures is difficult stems from the fact that the fugitives often entered the country with false identities or nationalities. Their given names, places of origin, and nationalities were, in many cases, false. Politics provided another reason why numbers of immigrants with tainted pasts tended to be underestimated after 1945. Established conservative representatives of the German-Argentinian community played down the extent of Nazi immigration. The German Club in Buenos Aires, for example, claims in its History of the Germans in Argentina, that from the end of the war until 1950 there was hardly any immigration from Germany, an attempt to deflect unwanted attention, perhaps.15 No matter what the true count of immigrants after the war may be, Argentina was clearly a much sought-after destination, and the Perón government’s policies ensured that this was the case."

And the policies were far from unclear about who Argentina welcomed.

"Although many of his instructions and pronouncements were distinctly obscure, he was nevertheless very clear on certain points: where possible, immigrants were to belong to the ‘white race’, come from Europe, have a good education, be Catholic, and ideally speak a romance language as their mother tongue. Asians and black Africans were excluded by Peralta’s racial guidelines because they would not meet the criterion of being ‘easily able to assimilate’. Since the population in Argentina was mostly of Spanish, Italian, and German origin, the new arrivals would preferably belong to one of these groups."

Of course, this wasn't straight, since obviously the world couldn't be hunky-dory about war criminals prospering openly.

"Perón’s positive experiences with German senior executives and his government’s recruitment of former Nazis and fellow travellers brought him into conflict with the victorious powers.33 Argentina’s global obligations forbade the intake of people from the former Axis powers without the permission of the Allies. Scientists from the war industry were ostracized, and war criminals had to be extradited. Under pressure from the United States, the countries of the South American continent, including Argentina, were obliged by the 1945 Act of Chapultepec to take common action against the Axis powers. This included freezing their bank accounts and hunting out members of enemy states who had gone into hiding in South America.34 Immigration from the defeated Third Reich was to be closely monitored, but neither Argentina nor the United States adhered to these policies. Nevertheless, the United States strongly criticized Argentina’s lax attitude.35

"In the summer of 1945, the United States had discussed the supposedly ‘critical situation’ in Argentina with other North and South American countries and published its severe accusations against Argentina in a ‘Blue Book’. The main working points in it were German military aid to Argentina, German espionage activities, and Nazi companies and business interests in Argentina.36 Furthermore, the Argentinians had supposedly delayed the extradition of Nazi agents and German embassy staff."

USSR too had taken some of the German scientists and engineers et al, for the same reasons, but they were forced to accept it, unlike those migrating to Argentina. Besides,

"Like Argentina, the United States was also involved in recruiting top German experts. The Americans had a whole arsenal of recruitment possibilities at their disposal. They made scientifically and financially attractive offers or threatened employment bans and worse. Under the code name ‘Operation Paperclip’, the US Army set about reeling in German specialists on a grand scale. The recruitment of a team of German rocket technologists around the designer of the V2, Wernher von Braun, was probably the most striking US achievement in the competition for top German personnel.46 Rather than ending up in the dock, hundreds of Nazi scientists launched new careers in the United States in this way. The facts that von Braun, the head of the Peenemünde rocket research institute, was an SS officer and that thousands of forced labourers and concentration camp inmates had died miserable deaths working in the underground armaments centre of Mittelbau-Dora were simply ignored by the US military."

And while

"By all accounts, the Nazis in Argentina remained loyal to their politics, meeting for coffee in the mornings and clinking glasses in the evening to toast the ‘good old days.’"

The author explains why this migration did not get Argentina take off as a major power - it lacked a vision and a long term program, a commitment, to scientific research and development that was needed, not just a few hundred men or even a few thousand, emigrated nazis. And most of the experts, lacking such programs, didn't stay on in Argentina.
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The details about individual nazis go on through the work, and a normal reader might lose count - are there over a hundred already? - while one reads about yet another Nazi, details of his birth place and time, education and career, some mention of his war criminal record explaining his need to escape, and the usual route via Bolzano to Argentina and other contiguous countries across southern Atlantic. One thing the author repeatedly attempts to emphasize is that there were no formal organisations of former nazis as such helping them to escape, but informal networks and of course the church. It doesn't seem to occur to him that such assertions by him are about as silly and futile as someone attempting to assert that strings don't exist and universe really is up only three dimensional.

"The Austrian authorities often knew of the escape and whereabouts of war criminals and Nazi perpetrators: ‘It has been known to the court for a long time that those chiefly responsible for the serious outrages of 9 November 1938, above all the former SS General [Johann] Feil, escaped responsibility by fleeing to South America.’160 Nevertheless, the efforts of the legal system were often rather modest. The escape of Nazi war criminals was a way for the legal system to avoid the responsibility of prosecution. In order to evade justice, the war criminals didn’t need to escape to South America, just jump across the Brenner."

But one name does come up in almost every case of escape, that of Bishop Hudal. And, too, he mentions names of organisations himself, albeit none formally named ODESSA.

"The Tyrolean was supposedly one of the founders of the Kameradenwerk, the relief organization for Nazi prisoners and their families run by Rudel."

"In many respects, the fleeing Tyrolean National Socialists were pioneers in escaping to Italy. They smoothed the way for comrades from other Austrian and German regions."
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"Franz Stangl was one of the most prominent camp commandants who fled to South America to find a new home. The first time Simon Wiesenthal came across his name was on a list of awards to senior SS officers. Added to it in pencil were the words ‘secret Reich matter—for psychological stress’. Translated from Nazi terminology that means the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp received an award for special merits in the execution of mass murder. Wiesenthal doubts whether this caused Stangl particular mental stress. When Stangl was finally brought in front of a court, he explained to the judge what it was that had really caused him headaches, which Wiesenthal repeats: ‘Some days he had been sent as many as 18,000 people at a time for extermination, yet it had been his duty to return all the railway wagons empty. He simply had no choice but to kill the people, there just wasn’t the room to accommodate them.’165 Stangl was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 900,000 people. How many people really died under his control as extermination camp commandant—first in Sobibór and later in Treblinka—will probably never be known.166 As German historian Wolfgang Benz explains, Treblinka extermination camp, ‘given its short existence and its staff—about twenty-five to thirty-five people [. . . was] the most efficient murder apparatus that has ever existed’."

"When the Third Reich deployed all its forces to organize the murder of the Jews, the SS leadership understood that it had ideal experimental laboratories in the euthanasia sanatoriums. In Hartheim and other institutions, methods could be tried out that would later be used on an industrial scale in Treblinka and Auschwitz: the killing of people with poison gas."
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"When the author Frederick Forsyth wrote his semi-fictional novel The Odessa File, he took advice from the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal had very personal reasons for wanting to catch Roschmann: he himself had been a concentration camp inmate, and most of his family were murdered. In 1945, after his liberation from the concentration camp, Wiesenthal began to work for the US Army in the search for war criminals in Austria and was at first employed by US intelligence services, then by the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps. In 1947 he began to establish his Documentation Centre in Linz and later in Vienna.

"Roschmann’s biography was tailor-made for the main character in The Odessa File. Wiesenthal had asked Forsyth to use Roschmann as a character in his book in order to publicize the Roschmann case.205 The film of the novel had its premiere in 1974 and was shown all around the world. Both the book and film were a great success and still shape popular ideas about the escape of the Nazis. In South America, at any rate, the film created considerable unease amongst Roschmann’s former comrades, and Wiesenthal received countless clues about the former Ghetto commandant’s whereabouts. Roschmann was probably given an increasingly wide berth by his comrades because, at Wiesenthal’s suggestion, in the movie Roschmann was responsible for the cowardly murder of a Wehrmacht officer; his comrades could not know if this depiction was fictional or factual.

As a result, they could no longer see Roschmann as an ‘honourable’ comrade, but only as a ‘swinish’ one. At any rate, from the moment ‘his’ film played in South America and ‘his’ book entered the bookshops, he constantly changed his place of residence and never stayed anywhere for longer than a few weeks. The newspaper reports about the film were also about him. Roschmann became the quarry, just as he had been the quarry in the film. In October 1976 the German embassy presented the Argentinian Foreign Ministry with the extradition request in the Roschmann case. Roschmann was warned and immediately fled to Paraguay.206 In August 1977 he died of heart failure in Asunción. Because of the amputation of several toes, mentioned in the SS files, he was unambiguously identified after his death.207 The dead man’s fingerprints were also identical to the ones taken from Roschmann in 1947 the first time he was arrested in Graz, thus ensuring that the deceased was, in fact, the Butcher of Riga.208"
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"The major German companies, such as Siemens, which had established a significant presence in Argentina before the war, re-established its branches there after 1945.211 West German companies and their branch offices in South America generally preferred the attitude of the new German and Austrian immigrants over that of locals, and some of the immigrants reached important positions. Practically the whole top level of Mercedes Benz in Argentina consisted of immigrants from Germany and Austria.

"After a brief transition phase, immigrated businessmen were able to connect with German companies who had developed a strong presence in South America during the pre-war years. Simon Wiesenthal observed bitterly that Siemens, Krupp, and Volkswagen in Argentina had been ‘a hotbed of Nazis’.212 The boards of companies such as Bayer, Höchst, and Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) sometimes worked with old comrades in Europe and overseas. But one should not assume that these were always ideological networks—although these did exist. Practical reasons were more crucial: the new immigrants spoke perfect German and, after a few years, good Spanish; they were technically up to date; they often had good training; and they were industrious, flexible, and highly motivated, as Holger Meding stresses.213 For some German and Italian escape agents, once their smuggling careers ended, emigration to the Río de la Plata was a natural choice, for they had the knowledge and the contacts needed to do so. The comrades who were now safely located in Argentina could show their gratitude for the escape assistance and hospitality they had received in Italy.

"Scientists with SS connections had numerous networks and circles of friends, which made it easier for them to make a fresh start. Over time a reliable network of companies and professional opportunities developed, particularly in Argentina. Because President Perón was very interested in specialists from the former Third Reich, between 1945 and 1950 alone, sixty German scientists emigrated to Argentina where they worked in their professions. This exchange continued the tradition of German researchers coming to work in Argentina. ‘Nevertheless, the post-war migration was not an exchange of scientists in the usual sense, as with guest professorships, because a large number of scientists planned to stay in Argentina on a more than temporary basis’, probably a longer period, or possibly forever, as Gabriele Ley stresses.214

"The German commercial and political penetration in Argentina went so deep that it was disturbed only slightly by Germany’s military defeat. Neither domestic nor foreign anti-Axis forces were able to induce the Argentine Government to take effective action against the principal German business houses which had provided funds and cover for Nazi operations. The men who headed these firms continued to exert great influence on high-ranking officials in the Argentine Government and armed forces. The main German businesses suffered no major interference and the repatriation or extradition of a large number of the Nazi leaders on Allied ‘wanted’ lists was prevented.218"
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"In Egypt, eighty German and Czech experts were working for the Egyptian Ministry of War. The country wanted to arm itself against Israel with the help of German experts. The leader of these experts was Wilhelm von Voss, a former adjutant of Hitler’s."
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"Not only did the former SS in Argentina help one another professionally, but in South Tyrol, other groups of former Nazis set up thriving businesses, sometimes working in conjunction with their friends in South America. Once again, Perón’s escape assistants in Italy played a key role in this. Connections from Germany, Italy, Spain, and Argentina often came together in companies and SS circles in South Tyrol. Thus the borderland developed from an escape hub into a business hub. In South Tyrol, for example, large quantities of agricultural machinery were imported from Germany and sold on the Italian market. Aedes-Land-maschinen in Bolzano and the firm Mengele & Steiner, operating a branch office in Auer and Merano, were involved in such transactions. There were also ideological networks within the South Tyrolean farming community, which was in large part organized into the Chief Agricultural Association (Landwirtschaflicher Hauptverband).235 Some networks of old comrades and their new careers in the agriculture industry were an open secret. Based on information of prominent local anti-Nazis, the British consulate in Bolzano reported to the embassy in Rome in May 1949: ‘The headquarters of the Nazi movement in S. Tyrol is the exhotel Sti[e]gl at Bolzano, now occupied by the “Hauptverband Land-wirtschaftlicher Genossenschaften” (Consorzio delle Co-operative Agricole), a very powerful body, the prominent Nazis inside this body are [. . .] Nicolussi, [. . .]"
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"After the Second World War the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco provided refuge for many former Nazis, and large numbers of National Socialists also fled overseas via Spain. To ease the pain of nostalgia among his SS comrades in Spain, Hafner opened the Cortijo Tiroles inn—(‘Tiroler Hof’, or ‘Tyrolean Courtyard’)—which seated 500. It was not until 2007 that Pablo Hafner became widely known when the documentary film Hafner’s Paradise by the Austrian director Günther Schwaiger caused a furore.244 The former ‘SS-Führer’ Hafner, who lived unmolested in Madrid until his death in 2010, denied the Holocaust: ‘Hitler was not the gasser of the Jews, but the promoter of efforts to establish the Jewish national state (Zionism!). [. . .] Not a single Jew was killed because he was a Jew! For me Hitler is the saviour of Europe and Christianity!’"
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"One other prominent Nazi fugitive was SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr Kurt Christmann, but unlike Hafner, he returned to Europe after emigrating to Argentina. Even as a young man, he had been involved in the failed Hitler Putsch in Munich in 1923. As a Gestapo official, he was deployed after the Anschluss of Austria in Vienna, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt. From the summer of 1942 until the summer of 1943, Christmann was head of Einsatzkommando 10a.252 The official task of the unit, based in Krasnodar in southern Russia, was to ‘combat partisans’. The SS took this as licence to murder everyone who, in their eyes, represented a threat, all those who were considered ‘Slavic Untermenschen’ or Jews. Christmann himself murdered at least 105 people, each ‘as an accessory’.253 While serving in Krasnodar, he once had between forty and sixty predominantly Jewish men, women, and children killed in a gas truck. The victims were horribly suffocated by the exhaust fumes of the truck within ten to fifteen minutes. Christmann claimed only to have been present at the gassings by chance. He added: ‘I think that if several people die together, it’s still more pleasant than each one individually’. For Christmann, at any rate, it was ‘not such a world-shattering event that I could remember it all that precisely.’

"After the end of the war, Christmann went on living in Stuttgart-Feuerbach, supposedly under a false name. In 1946 he was arrested by the Americans as a wanted Nazi perpetrator and interned in Dachau. He managed to escape from there after a short time and worked for the British occupation forces in Germany under his alias ‘Dr Ronda’. In Rome he acquired new papers and travelled, probably on a Red Cross document, to Argentina. Under questioning, Christmann gave only a brief account of his escape: ‘Via Munich I went to Italy, where thanks to the Vatican I got papers and an entry permit for Argentina for my wife and myself.’255 From the autumn of 1948 until February 1956 he lived in South America.256 Christmann was also political in his new homeland. He maintained close contact with the fighter pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, and the CIA identified him as one of the masterminds behind the Kameradenwerk neo-Nazi movement.257 After his return to Germany in 1956, he lived as an estate agent in Munich. His denazification trial was suspended as only insufficient charges could be brought against him. An initial indictment in 1971 was immediately abandoned for lack of evidence.258 Christmann was put on trial again only in 1980 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.

"On the whole, the SS perpetrators’ collaboration worked in assisting one another to emigrate and to start new lives in Argentina. On 23 October 1948 the steamer San Giorgio left the port of Genoa with Erich Priebke and his family on board. On 18 July 1948 Josef Mengele travelled to Argentina. On 14 July 1950 Adolf Eichmann alias ‘Richard Klement’ from Tramin landed in Buenos Aires, the portal to a new life. Hans-Ulrich Rudel travelled with his closest comrades in the Luftwaffe to the New World. It would be entirely false to say that these men formed a branch of the fantasy ‘ODESSA’ on the Río de la Plata. But contact between the ‘old comrades’ was maintained even in South America, which continued to feed rumours of a ‘secret organization’.

"Even if the SS community demonstrably maintained their connections and shielded and protected one another, there was never a rigidly organized conspiratorial network. As long as Perón held his protecting hand over the Nazi criminals, such a thing wasn’t necessary. In July 1949 the President even passed a general amnesty for foreigners who had entered Argentina illegally. Questions about the past were hardly asked. A certain ‘Otto Pape’ went to the immigration office and claimed to have found refuge in the German Embassy in Rome until the end of the war. In this way, Otto Pape once more became Erich Priebke—quite legally. He settled in one of the many German emigrant communities that had mutated into a stronghold of fleeing National Socialists; like many of his former comrades, Priebke, too, chose San Carlos de Bariloche, an idyllic ski resort in the Andes, where the former Nazi Reinhard Kops had already settled.

"San Carlos de Bariloche proved to be a comfortable town with its familiar architecture, activities, and cultural ties. In Bariloche there were houses in the Tyrolean style; in the 1930s Austrian ski instructors had developed the area for winter sports, the Residencial Tirol and Edelweiss hotels and the pension Kaltschmidt were inviting places to stay, and the ski lifts were built by the Austrian Doppelmayr firm. The number of German-speaking settlers was large even before 1945, and connections with the old homeland abounded.262 Thus the Innsbruck expert in Tyrolean folklore, Karl Ilg, was not surprised to note in 1976: ‘The German-speaking inhabitants, whose immigration has still not come to an end—around and after the Second World War it was, as I have said, particularly strong!—[are members of associations].’263 Here Priebke led a peaceful existence, opened his delicatessen, and even became the chairman of the German–Argentinian cultural association.264 He travelled often around the world and regularly renewed his passport at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires.

"Priebke’s life continued uneventfully in Bariloche until 1994 when he spoke to an American television crew, which was actually searching for Reinhard Kops, and openly described his participation in a massacre near Rome and his own shooting of two Italians. The former SS-Sturmbannführer Priebke had been involved in a spectacular act of violence—the shooting of 335 hostages in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome on 24 March 1944. Officially this was an act of retaliation for a bombing attack by Italian partisans which cost thirty-three South Tyrolean police soldiers their lives.265 This act of revenge in the Ardeatine Caves is seen to this day by most Italians as the worst symbol of Nazi barbarism in their country. The interview with Priebke caused a national outrage. An Italian call for extradition followed shortly after, and this was granted in November 1995. On 1 August 1996 a Roman military court declared in its verdict that Priebke could no longer be prosecuted for his crimes as they lay outside the statute of limitations. At the higher court, Priebke was sentenced to a limited period of imprisonment. But this sentence, too, came to nothing. In 1998 Erich Priebke and his fellow defendant Karl Hass were each sentenced to ‘lifelong imprisonment’. As of this writing, Priebke lives under house arrest in Rome.266

"In a part of the world in which prominent Nazis and some of the worst murderers of Jews from the Third Reich found a new home, many Germans thought the murder of millions was a malicious Allied—or Jewish—invention. This explains why so many escaped Nazi criminals found support among their compatriots. Simon Wiesenthal called Argentina the ‘Cape of Last Hope’, and in a way, it was: many Nazis saw it as their last refuge, and many long-established German settlers preserved their flattering image of the Third Reich."
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"Simon Wiesenthal’s demand of justice for the victims and judgment for the perpetrators faded away for the most part during the Cold War. It was no coincidence that Wiesenthal had the persona of the lone voice in the wilderness, the outsider, the moral authority that often became a source of discomfort to society and the leading elites, not only in his homeland of Austria, but in many countries around the world. His attitude didn’t fit the zeitgeist of the Cold War. Today his position is enjoying a renaissance, even if—with the war generation fading away—it leads to the discovery and sentencing of wanted Nazi perpetrators less often than it once did. The ‘Vienna Wiesenthal Institute of Holocaust Studies’ has been in development for some years. Even twenty years ago this appreciation of the man who tirelessly reminded his country of the criminal role of certain Austrians during the war would have been difficult to imagine from a political point of view. In Austria the debate around President Kurt Waldheim’s war record in 1986 finally shattered the myth of victimhood once and for all. Over the past few years, the Nazi past has provided fewer headlines than Austria’s consistent record in its treatment of the Holocaust—as, for example, when the controversial British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by an Austrian court in 2006 for trivializing the Holocaust, a violation of the law prohibiting National Socialist activities (Verbotsgesetz).

"This example shows very clearly the transformation that has occurred in Western democracies’ recent past, starting from the unprecedented prosecutions of the Nuremberg Trials, to silence about the Shoah, to today’s naming of historical injustices and the ‘mastering of an unmasterable past’.1 As the Anglo-American historian Tony Judt has shown, members of Western democracies now approach the World War and the Shoah through examination and research.2 But in the years of reconstruction immediately after the war, things were quite different. The years of the post-war economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) were a time both of double standards and of silence. The examination of the most recent past—and the Holocaust in particular—was still largely ignored. Thus the subject of Nazi flight reveals the difficulty of responding to the past. While this book has described the chief players and the mechanisms and conditions that enabled the flight in detail, the treatment of the subject since 1945 is of central importance and raises several questions: Why did it take so long for Nazi flight to come under scrutiny? What is the significance of this problematic area today? How different is the situation in individual countries that were particularly involved in the flight of Nazis? What is the reaction of the institutions involved in it, particularly the Red Cross and the Vatican? Finally, how are countries and individuals to respond to historical injustice?

"Auschwitz casts a long shadow, and the ghosts of the past catch up with us time and again. Thus Aribert Heim’s photo was seen everywhere in the media in the summer of 2008 when the media reported that Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre would search for him in Chile. Heim, a concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, had been tirelessly sought by Wiesenthal, unsuccessfully in the end. The Austrian Nazi perpetrator Heim had gone into hiding in 1962 and a warrant was still out for his arrest; for years he was suspected of being in South America. According to the latest newspaper reports, however, ‘Dr Death’ was supposed to have died in his hideaway in Egypt, yet in 2009 documentarians visiting Egypt could find no trace of his body or grave. Similarly, the case of the alleged Sobibór guard Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk is also keeping the courts and the international media busy. Demjanjuk emigrated to the US in 1951 and lived there undisturbed until the 1980s when first Israel, then Germany, prosecuted him. These more recent stories illustrate again the fact that Nazi perpetrators as well as tens of thousands of collaborators managed to flee when Europe lay in ruins.

"The days and weeks immediately after the end of the war were of crucial importance for the Nazi leaders and perpetrators. Shortly before or after the arrival of the Allies, some of them committed suicide. These included not only the internationally notorious representatives of the Nazi dictatorship, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, but also many senior and middle-ranking executives of the Nazi regime, as well as some Gauleiters. In the period immediately after the war, especially high-ranking and prominent Nazi perpetrators were subject to penalties. The first trial against the main war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945–6 was sympathetically received by wide circles of the German and Austrian public, but that soon changed. Another group of SS perpetrators and National Socialists, not the largest by a long way, but a considerable contingent, fled in the years immediately after the war and emigrated overseas as a way of escaping justice.

"For many, the escape routes through Italy were the path to the future, despite the hardships involved and the risk of Allied capture; over time, the Allies’ use of these routes for their own purposes and their shifting focus to the Cold War lessened the risks, however. Around 1947, US officials such as Vincent La Vista described the escape agents and the institutions involved in great detail. But the relevant ‘top secret’ report ended up in the classified sections of the archives, and the underground channels were not suppressed, allowing Nazis, fellow perpetrators, and Jews illegally travelling to Palestine to use the ‘ratlines’ in their bid for a new life. Michael Phayer sums up the findings and effects of the report succinctly:

"‘Not until July 1947 did the U.S. State Department’s Vincent La Vista produce his very important investigation of illegal emigration from Rome, by which time the United States had already made an executive decision to allow anticommunist black fascists to walk away from their World War II crimes. La Vista’s report, a boon for historians, had no effect on history.

"There were good reasons for that. In the US State Department, La Vista’s employer, the actual enemy was increasingly being identified as the Soviet Union. In 1947 the influential American diplomat George Kennan created the motto of ‘containment’. He demanded harsher policies against the Soviet Union, which was to be put under constant pressure so as to hasten its inevitable collapse. Against this background, denazification went into abeyance a few years after the end of the war and so did the search for Nazi perpetrators. Shutting down the ratlines, which were also used by the Americans in their drafting of technical experts and Cold War operatives, would have seemed counterproductive to US intelligence services.

"As the years passed, conditions made it possible for fugitives to escape Europe—and sometimes to return. As a result of the Allies turning a blind eye to the escape routes, perpetrators such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, as well as the great majority of fugitives, were able to get away without great difficulty between 1947 and 1950. Not only did the Allies no longer have any great interest in prosecuting the perpetrators or destroying the escape routes precisely mapped out by La Vista, but the countries of continental Europe quickly realized that establishing an administration and a new start for the state could not be accomplished entirely without the old elites. Soon generous amnesty laws were passed—in Italy as early as 1946 and in Austria in 1948. The West German Amnesty Law of 1949 for fellow-travellers and minor criminals and the social reintegration of 30,000 officials and former professional soldiers in 1951 exonerated the majority of Germans. From the mid-1950s hardly anyone had to fear prosecution by the state and the judiciary over his past. What followed was a quickly spreading amnesia. In the 1950s denazification and judicial reappraisal of the events of the war had been not only suspended, but largely forgotten or repressed.

"The Cold War made it particularly difficult to reappraise the very recent past. The chapter on the Nazi past had supposedly been concluded in the mid-1950s. Even when trials against Nazi perpetrators were held, the sentences were very lenient.5 In particular, the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 marks a caesura, as the Cold War immediately escalated into an open conflict there. From 1950 onwards very few war criminals fled Europe; on the contrary, many returned from abroad. For those responsible for the genocide of the Jews, however, a return to Europe was too risky, even after amnesty laws were enacted. The connection between the escape movement and the outbreak of the Cold War is obvious. As the Allied prosecutions abated and the conflict between West and East heated up in 1947–8, emigration reached its peak. But even a few years later, when the conflict in Korea broke out openly and the Cold War turned hot, the movements of emigration and escape came to a standstill in 1950–1.

"The Nazi past and the Shoah were repeatedly addressed from the 1960s onwards, but the Cold War also covered over many old crimes from the Second World War. This no longer holds true for Europe after 1989, in part because of a new generation born after the war that began to question its secrets. Tellingly, the first National Holocaust Memorial Museum outside Israel was not set up until 1992, and it was outside Europe in Washington, DC. Similar memorials have been set up in Europe only over the last few years. Since 2005 there has also been a Holocaust Memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) in the heart of Berlin. Yet these memorials point more to a tentative step at honouring, rather than re-examining, the past.

"The acknowledgement of the Holocaust of the Jews was not only repressed in places where there were good reasons for feeling responsible (as in Austria or Germany), but also in Poland, France, and Italy. Even in Great Britain, the genocide of the Jews was barely mentioned, though that nation has always been proud of its uncompromising role in the struggle against the Third Reich. Tony Judt stresses this global phenomenon: ‘In retrospect it is the universal character of the neglect that is most striking.’6 The Holocaust was only one event among many that people simply wanted to forget but could, in the end, only repress. In the words of Hans-Magnus Enzensberger: ‘In the affluent years after the War […] the Europeans sought refuge in a collective amnesia’.7 Everyone wanted to be a victim, even the Germans. They felt like the victims of a small clique of criminals around Hitler. They also felt like victims of the Allied ‘bombing terror’, the expulsions, the mass rapes by Soviet soldiers, and finally ‘Hitler’s war’. The Federal Republic under Konrad Adenauer acknowledged publicly that terrible crimes had been committed against Jews ‘in the name of the German people’, but for the most part the criminals were not given faces; they remained anonymous and abstract. The most recent past served in East and West as a quarry, so to speak, for selective historical images. In the German Democratic Republic, much more attention was devoted to the antifascist resistance fighters than to the perpetrators, who were in any case located for the most part in ‘capitalist’ West Germany.

"But Nazis on the run were a fact that could not be entirely ignored. Thus spectacular individual cases such as that of Eichmann became an outlet for suppressed feelings. The question of how Nazi criminals could escape prosecution after the war, and in which political context that was to occur, who covered up their escape, and what individual interests lay behind it, faded into the background. Sensational individual cases were a distraction, but at the same time they helped to keep the subject of Nazi flight and Nazi crimes alive. Simon Wiesenthal, the ‘Nazi-hunter’, knew that very clearly. For him, the ODESSA myth was maybe only a vehicle by which he could bring his concerns to a wider public. But myths alone can’t explain the Nazi flight. Only since the 1990s have misrepresentations surrounding secret escape organizations such as ODESSA begun to unravel. From the fog of myths, the outlines of Nazi flight are beginning to emerge.

"Over the last twenty years, historians and journalists have tried to identify the true impulses and determining factors of Nazi flight. Just as Heinz Schneppen convincingly demolished the ODESSA myth,9 Uki Goñi has emphasized how Argentina under Perón’s presidency was a major driving force behind the movement (the title of his book, The Real Odessa, is telling in this regard). Over the past few years, Richard Breitman and other American historians have clearly exposed the involvement of US intelligence services in the context of the ‘ratline’ in books such as US Intelligence and the Nazis. But the wider political context is only slowly coming into view, particularly when examining the relationship between the Cold War against the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the repression of the genocide of the Jews, the Shoah, on the other. Both factors, the political parameters and the silence and repression of a whole generation, were what made the flight of Nazis possible.

"Governments’ silence, but also that of nongovernmental agencies, contributed to the flight of Nazis and the secreting of the past. In the 1961 Eichmann trial, little importance was given either to illegal emigration or the background to it. A great deal of attention was probably devoted to editing out the involvement of major institutions such as the Catholic Church or the ICRC, and this was done almost completely. As an observer of the trial in Jerusalem, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was able to tease out only a few references to the role of such institutions in Eichmann’s flight. The notes that Eichmann took during his time in prison, ‘My Escape: Report from the Cell in Jerusalem’, could not be kept entirely hidden from the international press. But, in the end, such reports disappeared for decades into the CIA archives and were only released a few years ago.10 So it can hardly come as a surprise that efforts were made to sweep this information under the carpet. What was largely edited out during the Jerusalem trial continued by means of deliberate concealment to obscure the truth about Nazi flight. The political implications in particular were ignored. But it is precisely in these connections between realpolitik and morality, legal reappraisal and the interests of the Cold War, that we may find the key to an understanding of why a considerable number of Nazi perpetrators were able to escape justice and responsibility.

"Contradictions between public and private actions have further clouded the history of the post-war treatment of Nazis and other perpetrators. It was the United States that opened up a completely new chapter with regard to guilt and war crimes at the Nuremberg Trial. Traditional victors’ justice was to be replaced by the rule of law and new international legal and moral norms and standards. For the first time, heads of state and military commanders had to take responsibility for ‘crimes against humanity’. The massive, systematic, state-sponsored crimes led to the decision to set up an International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg against some (surviving) major war criminals such as Hermann Göring and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. But even in the ‘selection’ of the defendants, strategic and practical considerations sometimes found themselves in competition with moral and legal claims.11 While SS General Karl Wolff, Himmler’s deputy until 1943, was not prosecuted, but protected by US agencies against any kind of Allied prosecution, other perpetrators faced serious penalties. Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, which he ended in 1987 by taking his own life at the age of 93. In spite of repeated approaches by the Americans, the Soviets refused to put mercy before justice where the old man was concerned.12 Nuremberg thus also represents the selective treatment of guilt, responsibility, and justice. The 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg brilliantly captures the question of morality, justice, and the interests of the early Cold War. Its cast, which includes such excellent actors as Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, and Maximilian Schell, doubtless contributes to this. The film is set in 1948 and examines the trial of four Nazi judges who were complicit in euthanasia and the persecution of political opponents: not only the Germans, but also the Allies wanted to draw a line under the past, and many people saw the trial and the ‘rummaging around in the past’ as unnecessary. The accused lawyer and Nazi Minister Dr Ernst Janning (played by Burt Lancaster) breaks through this silence and freely admits his moral guilt. But at a time of conflict between the Western and Eastern power-blocks, such positions were the exception.

"Beyond Nuremberg, many examples reveal the uneven ‘justice’ that prevailed in the early Cold War years. After the suicide of his boss, Himmler, Karl Wolff could have been condemned at Nuremberg as a proxy for the SS, but nothing came of it. Because of his contacts with US intelligence services and his usefulness in the ‘fight against Communism’, the Allies decided not to prosecute him. In this respect Italy was an early ‘testing ground’ for future German–American cooperation. As historian Kerstin von Lingen has clearly shown, Wolff’s US counterpart and protector, Allen Dulles, knew of Wolff’s past as a perpetrator, but Dulles thought Wolff useful.13 The Americans’ treatment of Wolff was by no means an exception. Nazi criminals, scientists, officers, and collaborators were brought back into service—recycled for the new struggle against the Soviet power if they could be useful. Many such cases occurred in the intelligence services and the military. This coordinated recruitment of Nazi scientists has been the subject of heated debates in the United States over the past twenty years. One such example is that of Wernher von Braun. As SS-Sturmbannführer and technical director of the Peenemünde Military Research Establishment, he was responsible for the development and production of large rockets during the Second World War. His V-2 missiles terrorized people in British and Dutch cities. After the end of the war, the technician was immediately taken back into service by the Americans and became director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Braun’s past was no great secret, even in the United States. But little was made of the fact that concentration camp inmates in camps such as Mittelbau Dora produced the V-2 rockets in appalling conditions, and thousands died of their slave labour. Braun helped the Americans to be the first on the moon, and that was all that counted. Usefulness rather than morality was at the top of the US agenda.

"Similarly, General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the counter-intelligence division ‘Foreign Armies East’ made a remarkable second career for himself after 1945. Even before the end of the war, Gehlen was aware that the Western powers would probably turn against their former ally, the Soviet Union, sooner or later. When they did so, they would need his knowledge and his colleagues in the fight against communist expansion because the Americans themselves had no agents in Germany and the Soviet states. Gehlen’s calculations were correct. In 1946 the US military appointed him as head of the ‘Gehlen Organization’ spy network, which later became the West German intelligence service. Gehlen remained its head until 1968. He was the beneficiary of Allen Dulles’ position of ‘usefulness before prosecution’; Dulles had consistently fought for this policy and, in the end, became head of the CIA. Dulles and his intelligence agents were soon way ahead of the dilettantes of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) where active espionage was concerned, particularly in terms of experience. SS officers such as Wilhelm Höttl repeatedly offered the Americans at the CIC sound spy networks behind the Iron Curtain, even entire underground armies consisting of former collaborators of the Germans and nationalists who could supposedly be easily reactivated against the Soviets. But in many cases, these ‘underground armies’ operated somewhere between boundless exaggeration and pure wishful thinking, making the CIC less effective than its counterpart, the CIA.

"The story of Klaus Barbie, once a powerful and brutal Gestapo chief in Lyons in occupied France, explains better than any theoretical considerations the logic of the early Cold War. Barbie was one of those responsible for the torture and murder of members of the resistance—Jean Moulin among them—in the South of France. In 1947 he started working for the CIC and was smuggled to South America by US agencies. The Franco-German ‘Nazi hunters’ Beate and Serge Klarsfeld began to track Barbie down in Bolivia in the early 1970s. He was extradited to France and brought before the court there. The trial sparked intense controversies in France concerning the relationship between the occupying Germans and the Vichy regime. The first cracks appeared in France’s attempts to suppress the past. Barbie was by no means the most significant war criminal in France, but Moulin became a martyr of the resistance, and his tormentor thus became a symbol of the Nazi terror in France. This case was significant in that it raised the question of the US’s role in shielding Nazis from prosecution and the reasons behind that policy.

"Since the Barbie case, the problematic role of the United States in Nazi smuggling has become an internationally debated topic. In 1983 the US government even had to give a formal apology for its involvement in helping Barbie to escape—an early example of an apology for historical injustice. US authorities in the early Cold War put the usefulness of former SS men before the prosecution of the perpetrators. Consistent reappraisal and the prosecution of Nazi crimes that went hand in hand with it soon fell victim to reasons of state.

"One example will have to suffice here. In 1950 the Displaced Persons Commission of the US Congress stated: ‘The Baltic Waffen-SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS. Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States.’ The historian Tony Judt concisely sums up these distortions on the part of the US authorities: ‘The Baltic Waffen-SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course “our Nazis”.’14 As this example clearly shows, decisions in the context of refugee policy were extremely political, and by no means purely humanitarian.

"It becomes evident through this study that, in the larger context, fighting communism became more important to the West than punishing Nazis and justified a certain collaboration by US intelligence services and their high-tech community with former Nazis. Moral standards were subordinated to pragmatism. Some war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators were thus protected against prosecution by the US information services. The role of the US government and its intelligence services in the flight of the Nazis has been under examination by the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG) since 1999. This commission of historians is concentrating its investigations on the role of the US intelligence services in the recruitment of anti-communist specialists from the periphery of Himmler’s SS. Over the past ten years, the IWG has released some eight million pages of secret service reports, including 1.2 million pages on the SS, 74,000 pages of CIA personal and case files, and over 350,000 pages of FBI documents. Archive sources are the precondition for a solid reappraisal of this subject. The IWG’s results are shocking, but also show that a democratic society is entirely capable of ‘coming to terms with the past’.

"The United States was not the only country that aided Nazis when it was in its interests to do so; Italy did the same thing and, like the United States, tried to keep it quiet. One telling—if rather drastic—Italian example of secreting the past was the ‘cupboard of shame’. This was an old filing cabinet in the Palazzo Cesi, the headquarters of the Procura Generale Militare in Rome. Here, from the 1950s until the early 1960s, files in part deposited by the Allies concerning Nazi war crimes in Italy (committed by the SS, the Wehrmacht, and Italian fascists) were kept, even though they should have been sent to the responsible military state prosecutors. As Italy wanted to take its NATO partner Germany into account for reasons of state, the documents lay undisturbed, gathering dust. It was not until 1994 that a judicial officer in search of documents for the trial against former SS officer Erich Priebke opened the cupboard. Almost 700 files were revealed, and they were finally sent to the relevant military state prosecutors’ offices. A series of trials and sentences followed, albeit in many cases far too late.

"The story of Karl Hass, Priebke’s closest colleague in Rome, also draws a very clear picture of Italy’s attempts to deal with the past. Hass, who took part in the massacre in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome in 1944 and was a war criminal wanted in Italy, stayed in the sunny south after the war and worked for the Italian and US intelligence services. In the 1950s he was seemingly declared dead, but in 1969 he took a minor role in Visconti’s film The Damned, in which he played a Nazi officer. No one was troubled by that fact, and having been declared dead, he remained officially so. The ‘Priebke case’ unleashed a controversy about the recent past that was to last for decades. Now the ‘long shadows of the Holocaust’16 had caught up with Italy as well.

"After the Priebke affair, a belated judicial reappraisal of the recent past occurred in Italy. At the same time, in the 1990s, critical voices about the country’s own fascist past were also growing louder, in competition with the revisionist statements of leading politicians. The special role of Italy as a ‘highway (Reichsautobahn) for war criminals’ has hitherto never been examined in its own right. The question of Italy’s role was mostly only touched upon—as it was in the international media in 2007. In this case it concerned the archives of the Red Cross Tracing Service in Arolsen in Germany. There was repeated resistance to this from the Italian government, and journalists were not the only ones who surmised that the attitude of resistance might have something to do with Italy’s involvement in ‘Nazi-smuggling’. The Italian government delayed the process, supposedly ‘because they fear the records will reveal just how many Nazis escaped through Italy after the war’,18 the Washington Post wrote in March 2007. For Italy, the process of coming to terms with the past seems to be a slow one.

"Despite the stalling of the Italian government, historians’ reappraisal of Nazi war crimes and the fascist past has without a doubt made great progress in Italy since the 1990s. This reappraisal by current historians also applies to the northern Italian border province of South Tyrol. Nevertheless, the image of South Tyrol as a ‘victim’ still prevails there among the wider public. After the First World War, the southern part of the Tyrol was assigned to Italy as spoils of war, even though German was, and remains, the majority language; this fact contributes to a victim mentality. In addition, for seventy years the German-speaking population has referred to the years of cultural oppression by Mussolini’s fascism, which also furthers the victim mentality. The role of many South Tyroleans as perpetrators under National Socialism, however, tends to be overlooked. That has much to do with the ‘ethnic pillarization’ of South Tyrolean society—a division in many areas between Italian- and German-speaking populations.19 The Italians in the region refer to their role as victims during the Nazi occupation of 1943–5, and the German-speakers to their role as victims during the twenty-year rule of Italian fascism. Each group has always seen itself as the victim, the other as the perpetrator. After 1945, ‘fronts of unity’ formed on both sides according to language groups, quite openly serving to achieve political goals. In South Tyrol this stance of national hostility produced a situation not unlike that seen elsewhere in the Cold War, and the reappraisal of the most recent past was made much more difficult.20 Eichmann’s and Mengele’s new identities as South Tyroleans were in no way a coincidence and shed some light on the Nazi past of this border region. But as in Germany and elsewhere, in South Tyrol there were victims and perpetrators as well as victims who were also perpetrators.

"Argentina, like Italy, was forced to confront its past with Priebke’s extradition from Argentina to Italy in 1995. For the first time Argentina, too, officially requested clarification concerning his Nazi past. In 1997 the Argentinian government set up a special Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Actividades Nacionalsocialistas en la Argentina, CEANA). CEANA—whose panel included famous personalities from public life (Edgar Bronfman, President of the Jewish World Congress; Sir Ralph Dahrendorf, former Rector of the London School of Economics; and Richard Joseph Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor at the Yugoslavian Criminals Tribunal in The Hague) and whose staff included renowned historians—was set up to cast a penetrating light on Argentina’s relationship with National Socialism. But CEANA’s work was repeatedly accompanied by controversies. Ignacio Klich, the head of CEANA, criticized the book by Argentine journalist Uki Goñi about Nazi flight to Argentina. The Real Odessa, he claimed, was ‘unfair’ for not showing that Argentina had taken in thousands of Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945. But that was only half the truth—because Argentina had repeatedly prevented Jewish immigration.

"The debate touched off by Goñi’s reexamination of Argentina’s past policy regarding Jewish immigration yielded startling results. From 1938 Argentina officially closed its borders to Jewish emigrants from Europe who were fleeing from National Socialism. In his book, Goñi had brought the relevant anti-Jewish decrees to international attention. After lengthy discussions, a remarkable moment in the recent history of Argentina took place: on 8 June 2005, in the presence of State President Néstor Kirchner, the secret decree of 1938, designed to prevent the immigration of Jewish refugees, was declared invalid. The revocation of this order represented a high point in the discussion of Argentina’s past in which the country’s relations with the Third Reich were reexamined. Argentina’s immigration policy is often given as a prime example of the reception of Nazi refugees and collaborators, but a similar practice could also be seen in other countries in the Middle East and South America. Even America and Canada allowed Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborators into their countries from 1946 onwards. The one-sided image of Argentina as the only Nazi refuge came into being in the years around 1945. Argentina’s pro-German sympathies and her late declaration of war on Nazi Germany provoked US diplomats. The result was a demonization of the South American state by the media, an unfair portrayal that is now beginning to be revised.

"The US, Italian, and Argentinian governments are not the only institutions that must answer for their role in the protection of Nazis; the Vatican, too, still faces questions about its activities. In the 1948 Italian election, the United States went to great expense to prevent a possible communist election victory. Anticommunist forces and parties were supported, and the intelligence services were also well prepared. In addition, fresh collaboration between US agencies and the Catholic Church arose. The idea of a communist Italy was a bugbear for the Vatican and the United States; thus Italy was one of the first battlegrounds of the Cold War. In the battle against communism, the Catholic Church immediately found strong allies, not least among them the United States. The priest Krunoslav Stjepan Draganović is an example that demonstrates collaboration between US intelligence services and the Catholic Church in Italy. Draganović was not a lone exception, and neither was he just anybody: as a representative of the Croatian refugee aid mission, he was involved with the agencies of the Vatican. The question of the Vatican’s role in the escape of Nazis and other collaborators is thus posed with particular urgency.

"Additionally, the attitude of the Pope and the Catholic Church towards National Socialism has been controversial for decades. Since Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963), Pope Pius XII has been the focus of criticism for his silence about the Holocaust. The Vatican responded to Hochhuth’s accusations by setting up an internal commission of historians consisting of four Jesuit priests. Commissioned by Paul VI, the churchmen produced between 1965 and 1981 several volumes about the Vatican and its policy in the Second World War; the priests alone had exclusive access to the Vatican archives during this period.21 The commission exonerated the Pope and the Vatican of all moral guilt. Nevertheless, the topic of Pius XII and National Socialism has repeatedly stirred great interest among the public. In November 2008 an exhibition on ‘Pius XII—The Man and His Pontificate’ opened in Rome. It stressed his criticism of the Nazis and the Church’s aid for the Jews. Pope Benedict XVI has also refused to criticize Pius XII, but has at the same time delayed the planned canonization of his controversial predecessor.

"Church agencies did play a central part in helping National Socialists escape—particularly the PCA in Rome. This mission soon became a popular stopping-off point for serious war criminals from Central and Eastern Europe. Contemporary history still only touches on the subject of escape assistance by the Church, which is hardly surprising because access to the Vatican archive for the years after 1939 is still strictly limited. The Vatican’s assistance to escaping Nazis also did not play a major role in discussions about the canonization of Pius XII.22 Yet the history of the Vatican mission for refugees is key to understanding the Vatican’s attitude towards National Socialism, denazification, and the early Cold War. Following the publication of the La Vista report, in February 1992 the Vatican spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls made a statement about the accusations that the refugee mission of the Holy See had acquired passports for Nazi war criminals that allowed them to escape. ‘On the contrary, Pius XII and the Vatican helped to save the lives of thousands of Jews,’ said Navarro-Valls, here coming to the defence of the PCA: ‘In those days it was so easy to assume a fake identity and disappear among the refugees, but to represent the work of the Papal Aid Mission as supporting the escape of war criminals is historically false.’ The Pope also gave a statement on the subject. In an interview, he followed up on the comments of his press spokesman Navarro-Valls and said that similar accusations had already been examined and rebutted in the past by the relevant agencies.

"Despite the words of such prominent defenders, the papal aid mission was, in fact, massively involved in helping war criminals and Nazis to escape. A difficult question that remains to be answered is why Catholic dignitaries helped Nazis in their escape. My research shows that their motives were both political and religious. On one hand, high-up members of the Catholic Church aimed to weaken communism as much as possible, and on the other, they hoped to revive religion in Europe at any cost. Radical nationalism and anti-Judaism also played a role, especially in the cases like those of Bishop Hudal and Monsignor Draganović. But ‘the Vatican’ was not a ‘monolithic bloc’, and different positions, ‘different voices’ inside the Catholic Church, could be heard.24 Decisions at the highest level were made on the basis of sober strategic considerations. During the Second World War Pius XII worked to preserve the interests of the Church. It was a balancing act between the dictatorships of Stalin and that of Hitler, and the Pope was prepared for compromises. Although Pius XII’s portrayal as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ is unfair, Pius did see ‘godless’ communism as the main enemy of the Church.

"Religious renewal was also a clearly formulated and important aim in this context. Catholic priests’ understanding of guilt and responsibility was dominated by forgiveness. ‘We do not believe in the eye for an eye of the Jews,’ as Hudal put it. This attitude of Hudal’s was shared by other important people inside the Church. Pius XII and the Catholic Bishops repeatedly asked for mercy and even amnesty for war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators. They believed that the responsibility for the crimes lay only with a handful of leaders, foremost among them were Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. All others, including SS men, were not responsible, and were, perhaps, victims too. Priests and bishops helping war criminals and Nazis helped foremost Catholics. The lost sheep had to be brought back to the fold, they thought. The Catholic Church celebrated its moral victory over National Socialism. Former Nazi officials but also millions of simple Nazi party members were being freed from the ‘false teachings of Nazism’ and were welcomed back into the church. Better yet, non-Catholic Nazi criminals converted to Catholicism. In some cases, ‘re-baptism’ was the pre-condition for Catholic aid. For instance, former Protestant and war criminal Erich Priebke underwent ‘denazification through re-baptism’, as I call it, before he was ‘shipped’ through Italy to Argentina. Holocaust perpetrator Oswald Pohl’s conversion from Protestant Christian before the war to Nazi Gottgläubiger during the Hitler years, to Catholic was compared to St Augustine’s conversion.

"The involvement of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Nazi escape assistance is a similarly complex story. Individual ICRC delegations more or less actively helped war criminals to escape by issuing them with ICRC travel documents, whether out of sympathy for individuals, because of their political attitude, or simply because they were overburdened. The ICRC has a certain moral responsibility and bears a share of the blame for aiding the perpetrators of the war. But the ICRC is belatedly beginning to re-examine its role in the escape assistance for Nazis and fellow travellers. It was only a few years ago that the ICRC in Geneva made its archive generally accessible to research. Since then efforts have been made to find clarification in Geneva as well. Cornelio Sommaruga, the president of the ICRC until 1999, spoke of the ‘failure’ of the Red Cross in the context of escape assistance. ICRC spokespeople accused local ICRC delegates in Italy of joint responsibility and even of ‘complicity with fleeing war criminals’.28 Reference was also made to the extraordinary situation in the post-war years: ‘At the time there were thousands of refugees from completely unchecked backgrounds. If really reliable checks had been introduced, help would inevitably not have been given to many genuine refugees.’29 Was one to refuse help to the many genuine refugees because there might have been some criminals hiding among them? This is a tough question. On the other hand, the checks could easily have been improved, particularly towards the end of the 1940s, when the ICRC had already accumulated some experience. But Headquarters in Geneva delayed implementing these. Refugees from all over Europe were not creatures without biographies or histories; they all had a past. In a fair number of cases, this meant a past as a perpetrator or collaborator in Nazi crimes. But as long as people were able to demonstrate an anticommunist background, the ICRC plainly turned a blind eye. Still the ICRC’s role in assisting Nazis, whether willingly or unknowingly, is not the only question about its World War II past that the agency must answer.

"Was realpolitik placed above moral standards in the case of the ICRC’s silence about the Holocaust? For a moral superpower like the ICRC, its behaviour as regards the Shoah represents a serious problem. The ICRC was three times awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its charity work. Such high regard can be easily damaged. The Swiss historian Jean-Claude Favez, in his pioneering work on the ICRC and its attitude towards the Holocaust, has made it clear why the chief response in Geneva was one of silence.30 In the ICRC, leaders prioritized Swiss national interests and subordinated all other concerns to it. Swiss security and economic interests were not to be jeopardized. References were also made in Geneva to the unconditional neutrality of the ICRC and its lack of legal authority. The clear anticommunist attitude within the ICRC probably played a major role in its policies after 1945. For all the justified criticism, however, the help that the ICRC gave to millions of POWs, casualties, and refugees from the Second World War remains undisputed and unforgotten. In the last years, the ICRC also has dealt more openly with its past and has supported academic research on these topics. It is about time, because the ICRC’s involvement in Nazi escape is striking. Given its silence about the Holocaust and its hesitation in rescuing Jews, the ICRC’s involvement in helping Holocaust perpetrators to escape justice is a serious issue of moral guilt and responsibility.

"As the research presented in this book clearly shows, the escape of Nazis and war criminals aided by the Red Cross and the PCA was an open secret at the time. The US intelligence services knew, the US State Department knew, the International Committee of the Red Cross knew, its presidents Max Huber and Paul Ruegger knew, the Swiss government knew, the Italian government knew, Monsignors Carroll and Montini from the Vatican knew. They all knew as early as 1946/47 about the misuse of the Red Cross travel documents and PCA papers. Internal memos of the Red Cross in Geneva clearly show the agency’s awareness that war criminals escaped thanks to its papers. But the agency decided to continue its practices with few changes. The consequences of turning a blind eye—illustrated so shockingly by the case of Adolf Eichmann, who fled Europe with the help of the PCA and the Red Cross in 1950, four years after the massive abuse had become known inside the respective institutions—is still stunning to contemplate."
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April 20, 2019
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August 28, 2019
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