Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes 9789048536245

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface to the English translation
Introduction
I. The ‘Fourth Reich’
II. Reluctant Manhunt
III. Nazi Hunting as Political Opposition
IV. Two Ways of Dealing with State Atrocities
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
The Most Important Manhunts and Extradition Proceedings
Abbreviations
Sources and Literature
Index

Citation preview

Hunt for Nazis

NIOD Studies on War, Holocaust, and Genocide NIOD Studies on War, Holocaust, and Genocide is an English-language series with peer-reviewed scholarly work on the impact of war, the Holocaust, and genocide on twentieth-century and contemporary societies, covering a broad range of historical approaches in a global context, and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Series Editors Karel Berkhoff, NIOD Thijs Bouwknegt, NIOD Peter Keppy, NIOD Ingrid de Zwarte, NIOD and University of Amsterdam Advisory Board Frank Bajohr, Center for Holocaust Studies, Munich Joan Beaumont, Australian National University Bruno De Wever, Ghent University William H. Frederick, Ohio University Susan R. Grayzel, The University of Mississippi Wendy Lower, Claremont McKenna College

Hunt for Nazis South America’s Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes

Daniel Stahl

Amsterdam University Press

Hunt for Nazis. South America’s Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes is a translation of Daniel Stahl: Nazi-Jagd. Südamerikas Diktaturen und die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen Original publication: © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2013

Translation: Jefferson Chase Cover illustration: Beate Klarsfeld protesting in 1984/85 in front of the Paraguayan Court. The banner reads “Stroessner you are lying if you say that you don’t know were SS Mengele is.” Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 521 6 e-isbn 978 90 4853 624 5 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462985216 nur 689 © English edition: Daniel Stahl / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Preface to the English translation

7

Introduction 9 I The ‘Fourth Reich’ 1 The Second World War: The Particularity of Argentina 2 Nazi Flight: From Anticipation to Reality 3 Politicizing the Nazi Flight 4 European Amnesty Policies

19 20 32 52 74

II Reluctant Manhunt 1 The Capture of Eichmann 2 West German Reactions 3 Mengele and the Statute of Limitations Debate 4 Extradition Proceedings During the 1960s

93 94 113 134 153

III Nazi Hunting as Political Opposition 1 Recidivists in the Service of South America’s Dictators 2 Military Junta and Nazi Extradition 3 Klaus Barbie and Bolivia’s Democratization 4 Democrats and Nazi Hunters

183 184 213 235 246

IV Two Ways of Dealing with State Atrocities 1 Menem’s Amnesty Laws and the Nazi Past 2 Argentina and the Looted Gold Debate in the 1990s

277 278 301

Conclusion 315 Acknowledgements 327 The Most Important Manhunts and Extradition Proceedings

329

Abbreviations 337 Sources and Literature

341

Index 371



Preface to the English translation

The hunt for Nazis was a truly transnational undertaking. It involved actors from Eastern and Western Europe, from North and South America, and not the least from Israel. Therefore, following the publication of the German original in 2013, I started to think about ways to make this story accessible to readers in as many countries as possible. I was encouraged by the reactions to my book. Newspapers and journals in Germany and abroad kept showing a keen interest in my findings. In 2013, the book also received the Opus Primum Award of the VolkswagenStiftung. But as plausible as these reasons may seem, this translation never would have materialized without the generous support of Dr Nicolaus-Jürgen Weickart. When we spoke about my book during a conference dinner, he encouraged me with great emphasis to tackle the project of a translation. I am very grateful to him and his wife Dr Christiane Weickart for enabling the Jena Center of 20th-Century History to hire Jefferson Chase to translate the book. He turned out to be an extremely fortunate choice. As a highly accomplished translator of history books – he recently translated a much lauded biography of Adolf Hitler –, his version of The Hunt for Nazis is much more than ‘just’ a translation. I almost think that the English version turned out to be a more readable book than the German original. I am also thankful that Christoph Renner relieved me from the task to change the citations to Chicago style. When I talked to Professor Dr Peter Romijn about the possibility to publish this book with a Dutch press, he immediately offered his support. Only a few months later, the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam) decided to include The Hunt for Nazis in its book series. I would like to thank Peter Romijn, Ingrid de Zwarte, and the editorial board for their support. I also thank Inge van der Bijl and Jaap Wagenaar from AUP for working with me on the book. Since The Hunt for Nazis was published in German, historians have made significant progress in several relevant fields: in Germany’s coping with the Nazi past, the globalization of Holocaust memory, Latin American dictatorships and processes of democratization, and human rights history. New studies in these fields have confirmed me in my approach to study the connections between the history of state crimes in Europe and South America. In fact, to show how American and European debates on state crimes and practices became interconnected by telling the story of the hunt for Nazis seems even more convincing than before. However, to consider

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all relevant publications that have appeared since 2013 would have been beyond the scope of a translation. I therefore decided only to integrate new titles on fugitive Nazis in South America. Daniel Stahl Jena, December 2017

Introduction On 26 January 1983, Bolivian Interior Minister Mario Roncal contacted the German embassy on an urgent matter: Klaus Barbie, the former director of Security Policy and Security Service in Nazi-occupied Lyon, had been arrested for not paying some debts. Six months previous, the Federal Republic of Germany had requested his extradition. Barbie could now be turned over to German authorities the following day.1 But if Roncal expected that he would make West German diplomats happy with this announcement, he was sorely mistaken. The week before, West Germany’s Bolivian embassy had received clear instructions from Bonn that ‘appropriate’ steps should be taken to ensure that Barbie was extradited not to the Federal Republic, but to France, where he had been sentenced to death in absentia after the Second World War. West German judicial officials were worried that their own country’s laws and jurisprudence would not guarantee a conviction, and they were concerned about international criticism should Barbie be acquitted.2 So instead of discussing how Barbie could be transferred to West German custody the following day, the deputy director of the West German embassy declared that he didn’t have the necessary personnel at his disposal and asked whether the fugitive could not be extradited to France. Roncal responded that according to Bolivian law people could only be extradited to their country’s neighbours or to their home countries. The West German embassy was given until the end of the month to state whether Barbie could be transferred to them. If not, Bolivia would try Barbie for ‘suspected drug offences and organizing paramilitary units’.3 In the preceding months, various newspapers had reported that Barbie, who had fought the French Résistance during the Second World War, had supported the 1980 putsch of General Luis García Meza with a paramilitary unit of his own. In addition, Barbie had allegedly been involved in drug dealing under the subsequent military dictatorship, which had lasted until 1982. But it had taken a long time for Bolivia to pursue the crimes that had been committed under the Meza regime. Moreover, Bolivian prosecutors lacked hard evidence to prove the accusations against Barbie. All they had were newspaper reports.4 Instead 1 FS Eickhoff (Botschaftsrat La Paz) to AA, 26 January 1983, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1627. 2 FS AA to Botschaft La Paz, 19 January 1983, in ibid. 3 FS Eickhoff to AA, 28 January 1983, in ibid. 4 Rivero Boyán (Fiscal de Distrito en lo Penal, La Paz) to Ministro del Interior, Migración y Justicia, 2 February 1983, printed in: Torre Rodriguez, Altmann/Barbie, pp. 139-141.

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of launching into a lengthy trial with an uncertain outcome, the centre-left coalition under President Hernán Siles Suazo that came to power in 1982 decided to send General Meza’s German friend to French Guyana. France had repeatedly signalled that it would accept Barbie. Groups representing former resistance fighters and Jewish organizations had been calling for Barbie to be put on trial for years, and the Mitterrand government was very receptive to their demands. The former director of the Security Service in Lyon had taken part in the murder of Jean Moulin, one of the leaders of French resistance against the German occupation. The socialist government in France, which included several former resistance fighters, saw the trial of the murderer of a national hero as a perfect opportunity to underscore memories of the Résistance.5 In February 1983, after 30 years, Barbie was returned to European soil, where a French court sentenced him to life in prison. Like Barbie, a number of Europeans with reason to fear that they would be put on trial in their home countries fled to South America after the Second World War. They included former state officials like Adolf Eichmann, the director of the Jewish Affairs section of Reich Main Security Office who had organized from Berlin the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, concentration camp employees like Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps who had supervised the mass murder of Jews and Polish civilians, and doctors and scientists like Josef Mengele, who had organized and carried out horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners. But Germans and Austrians weren’t the only fugitives seeking to escape legal prosecution by fleeing to South America. Ante Pavelić, the former leader of Nazi Germany’s ally Croatia, was wanted by Yugoslavian authorities after his regime had murdered thousands of people from ethnic minorities. Post-war prosecutors also had their sights set on journalists. A French military court, for instance, had sentenced Frenchman Pierre Daye, who had fled to Argentina, to death for publishing Nazi-friendly articles. We still don’t have any exact figures about how many people were evading prosecution. Studies on Argentina put the number at 180 individuals specifically under investigation by European judicial authorities. But we cannot say how many fugitives simply weren’t counted.6 This study deals comprehensively with the treatment of Nazi criminals and collaborators who fled to South America from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Previously this topic has only been investigated

5 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 199-201. 6 CEANA, ed., Informe Final.

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with regard to individual cases.7 The focus is not on the history of how such people fled.8 Instead, we want to know what efforts were made and what obstacles had to be overcome to bring the fugitives to justice in the decades after the war. To that end, we will examine state and government figures as well as private individuals and non-state institutions. The extradition of Klaus Barbie neatly illustrates what was special about the pursuit and capture of this group of fugitives – a phenomenon that, starting in the 1960s, was often referred to by way of shorthand as the Nazi-Jagd, the ‘hunt for Nazis’. Like most of the Nazi criminals, Barbie had committed his crimes as a member of the German occupation force outside the boundaries of Germany. From the end of the Second World War, even before the first calls came in 1971 for him to be prosecuted in Germany, French authorities and the French public had taken an interest in the case. But whereas West Germany’s Basic Law prohibited the extradition of German citizens, so that those perpetrators who lived in West Germany were beyond the reach of foreign prosecutors, those who fled risked being apprehended by a variety of countries. A man like Barbie who absconded to South America risked the fact that West German authorities wouldn’t be the only ones on his trail. Even decades later, it was still legal both within and outside Germany to try former foreign collaborators, who had sought to escape the short but intense post-war de-Nazification processes in Europe, and German fugitives. The prosecution of Nazi crimes directly after the Second World War was conspicuously transnational,9 and so was the legal pursuit in the following decades of those who went underground. West Germany, France, Israel, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia and its successor states all tried to bring fugitives to justice. It was no rarity for several states to try to apprehend the same suspect simultaneously and for various political attitudes toward the past to collide. Conflicts were inevitable, but the result was often international cooperation. Above all, a transnational public sphere 7 Concerning Eichmann, see Wojak, Memoiren; Stangneth, Eichmann. For Eduard Roschmann, former commander of the Riga Ghetto, see Schneppen, Roschmann. Concerning Walther Rauff, who was involved in the construction of gas wagons, see Cüppers, Walter Rauff; Kletten, ‘Nachgeschichte’. About Klaus Barbie there are various publications, see particulary Hammerschmidt, Deckname; Linklater, Hilton, and Ascherson, Fourth Reich; Hoyos, Barbie. About the hunt for Mengele, see Posner and Ware, Mengele; Völklein, Mengele. For Josef Schwammberger, commander of ghetto and KZ, see Freiwald and Mendelsohn, Nazi. 8 See for this topic Senkman, ‘Perón’, pp. 673-704; Meding, ‘Flucht’; Gurevich, ‘Prólogo’; CEANA, ed., Informe Final; Goñi, Odessa; Schneppen, Vierte Reich; Steinacher, Nazis. 9 Frei, ‘Tat’, pp. 7-36.

12 

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arose. In order to bring fugitives to justice, various agents and agencies worked together across national lines, prompting an international debate about the prosecution of Nazi criminals. Nonetheless, the way the Bolivians handled Barbie’s extradition also shows that the countries that wanted to prosecute Nazi crimes weren’t the only ones that had an interest in apprehending the fugitives. Since 1972, Barbie had been a political thorn in the side of the country to which he had fled. The former member of the Nazi security apparatus had come to feel the need to intervene in the security policies of Bolivia. While he may have been a valued advisor in the eyes of the repressive Bolivian military apparatus, opponents of the regime wanted to bring him to trial. The situation was similar to numerous other Nazi criminals and collaborators who had fled overseas. The question of how to deal with them became a political issue in the countries they went to. Europe wasn’t the only place where people debated the legality and legitimacy of governments using violence. State violence was a common occurrence in South America, and people were constantly asking whether their governments should be allowed to use physical coercion against the populace in the interest of pursuing its goals. Were individual members of state institutions legally liable for the violent things they did? The way South American governments and authorities dealt with fugitives was always directly connected to their attitudes toward such questions. Not only European Nazi hunters, but also politicians, regime critics, and human rights activists interpreted governments’ responses to extradition requests as domestic political statements and positions on the legitimacy of state-ordered violence. One question was repeatedly discussed on both sides of the Atlantic: Was the notorious government repression in South America related to the fact that people who had committed crimes in the name of the Third Reich and its allies lived there? This book is not just a study of political approaches to the Nazi past after 1945. It is also about the debates surrounding state repression in South America in the decades that followed. At issue is above all how attitudes toward state-ordered violence were negotiated on both sides of the Atlantic over the course of the hunt for Nazi fugitives. On the one hand, we can observe a transformation of how the crimes committed during the Second World War were seen between 1945 and the turn of the millennium. To what extent, did the hunt for Nazis reflect, vis-à-vis the past, the interests of various European countries? How were public debates about Nazi crimes influenced by efforts to capture Nazi criminals? And what role was played by the trials of fugitives, which often only came decades after the end of the

Introduc tion

13

war and the start of the hunt for people in question? As we seek to answer these questions, the idea of a hunt for Nazis serves not just as a general category for the efforts to capture Nazi perpetrators and collaborators. We must also ask how terms like the ‘hunt for Nazis’ and ‘Nazi hunters’ influenced attitudes toward Nazi crimes themselves and what their use says about how people’s views changed over time. On the other hand, we will also focus on the resonance the hunt for Nazis had in South America. How did South American governments and authorities react to attempts made in their countries to capture people accused of committing crimes in the names of past governments elsewhere? What were the connections between South American countries’ extradition policies and their own relationship to violence and repression? Who in South America turned the presence of Nazi refugees into a political issue, and why? What was the relationship between the hunt for Nazis and criticism of the repressive policies of South American regimes? And how did transatlantic efforts to deal with Nazi criminals and collaborators reflect on the debates over those people’s crimes in Europe? The legal prosecution of Nazi perpetrators was not just a political issue in terms of the past. It was part of ongoing security policy debates in the post-war era.10 Research has shown that the legal prosecution of and amnesty granted to those who committed Nazi crimes cannot be explained solely by referring to the history of individual states. The post-war trials conducted by the Allies were the results of negotiations between nations.11 After the Nazi regime had ceased to exist, almost all European countries faced the question of how to deal with perpetrators and collaborators. How they answered this question depended greatly on foreign-policy interests and constellations.12 The fact that Nazi crimes were dealt with in part beyond Germany’s borders presented the first West German government under Konrad Adenauer with a problem. The Adenauer government’s general policy in the early 1950s of integrating former Nazi functionaries and pardoning war criminals may have been popular with most West Germans, but it met with resistance from and led to conflicts with the Western occupying powers. The US, France, and Britain had to account for how they treated German 10 On the security policy dimension of the treatment of former Nazi elites and criminals, see Rigoll, ‘Sicherheit’. 11 Kochavi, Nuremberg; Bloxham, Genocide; Tusa and Tusa, Nuremberg. 12 On the trials in the immediate post-war period in various European countries, see Henke and Woller, eds., Säuberung. Additionally, Frei, ed., Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik takes a look at developments during the entire second half of the twentieth century.

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Hunt for Nazis

war criminals to their own populaces.13 The Soviet Union, which exerted a dominant influence on the Communist German Democratic Republic, had no such problems. In the absence of any public debates, the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) succeeded in convincing the Soviet Union that former Nazis needed to be reintegrated into society, even as it was staging a handful of show trials of prominent fascists.14 The question of how to deal with Nazi criminals remained current in various countries until late in the twentieth century. Among the almost inscrutably vast number of studies about the prosecution and social reintegration of Nazi perpetrators, the notable exceptions are works investigating how various states’ policies toward the past influenced one another. For instance, research has shown that given the competition between West and East Germany, the instrumentalizing of the Nazi past had an effect on both countries’ prosecution of crimes.15 French and West German policies toward the past also show signs of such mutual influence. In France, people kept a close eye on West German amnesty initiatives and brought public pressure to bear in order to see that Nazi crimes didn’t go unpunished. At the same time, French courts’ legal prosecution of Nazi criminals was rejected by large portions of West German society. Behind the scenes, the West German government successfully lobbied for the pardoning of convicted perpetrators of Nazi crimes.16 This book continues in the vein of such studies, extending the focus beyond Europe and asking how transcontinental relations influenced debates about various sets of crimes. The story of the Nazi hunt is one of mutual influences between the prosecution of Nazi crimes and positions on repression exercised by South American regimes. It was part of the transnational debates about state-sanctioned violence and thus can be seen as part of the history of human rights, which is concerned not only with the genesis of certain basic standards of humanity, but also with the increasingly international reactions to state coercion. Since the 1970s, campaigns against repressive South American military juntas and the apartheid regime in South Africa led by an international alliance of dissidents and human rights organisations have generated support in many countries. These campaigns have made a major difference in state violence being seen less as a domestic political affair and more as a problem 13 Brochhagen, Vergangenheitsbewältigung; Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. 14 Vogt, Denazification; Leide, NS-Verbrecher. 15 Weinke, Verfolgung. 16 Bernhard Brunner, Frankreich-Komplex; Moisel, Frankreich.

Introduc tion

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affecting all of humanity.17 After the democratization processes that took place in many countries in the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of the international debate about state-sponsored violence has shifted. If the activists of the 1970s were chiefly concerned with denouncing human rights violations and holding them up for public condemnation, activists are now more concerned with prosecuting those violations. To that end, they are once again employing the strategy of transnational mobilization.18 The efforts to capture fugitive Nazi criminals were made in close conjunction with this transnational dialogue. As a result, the crimes committed by National Socialists became inseparable from attempts to deal with state repression in South America. Along with the invocation of human rights norms, comparisons with Nazism became an important instrument for internationally publicizing the criminal character of South American regimes. To do justice to this story, we cannot confine our investigation to national boundaries. The campaigns leading to the apprehending and extradition of fugitives from justice was too tightly interwoven to restrict ourselves to the hunt for Nazis in one of two exemplary South American states or to the measures taken by a single prosecuting country. Nazi hunters constantly crossed national borders in their search for perpetrators and collaborators. The campaigns encompassed a number of different states, and their experience with one government influenced their strategies toward others. Moreover, the behaviour of state authorities wasn’t immune to what was happening outside any given country’s borders. Events like Eichmann’s capture or Barbie’s extradition were powerful signals that were registered in other countries. Our investigation also cannot restrict itself solely to efforts to apprehend fugitive Nazis in the narrow sense. Requests by various European countries for the extradition of collaborators served as important precedents that affected deportation judgements concerning Nazi criminals. In any case, Nazi hunters tended not to distinguish strictly between the two groups of perpetrators. Consequently this study will be based on various types 17 Cmiel, ‘Emergence’, pp. 1231-1250; Sikkink, ‘Emergence’, pp. 59-84; Eckel, ‘Utopie’, pp. 437-484; Eckel, ‘Lupe’, pp. 368-396; Hoffmann, ‘Einführung’, pp. 29-32; Quataert, Dignity, pp. 61-140. 18 While historians have commenced historicizing the human rights campaigns, the transnational attempts to legally prosecute human rights violations have been examined almost exclusively by lawyers and political scientists, see Lutz and Sikkink, ‘Cascade’, pp. 1-33; Teitel, Transitional Justice; Roht-Arriaza, Pinochet Effect; Nash, ‘Pinochet Case’, pp. 417-435; Sikkink and Walling, ‘Impact’, pp. 427-445. For a critical look at the significance of international factors for the prosecution of state-sanctioned violence, see Collins, ‘Global Justice’, pp. 711-738.

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of sources, including both European and South American archives, and governmental and non-governmental records. Of course, the pursuit of fugitives didn’t have the same significance everywhere. Although various countries went after Nazi criminals and collaborators, West German authorities were involved in the greatest number of manhunts and extradition procedures after efforts to prosecute past crimes were intensified in the late 1950s. By contrast, the GDR didn’t have diplomatic relations with most South American countries – a condition for seeking international judicial assistance. Other European states were only sporadically active in this area, for example, in the short, but intensive period of de-Nazification after the Second World War or in case the fugitive came from and committed his crimes in a particular country. But it wasn’t primarily legal jurisdiction or leeway that made the hunt for Nazis more important in some countries than others. Reasons why the apprehension of fugitives didn’t simply remain an act of legal assistance between nations, but rather accrued an additional importance and became a transatlantic link in the debates about repression and state-sanctioned violence can be found in various public discussions and among advocacy groups in Europe, South America, and North America. They include: criticism of the Argentinian military regimes and the government of populist president Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s and 1950s and the parallel initial wave of de-Nazification in post-war Europe; the gradual intensification of the prosecution of Nazi crimes in West Germany since the late 1950s; the protests against right-wing South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s together with the contemporaneous internationalization of Holocaust memorials; and the debates about Peronism in 1990s Argentina. Efforts to track down fugitive Nazi criminals acquired their significance within these social contexts. Those contexts influenced the hunt for Nazis and were in turn influenced by it. The first section of this book will discuss the nightmare scenario popularized in the 1940s and 1950s of a Fourth Reich arising in Argentina. Both the Allies and Argentina’s left-wing opposition suspected that Perón had collaborated with the Axis powers. They feared that his government would offer shelter to war criminals in Argentina after the war,19 who would then use the wealth they spirited away from Europe to keep fascism alive after it had been defeated in Europe. This nightmare scenario would recur and be updated in an extremely diverse range of political contexts in the 19 Here I use the term ‘war criminals’, as was typical in the 1940s and 1950s. As we will see this phrase had a meaning different to today’s customary term ‘Nazi criminals’.

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second half of the twentieth century. The question is: How did this scenario evolve as a result of the interplay between American economic and security policy, Allied efforts to track down Nazi criminals, and domestic struggles for power in Argentina? What effects did it have on the hunt for Nazis and the toppling of the Perón government? And did the end of the first wave of de-Nazification cause it to lose significance in the late 1950s and put a halt to efforts to apprehend fugitive Nazi criminals in South America? The second section will focus on the hunt for Nazis against the backdrop of changes during the 1960s in attitudes toward Nazi crimes. The West German judicial system stepped up its efforts to track down fugitives, while the German public increasingly took an interest in unpunished Nazi crimes. At the same time, Jewish attitudes toward the Holocaust were also changing. Memories of this historical event became a major constitutive element of the identity of Jews in Israel, the US, and Europe. What impulses did the hunt for Nazis provide? And what consequences did the changing conditions of the 1960s have for efforts to apprehend fugitives in South America? Crucial for this period is, among other things, the ways in which the nightmare scenario of a Fourth Reich in Argentina was reinterpreted. During the 1970s and 1980s, remembrance of the Holocaust became more and more important both within and outside Jewish institutions in the US and various European countries. This development was encouraged by the rise of the global media, which historians identify as a major component of the second wave of globalization since the early 1970s. Globalization of the media had ramifications for other areas. The 1970s saw the creation of a transnational human rights activism, borne by a great number of NGOs, which had great international resonance. For the first time, on both sides of the Atlantic, South American military dictatorships and their human rights violations became topics of public debate. The hunt for Nazis was reinterpreted in light of those regimes’ repression of various populaces in South America. Human rights organizations, political dissidents, and left-wing activists, as well as Nazi hunters themselves, saw the juntas in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil as not just the protectors but also the students of Nazi criminals who had gone underground. The third section of this book will examine how the hunt for Nazis became a link between Holocaust remembrance, human rights activism, and political protest in South America, and how these additional levels of significance in turn affected the efforts to bring fugitive Nazi criminals to justice. The focus of the final section will be on Argentina, where the Peronist Carlos Menem became president in 1989. In the wake of his election in the early 1990s, the debates about Nazi fugitives returned to their point of

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origin. Thanks to several ongoing extradition cases, the Menem government was confronted right from the start with Perón’s role in the immigration of fugitive Nazi criminals and collaborators. This debate gained momentum and became potentially explosive for Argentina’s foreign relations with the rise of questions in the mid-1990s about what had become of the hidden assets of Jews during the Second World War. This fed rumours, which had existed since Argentinian-American conflicts of the 1940s, that fugitive Nazi functionaries had smuggled unreported riches into South America. Perón’s relationship with National Socialism became an international controversy again during this period. Not only was the Menem government compelled to take a position toward the relationship between Peronism and Nazi crimes in the past and the present, debates also arose in the 1990s about whether the so-called represores of the military dictatorships should be put on trial. The end of this book will draw conclusions about how the Argentinian government reacted to the international interest in Perón’s relationship to National Socialists and what effect the surrounding debate had on attempts to legally punish junta crimes.

I

The ‘Fourth Reich’

Even while the Nazi regime was still committing its serial crimes in Europe, the Argentinian government felt compelled to take a position on war criminals fleeing to their country. Since August 1944, with the end of hostilities in Europe becoming ever more foreseeable, there had been increasing reports about Nazi elites absconding in the American and British media. Argentina and Spain were considered the refugees’ most likely destinations. The Argentinian ambassador in Washington may have insisted that these reports were baseless, and his colleague in London may have given verbal assurances that Argentina wouldn’t open its doors to war criminals,1 but the reports remained widespread, and the American government found them credible. The Americans were concerned about Nazi criminals possibly escaping legal punishment for their crimes. But they were even more worried that the fugitives might be able to take Nazi assets and use them to help National Socialism survive, perhaps eventually to establish a Fourth Reich.2 The United States and Britain weren’t the only countries concerned about fugitive war criminals. After 1945 the Argentinian opposition also repeatedly drew attention to the problem, and their contention that the fugitives were keeping Nazism alive with the help of the Argentinian government seemed to be conf irmed by the conspicuous activity and connections with the neo-Nazi scene in Germany of Nazis who had emigrated to Argentina. Even after the Allies had transferred responsibility for criminal prosecutions to the Federal Republic of Germany in the mid-1950s and the trials of former Nazis had ground to a halt, to the approval of a majority of Germans, the debate about immigrant war criminals continued in Argentina. Why were people discussing the flight of war criminals to South America even before the Second World War ended? Why did people view Argentina among all the countries of South America with particular suspicion? Why did this topic continue to resonate there until the mid-1950s? And what were the consequences of Argentina’s special role for how the country dealt with fugitive criminals and how investigative authorities sought to bring them to justice.

1 Newton, Menace, pp. 353 ff. 2 Lübken, Nähe, pp. 167-186.

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Hunt for Nazis

The Second World War: The Particularity of Argentina

The rumours about war criminals fleeing to Argentina, which began to swirl in 1944, owed their existence to years of debate about Argentina’s relationship with the Axis powers. While events in South America had only secondary importance for Europe, the reverse was anything but the case. In the course of the 1940s, the war in Europe greatly influenced politics on other continents. South American leftists and liberals considered the aggression of the European dictatorships as part of a global attack on democracy also directed against their own continent. More often than not, they interpreted events in Europe with reference to political conflicts in people’s own countries and saw their own political adversaries as allies of the European fascists who wanted to remake their own countries along the lines of Germany and Italy. They were wary of the German and Italian minorities who they believed might serve as a ‘fifth column’ for turning South America fascist. Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, during which the Nazis had cited the interests of ethnic Germans living in that region of Czechoslovakia, had made this scenario seem plausible.3 In Argentina, too, fear of the fascist threat became a fixed component of 1930s political culture. In September 1930, the liberal-democratic government of the Unión Cívica Radical had been deposed in a putsch by a group of reactionary generals, whose rhetoric was heavily influenced by Mussolini and other fascist leaders in Europe. Whereas conservative camps had previously warned that Argentina was being infiltrated by the Soviet Union, supporters of the Unión Cívica and the Socialist Party now saw a ‘fascist international’ at work. Information they received from Germans living in Argentina seemed to support this fear. The Nazi assumption of power in 1933 only sharpened the long-standing conflict between democratic-republican and nationalist Germans in the country. Traditionally democratic-republican Germans and the increasing numbers of people persecuted by the Nazi regime were soon engaged in an open struggle with Nazi sympathizers and the German embassy to determine the political direction of German institutions abroad, above all, German schools. In their attempts to reduce National Socialist influence, detractors of the Nazis turned to leftist and liberal Argentinian media and politicians, warning that the many German schools in the country were churning out loyal citizens of the Third Reich and not true Argentinians.

3

Figallo, ‘Reflejos’.

The ‘Fourth Reich’

21

That prompted a public debate about Nazi influence in Argentina that reached its initial zenith between 1937 and 1938. 4 In the meantime, the right-wing government was coming under pressure because of the massive electoral fraud it used to keep hold of power. Roberto Ortiz, who was elected president in 1938, approached the opposition and promised to hold ‘clean’ elections in future. And in fact, the Socialists and the Unión Cívica achieved a majority in Argentina’s lower house of parliament in early 1940. Shortly thereafter, though, Ortiz fell ill. Vice-President Ramón Castillo, a military officer and a reactionary, took over the powers of the president’s office, immediately reversing the liberalization of government policy and stepping up persecution. The opposition saw this as a decisive step toward turning Argentina into a fascist country. One thing often cited as evidence for Castillo being an ally of the European fascists was his refusal to declare war on the Axis powers. Members of the Unión Cívica, which had previously supported neutrality, increasingly demanded that Argentina join the war on the side of Britain. Advocates of entering the war came together in the so-called Acción Argentina. In May 1941, the group issued a publication that purported to be the text of a speech made by a former high-ranking official of the Nazi Party in Argentina. It claimed that Germany had succeeded in infiltrating the highest levels of the Argentinian government and was planning to take it over. Argentina’s lower house of parliament demanded to be kept informed about the government’s doings so that it could monitor them for Nazi activities. When the subsequent report by Argentina’s Interior Minister proved unsatisfactory, parliamentary deputies decided to found a committee to investigate anti-Argentinian activities.5 Delegates of the two main opposition parties – the liberal Unión Cívica and the Socialists – had been demanding the establishment of such a committee ever since the debate about German schools. Under the leadership of Raúl Damonte, the Unión was finally able to carry out the investigations its members had been demanding for some time. Once again, detractors of the Nazis among the German ex-patriots, who were well connected to leftist and liberal circles, played an important role. Committee members cited the articles published in ex-pat newspapers about Nazi organizations and German schools in Argentina, and individual Germans also provided them with information.6 The general direction of the committee’s reports, which continued to be published until the end of the year, was unambiguous. 4 Newton, Menace, pp. 156-193; Friedmann, ‘Antinazis’. 5 Comisión Investigadora de Acitividades Antiargentinas. See ibidem, pp. 230-233. 6 Friedman, ‘Antinazis’, pp. 12-14; Schoepp, Tageblatt, pp. 104-112; Newton, Menace, p. 235.

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They were intended to show that the right-wing, authoritarian regime under Vice-President Castillo was doing nothing to combat the attempts of the fascist Axis powers to infiltrate and undermine Argentinian society.7 The opposition believed it knew only too well why the government was being so reticent. Castillo’s regime, they thought, was an Axis ally in terms of both its ideology and its foreign policy. Argentina’s neutrality in the war and the growing restrictions on civil liberties strengthened them in this belief.8 The Argentinian-American conflict Warnings about fascist infiltration and cooperation between local elites and the Axis powers could be heard in other South American countries in 1941, but scenarios involving Argentina attracted the most international attention. The reason was the constellation of political interests on the continent, among which American interests in Latin America were particularly significant. Since the Sudetenland crisis, the American public viewed Germans living in the western hemisphere as a threat. Right from the beginning of the Second World War, the interventionists under Franklin D. Roosevelt had sought to use the idea of the German threat to the western hemisphere to win over isolationists. The former emphasized the subversive potential of ex-pat Germans, portraying them as an army that could be activated at any time and arguing that it would be easy for the Third Reich to enlist individual Latin American nations and use them as a bridgehead to North America. The US, they asserted, was directly affected by events in Europe and couldn’t afford to stay out of the war.9 The British, who were equally interested in American involvement, did their best to stir up anti-German fears.10 In reaction to this perceived threat, the American Treasury and the State Department felt that it was necessary to go after German companies in Latin America, which were seen as potential financers of subversive activities. Here security and economic interests merged. Starting in 1934, the Third Reich had made great efforts to strengthen its economic ties to South America as a way of covering its burgeoning need for raw materials. This German expansionism had come at the cost of the Americans.11 In 7 Comisión Investigadora de Acitividades Antiargentinas, Informe 1–5. 8 Nállim, ‘Antifascismo’, pp. 78-92. 9 Lübken, Nähe, pp. 267-315. 10 Friedman, Neighbors, pp. 58 ff. 11 Schröder, ‘Südamerikapolitik’, pp. 337-451.

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1936, representatives of American businesses had asked their government for help protecting their interests. The threatening scenario of a fifth column of German ex-pats was the perfect justification for initiating an economic war. The United States revived a technique from the First World War and drew up a so-called ‘proclaimed list’ of companies in the Americas owned by Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Companies subject to US jurisdiction were forbidden from doing business with any companies belonging to individuals on the list. Latin American companies who did business with the companies in question were automatically placed on the list. For this reason, the list was an effective means of exerting pressure, and the American government hoped that it could curtail German economic expansion, which US State Department analysts felt was being phed forward by ex-pat German companies in South America.12 With the American entry into the Second World War in December 1941, the State Department tried to recruit Latin American countries into the efforts to combat the ‘fascist infiltration’ of the Americas. They were encouraged to cut their diplomatic ties to the Axis powers and join in measures aimed at German companies. Most of the smaller Latin American states acceded to these demands and accepted significant encroachments on their sovereignty, as economic sanctions were imposed on their German, Italian, and Japanese minorities. Mexico and Brazil declared war on the Axis powers and initiated programmes of their own to combat enemy economic activity. Chile went after people suspected of carrying out subversive activities for the Axis, although it waited until early 1943 to break off diplomatic ties to Germany and Italy.13 Argentina was unique in refusing to accede even partially to American demands. The Castillo-led government saw the US, with its aspiration toward hegemony, as a competitor for dominance of the Americas. Under no circumstances did Buenos Aires want to become dependent on the US by giving up its economic options or to give the impression that others were allowed to meddle in Argentina’s political affairs. The State Department’s reaction to this disregard for American security and economic interests was highly confrontational. Because the two countries’ economic ties were weak, Washington didn’t have to sacrifice much to pursue its policy. This situation was different with Britain, which depended on imports of Argentinian beef and followed the growing conflict with the US with concern.14 12 Friedman, Neighbors, pp. 74-101. 13 Ibidem, p. 9; Pommerin, Lateinamerika, pp. 321-331; Francis, ‘Chile’, pp. 93 ff. 14 Rapoport, Gran Bretaña, pp. 181-198; Major, Summing-up; Barbero, ‘Producción’, pp. 54-71; Eizenstat and Slany, Postwar Relations, Chapter on Argentina.

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The obstinacy of the Argentinian government convinced the State Department of something that the Argentinian opposition had believed for some time. In this view, the Argentinian people, led by the Unión Cívica Radical, wanted the country to enter the war because the authoritarian regime under Castillo was seeking to introduce fascism and to lead Argentina into the Axis. That, it was argued, was the only explanation for Argentina’s refusal to sever diplomatic ties with the Third Reich and Italy and to combat subversive activities by these countries. It was no coincidence that these views mirrored the standpoint of the Argentinian opposition. Many of the American secret service reports on the topic were based on information provided by Unión politicians. Moreover, prominent opposition politicians, above all Damonte Taborda, had good connections to the American government and American congressmen. In any case, the State Department concluded that Argentina would not relent as long as Castillo remained in power and threw its weight behind his adversaries.15 The Brazilians profited from the fact that the American government interpreted Argentinian neutrality as support for the Axis and was trying to come up with further proof for this view. After US entry into the war, Brazil had joined the Allies and was hoping to be given weapons. But Washington was only willing to deliver weaponry, which US troops desperately needed themselves, if it was essential to the war effort. Brazilian diplomats then trotted out the scenario of an alliance between Argentina and the Axis powers. They warned their American colleagues that Argentina was trying, with the help of the Third Reich and Italy, to spread fascism in South America – an argument that was ultimately successful.16 Swayed by such arguments, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were relieved when a group of Argentinian officers staged a putsch in July 1943 and removed Castillo. The Argentinian opposition, too, hoped that Argentina’s ‘fascist detour’ was now over and called upon everyone concerned to cooperate with the new government under General Pedro Ramírez. But their view of the new man in power flipped when the new government closed down leftist and liberal associations and publications and refused to give up Argentina’s neutrality in the war. Before long, Argentina’s opposition and Washington came to consider Ramírez a greater danger than his predecessors. The American secret service encouraged this view by making it known that Ramírez and his associates were receiving money from the Third Reich.17 15 MacDonald, ‘Intervention’, pp. 367-374, Damonte, Berlin, p. 14. 16 Hilton, ‘United States’, pp. 158-180; Hull, Memoirs, pp. 1390 ff. 17 Nállim, ‘Antifascismo’, pp. 92-94; MacDonald, ‘Intervention’, pp. 374 ff.

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In December 1943, there was a coup d’etat in Bolivia, and it soon emerged that the putschists received support from the Argentinian military. The Americas seemed to be facing a major fascist conspiracy. The FBI suspected that Germany was providing money and exercising influence in an effort to get the Argentinian government to support revolutionary movements in neighbouring states. Argentina, the FBI thought, had an eye toward undermining what looked like the Allies’ coming victory as well as strengthening Argentina’s own position. Roosevelt himself believed in this proposition.18 As America was coming to perceive Argentina in hostile terms, a debate commenced about legally prosecuting war crimes and the possibility that war criminals could flee justice. In July 1943, with the Mussolini regime collapsing in Italy, the Allies consulted for the first time about the problem of fugitive fascists.19 In a speech at the end of the month, Roosevelt stressed that war crimes would be prosecuted. The text of the speech was sent to Argentina – along with Sweden, Spain, Turkey, and Switzerland – with the request for those countries to state their positions. The Argentinian foreign minister replied that his country would offer asylum to the politically persecuted and that it would retain the prerogative to decide who fell into that category.20 It was not the sort of reaction designed to dispel American distrust. In January 1944, as the Allies racked up a series of battlef ield victories and the problem of Nazis fleeing became increasingly acute, the American secret service concluded that Argentina could and indeed did want to become a place of refuge for war criminals.21 Views like that and reports of Argentina’s role in the Bolivia putsch gradually coalesced into a larger picture of threat. Also in January 1944, US Vice-President Henry Wallace asserted: ‘The Germans have their minds made up that they have lost this war and they are already preparing for the next one […] they have begun their preparations through Argentina, and […] the next war will come via that country.’22 The prospect of Nazis fleeing wasn’t the Allies’ only worry. They were also concerned about Nazi wealth being spirited away to neutral countries outside Germany. The governments-in-exile of those countries Germany had occupied feared that the National Socialists were removing their nations’ capital for safekeeping as German troops retreated. They appealed to Britain 18 Ibidem, pp. 375-378; Hull, Memoirs, pp. 1390 ff. 19 Collado-Seidel, Angst, p. 26. 20 Newton, Menace, pp. 352 ff.; New York Times, 29 September 1944. 21 Lübken, Bedrohliche Nähe, p. 184. 22 Cited in MacDonald, Intervention, p. 379.

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Hunt for Nazis

and the United States and found sympathetic audiences. Washington and London also believed that, faced with imminent defeat, the Nazis would take capital, which would otherwise be confiscated to pay for German reparations, away to neutral countries, where it would be used to establish the Fourth Reich.23 Ramírez had only been in office for a short time before he was suspected of assisting the Nazi regime in this way. Between September 1943 and January 1944, British and American secret services investigated a number of allegations that German submarines were unloading the wealth of Nazi leaders along the Argentinian coast. Those allegations were never proven, but they fit in seamlessly with the Roosevelt government’s picture of Argentina.24 At the July 1944 Breton Woods Conference, all 44 Allied nations agreed upon a series of measures to prevent high-ranking Nazis from fleeing or capital from being transferred. One of them was Operation Safehaven, which was intended to track down German assets abroad and to cut off the flow of finances from the Third Reich.25 Shortly after the conference, the US reminded Argentina, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey that granting asylum to fugitive war criminals would have diplomatic consequences.26 At the same time, British and American media published a wave of reports about Nazis fleeing to Argentina. This was the situation that caused the Argentinian government to issue oral assurance that the country would not grant asylum to war criminals. With that statement, Buenos Aires hoped to improve US-Argentinian relations, which had hit an all-time low. The Ramírez regime finally gave into demands to break off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers on 26 January 1944, but a number of Argentinian military men viewed this step as an unforgiveable capitulation to the US and called for Ramírez to step down. That March, a new government under Edelmiro Farrell was installed, but the State Department considered it ‘Axis-friendly’ as well. As a result, Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Argentina and called on other governments to refuse to acknowledge the regime. The Farrell government, which was largely isolated diplomatically, hoped that its public promise not to accept any war criminals would lead to a change of heart abroad. Those hopes were disappointed. Roosevelt declared that Argentina was still suspected of trying to infect the western hemisphere 23 Collado-Seidel, Angst, pp. 151-165; Eizenstat and Slany, Efforts, chapters 1 and 2. 24 Newton, Menace, p. 352; Rout and Bratzel, ‘Jürges’, pp. 618-620. 25 Eizenstat and Slany, Efforts, chapter 2. 26 New York Times, 29 September 1944.

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with ‘Nazi fascism’, and the State Department maintained sanctions against the country.27 Nonetheless, in late November 1944, Secretary of State Hull, one of the main supporters of the hard-line approach to Argentina, was forced to retire for health reasons. His successor Edward Stettinus named Nelson Rockefeller as the new director of the State Department’s Division of Latin American Affairs. Rockefeller was part of a previously overshadowed group within the State Department that called for more moderate policies toward Argentina.28 The change of course he began to initiate garnered support from business circles and the Pentagon. The former feared that further sanctions would drive an important market into British hands, while the Defence Department planned to arm all of Latin America with unified weapon systems at the end of the Second World War as a way of cushioning the impact of the imminent cessation of hostilities on the armaments industry.29 The Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in February and March 1945 in Mexico City was to create a new basis for US-Argentinian relations. Argentina was not invited, but relieving the tensions between the two countries was part of the conference agenda. That, however, was not all the US government wanted to achieve at the conference. Washington sought to extend all the resolutions from the Bretton Woods Conference relevant for the western hemisphere to Latin America, including those about war criminals and Nazi capital. The latter was the particular responsibility of the Department of the Treasury under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who shared Hull’s alarmist interpretation of Argentinian neutrality. Morgenthau remained convinced that Farrell’s regime represented a danger to the western hemisphere. In September 1944, a group of Treasury employees carried out a series of investigations in Spain as part of Operation Safehaven and determined that the situation there allowed for the possibility of Germany transferring money to Argentina. That finding together with Argentina’s importance for the security of the western hemisphere led to the conclusion that in many respects Argentina was ‘the most critical Safehaven country’. In February 1945, Morgenthau approached the State Department, requesting that the Safehaven investigations be extended to Argentina and writing: ‘More recent reports indicate clearly that Argentina is not only a likely refuge for Nazi criminals but also has been and still is the focal point of Nazi financial and economic activity in this hemisphere’.30 27 Eizenstat and Slany, Allied Relations, pp. 7 ff.; New York Times, 30 Septermber 1944. 28 On the internal conflicts over policy toward Argentina, see Woods, Foreign Policy. 29 MacDonald, Intervention, p. 384; MacDonald, ‘Braden’, p. 138. 30 Cited in Eizenstat and Slany, Allied Relations, p. 9.

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Hunt for Nazis

But the State Department wasn’t prepared to endanger the nascent process of rapprochement by further encroaching upon Argentinian sovereignty and dismissed Morgenthau’s suggestion.31 The Washington diplomats didn’t want to offend the other Latin American nations by insisting that one of them tolerate international investigations on its territory. Nonetheless, the danger of National Socialist economic activity in South America was judged to be so acute that the American government refused to back off its demands that the Bretton Woods resolutions be implemented. For that reason, the Mexico City Conference passed a resolution in March that every country, each according to its own laws, should treat Nazi assets so as to hinder any revival of the National Socialist and fascist ideologies. ‘The Axis powers’, read section VII of the Conference’s final act, ‘although they realize they have lost the war, nevertheless hope to win the peace by reconstructing their centres of influence throughout the world, by disseminating their destructive ideology and by creating discontent and discord among the American Republics’.32 Two other resolutions can be read in conjunction with this perceived threat. They recommended that Latin American countries refuse entry to or turn over to the United Nations all war criminals and all groups that could represent a danger to the independence of countries in the Americas. The Roosevelt government still considered the Nazi regime’s greatest crime to be the waging of a war of aggression, and the picture of war criminals in the conference’s final act reflects this. They were defined as people who ‘have committed heinous crimes in violation of the laws of war, of existing treaties, of the rules of International Law, of the penal codes of civilized nations, and of the concepts of civilized life’.33 The Americans feared that war criminals would continue to threaten the community of nations and international peace. After the conference, James Byrnes, who had succeeded Stettinus as Secretary of State, wrote: The United Nations have perceived cause for anxiety in the possible flight of Axis capital for the use of war criminals and other dangerous persons and other Axis manipulation of assets located abroad to the detriment of both the peace and security of the post-war world and the welfare of the country in which such assets were located.34 31 Ibidem, pp. 8 ff. 32 Resolución 7 del Acta Final de la Conferencia Interamericana, in AMREC, accessed 4 January 2011, http://archivo.cancilleria.gov.ar/documentos_noticias/octubre_09/actachapultepec.pdf. 33 Ibidem; see also Resolución 42. 34 Cited in Eizenstat and Slany, Efforts, Kapitel 2 C.

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There was considerable tension between Washington’s two express aims for the Mexico City conference: to prevent a Fourth Reich and achieve rapprochement with Argentina, a country which high-ranking officials in the State and Treasury Departments and the liberal press still considered a fascist hotspot. Such conflicts of interests were likely what made Stettinus and Rockefeller, despite their support for rapprochement, contact Spruille Braden immediately after the conference and ask him to take up the onceagain vacant post of US ambassador to Argentina. Braden’s crusade against Peronism Braden was one of the most fervent advocates of going after German companies in Latin America. He himself had spent years as an entrepreneur in Chile before becoming a diplomat under Cordell Hull, and this experience influenced how he viewed the world. For example, he was convinced that the outcome of the First World War had hinged upon copper mined in Chile by his father’s companies. In similar fashion, he probably overestimated the significance of German companies in Latin America. Along with his Latin American focus, he had learned during the First World War about how proclaimed lists worked, which is likely why he became such an avid supporter of them during the Second World War.35 Braden’s outlook on the world was conditioned by perceived threats and economic interests, which went hand in hand. He spoke with his superiors at the State Department, for instance, about his conviction that the post-war American economy would benefit from using the proclaimed list to destroy German business connections.36 Braden didn’t feel comfortable with the course charted by Rockefeller and thus was all the more surprised when he was offered the ambassadorship in Buenos Aires. He speculated that Roosevelt had personally seen to it that he was assigned the post and defined his task as decisively opposing the Argentinian threat.37 Given that the US President had indeed seen Argentina as a danger throughout the war, this assumption was quite plausible. Naming Braden might also have been a concession to the critics of US-Argentinian rapprochement in the State Department and to the liberal press, which had voiced its hostility toward Rockefeller’s policies.38 In any case, Braden’s 35 Braden, Diplomats, pp. 49 ff. and 57-60. 36 Friedman, Neighbors, pp. 87 ff. 37 Braden, Diplomats, p. 319. 38 MacDonald, ‘Braden’, p. 139.

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appointment reflected the fact that despite a change of course at the State Department, Argentina continued to be seen as a threat to the western hemisphere. Although Argentina had not taken part in the Mexico City Conference, the Farrell government had pledged to abide by the conference’s resolutions. On 27 March 1945, Argentina declared war on the Axis powers, and immediately thereafter the government declared that it was confiscating the assets of German firms.39 With that, the conditions for a resumption of diplomatic relations between Argentina and the US were all fulfilled, and in May, Braden moved into his new offices in Buenos Aires. As he saw it, his main job was to ensure that Argentina made good on its word. Only after it became apparent that Argentina was fully cooperating with the US in making the Mexico City resolutions reality, was Braden willing to grant Argentina’s wish to import industrial and military hardware. But he continued to be confrontational, telling American reporters ‘We’re going to ask for plenty and keep on asking […] because we might bring things to an issue.’ Even though this policy ran contrary to the interests of American industrialists and the Pentagon, Braden enjoyed the support of the new Secretary of State James Byrnes. By contrast, Rockefeller, who had pursued policies of rapprochement together with Stettinius, lost influence. The American press was also on Braden’s side, with newspapers welcoming his battle against ‘fascist infiltration’. 40 Braden did not just act confrontationally on the implementation of the Mexico City Conference resolutions. He also took on the Argentinian regime head to head over the country’s opposition. He maintained highly visible contacts with opposition politicians in Argentina and repeatedly compared the situation in the country with Franco’s Spain. That made him a star among the Argentinian opposition, which had mistrusted Rockefeller’s policies. Now they had found someone willing to listen to their contention that Argentina was ruled by the same sort of fascism that had just been defeated in Europe. 41 Farrell and his ministers, who desperately needed to improve US relations to bolster the Argentinian economy and gain access to arms, not only had to grit their teeth and tolerate Braden. They also had to accede to his demands. Consequently, the government worked together with US authorities to track down enemy assets, 42 and in September Buenos 39 40 41 42

Eizenstat and Slany, Allied Relations, p. 9. MacDonald, ‘Braden’, pp. 139-143, quotation on p. 140; Braden, Diplomats, pp. 323-328. Ibidem; Frank, Perón, pp. 57-63. Eizenstat and Slany, Allied Relations, pp. 9 ff.; Kroyer, Vermögen, pp. 43-64.

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Aires issued a statement reiterating that it would not offer asylum to war criminals and their accomplices. 43 But the government’s efforts were in vain. Braden would not be disabused of his view that Farrell’s regime was an ally of the National Socialists. His distrust was stoked by the rumours that swirled among opposition figures and émigrés who had been persecuted by the National Socialists. In August, when two German submarines surfaced on the Argentinian coast and surrendered, people immediately voiced suspicions, drawing from rumours recently in circulation, that the U-Boats were smuggling Nazi assets and Nazi functionaries into Argentina. Braden believed these allegations. 44 He was rewarded for his mistrust. In August, after Rockefeller’s resignation, Byrnes nominated Braden to become the next director of the State Department’s Latin America Division. But at his Senate confirmation hearings in mid-October, it quickly became apparent that opponents of his hard-line policies had mobilized the majority of senators against him. Although Braden distanced himself from the economic and military sanctions he had previously supported, his confirmation was postponed. Meanwhile the Argentinian government called for elections. None other than Juan Domingo Perón – the Farrell regime’s War and Labour Minister who, in Braden’s eyes, was a main ally of the Nazis – was considered the frontrunner for the office of president. Braden had to do something, and he charged a subordinate at the State Department, who likewise believed in the idea of the ‘Argentinian threat’, with combing the archives of the Third Reich and the interrogations of German diplomats for evidence of connections between Nazis and Argentinian politicians. If such connections could have been proven, Braden would have been able to counter his critics and undermine Perón’s campaign. 45 It wasn’t nearly as easy to find evidence as Braden had imagined, and there was no indication of any direct connection between Perón and leading National Socialists. Nonetheless, the Argentinian opposition urged Braden to make the results of his subordinate’s research known. In mid-February 1946, just before the election, the so-called Blue Book was published in several Argentinian newspapers.46 It accused the Argentinian government of having supported the Nazis economically and with intelligence, and of having worked, with Nazi help, to spread fascism in South America in the first half 43 Newton, Menace, p. 374. 44 Braden, Diplomats, p. 357; Klich and Buchrucker, ‘Fin’, pp. 252-255. 45 MacDonald, ‘Braden’, pp. 143-151; Braden, Diplomats, pp. 356 ff. 46 Frank, Perón, pp. 99-108; Gravil, ‘Denigration’, pp. 100 ff.

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of the 1940s. The report also contended that the Argentinian government had never broken with German fascism and that the measures as of 1945 to get the state’s hands on enemy assets, aimed at preventing the fascist infiltration in the sense of the Mexico City Conference, had been completely ineffectual. Argentina, the Blue Book concluded, remained a danger: In Argentina the Germans have constructed a complete duplicate of the economic structure for war which they had in Germany. They possess today in Argentina the economic organization – industrial, commercial and agricultural – which they need to provide a base for the reconstitution of German aggressive power during the period when the homeland is still occupied.47

The Blue Book failed to achieve the desired effect. Perón won the election, and Braden didn’t succeed in convincing the US government that Argentina did indeed represent a threat. On the contrary, Braden’s successor in Buenos Aires, George Messersmith, returned to a policy of rapprochement culminating in Truman’s announcement in June 1947 that the Argentinian-American relationship had been restored. 48 Still, the conflict between Argentina and the US in the 1940s, which reached its zenith with the Blue Book, established an extremely potent nightmare scenario. Fears that Nazis could set up a Fourth Reich in Argentina and once again challenge for global domination made the anticipated flight of war criminals seem particularly ominous. While conspiracy theories of this kind lost their influence on US policy toward South America after Braden’s resignation, the Argentinian opposition, which had worked together with the State Department to create such conspiracy theories, now had to deal with an Argentinian president they suspected as being one of the main collaborators with the National Socialists. For the Argentinian opposition, the question of whether Nazis were entering the country remained very relevant.

2

Nazi Flight: From Anticipation to Reality

The radical nature of the shift in US government policy toward Argentina can be gauged by its attitudes toward emigration. At the 1945 Mexico City Conference, the threat presented by migrants had been in the foreground. But the shear incalculable mass of refugees in Europe quickly made it clear 47 Department of State, Consultation, quotation on p. 57. 48 Trask, ‘Messersmith’, pp. 79-87.

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that the Allies had to rely on the willingness of South American countries to accept displaced persons (DPs). In August 1946, representatives of the United Nations’ International Refugee Organization (IRO) met with diplomats from various South American states to investigate the possibilities of resettling a significant number of DPs on the continent. 49 Argentina agreed to the number of DPs the IRO envisioned. The Perón government was aiming to become more independent economically and thought to achieve this by assisting Argentina’s industrialization. But it needed experts.50 Shortly after the discussions with representatives of refugee organizations, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry informed the US embassy that Buenos Aires was willing to admit German, Austrian, and Hungarian citizens. To dispel any suspicions that this was a way of offering refuge to unrepentant Nazis, the ministry requested that the would-be immigrants be given documents proving that they were harmless. The American embassy treated this request as a welcome signal that Argentina was willing to cooperate on the immigration issue and abide by the Mexico City Conference resolutions. Yet in its answer, the State Department drew attention to the fact that Washington could only check immigrants from places under American jurisdiction. It recommended that the Argentinian government contact the various nations of Europe separately. There was no mention of concrete demands and strict monitoring as had been the case during Braden’s tenure as ambassador. British authorities responded in similar fashion.51 Even when secret service reports seemed to confirm the scenario of Nazi inf iltration that had dominated US foreign policy for so long, the State Department maintained its new-found calm. In late September 1946, it informed the Argentinian Foreign Ministry about information that had just arrived from Europe: This information, subsequently confirmed in large measure, indicates that there exists a concerted plan to arrange the clandestine departure from Spain and entry into Argentina of former German agents. It appears that it is becoming increasingly difficult for such German agents in Spain to remain concealed and that, as a consequence, some 150 to 200 Germans are expected to come to Argentina under false identity.52 49 Senkman, ‘Relaciones’, pp. 98 ff. 50 Meding, Flucht, pp. 46-48. 51 Senkman, ‘Relaciones’, pp. 99 ff. 52 Note Verbale of the Embassy of the United States, Buenos Aires, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship, 26 September 1946, in AT, ABACN 001-003.

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One of the agents, the Frenchman Charles Lescat, the source reported, had been sent from Germany to Spain with a large sum of money in 1944 to finance the German resistance to the Allies. Now that money was on its way to Argentina.53 Yet once again, the State Department left the decision about how to act up to Argentina. Although some of the agents were already in the country, the Perón government was put under no pressure to deport them.54 When Lescat finally did show up in Buenos Aries in 1947, Argentinian authorities failed to reach a deportation agreement with France, but the State Department again didn’t apply any pressure.55 There were several reasons for the State Department’s reluctance to get involved. For starters, Braden’s successor Messersmith wanted to improve Argentinian-American relations. He pled for the need to enlist Argentina for the United States in view of the incipient Cold War.56 Moreover, the Allies depended on Argentina’s assistance to deal with the refugee crisis in Europe. The idea was to get the country, traditionally a nation of immigrants, to join the IRO and agree to accept a set number of migrants. There were arguments within Argentina against joining the organization, chiefly concerning control over immigration and loss of national sovereignty, which the IRO was at pains to counter. Argentina’s ambassador in Washington received assurances of America’s conviction that every nation should be allowed complete freedom to determine its immigration policy and find solutions in its own interest. In view of the urgency of the DP crisis, all scruples about Argentina had to take a back seat. This was made clear in a communiqué to the American ambassador in Buenos Aires ahead of a vote in the Argentinian Congress: ‘Request you ensure cordial relations with Argentine representatives and defer any discriminatory measures against Argentine repatriation and immigration missions pending establishment of IRO’.57 Argentinian help for fugitives While the United States was signalling restraint on the controversial issue of immigration, the Perón government began to try to influence migration from Europe. An Argentinian delegation already travelled to Italy in late 1946. Its task was to negotiate with the Italian government about Argentina 53 Memorandum on Charles Lescat, in ibidem, ABACN 007. 54 Note Verbale of the Embassy of the United States, Buenos Aires, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship, 26 September 1946, in ibidem, ABACN 003. 55 Warszawski, ed., Testimonio II, pp. 15 ff. 56 Trask, ‘Messersmith’, p. 83. 57 Senkman, ‘Relaciones’, pp. 90 ff. and 99-102, quotation on p. 102.

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taking in Italian refugees. But above all, though, the delegation accepted travel applications from all over Europe.58 There were many and at times contradictory ideas among various authorities about how to distinguish between desirable and undesirable aliens as people began to leave Europe via Italy.59 The arch-conservative, anti-Semitic director of the Argentinian immigration authority, Santiago Peralta, feared that his country would be infiltrated by Communists and Jews. To prevent this, he installed like-minded confidantes to evaluate the immigrants. One of them was Branko Benzon, who arrived in March 1947 from Madrid. The former Croatian ambassador in Berlin was well-poised strategically. Many of the representatives and functionaries of the fascist Ustaša regime had fled to Italy, where they had received assistance and protection from the Catholic Church. Benzon helped them even further on their way to Argentina. Peralta’s successor, Pablo Diana, who shared his predecessors’ enmities, continued and expanded this system of ‘trusted advisors’.60 Benzon wasn’t the only immigrant with ties to the fascist regimes of Europe who would have an influence on Argentina’s migrant policies. Over the course of 1947, a group of immigrants succeeded in establishing contact with the Perón government and making themselves heard. Time was of the essence. Post-war European governments were beginning to track down the first fugitives from justice and present Buenos Aires with extradition requests. One prominent fugitive was Pierre Daye, a Belgian journalist and member of the far-right Rexist Party, who had agitated for the eradication of democracy and the establishment of a corporatist constitution. Like many of the representatives of this party, he had collaborated with the Nazis, vehemently arguing for his views in the magazine Nouveau Journal. After the war, he fled to Spain, as Belgium began to prosecute collaborators who had worked together with the German occupiers and defended their policies. Belgian military courts were allowed to bring in people who had collaborated in writing with the Nazis. In total, almost 3000 people, including Daye, received death sentences.61 In mid-1947, several months after Daye had learned of his sentence, he left Spain for Argentina. He was greeted at the airport by the former Nazi agent Lescat, who by then was living inconspicuously in Buenos Aires.62 The two 58 Senkman, ‘Inmigración’, pp. 110-115; Meding, Flucht, p. 47. 59 Devoto, ‘Políticas’, pp. 54-60. 60 Declaración de Diana (Director General de Migraciones English translation?), 13 May 1949, printed in Gurevich, Testimonio I, p. 348; Goñi, Odessa, p. 121. 61 Conway, ‘Justice’. 62 Quattrochi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, p. 6.

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men knew one another from their activities in Europe. Daye was the Belgian correspondent of the French newspaper Je suis partout, for which Lescat had also worked. After the war, the French judicial system had brought charges against the magazine’s editors, who stood accused of aiding and abetting the enemy in their articles. As the publication’s final director, Lescat and several other employees had received the death penalty.63 As was the case in Belgium, journalistic activities were regarded as a full-fledged form of collaboration. As a result, a significant number of writers were convicted. Their trials were based on several articles in the French code of criminal law, some of which had been modified to fit the crime of collaboration but which mainly came from before the war.64 People like Lescat who were convicted on this basis were therefore not considered war criminals.65 The requests for Lescat’s extradition received by the Argentinian Foreign Ministry in early 1947 thus made no reference to the Mexico City Conference resolutions, in which Argentina had declared itself willing to hand over war criminals to prosecuting states. On the contrary, the verbal request by the French made it clear that the Lescat verdict referred to conventional French criminal law.66 The request contained Lescat’s correct address so that it was easy for Argentinian police to keep Lescat under observation. But in their eyes, there were formal reasons not to arrest him. In the ensuing bureaucratic back-and-forth, no official decision was made about the French request. Lescat died the following year.67 Even as the authorities were still negotiating about Lescat, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry received a second request. Daye had only just reached Argentina in June 1947, when the Belgian embassy began to lobby for his return. But unlike the Lescat case, they didn’t file a formal extradition request, instead referring to the Mexico City Conference resolutions. As a collaborator, Daye didn’t strictly fall into this category, which encompassed people who had violated international law and been party to Nazi crimes. But because there was no extradition agreement between Belgium and Argentina, the Belgian ambassador decided to go down that route.68 Pascal La Rosa, the director of foreign relations in the Argentinian Foreign Ministry, considered the request legitimate. He recommended that Argentina either 63 Rubenstein, ‘French Intellectuals’, pp. 82 ff. 64 Rousso, ‘L’Èpuration’, pp. 207-210. 65 Moisel, Frankreich, p. 8. 66 Embajada de Francia to Bramuglia (Minister of RREEyC), 20 January 1947, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 58 ff. 67 Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 15 ff. 68 Quattrocchi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, p. 6.

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hand Daye over straight away to Belgian authorities or wait for another request by the embassy.69 Things, however, wouldn’t get that far. Before La Rosa’s recommendations could be put into practice, the Foreign Ministry changed the way in which it interpreted the Mexico City Conference resolutions. This became clear in how Argentina dealt with a request from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav government had not failed to take note of the fact that Ustaša members were emigrating to Argentina. In a public communiqué in January 1947, the country had already protested against the Vatican helping such criminals leave for South America.70 Between August and September 1947, Belgrade addressed several communiqués to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry and demanded that six people be handed over to answer for their crimes in front of Yugoslav courts. In doing so, like the Belgians before, Yugoslavia invoked the resolutions of the Mexico City Conference. In his evaluation of Yugoslavia’s extradition requests, written around a month after his memo on the Belgian request, La Rosa arrived at completely new conclusions.71 He argued that the sixth Mexico City resolution, concerning war criminals, contained only recommendations and not binding strictures. Thus it didn’t relieve Argentina of the responsibility to consult its own laws. La Rosa didn’t discuss Argentinian law in any depth when developing his main argument. Nonetheless he brusquely concluded: If you wanted to take the analysis to the extreme, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince yourself that the war crimes were simply misdemeanours with a political character. In any case, this is a figure who is connected with political crimes, but we could never maintain that this was about a crass crime. According to Argentinean law, extradition is only possible in cases of violations of civil law. Concerning matters of political crimes or crimes occurring within a political context, extradition is not permitted.72

In other words, because the resolution of the Mexico City Conference could not be reconciled with Argentinian law, they were null and void. La Rosa seemed to sense that this was not a persuasive argument. Regardless of 69 Memorandum de La Rosa (Director del Departamento de RREE del MREC), 9 October 1947, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 63-65. 70 New York Times, 1 Febuary 1947. 71 Warszawski, Testimonio II, p. 19. 72 Here and in the following: La Rosa (Director del Departamento de RREE del MREC) to Desmarás (Subsecretario Político, MREC), 16 November 1947, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 70-76, quotations pp. 72 ff. and p. 75.

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whether a case concerned political criminal acts or not, he continued, extradition was out of the question because Yugoslavia had not followed the procedure set by Argentinian law of including an arrest warrant or legal verdict. This argument treated extradition requests on the basis of the Mexico City Conference resolutions and regular extradition procedures as equivalents. As superficially as La Rosa may have treated the question of the political nature of war crimes, his arguments did highlight the weaknesses of the Mexico City Conference resolution. To avoid giving the impression that it was disregarding the sovereignty of Latin American countries, the US delegation had not explicitly made the resolutions binding. Instead it was up to the individual signees to pass laws concerning the extradition of war criminals. The Mexico City agreement alone was not a sufficient legal basis for extraditing anyone.73 Because Argentina had neglected to pass such laws, an extradition based on the resolutions could be legally challenged. But La Rosa didn’t just cite legal qualms. He explicitly devoted the second half of his evaluation to ‘political considerations’, citing a general assembly of the United Nations at which Yugoslavia had complained about the Western Allies’ unwillingness to extradite war criminals.74 The American delegation had answered that Yugoslavia was only interested in getting its hands on political dissidents. La Rosa interpreted this prominent document as confirmation for his view that the pursuit of war criminals was a political and not a legal matter. ‘The Western powers unanimously want to distance themselves from desires of the Soviet bloc’, La Rosa wrote. ‘The other side of the coin is not the punishment of war criminals, but support for the political repression and elimination of people and ideas that resist countries being subjugated by the Soviet Union’. Argentina immediately informed Yugoslavia that its request had been rejected, although without explaining the reasons. The rejection merely pointed out that the requests didn’t conform to Argentinian legal requirements.75 Despite being rebuffed, the Yugoslav government gave the Argentinian Foreign Ministry a list of alleged war criminals present in the country.76 That prompted Argentinian authorities to unmistakably clarify why the fugitives could not be extradited. The Yugoslav ambassador didn’t agree with La Rosa’s 73 Resolución 6 del Acta Final de la Conferencia Interamericana, in AMREC, accessed 4 January 2011, http://archivo.cancilleria.gov.ar/documentos_noticias/octubre_09/actachapultepec.pdf. 74 New York Times, 11 October 1947. 75 Desmarás (Subsecretario Político, MREC) to Legación de Yugoslavia, 15 November 1947, in AT, ABAAA, 011. 76 See procedures in: AT, Caja Croatas, Segundo Sobre.

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interpretation of the legal situation. The extradition of war criminals, he argued was a duty imposed by international treaties, while the extradition of people wanted for violations of the regular criminal code was governed by international law. But the ambassador’s objections were fruitless.77 Instead, other countries also had extradition requests rejected. In May 1948, Czechoslovakian representatives approached the Argentinian Foreign Ministry asking for Ján Ďurčanský to be handed over.78 Like Lescat and Daye, Ďurčanský had worked as a journalist and was the editor-in-chief of a Slovakian nationalist magazine that had advocated anti-Semitic and anti-Communist positions. Unlike his French-speaking colleagues, he had been directly involved in committing National Socialist crimes. In 1944, as a member of the Hlinka Guard, he had participated in the brutal reprisals after the anti-Nazi Slovak national uprising.79 Since La Rosa had already come out against the extradition of war criminals, the answer to the Czechoslovak request didn’t have to put forward any further arguments. The political division of the Foreign Ministry, which was responsible for communicating the Argentinian government’s response, was simply informed that an identical request by the Yugoslav embassy had been denied and that the answer to Czechoslovakia should use the same reasoning.80 Although La Rosa’s evaluation was directed against an Eastern European state and cited resistance by the Western Allies to the newly formed eastern bloc, it also had consequences for the Western powers. The Argentinian Foreign Ministry’s classification of war crimes as political matters was tantamount to a refusal to provide legal help pursuing war criminals. On the other hand, it emasculated the sixth resolution of the Mexico City Conference, which the United States had conceived as a way of preventing war criminals from fleeing. As a legal instrument, it ceased to exist. On the other hand, normal extradition channels were blocked insofar as European states classified the deeds of a given fugitive as war crimes. This legal category was useless when it came to Argentina. Belgian authorities were soon to find this out. In addition to Daye, numerous other Nazi collaborators, including several who had been condemned to death, managed to make their way to Argentina. In 1947 and 1948, Belgium issued a series of requests for the extradition of war criminals on the basis of 77 Pirc (Ambassador of Yugoslavia) to Desmarás (Subsecretario Político, MREC), 18 February 1948, in AT, Caja Croatas, MREC Exp. 174.699. 78 Kunosi (Ambassador of Tschechoslovakia) to Minister if RREEyC, 11 May 1948, in ibidem. 79 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 122 ff. 80 Vitione (Subdirector del Departamento de Relaciones Exteriores, MREC) to Subsecretario Político, 31 May 1948, in AT, Caja Croatas, MREC Exp. 174.699.

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the Mexico City Conference resolutions. But Argentinian officials rejected them all using the same justification.81 La Rosa must have been aware of the reach of his precedent-setting decision. For that reason, his superficial argumentation raises questions. In the middle of a phase of Argentinian-American rapprochement, the decision made it clear that the Perón government was unwilling to implement United States’ recommendations from the Mexico City Conference resolutions, even though signing up to those resolutions had been a trust-building measure on Argentina’s part. La Rosa’s decision had the potential to strain Argentina’s relations with other Western nations as well. Nonetheless, La Rosa refused to thoroughly explicate his main argument that war crimes were political. Instead, he confined himself to saying that it wouldn’t be difficult to back up this idea, ‘if you wanted to take the analysis to the extreme’. It seems as though he assumed that he would not have to justify his considerations to his own government. How could it happen that, within the space of only a month, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry so radically re-evaluated the resolutions of the Mexico City Conference? The scant records kept at the ministry don’t allow us to answer this question. We cannot rule out that Daye, who quickly established contact with individuals in public life, had a hand in this process. No sooner had Daye arrived than Mario Amadeo, an international law expert, was at his side.82 Amadeo’s interest in the journalist, newly arrived from Europe, whose writings were well known in Argentina, must have been primarily ideological. Amadeo was part of a circle of intellectuals who wanted to create an authoritarian state led by an elite. The fascist dictatorships of Europe were their role models.83 Until 1945, Amadeo had worked in the Foreign Ministry, among other things as the director of the political division. He resigned in protest when Argentina declared war on the Axis powers.84 It’s not improbable that, with Daye having got wind of the Belgian extradition request, Amadeo used his Foreign Ministry contacts to prevent the journalist from being deported. At the same time, it’s also possible that the reinterpretation of the Mexico City Conference was ordered from higher up. In later years, Perón repeatedly spoke of his belief that the war crimes trials in Europe were illegal. He once said during his Spanish exile: ‘What happened back then in Nuremberg was in my eyes a crying shame and an unhappy lesson for humanity […] How 81 Quattrocchi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, pp. 6 and 19-28. 82 Ibidem, p. 6; Goñi, Odessa, pp. 167-170. 83 Rein, Argentina, p. 145. 84 Amadeo, Ayer, pp. 21-24.

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often during my reign did I speak out against Nuremberg, which was a huge monstrosity and one for which history will never forgive us’.85 Perón’s contact with fugitive Nazi collaborators helps us explain his opinion about the Nuremberg Trials. Three weeks after La Rosa’s second evaluation put a stop to the extradition of fugitives, there was a meeting between Perón and Daye, who had joined forces with émigrés of various nationalities. They discussed alternatives to American liberal capitalism and communism and pondered how to enable more people who shared Daye’s fate to flee Europe. Perón learned from a confidante about the existence of this fugitive circle and invited members for talks in his palace on two consecutive days. Along with Daye, the participants included former Romanian ambassador to Spain, Radu Ghenea, Victor de la Serna, a member of the Spanish volunteer Blue Division on the Eastern Front, and a German-Argentinian who had fought with the Reich but whose name Daye never revealed. A missive to the president written after the conclusion of the meeting states: The authors of this note […] wish to express their absolute support for the policies of the third position he extensively explained to them. They declare their willingness to serve this political line unconditionally both domestically, insofar as they are able, and internationally, where they have a great deal of experience in Europe and in the fight against communism.86

The doctrine Perón had described since 1947 as his ‘third position’ brought him together with the fugitive representatives of the defeated revolutionary right wing. At least as far as common enemies were concerned, there was a lot of convergence. Both Perón and the Europeans saw themselves as opposed to American-style capitalism and communism. Perón wrote: The capitalist regime exploited its property and is thus at fault for communism because it provided the latter with its raison d’être. Without the excessive exploitation of the old capitalist system, communism would have never come about. Therefore it is the cause, and communism is the effect. In order to suppress the effect, you have to suppress the cause.87 85 Cited in Luca de Tena, Perón, pp. 85 ff. See also Meding, Flucht, pp. 158 ff. 86 Cited in Quattrocchi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, p. 11. 87 Subsecretaría de Informaciones, ed., Tercera posición, p. 49.

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Perón saw his state doctrine as overcoming both of these extremes because it encouraged solidarity between people of the basis of a national state identity and because it aimed at renewing Argentinian society. It was no accident that Perón’s ideas sounded like the ideas of the revolutionary right wing in Europe. Perón had intensely studied Italian fascism.88 His need to distance himself from capitalism was rooted in the tensions between America and Argentina in the preceding years. The massive pressure the US put on Argentina during the war must have helped convince him that capitalism as well as communism was expansionist and sought to subjugate all other states: ‘Did all of this, communism and political imperialism, originate in economic imperialism or with people who served this system? Yes, for both pursue the same goal, exploiting the working class, maybe for different motivations, but with the same methods’.89 Perón wanted to protect workers from the imperialistic designs of both systems by strengthening national sovereignty.90 Even after the war, this principle was not to be called into question. ‘We are of the opinion that victory doesn’t bestow any rights’, Perón remarked, ‘and that the people should be sacred to all peoples.’91 Perón’s statements about the Nuremberg trials have to be understood against this ideological backdrop. In his eyes, the trials aimed not at prosecuting inhuman crimes but at allowing a victorious alliance of capitalists and communists to take retribution against political forces they both hated and to illegitimately encroach upon the sovereignty of a people. That explains why Perón would seek contact with people who had been close to the fascist states of Europe. He saw them as victims of capitalist and communist imperialism as well as experienced allies in the struggle against these two systems’ drive for hegemony. Such ideological commonalities encouraged Perón to shape his immigration policies to include fugitives from justice. In August 1948, several months after the meeting in the presidential palace and at Perón’s express wish, the Sociedad Argentina de Recepción de Europeos (SARE) was founded. Its goal was to provide people who had been or could expect to be convicted of war crimes in Europe with visas and money allowing them to come to Argentina. Sympathy wasn’t Perón’s only motivation. He considered the fugitives with experience fighting communism and the Americans especially capable of evaluating immigrants coming from Europe. Daye wrote in his diary: 88 Finchelstein, Argentina, pp. 97-129; Finchelstein, Fascism, pp. 163-168. 89 Subsecretaría de Informaciones, Tercera posición, p. 49. 90 Nazar, Doctrina, p. 88. 91 Subsecretaría de Informaciones, Tercera posición, p. 35.

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The government of this country didn’t hesitate to show us understanding based on common humanity. It officially recognized us, and thanks to their generosity as well as their desire for selective immigration, it allowed us to save thousands of our friends and many strangers, of whom many escaped conviction and execution, as I did, without ceasing to be good, honourable people.92

SARE included members from Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, Hungary, France, Belgium, and Italy. It had at its disposal a guest house, where new arrivals could stay, and it found people jobs. But most importantly the immigration off ice gave SARE permission to issue entry permits even to people who were travelling under false identities and didn’t have the required travel documents.93 Thanks to their good contacts in the government with its plans to recruit scientists from overseas, those lobbying for the fugitives could expand their scope of action to Europe. A part of Perón’s industrialization project was to modernize the country’s military. The experience of the Second World War, during which Argentina’s competitor to the north, Brazil, had been armed with American weapons while Argentina was stripped of any chance to import weapons of its own, had convinced Perón to expand the country’s own armaments industry. One problem with this initiative was drastic shortage of experts, which could be solved by exploiting the arms specialists who were prohibited from working in Germany.94 The idea of getting a German to do the recruiting was obvious, and Perón could count on Rudolf Freude, the head of the Argentinian secret service, to do the recruiting. Perón had close ties to Freude’s family. Rudolf’s father, Ludwig Freude, was a major entrepreneur in Argentina. As such he had attracted the suspicious eye of the United States during the Second World War. The State Department had repeatedly requested his extradition – to no avail. In the Blue Book, Braden had stylized Freude into the paradigm of a German entrepreneur who had used his business activities and influence in South America to infiltrate the western hemisphere. Braden viewed Freude’s close ties to Perón with particular distrust.95 In October 1945, Freude had not only hidden the then Argentinian Vice President in his summer house 92 Cited in Quattrocchi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, p. 8. 93 Ibidem, pp. 8-11; Schneppen, Vierte Reich, pp. 189-191. 94 Meding, Flucht, pp. 46-48; Potash and Rodriguez, ‘Empleo’; Stanley, Rüstungsmodernisierung, pp. 100-120. 95 Department of State, ed., Consultation, pp. 58-60.

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when he faced arrest, he had also given Perón a helping hand financially during the election. After the vote, Perón had repaid the favour by charging Ludwig Freude’s won with establishing the Argentinian intelligence service.96 In this capacity, Rudolf Freude was involved in shaping Argentinian immigration policy and came into contact with representatives of the fugitives’ lobby,97 and he seems to have been receptive to this group’s concerns. At the very least, he kept in close touch with Daye, and when the latter’s circle composed its declaration of loyalty after its meeting with Perón, Freude ensured that this missive indeed ended up in the president’s hands. In addition, a letter by Daye suggests that Freude, if in fact not Perón himself, gave SARE the funds it needed to operate.98 Above all else, though, Freude was responsible for organizing the planned recruitment of German scientists.99 The man assigned to carry out that recruitment in Europe was Carlos Fuldner. He could look back on a long and winding career in the Third Reich. Born in Argentina, he joined the SS in 1932, where he was promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. Four years later, though, following accusations of corruption and embezzling SS money, he was booted out of that organization. He spent five months in jail and was ultimately barred from the Nazi Party itself. Not much is known about the years that followed, but despite being demoted, Fuldner never broke with National Socialism. On the contrary, there are indications that he worked during the war as an interpreter for Franco’s Blue Division. Shortly before the end of the war, he went to Spain. It was perhaps during his time there that he met Daye, Ghenea, and de la Serna.100 In mid-1947, Fuldner made his way to Argentina, where he was soon given the task by Freude’s intelligence service of recruiting German scientists from Europe. The importance of this enterprise for the Argentinian government was apparent in the fact that in late 1947, Perón held four meetings at which he personally gave Fuldner instructions for his trip. Pablo Diana, Rudolf Freude, and the director of Argentina’s national bank all attended the meetings. At one of them, the leading heads of the fugitives’ lobby – Benzon, Daye, Ghenea, and de la Serna – also participated. We do not know why 96 Newton, Menace, pp. 368-370; Meding, Flucht, p. 54. 97 Declaración de Carlos Fuldners, 18 August 1949 – 12 September 1949, printed in Gurevich, Testimonio I, p. 409. 98 Quattrocchi-Woisson, ‘Colaboradores’, pp. 9 and 11. 99 Gurevich, Testimonio I, pp. 493 ff. 100 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 81-86; Collado-Seidel, Refugio, pp. 128 ff.

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they were invited and what they contributed to Fuldner’s mission, but their presence shows the significance Perón attached to their opinions on questions related to immigration.101 By December, Fuldner was already on his way back to Europe. Together with the Argentinian consulate general in Genoa, where the delegation for promoting immigration from Europe had their headquarters, he worked on smuggling people from the continent. Very crucial to him was the contact with the network of people helping the fugitives, which consisted to a great extent of former inmates of Allied internment camps. They assisted the fugitives in crossing the Alps. But merely making it across that mountain range by no means ensured that people would get to Argentina. Fuldner made use of the assistance from the Catholic Church, which enjoyed the trust of the Red Cross. This trust was key in obtaining Red Cross passports for stateless DPs. Moreover, when it came to overcoming difficulties with Italian authorities, the word of a man of the cloth was often invaluable. The bishop of Rome, Alois Hudal, had begun helping fugitives from fascist countries early on, and thanks to his commitment, nothing stood in the way of further cooperation between the Argentinian consulate and the Catholic Church. Soon, Fuldner was a prominent figure among the Catholic helpers of the fugitives.102 The number of people who were recruited in this way for the Argentinian military was somewhere between 250 and 300.103 One of them was Erich Müller. In 1942, he had been in charge of Action Commando 12 which carried out the mass murder of Jews and fought partisans in Transnistria. After arriving in Argentina, he worked under the name Francisco Noelke as an adviser to the Argentinian military.104 It is impossible to say exactly how many of the Nazi criminals were recruited by the Argentinian armed forces because people commonly travelled under assumed names. It is also uncertain whether all Fuldner did was recruit military experts. Perón himself later asserted that the news of the Nuremberg Trials had led him to instruct Argentinian consulates to assist all fugitives from ‘victors’ justice’ to emigrate to Argentina. Perón said that a unit had been formed to save Germans threatened with the death penalty.105 But there’s no way to ascertain whether Perón was referring to Fuldner and his assistants. 101 Declaración de Carlos Fuldners, 18 August 1949– 12 September 1949, printed in Gurevich, ed., Testimonio I, p. 409. 102 Steinacher, Nazis, pp. 249-275. 103 Potash and Rodriguez, ‘Empleo’. 104 Jackisch and Mastromauro, ‘Identificación’, pp. 13 ff.; Meding, ‘Criminales’, p. 33. 105 Luca de Tena, Perón, p. 86.

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In addition to Erich Müller, two other cases directly connect Fuldner’s work with the flight of Nazi criminals. Gerhard Bohne, who played a leading role in carrying out the Nazi euthanasia programmes, later testified under interrogation: ‘I […] accidentally came into contact with an organization led by a Catholic clergyman that illegally brought specialists to Argentina. I went abroad with a group of airplane construction engineers including Professor Kurt Tank and Lieutenant General Adolf Galland’.106 In the case of Josef Schwammberger, who had been in charge of the Przemyśl ghetto and the Mielec labour camp, Fuldner’s assistance is proven by the entry application of the Argentinean travel company Vianord. Fuldner sometimes used this name to apply for immigration permits for those he recruited.107 Argentinian journalist Uki Goñi also points out that the immigration files on Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Ludolph von Alvensleben, and Erich Priebke were all begin in 1948, when Fuldner was in Europe.108 In Argentina, the European recruits, who normally didn’t speak a word of Spanish, were welcomed by August Siebrecht and put in contact with various Argentinian offices. During the war, Siebrecht had been in charge of German appliance manufacturer AEG’s Chilean subsidiary. In 1943, once Chile had broken off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers, he was taken from there and interned in a camp for members of the ‘enemy race’ in Texas. In 1950, he helped Fuldner found the energy company Capri – a firm charged by Perón with irrigation, dam building, and energy production – under the aegis of the Argentinian state energy company. Capri employed a number of scientists and technicians recruited from Europe as well as Nazi fugitives from justice with no special areas of expertise.109 The trust the fugitives from Europe enjoyed within the Perón government also created job opportunities beyond Capri. Giuselle Spinelli, the final labour minister of the Italian Social Republic, was named the state secretary in the Navy Ministry and supervised the construction of a naval base on Tierra del Fuego. From his final days in Italy he knew Josef Vötterl who had been responsible for the deportation of Jews there as the head of a border command centre. When the two men met up again in Buenos Aires, Vötterl was offered a job with the city’s harbour authority contingent if he pledged to work in the interests of Peronism. He declined, saying that he 106 Cited in Klee, Ärzte, p. 31; Meding, Flucht, p. 90; Goñi, Odessa, pp. 254-259. 107 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 260-264; Declaración de Carlos Fuldners, 18 August 1949 – 12 September 1949, printed in Gurevich, Testimonio I, p. 410. 108 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 126 ff. and 242-298; Stangneth, Eichmann, p. 377. 109 Meding, Flucht, pp. 214-219.

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no longer wished to be politically active. A short time later, the Argentinian intelligence service approached him with the prospect of employment at the rank of a colonel. Perón himself supposedly approved this offer personally. As Vötterl now learned, Argentinian authorities received information from the United States about émigrés. This had been part of the negotiations regarding DPs. But the information was not used in the sense of the Mexico City Conference resolutions to prevent war criminals from entering, but rather to enable anyone interested to get an idea about where the new arrivals might be useful. Nonetheless, Vötterl and the intelligence service never worked together. Thanks to Spinelli’s mediation, he ended up getting a job in a construction company.110 The Argentinian government’s treatment of Nazi criminals and collaborators shows clearly that the motivation for Perón’s creation of structures to make illegal immigration from Europe easier was not, as some historians argue, restricted to his desire for a ‘brain gain’. 111 His support for fugitives from justice was also ideologically motivated. This is shown by his statements about post-war European justice systems and his contacts within SARE. Peronism may have been selective about which ideas it adopted from European fascists and reinterpreted them for an Argentinian context.112 But Perón himself saw common ground between his and the fascists’ mutual animosity toward capitalism and communism. This commonality caused him to trust fugitives from justice and to include them in his immigration policies. He not only accepted the fact that he paved the way for criminals to evade justice. He actively approved of them doing so. Although there was considerable state assistance helping Nazi criminals to flee, fugitives also had plenty of other opportunities to abscond to South America. Family members were able to apply for entrance permission despite missing documents, thereby taking over the role of ‘confidential advisers’ to immigration authorities and people like Fuldner. For instance, Eduard Roschmann, the former commandant of the Riga ghetto, directly approached relatives of his wife who lived in Buenos Aires and asked them to send him the necessary documentations.113 Others chose to first enter neighbouring Paraguay and then continue on illegally to Argentina.114 110 Heidemann’s Interview with Josef Vötterl, Juli 1979, in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 111 Devoto, ‘Políticas’, pp. 32 ff.; Schneppen, Vierte Reich, pp. 197-201. 112 Finchelstein, Argentina, pp. 97-129; Finchelstein, Facism, pp. 163-168. 113 Schneppen, Roschmann, pp. 235-246. 114 Jackisch and Mastromauro, ‘Identificación’, pp. 10, 19, and 21.

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People who had cooperated with American authorities at the end of the Second World War also had another possibility open to them. One such person was Walter Schreiber, who as the commander of the Military Medical Academy in Berlin had been involved in deadly experiments on human beings. After the war, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets, before fleeing in 1948. A short time later, the Americans brought him to Texas where he began working at the School of Aviation Medicine in San Antonio. In 1951, after the New York Times began to report on his activities during the Third Reich, the US Air Force wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible. With permission from his employers, Schreiber went to Argentina, where his daughter was living.115 The numbers of people who fled in this way were rather insignificant, but they did include Klaus Barbie. After the war, he worked for the American intelligence service, and in 1951 when he was no longer needed, the Counter Intelligence Corps organized his flight to Argentina via Bolivia.116 Fugitives from justice in Brazil Argentina was one of the preferred destinations of those seeking to flee judicial accountability, but of course it wasn’t their only option. All the South American states had been called upon to accept DPs, and people involved in Nazi crimes mingled with them. And even if they didn’t succeed in obtaining that status, fugitives had plenty of chances to emigrate to various South American countries. Walther Rauff, for instance, got to Ecuador with the help of a Red Cross passport obtained by Hudal. Rauff had played a pivotal role in the design of the gas trucks with which SS Action Groups had murdered thousands of Jews.117 Two members of one of the action groups were able to emigrate to Paraguay amidst a group of ethnic Germans who were largely from Ukraine.118 Two Dutch men accused of collaborating with the Nazis also travelled with the group.119 Fugitive collaborators from Hungary usually preferred Peru.120 There is no research about fugitives from justice in other South American countries that would allow for the sort of precision statements we can make about Argentina, but there were certainly a number of similar cases of people taking flight to countries elsewhere. 115 Klich, ‘Ingreso’, pp. 404-415. 116 See amongst others US Department of Justice, Barbie, pp. 23-66 and 135-156. 117 Cüppers, Walther Rauff, pp. 109-144. 118 Kroeker (Oberschulze der Kolonie Volendam) to Botschaft der BRD in Paraguay, 16 February 1970, in Staatsarchiv München, Staatsanwaltschaften, 35 308/20. 119 Thiesen, Mennonite, pp. 206 ff. 120 Steinacher, Nazis, p. 134.

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High-ranking Nazi criminals and collaborators even made it to Brazil, even though it had worked closely together with the US during the Second World War and was the only South American country to send troops to the conflict, and even though it took great pains to abide by the Mexico City Conference resolutions. Brazil’s leaders were just as interested in attracting specialists as Perón was, but unlike the Argentinian leader, they made sure that their recruitment efforts didn’t damage their relations with the hegemonic power to the north by violating Allied orders. Instead of sending secret commandos to Europe, in August 1947 the Brazilian embassy in Washington officially asked to be allowed to acquire experts. In the aftermath, the Brazilian military mission in Berlin went looking for people and submitted a list of 59 candidates to the Americans. The reservation with which the Brazilian request was greeted by the Americans, makes it clear that, despite signals to Argentina that Washington wouldn’t get involved, the US viewed South American attempts to recruit specialists with great scepticism and wanted to keep them to a minimum. American military government checks of the list of names the Brazilians submitted revealed that five of the people concerned had entries at the Document Centre. That meant that they were required to go through de-Nazification proceedings before being allowed to emigrate. The United States also didn’t want to endanger the process of reconstruction in Europe. The Brazilian military mission was told that approval of the specialists’ applications to emigrate would only be granted because they represented such a small group. The military government didn’t want such approval to be seen as a precedent but rather only as a special favour toward a wartime ally.121 Brazilian recruitment measures were not what created the conditions allowing fugitives from justice in Europe to go underground. For example, Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner, the former commandants of the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps, exploited existing structures allowing Catholics in Italy to flee in order to obtain Red Cross documents. As was customary, thanks to the close cooperation with Argentinian authorities, they initially applied for passports to go to Argentina. But job opportunities in Syria intervened, and so it was only after a lengthy stay in the Middle East, that Wagner and Stangl arrived in Brazil in the early 1950s.122 Herbert Cukurs, a member of a Latvian commando that had assisted the Nazis in carrying out their policies of extermination in the Baltic countries, had a somewhat 121 Stanley, Rüstungsmodernisierung, pp. 100-103. 122 Steinacher, Nazis, pp. 276-278; Sereny, Abgrund, pp. 341 ff.

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easier time. As a refugee and a Latvian citizen, he was officially considered a DP and didn’t have to overcome any of the emigration restrictions German citizens did. He had already arrived in Brazil in 1946 as part of a regular contingent of DPS.123 The events that transpired there illustrate the clear differences in the willingness of the Brazilian and Argentinian authorities to hand over fugitives from justice to the courts. Just like the Nazi collaborators who had fled to Argentina, Cukurs had no intention of ending his political activities and participated in an anti-Semitic demonstration in Rio de Janeiro. There, he was randomly checked by police and had to show his identity documents. Several Jews in Brazil became aware of his presence and informed Simon Wiesenthal, who was living in Austria after having been freed from the Mauthausen concentration camp and was helping the War Crimes Office check on East Europeans in the DP camps. In October 1948, Wiesenthal approached the representative of the International Relief Organization in Salzburg. Referring to Cukurs, whom he mistakenly believed to have been the commandant of the Riga ghetto, Wiesenthal told him that major Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe were fleeing to South America. Wiesenthal warned of the danger these people represented and demanded stricter checks before DP status was given to hinder these people from absconding.124 Wiesenthal wanted to see Cukurs brought to justice. At the Jewish World Conference early that July in Montreux, he had agreed with Fritz Feigl, the president of the Jewish community in Rio de Janeiro, to collect incriminating evidence against Cukurs so that Brazil could move against him.125 Feigl, a chemistry professor from Vienna, had emigrated to Belgium in 1938. After Belgium was defeated by Germany, he had been taken to a French collection camp, where he fled and headed to Brazil. There, he and other European refugees quickly succeeded in gaining influence within Brazil’s Jewish communities. Many of the Jews living in Brazil were directly affected by the Nazis’ policies of extermination. Either they had fled Nazism, or had personally been the victims of Nazi crimes. So it wasn’t hard for the investigation launched by Feigl and Wiesenthal to find witnesses to testify against Cukurs.126 123 Künzle, Tod, pp. 79 ff. 124 Wiesenthal to Bedo (Chief Eligibility Officer, Salzburg), 20 October 1948, in SWA, Akt Cukurs. 125 Komitee Ehemaliger Jüdischer KZ-Häftlinge to Juristische Abteilung des Jüdischen Zentral Komitees, München, 6 October 1948; Wiesenthal to F.L. Brassloff (WJC, Legal Department, London), 27 August 1960, in: ibidem. 126 Künzle, Tod, pp. 79 ff.

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Forcing him to face justice, though, required the cooperation of Brazilian authorities. The outlook initially appeared good. Even before the resolutions at the Mexico City Conference were signed, laws had been passed in Brazil that allowed the nationalist government of Getulio Vargas, which had always treated minorities with severity, to deport politically undesirable immigrants without any complicated legal procedure. Brazil didn’t need any new legislation to meet the demands of the conference. All it had to do was suspend an amnesty, decreed in 1945, for foreigners who were suspected of working for the Axis powers. Directly after the war, the people who were mainly affected by the deportation laws were those who had lived in Brazil and were considered agents of the Third Reich during that conflict. But the same legal basis made it possible to deport war criminals.127 In 1946, the Office of Political and Social Order 128 founded a special division to investigate politically active foreigners. One of the first deeds of the new division was to arrest communist activists within Brazil’s Lithuanian minority. But because Soviet-Brazilian relations broke down in October 1947, these people could not be deported early the following year as planned and were released.129 For the same reason, it wasn’t possible to hand Cukurs over to the Soviet Union. In light of the accusations levelled against him, the Brazilian government turned to the State Department in September 1951 and asked it to check the testimony of the Holocaust survivors, although according to his son, Cukurs enjoyed close contacts in military circles at this time. The State Department passed this request along to the US High Commission, which apparently didn’t respond. In any case, in February 1952, Brazil approached the British government and repeated its request. But because Cukurs had not yet been charged with any war crimes, the Foreign Office declined to answer and didn’t respond when Brazil repeated its request. That was the end of the first attempt to bring Cukurs to justice.130 Brazil was thus prepared to abide by the resolutions of the Mexico City Conference and deny war criminals entry into the country, and there is no indication in other South American countries that they were willing to assist fugitives to the same degree that Argentina was. On one hand, we owe our detailed knowledge of the emigration of European war criminals to Argentina to the greater volume of research done about it than in any other country. But on the other hand, it also was well known that Argentina had helped fugitives, 127 Ribeiro, ‘Autoritarismo’; Carneiro, Alemañha. 128 Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS). 129 Zen, Germe, pp. 86 ff. and 189 ff. 130 Walters, Evil, pp. 321 ff.

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before historians began to carry out such research. Most of the assistance the Argentinian government offered, from help in fleeing to procuring jobs to protecting fugitives against legal prosecution, was probably unique to Argentina. These are some of the reasons that Argentina was the South American country with the most known fugitives – even before 1998, when a commission of historians employed by the Argentinian government published a list of 180 Nazi criminals and collaborators wanted by European authorities. Not only were there rumours before the end of the war that Perón was cooperating with representatives of the Axis powers. After the war, the Argentinian government was accused of actively seeking to work with members of the deposed Axis elite. This was no accident. The rumours actually did reflect the Argentinian assistance for fugitives from justice. The Argentinian-American conflict had a decisive influence on the speculations and motives that allowed Perón to be moved by the fugitives’ lobby and made him condemn the prosecution of war criminals. Even if Perón’s enemies exaggerated his ideological similarities with European fascists, on one score they were concrete. Both the Argentinian president and the representatives of the revolutionary Right in Europe who had fled to Argentina saw the ‘third position’ Perón elevated to a principle of state as a good basis for cooperation. That position was, among other things, a reaction to America’s confrontational policy toward Argentina. The conflict strengthened the Argentinian conviction that it urgently needed to expand its own arms production with the help of European experts. State assistance for fugitives only achieved its full effectiveness when it was paired with the nascent recruit measures. The evidence that Argentina was helping war criminals evade justice, which soon leaked through to the public at large, reinforced the already common perception among Perón’s adversaries that Peronism was nothing but a variation of National Socialism and helped keep this interpretation remain politically current.

3

Politicizing the Nazi Flight

Opposition fears that fascism remained a threat to Argentina even after it was defeated in Europe seemed to be more founded than ever after Perón’s electoral victory in February 1946. Immediately after that poll, one of the most important left-wing, liberal publications – it was even called Antinazi131 – called for its readers to continue the fight against Peronism, writing 131 Because the publishers of the newspaper were forbidden from including the word Argentina in the title, ellipses were substituted. The front page read: ‘…Antinazi’.

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‘Every Peronist, by virtue of being a Peronist, is also a Nazi’.132 The series of high-ranking Nazis fleeing to Argentina seemed to confirm this argument. One man repeatedly named was Martin Bormann, the former director of NSDAP’s party chancellory. He was the only one of the defendants at the main Nuremberg Trials whose whereabouts were unknown at the time. In May 1945, Stalin told representatives of the US government that he believed Bormann had succeeded in fleeing Berlin, and afterward reports repeatedly surfaced about where he allegedly was.133 Radio Moscow also spread such rumours. In early 1947, the FBI intercepted two radio communications of the British secret service that suggested Bormann was on his way to Argentina.134 The American ambassador in Buenos Aires informed the Argentinian foreign minister about Washington’s suspicion.135 The idea that Bormann had gone underground in Argentina presented a tempting scenario to Perón’s enemies. What better argument could there be for the idea that Peronism represented the rebirth of National Socialism after its defeat in Europe than the flight of the only Nuremberg defendant to have been convicted in absentia to the country of which Perón was in charge? In mid-1948, John Griffith, who had worked for the American embassy in Buenos Aires until 1946, was told by an anti-Perón journalist that Bormann was in Argentina. Like Braden, Griffith had good connections to the Argentinian opposition. After Perón had assumed office, Griffith was deported for supporting adversaries of Perón’s party. Since then he had been living in Montevideo, Uruguay.136 Given Griffith’s hatred of Peronism, it’s understandable why he was convinced that the information he’d been given was correct and travelled on his own initiative to Washington where he met with Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Jackson remembered rumours about Bormann fleeing during the trials. Even if he didn’t think Griffith’s information was absolutely credible, he did pass it on to President Truman with the recommendation that the situation be looked into further. The Soviet Union, Jackson argued, could use lax investigations to discredit the Western Allies’ attempts to bring war criminals to justice as insufficient. While the American embassy again approached the Argentinian government, 132 Cited in Nállim, ‘Antifascismo’, p. 101. 133 Klich and Buchrucker, Fin, pp. 270 ff. 134 Goda, Manhunts, pp. 422 ff. 135 Messersmith (US ambassador in Buenos Aires) to Bramuglia (Minister of RREEyC), 3 March 1947, in AT, ABABB 001 ff. 136 Here and in the following Goda, ‘Manhunts’, pp. 419-426; Walters, Evil, pp. 161-163.

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asking it to review the information,137 an FBI agent was charged with finding out more about what was going on in South America. After conversations with Griffith’s sources, though, the agent came to the conclusion that they knew nothing definite and were pursuing an obvious political agenda. When Argentinian authorities likewise failed to turn up anything concrete, the matter was laid to rest.138 Although anti-Perón circles remained convinced that Bormann was in Argentina, lack of evidence for the idea made it ill-suited for any wide-ranging campaigns against the Argentinian president. Nonetheless, another prominent fugitive from justice was soon linked with the country. Otto Skorzeny, a former Waffen-SS officer, had escaped from American detention and had supposedly succeeded in reaching Argentina. In the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon media, Skorzeny was ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’;139 a distinction he owed not just to his rank in the Nazi hierarchy but to his reputation as an equally brilliant and brutal agent. This reputation was based on his role in carrying out Hitler’s orders to free Mussolini from captivity in Italy in 1943. After the war, the American secret service had suspected him of setting up an underground Nazi organization.140 He was eventually captured and brought up before a military court in Dachau together with nine other members of an SS special unit. International public interest in the proceedings was greatly beneficial because Skorzeny had allegedly used American military uniforms and had shot unarmed American POWs. The military tribunal freed him because of lack of evidence,141 but he still had to answer to a special court as part of de-Nazification proceedings and was accused of being a ‘major offender’ in the crimes of the Third Reich. Before the proceedings could begin, he fled. American authorities looked for him, but he had disappeared without a trace. Then reports emerged that he was working for the Nazi magazine Der Weg (The Way), published in Buenos Aires.142 Silvano Santander, one of the leaders of the parliamentary group of the Unión Cívica Radical in Argentina’s lower chamber of parliament, seized the opportunity to highlight the danger represented by fugitive war criminals in the eyes of the Argentinian opposition. Santander had been concerned 137 Note verbale from the US embassy to MREC, 19 May 1948, in AT, ABABA 001-004. 138 See procedures in AT, ABABA 005-020. 139 See amongst others The Washington Post, 25 June 1947. 140 Walters, Evil, pp. 141-149. 141 Sigel, Gerechtigkeit, pp. 124-127. 142 New York Times, 28 July 1948 and 27 May 1949; Der Spiegel, 29/1949, Sunday Herald, 3 July 1949.

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about fascist infiltration of his country from the beginning of his political career. As early as the 1930s, he had criticized the existence of schools for Argentina’s German and Italian minorities, saying they were educating children to become fascists. He had been one of the most vocal members of the Commission for the Investigation of Anti-Argentinian Activities, founded in 1941, and had insisted on continuing the commission’s work in later years. Even after Perón’s election, he had repeatedly demanded that the government confiscate the assets of and deport Germans accused of trying to help Nazis infiltrate Argentina.143 Now he called for a parliamentary inquiry, insisting that the government provide information not only about Skorzeny’s whereabouts and activities but also those of fighter pilots Adolf Galland and Hans-Ulrich Rudel, whom Nazi propaganda had stylized into heroes. Santander also wanted to know whether the government was aware of Ante Pavelić. The final head of the fascist Ustaša had come to Argentina in November 1948. Finally, he also inquired as to whether a certain Dr Theiss was working for the police and whether this was the same Theiss who had been a Gestapo member during the Third Reich.144 The question of whether a former Gestapo officer was working for the Argentinian police illustrates the dimensions the immigration of war criminals had taken on from the point of view of the opponents of the regime. The Perón government took drastic action against its critics, restricting freedom of the press, firing nonconformist university professors and torturing dissidents in the headquarters of the notorious special unit of the national police. A number of people felt they had no choice but to go into exile.145 By mid-1949, government repression was the dominant topic in Argentina. The same week that Santander submitted his query, the opposition parties tried to force a hearing in the lower house of parliament about police torture. ‘This is going to be another Nuremberg’, one of the parliamentary deputies announced.146 Opposition politicians saw the government crackdown against critics as part of a Nazi ‘conspiracy against world peace’, which had been one of the main charges levelled against the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. They interpreted indications that the Argentinian police were recruiting security personnel who had fled from Europe as proof of that charge.147 In their 143 DSCD, 31 July 1946, pp. 185-193; New York Times, 28 July 1946 and 26 September 1947. 144 DSCD, 20 July 1949, p. 1742. 145 Gambini, Poder, pp. 331-378; Waldmann, Peronismus, pp. 87-100. 146 Cited in New York Times, 27 July 1949. 147 Santander, Técnica, p. 19.

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eyes, the people Santander had named were war criminals who had served important functions within the Third Reich and its satellite states. It made no difference in the eyes of the opposition whether the people concerned had been involved in perpetrating specific crimes. Years later, after witnessing the Eichmann Trial upon the special invitation of the Israeli government in Jerusalem, Santander would write that he had been well acquainted with Nazi ideology but had known little about how it was actually carried out.148 The opposition’s idea of the war criminal was derived from the same thesis which had played such a major role in American efforts to track down perpetrators and which presupposed that the Second World War had been the result of a gigantic conspiracy. The charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg held that ‘leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan’.149 The Argentinian opposition expanded the Nuremberg thesis of the Nazi conspiracy. For the opposition politicians, it was enough for someone to have exercised a function within the Nazi state to be described as a war criminal.150 The conspiracy-theory thesis even opened up the possibility of holding Perón himself accountable. If everyone who had helped realize Nazi plans for war was a war criminal, the anti-Peronists thought that they could extend that definition to the president they so loathed. After all, so ran the thinking, he had contributed to the National Socialist infiltration of the western hemisphere. Raúl Damonte Taborda, a close associate of Santander and a leading member of the Unión Cívica Radical in the 1940s, wrote in one of his pamphlets: ‘The United States, which were engaged in war against the Axis powers and their satellites should have put Perón and his band of war criminals on trial in 1945 and convicted him’.151 Since this had not happened, Taborda argued, Perón and the fugitives he allowed into Argentina continued to present a threat. The persons concerned were keeping National Socialism alive and prepared for its revival: Every group of German war criminals fulfilled its mission together with Perón in Argentina. The military instructors teach officers the same 148 Santander, Proceso, pp. 11-19. 149 Charter of the International Military Tribunal, accessed 4 January 2011, http://avalon.law. yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp. 150 Damonte, Berlin, pp. 144-152. 151 Ibidem, p. 142.

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techniques which the old German teachers taught the officers of the Argentinian army. The capitalists and magnates of heavy industry are preparing the industry of war. The Gestapo members and the technicians of the ‘putsch’ and the infiltration [i.e. the Argentinian officers that carried out the 1943 putsch of Castillo] are instructing the members of the fifth continent all over the continent. The scientists, airplane constructors and weapons technicians work in war factories and study groups. The ‘geo- politicians’ teach the Peronists the goals of economic dominance and the politics of ‘living space’, drawing equivalencies between Peronism and National Socialism. The specialists in trade union policies and controlling workers control and indoctrinate the Argentinian labour movement just as they did with their European equivalents.152

In the eyes of the anti-Perónists, the Nazi conspiracy went much further than had been uncovered at the Nuremberg Trials and was continuing to influence events in Argentina. Santander’s request for information remained unanswered until the end of the legislative period, whereupon it disappeared into a government drawer.153 The United States reacted with reserve to his accusations. While the US embassy did announce that it would review Santander’s information, especially concerning Skorzeny,154 the accusations had no effect on Argentinian-American relations. Nonetheless, the opposition’s attempt to put Perón in the hot seat in front of the world with their parliamentary request and to get people to listen to their interpretation of Peronism was a success. The Yugoslavian embassy contacted the Argentinian Foreign Ministry and inquired – to no avail – whether Santander’s statement about Pavelić was true.155 Even more significantly, the American and British press, with which various members of the Unión Cívica had close contact, once again took an interest in Perón and his relationship with the National Socialists, reprising the same threatening scenario of fascist infiltration in South America they had used in the war. Only two days after Santander’s parliamentary request, the New York Times published a short report about it, following up with a longer article about the presence of war criminals in Argentina. Very much in the sense of 152 Ibidem, pp. 151 ff. See also Santander, Técnica, pp. 17-24. 153 Zavalla Carbo (Secretario de la Cámara de Diputados) to MREC, 8 November 1949, in AT, MREC Yugoslavia, Exp. 21, Año 1949. 154 New York Times, 25 July 1949. 155 Aide Memoire to Bramuglia (Minister of RREEyC), 8 September 1949, in AT, MREC Yugoslavia, Exp. 21, Año 1949.

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the Argentinian opposition, the newspaper’s correspondent cited a ‘former Nazi’ as saying there were so many Gestapo members in the Argentinian police that it was more dangerous to tell an anti-government joke in German than in Spanish.156 Britain’s Daily Express considered the reports coming out of Argentina to be important enough to send the head of their foreign news section, Sefton Delmer, to the country. During the war Delmer had been the director of the British military radio station in Calais, which had begun broadcasting reports about war criminals fleeing to South America in 1944.157 After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, Delmer’s biggest worry was about whether the old economic and political elites would regain power, and he repeatedly predicted the return of National Socialism in his articles. What he was now hearing about Perón and his connections to Nazi fugitives seemed to confirm this view. Armed with information from Argentinian politicians, he published an article entitled ‘So Perón turns to Our Old Enemies’. Delmer’s descriptions of the activities of Rudel, Galland, Tank, and Theiss ended with the conclusion that these people were trying to convince Perón to start another war.158 The Jewish writer Curt Riess, who had emigrated from Germany in 1933, also took up the news coming out of Argentina. In 1944, he had published a book advancing the thesis that circles from the Nazi regime, led by Bormann, were preparing to flee so that they could ensure the survival of National Socialism. The most important country for fugitives, in Riess’ view, was Argentina.159 The reports about Skornezy’s alleged flight to Argentina and the German-language Nazi newspaper Der Weg were being published in Buenos Aires. In a series of exposés published in 1949 and reprinted by a variety of newspapers and magazines, Riess concluded that an organization called Die Spinne (The Spider) was behind all this. The leaders of The Spider included Bormann, Skorzeny, Pavelić, and Der Weg publisher Eberhard Fritsch. The organization, Riess contended, had made it possible for a number of former Nazis to flee to Argentina.160 Fritsch, a teacher of the German language, had founded Der Weg in mid-1947. Free from the restrictions on content imposed by the allies in Europe, the publication soon developed into a radical right-wing, revisionist magazine with a healthy circulation and readers in Europe, South America, 156 New York Times, 26 July 1949. 157 Newton, Menace, pp. 355 ff. 158 Daily Express, 20 September 1949; Bayer, Hitler, pp. 184 ff. 159 Riess, Underground. 160 Smoydzin, Faschismus, pp. 42 ff.; Der Spiegel, 47/1969; Walters, Evil, pp. 142-146.

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and South Africa. The attention it had generated together with Skorzeny’s flight led to the magazine being banned in the American occupation zone and Austria. The fact that many of the newspaper’s employees were refugee Nazi functionaries encouraged speculation that Der Weg was the journalistic mouthpiece of a nascent Fourth Reich, even considering the magazine was an exile periodical and its writers were men who had only occupied third-rate positions in the Nazi hierarchy. Johann von Leers was the head of a department at the University of Jena and had become one of the most effective purveyors of Nazi propaganda, Wilfried von Oven was a press spokesman in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, and Carlos von Merck was the Latin America correspondent for the Völkischer Beobachter. The naked facts about the financial situation of the periodical also stood in stark contrast to rumours that it was being financed by monies spirited away from the Third Reich.161 Nonetheless, suspicions persisted that fugitive Nazis were regrouping in the circles surrounding Der Weg. Along with the Argentinian opposition and the Anglo-Saxon press, Jewish organizations also seized upon this idea. In late 1951, the World Jewish Congress articulated its concern that National Socialism was being propagated from South America. In view of the publications appearing there, the WJC had no doubt that the centre of Nazism was now located on that continent. Making obvious reference to the debate about the Argentinian government’s attempts to attract former Nazi specialists, the WJC declared former Nazis had succeeded in gaining great influence in the country.162 One year later, a series in Der Weg about the alleged dependency of the US and the USSR on the ‘Jew state’ of Israel caused uproar. The WJC, the United States, and the Federal Republic of Germany protested against the magazine, to no avail.163 A further reason why the reports about Nazis emigrating to Argentina kept coming was the activity of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, another of the authors for Der Weg. He founded the Kameradenwerk (Comrades Fund), whose main purpose was to collect money for incarcerated war criminals. He combined this charitable endeavour, performed on behalf of a cause the political mainstream in Germany also supported, with blatantly revisionist propaganda and vitriolic attacks on the Federal Republic of Germany. This soon earned him the ire of Bonn, and Bundestag deputy Erich Mende tried to exploit the situation. A member of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), he was an energetic 161 Meding, Weg, pp. 110-133. 162 Basler Zeitung, 10 December 1951, copy in: PA AA, B 11, vol. 528. 163 Meding, Weg, pp. 128 ff.

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advocate of a general amnesty for all war criminals still imprisoned by the Allies. On a set of new laws, which included how war criminals would be treated, Mende made his vote conditional upon the issue. At the final reading of the accompanying legislation in March 1953, the problem of war criminals wasn’t mentioned,164 but Mende refused to let the opportunity pass. On the margins of the parliamentary meetings, he went before the press, declaring that Rudel had approached him the preceding December with a plan to get the war criminals incarcerated in Werl Prison released. Mende coupled this statement with an appeal not to abandon this topic to Nazi circles.165 A short time later, Rudel was back in the headlines. Rudel maintained close contact with the radical right-wing scene in West Germany and in particular with the Naumann Circle. Beginning in 1952, this group tried to infiltrate the FDP as a way of gaining a foothold for National Socialism. In their efforts, they could count on support from several prominent party members. The group’s activities didn’t go undetected, and since November the foreign press, especially, had been reporting on them. The British intervened, and the leaders of the movement were arrested. But Werner Naumann, Goebbels’ final state secretary and the founder of the circle, didn’t give up. After his release, he allowed himself to be put forward as the lead candidate of the far-right German Reich Party.166 He also succeeded in getting Rudel, who was very popular with veterans’ associations, to stand for office. French and English news services reported that the party had asked Perón to release Rudel from his commitments in Argentina.167 In fact, Rudel was soon granted an audience with the Argentinian president, and any concerns he had that Perón might have been upset about the press reports proved unfounded. On the contrary, Perón was convinced that Rudel’s candidacy was consonant with his doctrine of the ‘third position’ and served his own political interests. ‘He was very well informed about the domestic political situation in West Germany and explained several fundamental points of his policies in this regard’, Rudel wrote, Perón himself is the author of the state doctrine of the third standpoint, i.e. a form of state and the nation that goes beyond liberalism and communism, that now dominates Argentina. He has studied and thought about 164 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 274-290. 165 New York Times, 21 March 1953; Washington Post, 21 March 1953. 166 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 361-396. 167 Santander, Técnica, p. 63; Rudel, Argentinien, p. 232. Rudel, Argentinien, pp. 232 ff.

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his set of questions for years, and as a matter of course, he’s interested in anyone able to liberate himself from liberalism and communism or overcome them in a new synthesis so as not to be sucked down into the catastrophe to which these two ideologies inevitably lead.168

The ambitions of the Reich Party met with determined resistance in West Germany. The Federal Government barred Neumann from standing for election. As a result, Rudel was promoted to lead candidate. But he had no political success. His party received a mere 1.1 per cent of the vote in the national election of September 1953.169 But his candidacy alone was enough to reinforce the fears of all those who worried that National Socialism was being reorganized in Argentina. Perón and Nazi gold Argentinian opposition politicians were among those who saw their interpretation of Peronism confirmed by all this. Reports about Nazi activities in Argentina added to and supported information from Germany that was passed on by Heinrich Jürges, an ally in the opposition’s fight against the various repressive military governments in Argentina. Jürges was one of the leading figures in the anti-Nazi resistance in South America. In 1930, while still living in Germany, he had joined the NSDAP, but he was thrown out of the party after a Düsseldorf court sentenced him to four years in prison for fraud in July 1933. He succeeded in evading imprisonment by fleeing to South America. In 1938, he joined Otto Strasser’s Black Front in Buenos Aires, a group primarily consisting of NSDAP dissidents who had made up the party’s left wing. It is unclear how long Jürges remained a member of this group. In any case, he was one of those Germans who warned against Nazi infiltration of Argentina and provided the liberal and leftist opposition with useful information. In the process, he played somewhat fast and loose with the truth. Whether he was confirming that German troops were preparing to land in Patagonia or that ranking National Socialists were fleeing Germany in submarines, Jürges often had the necessary supporting documents made by a factory of forgers.170 168 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 390 ff. 169 Rout and Bratzel, ‘Jürges’; Newton, Menace, pp. 194-214. Concerning the Schwarze Front in Lateinamerika see Mühlen, Fluchtziel, pp. 113-117. 170 Vermerk über die Besprechung der Entnazifizierungskommission on 20 February 1947, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 192; Jürges to Santander, 18 February 1952, in ibidem, vol. 200.

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In late 1946, he returned to Germany. At first, he worked for the financial division of the US military government, searching for evidence of Nazi assets being transferred to Argentina.171 In November, he composed a memorandum in which he asserted that 98 people in Argentina, including Perón’s wife Eva Duarte and the president’s financial advisers, were acting as conduits to Nazi wealth. Although the memorandum contained no evidence for this claim, Braden – then the Under-Secretary for Latin America in the State Department – considered the document significant enough to have it reviewed by the US ambassador in Buenos Aires. If Jürges’ memorandum had been proven correct, it would have immensely boosted Braden’s fight to have the US take a confrontational stance toward Argentina.172 The topic lost much of its relevance in mid-1947, as tensions relaxed between the US and Argentina. Jürges stopped working for the American military government in Germany and tried his luck as a journalist. The articles he wrote repeatedly broached the idea of Nazi-Peronist cooperation.173 But money was tight, and he desperately needed to be classified as a ‘victim of fascism’ – a status that brought with it financial advantages. It was therefore all the more painful when in 1950 he was stripped of that classification after it emerged that he had a criminal record dating back to before 1933. As he tried to regain his former status, he forged two letters from major National Socialists in Argentina intending to show that the Nazi regime had manipulated criminal records so as to discredit him while he was living in Argentina. He announced that he would be submitting evidence to this effect to the commission that handed out the victim-of-fascism status.174 To bolster the credibility of the forgeries, Jürges tried something he was to employ frequently in the future: creating a system of references with the help of the media. Shortly after his announcement about providing proof to the commission, he wrote to Santander informing him about interrogations he had supposedly carried out with former employees of the German embassy in Buenos Aires. From them, he claimed to have learned that a number of people close to Perón had received cheques and money from Edmund von Thermann, the ‘ambassador of the Third Reich’. Jürges wrote that he had summarized what he had learned from the interrogations in a manuscript.175 Santander was surprised. He had heard things about Nazis ending up in 171 Rout and Bratzel, ‘Jürges’, pp. 620-623. 172 See amongst others Jürges, ‘Hakenkreuz’; Jürges, ‘Nazibotschafter’. 173 Vollmer, ‘Geschichte’, pp. 422-429. 174 Jürges to Santander, 18 February 1952, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 200. 175 Santander to Jürges, 25 February 1952, in ibidem.

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Argentina, but connections between Thermann and Perón were new to him. If the information were correct, it would be very significant. Santander asked Jürges for proof that those who were interrogated had really said the things he claimed.176 Jürges promised to do everything in his power to do precisely that, and he subsequently sent Santander copies of the letters he had forged for the commission reviewing his status as a victim of fascism. In them, he drew connections between passages in which high-ranking Nazis criticized him as a detractor of National Socialism and indications, which he knew would interest Santander, of connections between Perón and the transfer of assets from the Third Reich.177 Promising to help spread the word in Europe about every article Santander composed on the basis of these documents, Jürges suggested that his Argentinian colleague publish them in South America.178 But Santander had other plans. He didn’t want to publish the documents one by one, but rather to present them to the public in one spectacular sweep. He also wanted to remove any doubts as to their authenticity beforehand. In order to cover up traces of his forgery, Jürges had provided only copies of the letters, which he had notarized by an East Berlin court.179 Now he saw himself compelled to convince Santander that notarization was sufficient to prove their provenance. To dispel any lingering doubts, Jürges suggested that Santander come to Germany and inspect the documents himself.180 In late 1952, Santander travelled to Berlin together with Juan Solari, a former member of the Committee on Anti-Argentinian Activities and a member of the Argentinian Socialist Party, who was living in Parisian exile.181 Jürges not only let Santander look at the documents but informed him about attempts by nationalist circles to influence the national government of the Federal Republic of Germany. A few days before Santander and Solari’s arrival, Berlin’s Nacht-Express newspaper published a report about the arrests of members of the ‘Bewegung Reich’ movement. Under the headline ‘Tank commander Rudel made “Führer”’, the article posited the existence of a broad conspiracy that had been planned in Berchtesgaden. ‘The goals of the conspirators are the re-founding of the Nazi Party and a 176 See letters from Jürges to Santander, 3 March 1952; 15 March 1952; 25 March 1952; 2 April 1952; 23 April 1952 and 10 June 1952, in ibidem. 177 Jürges to Santander, 8 May 1952, in ibidem. 178 Santander to Jürges, 10 June 1952, in ibidem. 179 Jürges to Santander, 13 October 1952, in: ibidem. 180 Rechnung vom Zentral-Flughafen-Hotel in Berlin für Santander and Solari, 28 November 1952 until 2 December 1952, in ibidem. 181 Nacht-Express, 21 November 1952, copy in Santander, Técnica, p. 62.

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new “Assumption of power” along the lines of 1933’, the article’s author wrote. ‘Taking part in the Berchtesgaden conference were Hitler Youth staff leader Lauterbach and retired Luftwaffe colonel Rudel, who especially came to the meeting from Argentina. At some point in the future, Rudel is to assume leadership of “Bewegung Reich” and is considered Hitler successor as head of state’.182 Santander was careful to save this report since it seemed the perfect confirmation of the Perón government’s role in the reorganization of National Socialism. Although Jürges was unable to provide him with any original documents, Santander was convinced of their authenticity and published a book, entitled Techniques of a Betrayal, in mid-1953. In it, Santander presented the forged letters as evidence for the transfer of Nazi assets to Argentina and for Perón being a National Socialist ally. These connections, Santander claimed, had laid the groundwork for Nazis to flee to Argentina long before the end of the Third Reich. Here was a clear danger. Because of the Nazis who had been allowed to emigrate, both Argentina and the Federal Republic of Germany were threatened by the revival of National Socialism, which was shown by the activities of the new Führer, Rudel, who had connections to both Perón and German National Socialists.183 The book was immediately banned in Argentina, and opposition calls for an investigation were refused.184 But the book had a huge resonance in Uruguay, where many anti-Perón dissidents lived in exile, and provided ammunition to critics of the pro-Argentina policies of the Uruguayan government. The Uruguayan parliament even investigated the book.185 Santander’s true goal was indeed to isolate Perón abroad. Jürges had realized this and cleverly included in the forged letters a remark supposedly by Perón in which he dismissed Dwight D. Eisenhower as a lunatic who had run amok.186 A short time after Santander’s book was published, his ally and fellow party member Damonte followed suit. In his book, entitled From Berlin to Wall Street, he contended that Perón and the war criminals he had brought to Argentina were working toward the next world war. Damonte wrote of his regret that the United States didn’t see through Perón’s simulated change of course and was blind to the danger he represented for the western hemisphere.187 Damonte’s attempts to undermine US-Argentinian relations 182 Santander, Técnica. 183 Santander to Jürges, 23 November 1954, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 200. 184 Herbig (Ambassador in Montevideo) to AA, 7 September 1953, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 12. 185 Santander, Técnica, pp. 67 and 69. 186 Damonte, Berlin. 187 Rapoport and Spiguel, Peronismo, pp. 93-160.

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didn’t come out of nowhere. After the rapprochement of 1947, those relations had cooled again, but since mid-1953 both countries had tried to put them on better footing.188 The attempt’s to revive the tired old scenario of the western hemisphere being under threat didn’t go over very well in the State Department. On the contrary, the Uruguayan government was told that after being cross-checked with American archives, Santander’s claims had been deemed ‘not exact’.189 For that reason, Santander’s and Damonte’s books had no effect on Perón, who merely ignored them, telling an ally in Uruguay not to waste his time refuting any of the charges.190 Completely different reasons – conflicts with the military and the Catholic Church – were what spurred the so-called revolution of liberation two years later and sent Perón into exile. The political remaking of Argentina opened up brand new possibilities for Santander. Suddenly, everywhere in Argentina, commissions were investigating crimes supposedly committed by the Perón government. One of the first measures undertaken by the newly installed interim government was to report about the valuables the self-proclaimed friend to the poor had hoarded in his houses. Jürges, who hadn’t stopped feeding Santander with fake letters, pricked up his ears at news of the report. Just before the putsch that toppled Perón, he had sent a further document. It was purportedly a letter from the German-Argentinian entrepreneur Ludwig Freude to Bormann mentioning a money transfer to Perón and his wife Evita. Now, hearing the latest from Argentina, he sent the same document to the Argentinian foreign minister, suggesting that there could be a connection between the valuables found in Perón’s various residences and the transfer of Nazi assets to the country. The minister forwarded Jürges’ letter to the relevant investigatory committee,191 which in turn approached the Argentinian national police with a request for information about the entrepreneur. The committee wrote that he had been a ‘representative of the Hitler regime’ and had been connected to Bormann, whose ‘global activities’ were extremely well known.192 188 AA to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 15 June 1954, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 12. 189 Perón to Haedo (member of the Uruguayan Congress), 15 July 1954, copy in AGN, Archivo Intermedio, Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones, Comisión 2, Caja 2. 190 Jürges to Santander, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 201; Jürges to Amadeo, 5 October 1955, in ibidem and in AGN, Archivo Intermedio, Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones, Comisión 2, Caja 2. 191 Presidente de la Comisión Investigadora Nr. 2 to Dellepiane (Jefe de la Policía de la Capital Federal), 15 November 1955, in AGN, Archivo Intermedio, CNI, Comisión 2, Caja 2. 192 Presidente de la Comisión Investigadora Nr. 2 to Santander, 15 November 1955, in ibidem.

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Santander, too, was called in to provide information about Freude,193 and he used the opportunity not just to advance suspicion against the entrepreneur but also other people who in his eyes had played an important role in the Nazi infiltration of Argentina. Among them were a number of the former Nazis, above all Rudel, who had emigrated to the country in 1945.194 Shortly thereafter, authorities began to monitor Freude’s finances,195 and Rudel’s apartment was searched. In this way, the investigative committee got its hands on the voluminous correspondence between the former pilot and right-wing extremist circles all over the world. This seemed to confirm Santander’s theses, and the committee declared: ‘The documentary proof for the statements of the freedom fighter [i.e. Santander] are now in the possession of the investigative committee’. Moreover, the committee wrote, Santander hadn’t been the only one to draw attention to Rudel’s role in the organization of the ‘Nazi-fascist international’. The FDP Bundestag deputy Erich Mende also attacked his activities. German media had already reported that the neo-Nazis had named Rudel their new Führer. But along with Rudel, other representatives of the tyranny that had been defeated in Europe were being welcomed with open arms in Argentina.196 Argentinian newspapers published special editions reporting on these events, taking the opportunity to discuss the flight of the Nazis and Nazi collaborators to the country. Crítica, for instance, whose editorial board had close connections to Santander, wrote: ‘Hans Ulrich Rudel, the successor to the Führer, was protected by the deposed regime’.197 Rudel left Argentina for Paraguay, where Perón had also fled to and which was run by a dictator with German roots, Alfredo Stroessner. In a sign of how successful Santander was in getting people to listen to his ideas, Germany reacted with alarm to this report. German-Argentinian relations were in danger of being badly damaged. After Argentina had declared war on the Third Reich, in fulfilment of the Mexico City Conference resolutions, the country had placed a number of German companies in Argentina under 193 Nomina de personas mencionadas en los antecedentes entregados por SS, in ibidem. 194 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 27 December 1955, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1288. 195 Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones, ed., Documentación, Autores y Cómplices de las irregularidades cometidas durante la segunda tiranía, Tomo IV (Buenos Aires, 1958), pp. 285-293, quoations on p. 285. 196 Crítica, 16 December 1955, ‘Hans Ulrich Rudel, Sucesor del Fuhrer, era protegido del régimen depuesto’. See also Argentinisches Tageblatt, 16 December 1955; El Día, 17 December 1955; La Nación, 19 December 1955. 197 Santander, Técnica, pp. 58 ff. and 91-94; Instruktion an Junker (Botschafter Buenos Aires), August 1956, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 13. Concerning the following see Conze, Frei, Hayes, and Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 595-600.

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compulsory administration. With the resumption of diplomatic relations, the German government had tried to get these assets released. Santander, convinced that these were Nazi assets, vehemently opposed them being released. If he succeeded in gaining more influence, Germany felt, all the progress that had been made in recent years would have been destroyed. Germany’s Minister for Lower Parliamentary Affairs, Hans-Joachim von Merketz, had also played a role in Santander’s book. During the Second World War, the conservative politician was a secretary at the Ibero-American Institute and, according to Santander, a part of the Nazi conspiracy threatening Argentina. Santander was convinced that the government of the Federal Republic had generally been infiltrated by National Socialists and urged Argentina to intensify its relations with the Anglo-Saxon countries.198 Santander did succeed in gaining influence over the investigative committee’s work and, in a meeting at the German Foreign Ministry with German firms, the conclusion was drawn that the new government could ‘be perceived as anti-German’. A meeting protocol read: That is because of the presence in Perón-led Argentina of Germans who because of their political past were very sympathetic to the fascist-Perónist regime. It is understandable that from the Argentinian perspective fascism and all things German are connected. One result is the outbreak of anti-German agitation against prominent German-Argentinians […] English, and, more recently, American circles are doing their best to exploit the situation to further improve their already good relations to the present government.199

Nevertheless, Santander’s attempts to interpret Peronism as Nazi infiltration of Argentina and to get various national authorities proceed against those responsible for it soon proved to be a problem for his own party. Ever since the 1940s, Santander had been among the most vehement critics of the Argentinian military, believing that its orientation toward Prussian militarism had contributed to the infiltration.200 But now the Unión Cívica Radical depended on the army, which had carried out the putsch against Perón and whose consent would be needed to end the interim military government with regular elections. Santander’s criticism may have been 198 Vermerk Deussen (Ref. 506, AA), 17 December 1955, in B 11, vol. 1291. 199 Santander, Nazismo. 200 Jürges to Santander, 20 April 1956; Santander to Jürges, 2 September 1956, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 201.

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welcomed by certain navy circles, which had historically been more oriented toward Britain than Germany, but it had no hope of gaining a consensus within the Argentinian armed forces. Another problem with Santander’s militant, uncompromising position was that if elections were called, Peronism was likely to remain a serious political force. Under the leadership of future president Arturo Frondizi, there was a strong faction within the Unión that favoured cooperating with Peronist circles. As a result, Santander’s former allies quickly turned their backs on him. Damonte became a supporter of Frondizi, and other former members of the commission investigating anti-Argentinian activities dropped a topic that, in view of the Cold War, no longer seemed relevant anyway.201 Santander soon discovered that he was losing support in the government and within his own party. Under the first labour minister of new president Pedro Aramburu, he succeeded in getting a commission to travel to France and the Federal Republic of Germany. His official mandate was to study the two countries’ social welfare systems. But above all, Santander wanted to collect new documents to prove Perón’s connection to the Third Reich.202 When it became known that the Labour Ministry was sending him on a tour of Germany, critics quickly objected that this would unnecessarily strain German-Argentinian relations. A short time later, Santander’s diplomatic passport was revoked.203 He travelled anyway as a private citizen. By then he was facing accusations of forgery and lawsuits and urgently needed additional material. Two books had also appeared that uncovered the erroneous nature of his sources.204 Bewildered, he contacted Jürges and asked him to clear up the misunderstandings.205 But the forger was unable to give him any satisfactory answers. In the years that followed, Santander was sued multiple times. He never again attained a position comparably influential to the one he had in his party before his exile. The Pavelić case Although Santander’s writings had often been based on forged sources, they did possess a kernel of truth. Under Perón, numerous suspected war 201 Santander to Jürges, 9 July 1956 and 22 September 1956, in ibidem. 202 Werz (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 24 September 1956, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 12. 203 Becke, Infamia; Simons, Papelón. 204 Santander to Jürges, 8 December 1956 and 25 December 1956, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 201. 205 Carta abierta to Dr. Silvano Santander, 10 October 1956, in AT, Caja Pavelić, Exp. E.

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criminals went to Argentina. Not all of them were Nazi officials like Rudel, who hadn’t been sought by any court to answer for specific crimes. In 1955, Santander also launched a campaign against Ante Pavelić, the former leader of the fascist Ustaša state in Croatia, who had not only turned over Jews to the Nazis but had himself ordered the killing of tens of thousands of ethnic minorities and political dissidents. But those past crimes against humanity were not the primary reason for the campaign. Santander remained obsessed with the conspiracy paradigm, warning about the danger he thought war criminals still presented. He accused Pavelić of being a member of a ‘brown international’ that was trying to revive National Socialism and fascism and maintained connections with the Perón regime. Santander also claimed that Pavelić had been involved in the suppression of an anti-Perón rebellion ahead of the successful putsch in September 1955.206 The intelligence division of the Argentinian Air Force used these accusations to commence an investigation against the Ustaša leader. It sought to make contact with several representatives of the Croatian community in Argentina, who described themselves as Catholic and distanced themselves from both Pavelić’s circles and those Croatians who supported Tito’s Yugoslavia.207 The informants recruited were upset about Pavelić’s efforts to expand his influence on the approximately 200,000 Croatians living in Argentina. They confirmed the accusations regarding Pavelić’s political activity and his connections with Peronism and drew attention to other Ustaša functionaries in the country. These groups promiscuously displayed Catholicism, the air force concluded, was merely a façade aimed at gaining the support of the Catholic Church208 and countering Pavelić’s anticipated strategy of defence with the military government, which considered itself a protector of the church. Inquiries were also made about Pavelić at the Yugoslavian embassy, which took the opportunity to point out the extradition request Belgrade had filed with the Argentinian foreign ministry.209 The Yugoslavian foreign minister interpreted the query as a sign that another attempt to get Pavelić in custody was hardly hopeless. When the Argentinian foreign minister visited Yugoslavia in January 1956, he was told in confidence that the extradition 206 Memorandum producido por Pérez (Jefe Departamento Informaciones del Comando en Jefe de la Fuerza Aérea Argentina), in ibidem. 207 Origen y actividades de las organizaciones de Pavelić, n.d., in ibidem. 208 Informe sobre Pavelić proporcionado por el Primer Secretario de la Legación de la República Federal de Yugoslavia, in ibidem. 209 Vicepresidente Provisional de la Nación Argentina to Podesta Costa, Ministro de RREEyC, 27 January 1956, in ibidem.

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of the former Ustaša leader would be seen as a gesture of friendship. The argument was also made that an extradition would be in Argentina’s own security interests. Pavelić and two other Croats, it was suggested, were connected with a Peronist underground organization, which they helped finance through shady means.210 The Yugoslavian people and their government, it was added, couldn’t understand why Argentina would harbour a convicted, still dangerous war criminal.211 The Argentinian Foreign Ministry had already reviewed the Pavelić case and the rejection of all extradition requests on the basis of de la Rosa’s contention that they concerned political crimes, and the ministry apparently felt itself bound to stick to this argumentation.212 Nonetheless, it was prepared to take some action regarding Pavelić. The ministry approached the various branches of the armed forces and the police to find out what was known about the Croat and whether people felt that the anti-residency law could be applied in his case. This law allowed for the deportation of ‘undesirable foreigners’.213 The answers could hardly have been more different. The air force passed along the memorandum it had drawn up the previous October, in which the accusations against Pavelić were confirmed. But the air force doesn’t seem to have been convinced by the testimony of its informants. It also told the foreign ministry that it didn’t have the information necessary to answer the question about the anti-residency law.214 The police confirmed the assertion in the air force response that Pavelić had contact with the guardians of law and order in Argentina but denied that either the Croatian community in general or the circles around the former Ustaša leader had interfered in Argentina’s political affairs. On the contrary, Pavelić and his associates had ‘displayed a proper respect toward the country’s authorities’ and had maintained ‘no contact with the deposed regime’. For that reason, there was no way to deport Pavelić.215

210 Memorandum Confidencial, in ibidem. 211 Memorandum de Serrano Redonnet (Dirección Europa Oriental y Cercano Oriente) to Subsecretario de RREE, 20 October 1955, in ibidem, Yugoslavia, Exp. 14. 212 Augusto Garcia (Subsecreatrio de RREE) to Ruiz (Subsecreatrio de Aeronáutica), day? January 1956, in ibidem, Exp.E. 213 Ruiz (Subsecreatrio de Aeronautica) to MREC, 6 February 1956, in ibidem. 214 Memorandum de Shaw (Dirección de Coordinación y Enlace del MREC) to Director de Europa Oriental y Cercano Oriente, 6 March 1956, in: ibidem. 215 Rial (Subsecretario de Marina) to Castineiras (Subsecretario de RREE), 29 February 1956, in ibidem.

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On the other hand, the navy reached the conclusion that although Pavelić had committed no crimes in Argentina, he did represent ‘a danger to the public peace’ because of what he had done in Europe and his connections to Perón supporters. If he couldn’t be convicted of a crime in Argentina, the anti-residency law should be applied.216 From all these positions it must have become clear to the foreign ministry that opinions about Pavelić differed. The ‘revolution of liberation’ had brought together strict Catholics who criticized Perón’s policies toward the church, and leftist-liberal anti-fascists. While Pavelić as a Catholic had a good relationship with the former group, the latter considered him a representative of the system that had just been defeated. The Yugoslavian government exercised restraint. It was important to protect the country’s relationship to Argentina, which had hardly been in the best of shape during Perón’s presidency. Belgrade refrained from filing a new request for extradition, waiting to see what position the Argentinian government would take on the Pavelić case. But when nothing had happened by October 1956, Yugoslav patience ran out. During a conversation with the Argentinian ambassador in Belgrade, the director of the Latin America division of the Yugoslav foreign ministry complained of having been fobbed off with vague promises. It was high time, he said, for the Argentinian government to take a stand. The embassy in Buenos Aires had already been sent the necessary documents in case the Yugoslav government decided to appeal Pavelić’s extradition again. This announcement was no doubt intended to increase pressure. Nonetheless, the fact that the discussion took place before the Yugoslav government had made a decision and while it was still being determined whether an extradition request had any chances of success shows an unwillingness to offend the Argentinian government with an entreaty it would have had to refuse. When the Argentinian ambassador bushed off his Yugoslav colleague’s statements by saying that things would proceed according to Argentinian law, the Yugoslav diplomat was disappointed. The message was that a further extradition request had no chance. The number of rejected extradition requests, he wrote, had convinced him that success would only be possible if the Argentinian side suggested a deviation from normal procedure.217 It isn’t known what instructions were issued by Buenos Aires to the ambassador in Belgrade after this conversation. In any case, nothing was done on the matter of Pavelić. 216 FS Roigt (Ambassador in Belgrad) to Ministro de RREEyC, 30 October 1956 and 2 November 1956, in ibidem. 217 Burzanovic, Pavelić, pp. 78-90.

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In the meantime, an anti-Communist exile named Blagoje Jovovic had begun to take an interest in the former Ustaša leader. Outraged at the murders of Serbians by Croatian troops, Jovovic decided to assassinate Pavelić, attacking him in front of his house on 10 April 1957 and wounding him with a number of gunshots.218 Media around the world reported on the assassination attempt. The government in Belgrade, which had discovered how to formulate an extradition request so as to conform to Argentinian law, now decided to act. In mid-April, the Yugoslavian embassy in Buenos Aires filed another request. This time, Belgrade didn’t argue that Pavelić was a war criminal but rather cited the Yugoslav criminal code. Pavelić, so the argument went, had been behind the murder of whole ethnic groupsed.219 The day after it had filed the necessary paperwork, the embassy gave the press information about its extradition request.220 That put pressure on the Argentinian government. The Argentinian foreign ministry determined that Yugoslavia wasn’t the only country interested in Pavelić. The Argentinian embassy in Paris reported that French media had extensively covered the attempted assassination of the former Ustaša leader, arguing that it was only logical for him to have found refuge in Perón’s Argentina. The archive of German general and Ibero-American Institute director Wilhelm Faupel showed, argued one report, that Pavelić had been a well-paid spy for Hitler.221 The French media echo shows that the theses advanced by Santander, who had been in France a few months previously,222 also resonated outside Argentina. The supposed archive was an invention of Jürges, which he had claimed was the source of his documents to his Argentinian friend. Suddenly the foreign ministry sprang into action. Within a week of the extradition request, an evaluation had been forwarded to the legal department for review. And for the first time since the Second World War, an extradition request for someone involved in Nazi crimes was approved. Because the crimes in question were not political in nature, but rather covered under regular Yugoslav criminal law, the foreign ministry’s legal experts recommended that Pavelić be arrested and the documents be passed 218 Note verbale from the Yugoslavian Embassy to MREC, 16 April 1957, in AT, Caja Pavelić, Exp.F. 219 Memorandum Recordatorio ref. Extradición Pavelić por Subsecretario de RREE, 3 May 1957, in ibidem, loose copies. 220 Embajada en Paris to Ministro de RREEyC, 18 April 1957, in ibidem. 221 Santander to Jürges, 8 December 1956, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 409, vol. 201. 222 Ruiz Moreno (Consejería Legal) to Ministro de RREEyC, 23 April 1957, in AT, Caja Pavelić, Croatas.

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on to the general prosecutor.223 This procedure was in line with Argentina’s extradition law, which stipulated that the government had to check whether every request contained the necessary documentation and concerned a crime for which extradition was allowed. If that was the case, an independent authority would decide on the request in a trial-like proceeding in front of a regular court, where the person whose extradition was requested had the right to legal counsel. But Pavelić, realizing that things were getting tight, had gone underground. Upon learning of his disappearance, the agitated Yugoslav ambassador appeared at the foreign ministry in early May, complaining that thanks to their negligence in processing the extradition request, Argentinian authorities had drawn out the process and enabled Pavelić to flee. The foreign office denied these allegations. The request had been reviewed in orderly fashion, officials said, and his arrest had been ordered. Pavelić’s disappearance wasn’t their fault, but rather that of the Yugoslav embassy, which had gone to the press with their request instead of keeping it confidential.224 This wasn’t entirely true. While the foreign ministry had done part of its job, an arrest warrant for Pavelić still hadn’t been issued when the conversation with the Yugoslav embassy took place. It was only two weeks later that an Argentinian judge ordered Pavelić to be detained.225 Several months later the fugitive appeared in Madrid. He died in the German hospital there in 1959. The cases of Rudel and Pavelić demonstrate that the issue of fugitive war criminals, which Argentinian opposition leaders had used politically since the 1940s as a putative source of danger to the country, had a definite, short-lived significance for the government after the ‘liberation revolution’. But they never became the dominant issue, and the effort of Argentinian authorities to deal with them remained limited. Still, the politicization of the topic had prompted extradition proceedings against Pavelić, which set the tone for the future. On the one hand, the foreign ministry under the new government confirmed the decision to treat war crimes as political crimes. That underscored the uselessness of the Mexico City Conference resolutions, which could have served as the basis for extradition laws. At the same time, though, by referring to their country’s regular criminal code, Yugoslav authorities had found a way of getting the Argentinian foreign ministry to approve an extradition. That made it clear that under the new 223 Memorandum Recordatorio ref. Extradición Pavelić por Subsecretario de RREE, 3 May 1957, in ibidem, loose copies. 224 Orden de arresto contra Pavelić, 10 May 1957, in ibidem, Exp.F. 225 Aufzeichnung Haas (DfAA), 18 January 1950, in PA AA, B 10, vol. 157.

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government, crimes committed during the war would not be considered political per se. The extradition proceedings against Pavelić would set a precedent that would pave the way for such requests in the years to come. Even more significant for the following decades was the fear among Perón’s opponents that the populist president would use the help of Nazis and collaborators who had fled from Europe to transform Argentina once and for all into a fascist state. This nightmare scenario, which they derived from faked documents and their own experiences with the repressive methods employed by the Perón regime, had a decisive influence on how Perón and Argentina were viewed in Europe and North America up until the 1990s. A wide variety of people and institutions would follow, interpret, and use the rumours of Perón’s connections with the National Socialists. That fact would have important consequences for the hunt for Nazi fugitives.

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Speculations about the activities of Nazis who had emigrated to Argentina didn’t fail to affect German-South American relations either. At the start of the 1950s, representatives of the West German government held talks with members of the political advisory staff of the High Commission about establishing German consulates abroad. A short time before, rumours about Skorzeny’s flight to Argentina and Santander’s parliamentary query focused the attention of Western media on Nazi exiles. For that reason, the German officials were advised, ‘out of concern for public opinion in the US’, not to start their efforts with Argentina.226 The West German capital Bonn then asked for permission to set up consulates in Brazil and Chile, but surprisingly the High Commission rejected that request.227 The French mediator believed that the reason for the rejection was the fear that ‘Germany intended to establish consulates in Argentina and Spain in the near future’. The French mediator added: ‘This is considered extremely undesirable by the Allies with regard to the Nazi colonies in both of those countries.’228 It wasn’t until October 1950 that the High Commission gave the green light to the establishment of German-South American relations.229 226 Rat der AHK to Adenauer, 6 June 1950, in ibidem, Protokoll der 23. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 19 July 1950, in AADB, vol. 13/I, p. 104. 227 Notiz Böckers für Blankenhorn (DfAA), 28 June 1950, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1184. 228 Aufzeichnung Haas (DfAA), 13 September 1950, in ibidem, B 10, vol. 157. 229 Meuer to Velhagen (DfAA), 10 October 1950 and Velhagen to Kordt (DfAA), 18 October 1950, in ibidem, B 11, vol. 1184.

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Despite such reservations, the West German government did succeed in getting the Allies to allow a commission to be dispatched in August 1950 to prepare the ground for such relations. It was headed by Carl Spiecker, a journalist and politician who had been persecuted under National Socialism. His appointment was intended to counter any suspicion that the real purpose of the commission’s trip was to make contact with fugitive Nazis. Germans in South America weren’t happy with the choice of Spiecker. Before Spiecker could leave, German-Argentinian Ernesto Meuer visited the Office for Foreign Affairs in Bonn and warned against sending an enemy of the Nazis to South America. Meuer had made contact with the office, a precursor to the West German foreign ministry, via the influential industrialist Wehrhahn family.230 Meuer was right. The well-connected and numerically much stronger group of Germans with close ties to National Socialism reacted with hostility to the delegation’s trip. In a report Meuer drew up for the Office for Foreign Affairs, the former Latin America correspondent of the Völkischer Beobachter, Carlos von Merck complained that, in the face of all warnings, the West German government had nominated none other than the special envoy for combating Nazism under one of Hitler’s immediate predecessors as German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, the man, in Merck’s words, ‘responsible for the German police attacks from 1930 to 1932’. Explicit warnings had been issued, Merck added, ‘about his connections to North American-Jewish circles’. Fears about Spiecker’s lack of neutrality had been confirmed after a visit to Brazil, when he had shown ‘his preference for Jewish circles in Rio de Janeiro and those Germans who had been on the enemy’s side during the war’. In Argentina, too, Merck complained, Spiecker had exclusively sought out contact with these groups of Germans.231 Merck’s report was filed away after it was noted that it reflected ‘the attitudes of long-established Germans in South America’ and that future heads of missions would need to be kept informed about such views.232 Over time, the Office for Foreign Affairs collected further evidence about the mentality of Germans abroad, although the attitudes in question probably differed less from those of ordinary West Germans than government officials wanted to admit. Among this evidence were letters from former colleagues. For example, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, who while working for the Foreign Ministry during the Third Reich had been only too willing to expatriate Germans in exile, passed along a letter by ‘an influential Argentinian personality from a German background’ who 230 Vertraulicher Bericht Mercks, 4 October 1950, in ibidem. 231 Velhagen (DfAA) to Kordt (DfAA), 18 October 1950, in ibidem. 232 Bülow-Schwante to Kordt (DfAA), 27 November 1950, in ibidem.

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protested that the West German government was listening too much to ‘the enemies of the regime’ while basically ignoring ‘pro-German circles’.233 It was also important to detractors of the Nazis to have their voices heard in West Germany. In particular, those who had emigrated to South America because of political persecution by the Nazis tried to reconnect with political life in Germany after the war. One important issue for them was Nazi activities in South America. In early 1950, Jürges succeeded in contacting the SPD deputy Gerhard Lütkens, a former employee of the Foreign Office who was primarily involved in foreign policy. Jürges supplied Lütkens with information about Nazi wealth which had been transferred to South America and which could be used to finance Nazi propaganda from that continent. He also informed Lütkes about the plans of Nazis in South America to infiltrate West Germany.234 Likewise, after returning to Germany, former parliamentary deputy of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) August Siemsen, who had worked as a teacher at the German-language Pestalozzi School in Buenos Aires during the war and was involved in work for Social Democratic organizations, provided information about the ‘activities of Nazis who had achieved success in South America’.235 Not all of the nearly 2000 SPD members who lived in South America were willing or able to return to Europe.236 Nonetheless, they were convinced that they were helping protect the political turnabout in Germany with their activities against Nazis who also lived in South America. As early as 1946, an association of German Social Democrats was founded in Brazil. One of the goals of its group, which worked together closely with the Social Democratic Party headquarters in West Germany, was to exert a Social Democratic influence on German-Brazilian relations. As the association leaders began to get the impression that the SPD’s foreign representative wasn’t taking them seriously, they articulated their outrage in a series of letters to the party’s top brass. The ‘Germans jingoists here’, they wrote, are working ‘exactly in the same way as after 1918 and are intensively trying […] to keep the flame of Nazism alight until “better days” are back’.237 For that reason, they argued, the work of SPD loyalists abroad was all the more crucial. The 233 Jürges to Lütkens (SPD), 25 February 1950, 22 March 1950, 17 April 1950, in HStA Düsseldorf, Rep. 409, vol. 203. 234 Feidel-Mertz, Schulen, pp. 197 ff. 235 Foitzek, ‘Exil’. 236 Vorstand der VDSB to SPD-Parteivorstand, 24 November 1949, in AdsD, SPD-Parteivorstand, Büro Erich Ollenhauer, 2/PFAH000091. 237 Röttgen (Vorsitzender der VDSB) to Wilhelm Sander (Sekretariat der SPD-Fraktion im Deutschen Bundestag), 20 November 1949, in ibidem.

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former editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, for instance, had succeeded after only a single article in a Brazilian daily in getting the Nazi newspaper Die Brücke, which the Allies regarded as extremely dangerous, banned.238 Failing to treat Social Democrats abroad with the proper respect, they wrote, could have devastating consequences: ‘Reactionary German jingoism abroad, contaminated as it is by Nazism, would deserve congratulations in that case. It couldn’t wish for any better attitude in the foreign division of the one party capable of defending democratic and socialist goals in Germany and of thereby checking anti-democratic elements abroad.’239 In 1950, as German-South American relations were about to be resumed, the Social Democrats had not only heard a lot in the press about Nazi activities in South America. They had also been made aware from within their own ranks of the gravity of the problem. It was one of the first topics Spiecker was asked about in the foreign affairs committee after he returned. In so doing, Lütkens made use of the information Jürges had given him. He asked whether Spiecker had tried to track down the funds ‘that were kept until 1945 in South America’ and whether he had enquired about whose hands they were in and for what purposes they had been used. But Spiecker only said that there were ‘millions of pieces of German gold’ in Argentina and that ‘those who knew about their whereabouts wouldn’t say anything’.240 Still, this answer no doubt strengthened suspicions that Nazis abroad had large sums of money at their disposal. Six months later, when a conservative CDU deputy reported about his trip to South America, the Social Democrats again immediately seized the opportunity to bring up the topic of Nazi activities among Germans abroad in a meeting of the foreign affairs committee. The SPD vigorously contradicted the CDU man’s assessment were ‘for the most part people who looked back fondly on the Wilhelmine Empire’. ‘South America’, he opined, ‘was like ‘a “national game reserve” for Nazis who were trying to exercise significant influence on Germany’. State Secretary Walter Hallstein tried to calm sceptical Social Democrats by assuring them that the combatting of ‘neo-fascist efforts’ among Germans abroad would not be left up to ‘the discretion of the mission heads there […] action will be taken centrally’.241 238 Vorstand der VDSB to Ollenhauer (Stellvertretender Parteivorsitzende der SPD), 12 November 1949, in ibidem. 239 Protokoll der 37. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 5 January 1951, in AADB, vol. 13/I, p. 231. 240 Protokoll der 55. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 13 June 1951, in ibidem, pp. 339 ff. 241 Bericht an den Auswärtigen Ausschuss über die Lage des Deutschtums in Südamerika, 1952, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 988.

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The Foreign Ministry did in fact keep a close eye in the following years on Nazi propaganda coming out of South America. Even if it externally put forth the opinion that ‘the occasional reports in the press or from private sources about allegedly growing neo-Nazi currents in individual countries, namely in Argentina’ were ‘unfortunate isolated cases’,242 the Foreign Ministry still followed up on various information about Nazi tendencies among German émigrés.243 At a conference for directors of Germany’s embassies in Latin America in November 1954, Hallstein stressed that ‘no softness or understanding’ should be shown to ‘Nazi tendencies’.244 Hermann Terdenge,245 who became Germany’s ambassador to Argentina in early 1952, refused to abide by this instruction completely. Before leaving Germany to take up his post, he had been shown the angry reactions of German émigrés to Spiecker’s trip, and they had their effect. The way in which ‘circles in West Germany had been inundated by Argentina’,246 Terdenge said, had not only opened his eyes to the ‘echoes of National Socialism’ among Germans in that country.247 It also showed him this group of Germans abroad had enough connections in West Germany to get the attention of political leaders and the media. Various German newspapers had reprinted the accusations against Spiecker practically word for word.248 The influence of neo-Nazi circles on German newspapers was no accident. Carlos von Merck was a correspondent for the Federal Information Office for Foreign Trade and several West German papers. Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel had signed a contract with Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels’ former press spokesman, before he left for Argentina,249 and William Sassen, a Dutch former member of the SS, worked for Stern magazine. All three men published articles in Der Weg and were part of the Nazi scene in Argentina.250

242 See procedures in PA AA, B 11, vol. 528; vol. 988; vol. 1285; vol. 1286, 243 Bericht an den Auswärtigen Ausschuss über die Lage des Deutschtums in Südamerika, 1952, in: PA AA, B 11, vol. 988. 244 Protokoll der Arbeitstagung für Behördenleiter der süd- und mittelamerikanischen Vertretungen in Montevideo, 18-24 November 1954, in ibidem, B 110, vol. 51. 245 Terdenge had already worked for the Foreign Ministry before in the 1930s. In 1937, he left for the private sector, only returning to the ministry when it was re-established after the Second World War. 246 Referat des Botschafters Terdenge, 19 November 1954, in PA AA, B 110, vol. 51. 247 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 28 December 1953, in ibidem, B 11, 1286. 248 Theodor Heuss (Bundespräsident) to Middelhauve (Stellvertretender Vorsitzende der FDP), 14 January 1951, in Barch, B 122, vol. 441; Der Spiegel, 43/1950. 249 Oven, Nazi, pp. 113, 125-127. 250 Wojak, Bauer, pp. 290 ff.

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Terdenge recognized that policies of distance, to say nothing of a confrontational course toward Nazi sympathizers, would call forth fierce resistance and cause him numerous problems. So he decided to pursue a different option, trying to encourage ‘positive attitudes’ among all groups toward West Germany and to overcome the differences between Germans in Argentina.251 Ahead of his arrival, he already wrote an article for the Freie Presse, which served the much larger right-wing German-Argentinian milieu and unapologetically advocated Nazi positions. He was coming to Argentina, Terdenge wrote, ‘without any preconceptions in favour of one side or the other’ and was willing ‘to work together with everyone without prejudice’.252 Justifying this course to the Foreign Office, Terdenge wrote that although the Freie Presse didn’t always refrain ‘certain gestures of obeisance toward readers with Nazi views’, it did have ‘a fundamentally positive stance toward the Federal Republic of Germany’.253 Later he would declare that because ‘the predominant part of the [German] colony’ read this paper, he did not think it would be too clever ‘to brand it a “Nazi mouthpiece” on the basis of its occasional indulgence of Nazi memories’.254 The situation was completely different, Terdenge argued, with Der Weg, which was openly hostile to the Federal Republic.255 What he didn’t mention was that the borders between the employees of the Freie Presse and the Dürer publishing house, which put out Der Weg, were very fluid.256 Terdenge also failed to mention that, despite statements to the contrary, he maintained contact with circles around the Dürer publishing house and only avoided controversial personalities like Rudel or Fritsch.257 For example, Merck, who had been employed as a member of Perón’s staff directly after the war,258 accompanied him as a reporter on his trips. He also personally knew Oven, the editor-in-chief of the Freie Presse and the author of a book entitled Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende [With Goebbels to the Very End], published by Dürer. These contacts were very important for the ambassador. They ensured that friendly articles would appear in the Freie 251 Referat des Botschafters Terdenge, 19 November 1954, in PA AA, B 110, vol. 51. 252 Freie Presse, 2 December 1951. 253 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 17 June 1952, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 988. 254 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 28 December 1953, in ibidem, vol. 1286. 255 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 17 June 1952, in ibidem, vol. 988. 256 Meding, Flucht, S. 237 ff. 257 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 5 January 1953 B 11, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1285; Terdenge an AA, 11 February 1954, in ibidem, vol. 1286; Referat des Botschafters Terdenge, 19 November 1954, in ibidem, B 110, vol. 51. 258 Oven, Nazi, p. 112.

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Presse, which was read by the majority of German ex-pat community, and it also opened doors to the government circles.259 For that reason, Terdenge avoided openly discussing political issues. He only tried to change others’ pro-Nazi sentiments in private conversations – a strategy he himself deemed a success, even if those on the receiving end of such ‘therapy sessions’ didn’t always share that view.260 A part of Terdenge’s strategy was ‘to allow divisive moments from the past to recede into the background’.261 They included not only conflicts within the German community in Argentina between 1933 and 1945, but also the events in Europe that had caused such conflicts. Even after Terdenge was recalled, his loyal deputy of many years protested against a Foreign Ministry-approved showing of the film ‘The 20th of July’, arguing that this positive depiction of the attempted Hitler assassination would only open old wounds and create unnecessary quarrels.262 Hallstein lent his support to the embassy’s handling of the politics of the past when he commented upon Terdenge’s reports of tensions within the German community by saying that ‘incriminating memories of the past and everything divisive’ should be avoided.263 Extradition requests for Karl Klingenfuss Terdenge’s attempts to allow the past ‘to recede into the background’ seemed to come under threat in 1952, as the legal assistance between West Germany and Argentina gained momentum. In September 1949, the city court in Nuremberg had issued an arrest warrant for the former legation councillor Karl Klingenfuss. In the final report by American prosecutors, he was accused of having helped organize the deportations of Jews between June and December 1942 as a member of Department D of the Foreign Office, which was responsible for the ‘Jewish question’. Klingenfuss had written a number of documents with which the Foreign Office had pushed the deportations forward. They included a letter to the German ambassador in Bucharest 259 Ibidem, p. 130; Meding, Flucht, p. 268. 260 Terdenge (Botschafter Buenos Aires) to AA, 28 December 1953, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1286; Terdenge to AA, 5 January 1953; Terdenge to AA, 11 August 1954, in ibidem, vol. 1285; Oven, Nazi, pp. 130-134. 261 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 28 December 1953, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1286. 262 Werz (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 2 December 1955, in ibidem, vol. 1289. 263 Protokoll der Arbeitstagung für Behördenleiter der süd- und mittelamerikanischen Vertretungen in Montevideo, 18-24 November, 1954, in ibidem, B 110, vol. 51.

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to communicate to the Romanian government the Nazi regime’s position on deporting Romanian Jews in the Third Reich to Eastern Europe. In his explanation, he had declared that the Foreign Ministry had nothing against the deportations. For negotiations with the Bulgarian government, he had written a memorandum suggesting, in return for financial compensation, taking over all of Bulgaria’s Jews with the intention of deporting them ‘to the East’. West European Jews had also been targeted for extermination during Klingenfuss’ time at the so-called ‘Jewish department’. At the behest of Adolf Eichmann, Klingenfuss had declared that there were no objections within the foreign ministry to Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands being sent to work deployments in Auschwitz. Orders written and signed by him to the foreign ministry’s office in Brussels to help with the deportations of at least 10,000 Jews, however, were never followed.264 After a government doctor declared Klingenfuss too ill to be imprisoned, German authorities initially declined to arrest him. But when charges were filed against him in 1950, it emerged that the former diplomat had fled to Switzerland, presumably moving on from there to Argentina, where he had worked from 1939 to 1940 as a legation secretary at the German embassy. Because the Allies were still responsible for the legal assistance between Germany and Argentina in 1950, German prosecutors informed occupation authorities. The occupiers, however, saw no reason to file an extradition request, so in 1950 the case was temporarily put on ice. Given the fact that responsibility for legal assistance was about to be transferred to West German authorities, it’s no surprise that the Allies left the filing of an extradition request to German prosecutors. This followed in January 1951, but it wasn’t until the following year, with the resumption of diplomatic relations between West Germany and Argentina that the conditions existed for legal assistance. But prosecutors were busy with the trial of Franz Rademacher, the director of Department D and Klingenfuss’ boss. His case would serve as a precedent whether these sorts of defendants were likely to be found guilty.265 The Rademacher trail possessed enormous importance for the SPD, which hoped it would bolster their criticism of the personnel policies of the newly reconstituted Foreign Ministry. The rehiring of diplomats who had assisted in carrying out Hitler’s bellicose foreign policy had long been an outrage. In late 1951, in response to massive criticism from the political opposition in West Germany and from abroad, a parliamentary investigative 264 Browning, Foreign Office, pp. 133 ff.; Hoffmann (StA Bamberg) to GStA Bamberg, 1 October 1960, copy in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76. 265 BT-Drucksachen 1. WP, 23 October 1952, no. 3817.

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committee had been formed to look into the past of newly hired diplomats.266 In March 1952, two months before the publication of the results of those investigations, Rademacher was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for his activities for the Foreign Ministry. The judges found him guilty of being an accessory to the manslaughter of 1300 people. Yet although the sentence was unacceptably mild, the Social Democratic press service was happy that the trial ‘had revealed with terrible clarity the complicity of the Foreign Ministry in the deportations of Jews. Leading diplomats from back then’, wrote the press service, ‘have today been restored to their offices, with all they entail, as well-paid ambassadors, consular secretaries, and allegedly irreplaceable experts’. During the trial, the press service, complained, only a very few of the many witnesses had possessed the courage to tell the truth. Many had refused to speak out because of collegial loyalty.267 It was now clear that legal proceedings against Klingenfuss could be successful. By the latest in August 1952, when the court in the Rademacher case publishing the reasoning behind its decision, Nuremberg prosecutors could have filed an extradition request for Klingenfuss, but at first they didn’t.268 It was only when the media took an interest in the case that things began to move. On 23 September, the Parlamentarischer Pressedienst, a parliamentary circular, reported that the murder suspect Klingenfuss was acting as a representative of German foreign trade in Argentina and functioning as the director of the German-Argentinian chamber of commerce. Readers of the article were even given his address. The report also said that Klingenfuss’ former colleague Horst Wagner, the director of the Inland II Department of the Interior Ministry, which bore the main responsibility for deporting Jews, had also been able to flee to Argentina.269 A short time later, the news made the rounds that Rademacher had also escaped to Argentina. The court had counted his time in investigative custody and as a prisoner of American occupiers against his sentence, so that he was already a free man by July 1952. German prosecutors were preparing another arrest warrant, but before it was issued, Rademacher fled. Reports such as these about Nazi criminals absconding to South America caused the Social Democrats to file a parliamentary request for information. They wanted to know whether extradition proceedings had been initiated and 266 Conze, Frei, Hayes, Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 475-488; Döscher, Seilschaften, pp. 161-192. 267 “Stillstand in Den Haag”, in Sozialdemokratischer Pressedienst, 9 April 1952. 268 BT-Drucksachen 1. WP, 23 October 1952, no. 3817. 269 Parlamentarisch-Politischer Pressedienst, 23 September 1952, in PA AA, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532.

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whether Argentina had been included, which government officers had issued passports and visas, and whether Klingenfuss was in fact working for the chamber of commerce.270 Amidst the criticism of the Foreign Ministry’s personnel policies, the German government classified this request as ‘politically significant’.271 However there were no indications that Rademacher was actually in Argentina. The situation was different with Klingenfuss. In the wake of the parliamentary inquiry, prosecutors readied and had the extensive extradition documents translated within three days.272 Because of their ‘pressing nature’, they were not, as was standard procedure, sent to the German embassy in Argentina to be relayed to the Argentinian government. Instead, ‘exceptionally’, prosecutors sent the documents directly to the Argentinian embassy in Bonn for notarization and forwarding to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires.273 In its answer two weeks later, as an attempt to offset criticism that it had only acted after the SPD query, the government avoided giving any specifics about extradition procedures. ‘Because in the summer of 1952, the first extradition requests [of people who weren’t Nazi criminals] were sent to the Argentinian government, the Bavarian Justice Ministry in Munich instructed the General prosecutors Office in Nuremberg to collect and present the documents necessary for a request for extradition’.274 This formulation was surely designed to give the impression that the request was made much earlier than it in fact was. When Terdenge learned of the extradition request on 15 October, he was anything but happy. The German-Argentinian chamber of commerce may nominally have been independent of the Federal Republic, but the embassy had offered considerable support when the institution was founded. The fact that its board of directors consisted of both camps within the German community in Argentina proved particularly problematic. Those who had cooperated until 1945 with the institutions of the Third Reich had joined, together with an equal number of Nazi detractors.275 Terdenge saw the cooperation of both factions with the chamber of commerce as 270 BT-Drucksachen 1. WP, 8 October 1952, no. 3743. 271 Vermerk BMJ, 23 October 1952, in Barch, B 141, vol. 17056; Conze, Frei, Hayes, Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 486-488. 272 Denkschrift über den Gang des Verfahrens gegen Klingenfuß, Bayerisches Staatsministeriums der Justiz, 11 Ocotber 1952, in Barch, B 141, vol. 17056. 273 AA to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 21 October 1952, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76. 274 BT-Drucksachen 1. WP, 23 October 1952, no. 3817. 275 Vertraulicher Bericht Mercks, 4 October 1950, in PA AA, B 11, vol. 1184.

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a great success. In the case of Klingenfuss, he immediately summoned the chamber’s president Heriberto Rastalsky. That very day, he passed on Rastalsky’s thoughts, which most likely mirrored his own, to the Foreign Ministry. Everything, he wrote, that ‘might endanger the arduously achieved unity of all parts of the German community in the chamber of commerce’ must be avoided.276 In his report, Terdenge included correspondence between Rastalsky and Robert Kempner, who in 1947 had testified for the prosecution against the employees of the old foreign ministry. The correspondence had arisen after Klingenfuss told Rastalsky in mid-1951 that ‘things were being turned against him from a particular side […] in the belief that he had been involved in war crimes’. The president of the chamber of commerce had then written to Kempner, who had interrogated Klingenfuss, arguing that ‘unfounded rumours should not be allowed to hinder him in rebuilding his life’.277 Kempner confirmed that, when instructed to do so, Klingenfuss had written orders connected with the deportation of Jews but that he had got himself transferred because he felt ‘disgust at the things he had seen’. Kempner said that Klingenfuss had been interviewed after the war that ‘his openness and condemnation of what had happened’ had made a ‘favourable impression’. Later, prosecutors in Nuremberg had reviewed him ‘without initiating criminal procedures’.278 For the chamber of commerce, that was reassurance enough. Forwarding such exonerating material to the foreign office and warning Klingenfuss about the consequences of extradition procedures wasn’t all that Terdenge did. He had a further opportunity to do the ex-diplomat a favour when he was instructed to inform the Argentinian Foreign Ministry about the extradition request and to inquire whether the Argentinian embassy in Bonn had already passed it along. During a discussion at the Argentinian Foreign Ministry, Terdenge’s representative let drop that Klingenfuss was a ‘former colleague’ who had ‘told him a bit about the matter many months ago in Buenos Aires’. The representative tried to downplay the charges against Klingenfuss and his possible culpability. ‘Klingenfuss was not charged by American prosecutors back then in Nuremberg’, the deputy said. ‘The man responsible for the crimes in question, Dr Rademacher, recently disappeared 276 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 15 Ocotber 1952, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 76. 277 Rastalsky (Deutsch-Argentinische Handelskammer) to Kempner (Lawyer, Frankfurt a.M.), 8 August 1951, in ibidem. 278 Kempner (Lawyer, Frankfurt a.M) to Rastalsky (Deutsch-Argentinische Handelskammer), 17 August 1951, in ibidem.

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in Germany and has gone abroad.’ The deputy also told his Argentinian colleagues that the accused had assured the German embassy that he would voluntarily give himself up to the West German authorities. The discussion wasn’t designed to stress the importance of the extradition request. On the contrary, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry could easily figure out that the embassy had little interest in the request being granted.279 The ambassador didn’t inform the German Foreign Ministry about the intervention he had made on his own initiative in the legal assistance between the two countries, reporting only that the Argentinian Foreign Ministry had not yet received the request.280 A short time later there was an initial triumph. Terdenge’s new deputy asked during his briefing at the foreign ministry whether a decision was coming in the Klingenfuss case. His conversation partner was surprised, saying that he had assumed from the earlier conversation that ‘the foreign ministry will be able to stay out of the affair’. If this interpretation from headquarters in Bonn had become known, it would have meant difficulties for the embassy. The German Foreign Ministry knew of Klingenfuss’ offer to go to the Federal Republic, but the authorities in question had reacted to it as an ‘unpleasant suggestion’.281 For that reason, Terdenge’s deputy insisted ‘with great emphasis’ that the request be subjected to ‘objective review’. He then told his conversation partner he believed he could safely say that the government would not approve the request from Bonn.282 A short time later, a regional court in Fürth decided to accommodate Klingenfuss in one respect. If he turned himself in, he wouldn’t have to be kept in investigative custody during the main part of the trial.283 Prosecutors initially intended to file an objection, but after the intervention of the state secretary at the Bavarian Justice Ministry, they decided not to. The ministry also recommended that Kingenfuss needed only to arrive in Germany at the beginning of the trial and that the extradition request be withdrawn.284 Most probably the dim chances of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry approving the request played a role in this conciliatory course. In any case, people in 279 Vermerk Fischer (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires), 6 November 1952, in ibidem, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532. 280 Terdenge (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 6 November 1952, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 76. 281 Vermerk Hopmann (AA), 21 November 1952; FS AA to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 21 November 1952, in ibidem. 282 Vermerk Werz (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires), 28 November 1952, in ibidem, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532. 283 Beschluss der Ersten Strafkammer des LG Nürnberg-Fürth, 18 December 1952, in ibidem. 284 Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Justiz to AA, 2 February 1953, in ibidem.

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Buenos Aires were satisfied. When the embassy informed the president of the chamber of commerce about the communiqué from Bonn, he declared ‘that this order represented, in light of how things are, an optimum of conciliation by the responsible German authorities’ and was particularly pleased in the interests of the chamber. Rastalsky was instructed to inform the Argentinian Foreign Ministry since he knew the head of the ministry’s legal division quite well personally.285 But Rastalsky’s visit to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry did not mean that the processing of the German request was discontinued. Despite words to the contrary from Bonn, the legal division took the time to deal with the request and put up barriers to any future extradition attempts against Klingenfuss. The arrest warrant upon which the extradition request was based referred back to the decree written by Klingenfuss concerning the deportation of Belgian Jews. The German ambassador in Brussels had refused to put it into practice, but according to German law, the intention alone was a legally punishable act.286 According to Argentinian law, argued the foreign ministry’s legal division, this was a case of incitement to an act that hadn’t been carried out and was beyond criminal prosecution. Since extradition could only take place in accordance with Argentinian law, that was not an option in the case of Klingenfuss.287 The attempts to get hold of Rademacher and Wagner also ended in ways that gave Terdenge no cause to fear for the unity among German ex-patriots. Following Rademacher’s flight, German prosecutors had tried via the Federal Criminal Investigations Office (BKA) to get Interpol to issue an international manhunt. But Interpol General Secretary Marcel Sicot answered: Rademacher is an alleged accessory to the murder of 1300 Jews in October 1941. In connection with this, I would like to inform you that Article I of the statutes of the International Criminal Police Commission prohibits our organization from intervening in affairs of a political, religious or racial nature.288 285 Vermerk Werz (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires), 23 February 1953, in ibidem. 286 Haftbefehl der 1. Strafkammer des LG Nürnberg-Fürth, 30 September 1952, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 76. 287 Delfino (MREC) to Ministro de RREEyC, 24 March 1953, in ibidem. Article 2 of the Argentinian Extradition Law (Law Number 1612) specified that an extradition request could only be approved, if it concerned a crime ‘punishable by not less than a year’s incarceration according to the laws of the Republic’. 288 Sicot (Secretary General of Interpol) to Max Hagemann (Präsident des BKA), 28 November 1952, in Barch, B 141, vol. 17056.

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The BKA wrote that the French Interpol office had recommended classifying crimes that ‘had in any way to do with the particular organizations and institutions of the Third Reich as political affairs and not to process them within the organizations, even if they had originated in the individual criminal impulses of the perpetrator’.289 The fact that the police of one of the victorious nations in the Second World War would say such things may seem surprising, but on closer examination it’s not really astonishing. Many high-ranking French police officials had served the Vichy regime, whose police forces had cooperated with the Nazis in arresting and deporting Jews. Those forces had good reason to want to draw a line under deeds that ‘had in any way to do with the particular organizations and institutions of the Third Reich’.290 In light of this obstructionist stance, West German authorities had no choice but to rely on the help of foreign representatives when going after Nazi fugitives from justice. For that reason, they ordered Terdenge to look for evidence that Rademacher and Wagner had fled to Argentina. One of the embassy employees discussed the question of Wagner’s possible whereabouts with Klingenfuss and ‘in careful form with various gentlemen here who had knowledge of Nazi immigration’ but preferred to remain nameless. The diplomat was told that the man he was looking for had been in Argentina a while and had ‘stretched out feelers to his former ideological comrades here’, but that he had returned to Europe via Chile in the meantime.291 Wagner had in fact left Argentina for Italy in April 1952. In 1956, he returned to West Germany, but it wasn’t until 1958 that the authorities tracked him down. Wagner and his attorneys successfully prolonged the trial with a series of medical diagnoses, until it was finally abandoned in 1974, because the defendant was judged too old and frail to answer the charges.292 By contrast there was no sign of Rademacher. In 1954, it emerged that he had fled not to South America, but to Syria.293 Because the trail of Rademacher and Klingenfuss could not be opened without the former, there was no reason for the latter to travel to West Germany. Things would only start to happen again in the case in the 1960s. In 1963, Rademacher was convicted in Syria of being a West German spy. After being pardoned two years later, he returned to Germany. In 1968, the regional court in Bamberg sentenced him to five years in prison, but this was offset by the time already served. 289 Dullien (BKA) to BMI, 12 May 1964, in ibidem, vol. 104091. 290 Klarsfeld, Vichy, see especially pp. 67-75. 291 Vermerk Botschaft Buenos Aires, 14 January 1953, in PA AA, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532. 292 Heidenreich, Täter, pp. 241-246; Weitkamp, Diplomaten, pp. 390-439. 293 Terdenge (Botschafter Buenos Aires) to AA, 5 June 1953, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 67.

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A further trial against him never got underway because Rademacher died in 1973.294 As we shall see, Klingenfuss had nothing more to fear anyway. A temporary end to state manhunts The German judicial system’s first attempt to apprehend Nazi criminals who had fled to South America had come to nothing. But this historical episode had made German authorities address the problem for the first time. As the search for Rademacher was going on, Heinrich Grützner, who was part of the German Justice Ministry’s department of international criminal law, approached the Foreign Ministry suggesting that Germany concluded an extradition treaty with Argentina. ‘Since in the post-war era Argentina has become a place of refuge for numerous German citizens who are wanted in Germany for crimes’, he argued, ‘it is safe to assume that extradition issues with Argentina will remain quite lively’.295 Initially the suggestion was met with interest by the Argentinian Foreign Ministry, which itself had suggested a legal assistance treaty for civil law the previous year. The ministry had no objections to that proposed treaty being extended to criminal matters.296 The German Foreign Office asked the Justice Ministry to draw up a draft agreement, but Grützner never succeeded in getting his boss Ernst Kanter to support an extradition and legal assistance treaty between Germany and Argentina. Kanter, who as a judge working for the commander of Germany’s occupying troops in Denmark had issued more than a hundred death sentences for resistance fighters,297 believed that there was not ‘the slightest interest on the German side for the conclusion of such a treaty’. In his eyes, the German-Argentinian treaty could wait until a model treaty had been decided upon for all nations.298 The German Foreign Ministry disagreed. Two members of the ministry’s legal department who were responsible for reinstituting agreements from before the war set up a meeting with Kanter. They were particularly motivated by the case of Rademacher, in which the SPD was putting pressure on the Foreign Ministry. That case, they argued, showed that extradition matters could be ‘particularly difficult’. Without a treaty, legal assistance between the two countries would be made harder 294 Klee, Personenlexikon, pp. 476. 295 Grützner (BMJ) to AA, 3 February 1953, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 485. The fugitives from justice Grützner mentions weren’t exclusively Nazi criminals. 296 Werz (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires), to AA, 18 March 1953, in ibidem. 297 Müller, Juristen, pp. 213 ff. 298 Vermerk Grollmann (Ref. 503, AA), 19 August 1954, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 102. See also Aufzeichnung Voigts (Ref. 503, AA), 5 June 1954, in ibidem.

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by the fact that in such cases, all documents would have to be authorized by Argentina’s representatives in West Germany – a time-consuming and complicated process.299 But Kanter remained unconvinced, ultimately noting with satisfaction: The Foreign Ministry has agreed that the draft be held off for a long time. They recognize that there is no practical need for a contractual regulation of extradition with Argentina since thus far there has been only a tiny number of extradition requests and none of those requests has been successful.300

There were several reasons that the number of extradition requests was so small. A lobby pushing for amnesty for former Nazis in West Germany came together before the state was even officially formed, and before long it had won over public opinion, with the majority polls saying that war criminals should not be pursued. Because of its desire to include the new nation in its western defensive alliance, and under pressure from the West German public opinion and the first West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government, the United States didn’t insist that verdicts against war criminals were enforced. In the meantime, the German parliament, the Bundestag, was preparing a series of non-partisan amnesty laws. None other than Kanter was diligently working on a law protecting malefactors from prosecution. It was passed in July 1954 just before the German-Argentinian extradition treaty was put on hold, and many Nazi criminals profited from it.301 Following these laws, more and more efforts to prosecute people ground to a halt. State authorities declined to press charges since the verdicts were usually mild and there was little hope of getting sentences long enough so as not to fall under the amnesty laws. Thus, the number of cases pursued by prosecutors declined, although the majority of Nazi crimes still hadn’t been dealt with legally. 1954 saw record lows of 162 investigations and fifteen convictions. These numbers rose gradually,302 but the situation didn’t turn around until 1958. The investigations of Adolf Eichmann, which began in 1956, were the only ones undertaken by West Germany against a Nazi criminal who had fled to South America. But it wasn’t until 1957 that the 299 Vermerk Voigt (Ref. 503, AA), 6 September 1954, in ibidem. 300 Vermerk Kanter (BMJ), 8 September 1954, in Barch, B 141, vol. 92460. 301 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 133-306; concerning Kanter’s involvement see pp. 106 und 115 ff. 302 Rückerl, Strafverfolgung, pp. 49-58; Eichmüller, ‚Bilanz‘, pp. 625-629.

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prosecuting authorities had reliable information about his whereabouts. During this period all the other South American fugitives who would achieve such notoriety in later decades weren’t even under investigation. That had not escaped the attention of the fugitives themselves. Gerhard Bohne and Hans Hefelmann who had been involved in the Nazi euthanasia programmes, Josef Vötterl and Kurt Christmann, both leaders of a SS mobile killing squad (Einsatzkommando 10), and Albert Ganzenmüller, who as deputy director of the Reich rail company had been complicit in the deportation of Jews, returned to West Germany between 1955 and 1956.303 Others, like Josef Mengele, came out of hiding and applied for identification documents from the German embassy using their own names.304 Other states that had arisen on the territory of the former German Reich and whose judicial systems were as a rule responsible for prosecuting crimes that had been committed there, also made almost no serious efforts during this period to apprehend Nazi criminals. Despite all of its anti-fascist propaganda, Communist East Germany had as much difficulty going after Nazi perpetrators as West Germany did.305 And since East Germany maintained no diplomatic relations with the nations of South America, they lacked the necessary preconditions for tracking down criminals abroad and getting them extradited. That was why East German authorities would never play a role in the hunt for Nazi criminals. Unlike the Federal Republic, whose judicial system tried to deal with Nazi crimes with existing laws and thus applied the criminal code that had existed since before 1933, the cases brought by the Austrian judicial system relied on laws from after the Third Reich. Austria had created its own legal framework for pursuing and punishing Nazi criminals. So-called prohibition and retribution laws classified membership in the Nazi Party, which until 1938 had been illegal in Austria, as high treason. The War Criminals Law criminalized informing on people to the Nazis and organizational work for them. In this way, members of the Third Reich government and high-ranking functionaries in the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, the Security Service, the People’s Court, and the concentration camp administrations could be punished without having to show that they committed crimes as individuals. On the basis of these laws, the Austrian judicial system rendered guilty verdicts against 13,000 people up until 1955.306 303 Schneppen, Vierte Reich, pp. 125-186. 304 Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 112 ff. 305 Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 68-75. 306 Garscha and Kuretsidis-Haider, ‘Rüter-Kategorien’, pp. 74-85.

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In the process, investigations commenced against several of the Nazi criminals who had fled to South America, including Eichmann. But Viennese prosecutors, who handed over responsibility to their colleagues in Frankfurt in 1956, hardly made any progress. The only thing they had found out about Eichmann was his function within the Reich Main Security Office and the fact that he had allegedly been in charge of Auschwitz for a time. That was far less than had come to light at the Nuremberg Trials. The files from the trials contained both rumours about Eichmann’s secret activities in the Altausee area and indications that he was hiding out in Brazil.307 Nonetheless, the Viennese Prosecutor’s Office, which otherwise can hardly be accused of dragging its feet in the pursuit of Nazi criminals, avoided complicated extradition requests. As early as 1950, for example, prosecutors knew that Oswald Menghin, wanted for being a member of the government cabinet that assisted Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, was residing in Buenos Aires. But they declined to file an extradition request with the Argentinian government, arguing that the costs would be too high.308 That wasn’t the only case in which Austria didn’t request extradition, even though the whereabouts of a perpetrator were known. Also in 1950, the Austrian embassy in Buenos Aires reported that a certain Herr Schramm had turned up asking for an Austrian passport. After a conversation, it turned out that the man was none other than Hans Fischböck, the former minister of trade in the annexation cabinet. During the war, he had served as commissioner general for the Netherlands and had been responsible for recruiting slave labourers. He was now wanted by Viennese prosecutors.309 When Fischböck in fact applied for a passport two years later, the Austrian Ministry of Justice refused the application on the grounds that ‘issuance of a passport could make it seem as though the state approved of the residence of the recipient abroad’.310 But again no extradition request was made. Likewise, no one in the Austrian government reacted to indications that Franz Sterzinger, the former Reich commissioner for electricity, who was wanted by prosecutors in Innsbruck, was living in Argentina.311 Ultimately Fischböck, Menghin, and Sterzinger were made immune to prosecution in 1957 as part of special laws passed by the Austrian parliament, the Nationalrat, giving immunity to some former Nazis. Leopold Pribitzer 307 Wojak, Bauer, pp. 286-289. 308 Blaschitz, ‘Austrian National Socialists’, pp. 230 ff. 309 Leinmaier (DfAA) to BMfI, 7 June 1951, in ÖStA, AdR, BMfI, 55189-18/66, Fischböck. 310 Vermerk Generaldirektion für die öffentliche Sicherheit, 30 January 1954, in ibidem. 311 Blaschitz, ‘Austrian National Socialists’, p. 231.

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and Reinhard Spitzy, both of whom were wanted for being members in the Nazi Party prior to 1938, also benefited from the amnesty. From that point on, the Austrian judicial system had to rely on the criminal code, which meant that as a rule only cases of murder or manslaughter could be prosecuted. Prosecutors still investigated cases of former Nazis thought to have carried out such crimes before emigrating to South America, but the Austrian government’s refusal to file extradition requests would essentially remain the same.312 In light of developments in Austria and West and East Germany, as well as the fact that most of the other European states had ended their efforts to legally prosecute Nazi crimes, the issue of the war criminals who had fled to South America, seemed to have run its course by the late 1950s without a single fugitive having been brought to justice. The capture of fugitive Nazis and collaborators – the hunt for Nazis – had only been relevant to Allies in the mid-1940s and to the opponents of Perón for a bit longer. By contrast, in Western Europe, amnesty laws, the reintegration of old elites, and the new nightmare scenarios of the Cold War served to extinguish people’s interest in the fugitives. But by the end of the 1950s, there was a change of course in relation to the past in both West and East Germany. Whereas in the East authorities discovered the propaganda value of addressing the Nazi past of West German elites, the broad political consensus in the West, which had resisted the prosecution of Nazi criminals in favour of reintegrating former elites, began to fall apart. The advocates of legally prosecuting Nazi crimes gradually began to attract a wider audience. That dramatically changed the situation of Nazi perpetrators who had fled to South America. They now increasingly found themselves the focus of investigators’ attention and the public eye. This was the point at which people first began to speak of the ‘Nazi hunt’ and ‘Nazi hunters’.

312 Ibidem, pp. 231 ff.; Meding, Cuantificación, pp. 29-32.

II

Reluctant Manhunt

A pamphlet published in 1956 in communist East Germany included a remarkable section about the West German Justice Minister Joachim von Merkatz, who had been the general secretary of the Ibero-American Institute during the Second World War. The author wrote that as an employee of what was ostensibly only a cultural institution but in fact ‘a spying centre for Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry’, Merkatz had been involved in the planning of an assassination of the British diplomat Arthur Yenken in 1944. After the assassination had proved successful, the director of the institute, General Wilhelm Faupel, allegedly reported: ‘We’ve finally laid low that accursed Yenken. He’s dead, literally brought down to the ground by Dr Panhorst and Commandant Moreno and sent directly to hell.’1 The pamphlet was part of an East German attempt to discredit the Federal Republic, beginning in the 1950s, by trying to find incriminating evidence of fascism in the pasts of West German government members and high-ranking officials. But before long, East German researchers discovered that Faupel’s letter could not possibly be genuine. In fact, Faupel’s quote, written in the sort of purple prose one might find in a crime novel, came from one of the letters Heinrich Jürges had forged and sent to Silvano Santander. Later editions of the pamphlet omitted any mention of Merkatz. Those in charge of East German propaganda didn’t need forgeries to excoriate the Nazi pasts of the West German elite – the personnel continuities with the Third Reich were too manifest to require that. In May 1957, East Germany began a campaign focused on judges, many of whom had helped to enforce Nazi law and legally legitimize the Nazi regime. In the months that followed, East German authorities published a series of pamphlets containing information about the activities of more than a thousand West German judges and lawyers during the Third Reich. It wasn’t long before the West German embassy in London reported back to Bonn that both British media and the British parliament were taking a keen interest in this topic. Gradually, the West German government and legal system decided that it could no longer afford to ignore the accusations.2 At the same time, the so-called Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial led a small group of judges and lawyers to believe that investigations into Nazi crimes should be centralized. Because of the pressure to act following the East 1 Ausschuß für Deutsche Einheit, ed., Bonn, p. 121. 2 Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 76-82.

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German accusations, a conference of justice ministers from the federal German states in September 1958 welcomed this suggestion. Several months later the so-called Central Office was founded in Ludwigsburg. Its task was to carry out preliminary investigations into ‘concentration camp and war crimes and to communicate the results to the relevant state prosecutors’. Although the Office’s powers were limited, it still provided the investigations of Nazi criminals with some needed momentum.3 Prosecutors began pursuing perpetrators more intensively, especially as the national government temporarily intensified investigations in order to legitimate the forthcoming statute of limitations on cases of murder and accessory to murder committed during the ‘Third Reich’. This intensification was a way of drawing a line under the Nazi past. 4 Moreover, beginning in the early 1960s, a public debate commenced in West Germany about the crimes committed under National Socialism. It reached its high points in the Auschwitz trial from 1963 to 1965 and in the conflicts over the statute of limitations in 1964-65 and 1968-69.5 The changes in how Nazi crimes were perceived and legally pursued since the late 1950s didn’t fail to have an effect on the fugitives in South America. Many of them were now in sight of the prosecutors. The abduction of Eichmann in Argentina, a global sensation, attracted the attention of journalists and activists to criminals who had gone underground abroad. This backdrop made it easy to resuscitate the threatening scenarios that had arisen in conjunction with the opposition to Peronism. When preparing to snatch Eichmann, Israeli authorities had assumed that those Nazis who were still alive in Argentina continued to pose a serious danger to Jews. The assumption that Argentinian Nazis had built an organization that had cooperated with the Argentinian government in the run-up to the overthrow of Perón would play a role in West German debates about the pursuit of Nazi criminals throughout the entire 1960s.

1

The Capture of Eichmann

One of the figures who dominated the discussion about the Nazi past was the concentration camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal. Born Jewish in Galicia in 1908, Wiesenthal’s persecution by the Nazis began when the German 3 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 146-185; Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 82-93; Weinke, Gesellschaft, pp. 10-34. 4 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 224-264; Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 180-235; Weinke, Gesellschaft, pp. 71-86. 5 Osterloh and Vollnhals, NS-Prozesse; Siegfried, ‘Aufarbeitung’; Rusinek, ‘NS-Vergangenheit’.

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Wehrmacht marched into Lviv, then part of Poland, in June 1941. From there he was taken to a camp for slave labourers and made to work for the German railway, the Reichsbahn, until September 1943, when he succeeded in going underground. By the time the SS had found him, the Red Army was already approaching the city, and the Germans took their Jewish prisoners further west. After a number of stops in transit, Wiesenthal ended up in the Plaszow concentration camp, southeast of Warsaw, in late 1944. There he was part of a labour commando that had to incinerate thousands of corpses in order to conceal the horrors the Nazis had committed. As the Red Army again approached, concentration camp guards forced the prisoners to go on a death march. Despite an injured foot, Wiesenthal survived, making it to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was liberated by American troops in early April 1945.6 Wiesenthal remained convinced that Nazi crimes had to be atoned for. Only three weeks after his liberation, he presented the American military with a list of 150 people he believed were complicit in those crimes. The list marked the beginning of his work for the American intelligence services, initially the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), later the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he helped track down Nazi criminals.7 In the process Wiesenthal gained access to classified documents. One year after his liberation, as the US government’s Safehaven investigations were running at full tilt, he was allowed to view several documents concerning the transfer of Nazi assets abroad.8 They contained reference to a meeting that supposedly occurred in the Maison Rouge hotel in Strassbourg, where a group of German industrialists decided to move capital outside of Germany to preserve the underground existence of National Socialism. Argentina was named as one of the most important countries – together with Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Turkey. Assets had allegedly been transferred to 98 Argentinian shell companies. With permission from the American authorities, Wiesenthal, who was by this time residing in Linz, published the contents of the documents in an Austrian newspaper.9 This was how Wiesenthal appropriated the nightmare scenario of an active Nazi underground in South America that had originated in tensions between the US and Argentina. Since the Americans had seized the reserves of the Reichsbank, Wiesenthal assumed that the money in question must 6 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 61-83. 7 Ibidem, pp. 85-88. 8 Sporrer and Steiner, Wiesenthal, pp. 80 ff.; Wiesenthal, Eichmann, pp. 123 ff. 9 Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 25 May 1946, copy in SWA, Akt Toplitzsee.

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have come from stolen Jewish assets. For this reason he considered Adolf Eichmann, the former director of the Division for Jewish and Liquidation Matters at the Reich Main Security Office, as a figure of central importance. Wiesenthal was convinced that Eichmann had spirited the stolen assets abroad for safekeeping and was using them to finance the flights of fugitives and the activities of the Nazi underground.10 He learned from informants that it was difficult to get to Eichmann because he had been ‘earmarked for later, bigger tasks in the underground movement’.11 Moreover, Wiesenthal was told, Eichmann was planning to build up a group together with Otto Skorzeny that would work toward a second attempt to annihilate the Jews.12 When Wiesenthal began to search for Eichmann in the 1940s, his motivation was not only to locate a major Nazi criminal, but first and foremost to prevent a National Socialist rejuvenation and to achieve a restitution of Jewish assets. In early 1953, there seemed to be an initial connection between Eichmann’s trail and information about a transfer of wealth to Argentina. An acquaintance told Wiesenthal that Eichmann’s wife had emigrated to South America. A short time later, a former member of the Organization Gehlen confirmed that Eichmann himself was living in Argentina, the country to which secret service reports said that the National Socialists had brought part of their wealth. In April, Wiesenthal learned that a raid of a neo-Nazi association in West Germany had secured correspondence with Eichmann, which also confirmed he was in Argentina. As a Zionist whose loyalty lay primarily with Israel, Wiesenthal passed all this information on, not to the Austrian authorities, but to the Israeli consulate in Vienna, which in turn forwarded it to the Israeli secret service.13 Wiesenthal wasn’t the only one interested in Eichmann. The former director of the Security Service’s Jewish affairs department may not have been a household name in the 1940s and 1950s, but anyone familiar with the mass murder of Jews had heard the name. The Nuremberg Trials had made it clear that he was one of the central figures in implementing 10 Aufbau, 6 July 1951 and 29 July 1951, in SWA, Akt Toplitzsee; manuscript ‘Eine durchsichtige Zweckmeldung’, Iskult-Presse-Nachrichten, Pressekorrespondenz des Bundesverbands der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinden Österreichs (IPN), November 1954, in ibidem, Pressestelle Juni until November 1954; manuscript ‘Die Schatzsuche beginnt’, IPN, July or August 1955, in Pressestelle 1954-1956. 11 Bericht, 3 November 1948, in ibidem, Akt Eichmann I. 12 Informationen über Adolf Eichmann, 16 December 1948, in ibidem. 13 Wiesenthal to Arie Eshel (Israeli Consul in Vienna), 24 March 1953, in ibidem; Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 128 ff. Bettina Stangneth assumes that Nazi exiles in Argentina purposely directed information about Eichmann’s whereabouts to Austria in the mistaken belief that the Holocaust was a fiction and that Eichmann would back up their version of history.

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the Holocaust, 14 and the fact that he was still at large worried many survivors. In 1953, as Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, the director of the respected Mirrer Yeshiva in New York, heard that Eichmann was hiding out in the Middle East, he immediately contacted the State Department and President Eisenhower and demanded that they do something. Like Wiesenthal, Kalmanowitz was not only interested in bringing criminal charges against Eichmann. On the contrary Kalmanowitz believed that Eichmann represented a terrible threat to all nations that were pursuing democracy. Above all, the rabbi thought, he threatened the existence of Israel by supporting the Arabs in their struggle against the Israelis. A State Department representative told Kalmanowitz that the United States didn’t have the power to arrest people in other countries. Moreover Eichmann’s whereabouts were uncertain, so Washington could not approach any specific foreign government. The rabbi refused to give up and started to mobilize congressmen to approach the director of the CIA. The president of the World Jewish Congress Nahum Goldmann also took an interest in the case and asked the Israeli embassy in Vienna how the search for Eichmann was going.15 The embassy in turn contacted Wiesenthal for information and told him that Goldmann apparently now had ‘the right man to continue the search’.16 Wiesenthal then drew up an extensive report concerning what he knew about the Eichmann case, which he sent to Goldmann. Eichmann was not just wanted by Jews and the Allies, Wiesenthal wrote in that letter to Goldmann, but by Nazis themselves since according to testimony at Nuremberg he had with him the so-called JUVA gold (eyewitnesses spoke of 22 creates of gold and jewelry, which he had allegedly hid away in Tegengebirge). In various confidential reports made to the Upper Austria directorship of security Wiesenthal claimed that Eichmann was in close contact with the underground organizations ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Sechsgestirn’, and ‘Spinne’ in 1948 and 1949. People speculated that he financed the underground movements from the gold and paid for a number of wanted war criminals to flee abroad.17 By 1950, Eichmann had disappeared from Austria. One year later he published an article in the neo-Nazi Reichszeitung newspaper. It was edited in part by the Dürer circle in Buenos Aires. 14 Stangneth, Eichmann, pp. 91-93. 15 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 144 ff., quotation on p. 145. 16 Wiesenthal, Eichmann, pp. 228 ff. 17 Here and in the following Wiesenthal to Goldmann (WJC), 30 March 1954, in SWA, Akt Eichmann I, accessed 3 November 2009, www.wiesenthalarchiv.at.

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This report made its way to the CIA via Kalmanowitz who still assumed that Eichmann was in the Middle East. But the American intelligence service didn’t consider itself responsible for Nazi criminals and only promised to pass on information about the whereabouts of men like Eichmann to the proper West German authorities.18 The CIA’s files contain Wiesenthal’s report only in German, so it’s possible that no one at the agency actually read it. Thus it is no surprise that the information was never passed on, as promised, to West German authorities.19 Wiesenthal, however, didn’t just send his report to Goldmann but to the West German intelligence service, the BND, as well. It was not unknown there that Eichmann was in Argentina. In mid-1952, someone passed on the information to the BND, which was still known as the Organization Gehlen, that Eichmann was living under the name Clemens in the South American country. His address could allegedly be got from Eberhard Fritsch the publisher of Der Weg.20 Six years later, an agent gave this information to the CIA, after the American agency enquired whether the BND used former members of the Reich Main Security Off ice. The agent added that according to other rumours, Eichmann was living in Jerusalem.21 At the same time, the West German Verfassungsschutz, the domestic intelligence service, also took an interest in Eichmann. The Office had learned that ‘a certain Karl Eichmann (more personal details aren’t known), the organizer of the deportation of Jews during the Third Reich’, had fled to Argentina using the name Clement and had made contact there with Fritsch.22 The Off ice approached the German Foreign Ministry with a request to check this information. But investigations yielded no results. The German embassy in Buenos Aires declared it unlikely that Eichmann was in the Argentinian capital. Still, the diplomats did have one piece of information they thought useful. The man investigators were after was said 18 CIA Memorandum, 20 October 1953, in NARA, RG 263, CIA Names Files, Boxes 14-15, Directorate of Operations File Volume 2, accessed 3 November 2009, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB150/index.htm#1. 19 Wiesenthal to Goldmann (WJC), 30 March 1954, in ibidem, Directorate of Operations File Volume 1, URL ibidem; Segev, Wiesenthal, p. 147. 20 Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Triumph der Gerechtigkeit’, in Spiegel 13/2011; Stangneth, Eichmann, pp. 159-163. 21 Near Eastern Connections, 19 March 1958, in NARA, RG 263, CIA Names Files, Boxes 14-15, Directorate of Operations File Volume 1, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB150/index. htm#1. 22 Bf V to AA, 11 April 1958, sent by request from Bf V.

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to be in the Middle East. The embassy promised to follow this up and ‘pass on information at an appropriate time’.23 It never came to that, although we cannot say for sure whether the embassy in fact never succeeded in gathering any information on Eichmann. We do know that the diplomats continued to downplay Nazi tendencies among the German community in Argentina. Even among Germans who had emigrated after 1945, it was an open secret that Eichmann was in the country. German Ambassador Werner Junker had close contact with people who knew him.24 Journalists and historians have often asked why intelligence services and the Verfassungsschutz did nothing about Eichmann although his whereabouts were known. Some have speculated that the West German authorities intervened because German Chancellor Adenauer’s deputy Hans Globke would have been compromised if the former head of the Jewish department was put on trial.25 Globke had been a member of the department for Jewish affairs in the Interior Ministry during the Third Reich. Adenauer’s appointment of him had drawn significant criticism, especially as he had also served as a legal commentator of the Nuremberg Laws. Thus far, no one has considered why the intelligence services and the Verfassungsschutz were concerned with Eichmann at all, although the pursuit of criminals wasn’t one of their responsibilities. Why did Wiesenthal and Kalmanowitz turn to these institutions as a matter of course, although they knew that the pursuit of criminals was actually something for prosecutors? The main point was not to legally punish the mass murder of Jews. The intelligence services were much more interested in Eichmann’s post-war activities. The Verfassungsschutz investigated him in conjunction with right-wing extremist publications, and Wiesenthal and Kalmanowitz considered him a key figure in the Nazi underground. Eichmann was not just a criminal from the past. He was a security risk in the present. Nonetheless, at the same time, German authorities considered the danger he posed to be so slight that they didn’t move against him. Fritz Bauer and Mossad The head of the Frankfurt prosecutor’s off ice in Frankfurt am Main, Fritz Bauer, also quickly found Eichmann’s trail when he commenced 23 AA to Bf V, 4 July 1958, sent by request from Bf V; Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren, pp. 30 ff. 24 Stangneth, Eichmann, pp. 413, 419 ff. 25 See amongst others Naftali, ‘Information’, pp. 4 ff.

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investigations in 1956. Bauer was a Social Democrat from a Jewish family who had himself spent several months in a concentration camp in the Third Reich before fleeing to Sweden. He considered his task as an investigator not just to punish injustice but to protect the young and by to secure the democracy of the Federal Republic from lapsing once more into dictatorship. In 1952, he used his summation arguments in the so-called Remer Trial to advance the relatively unpopular opinion that resistance to an unjust state was a legitimate means of self-defence.26 Six months later, the existence of a paramilitary unit, founded on the initiative of the American intelligence service, became known. Investigations showed that the organization, whose members had been recruited from former Luftwaffe, Army, and Waffen-SS officers, had collected the names of people who were to be ‘put on ice’ in case of a Soviet invasion. The list encompassed prominent Social Democratic politicians, in particular the state premier of Hessen, Georg-August Zinn. Bauer succeeded in gaining responsibility for the trial of one of the paramilitaries for a short time, although he soon had to relinquish it.27 In 1956, he was appointed the general prosecutor of Frankfurt. A short time after assuming the office, he was given responsibility for the Eichmann investigation, which had previously been run from Vienna. Most likely Bauer also saw this case as a matter of German security. The belief that the former head of the Jewish department was still politically active and was using the assets his department had stolen from Jews was widespread. It was clearly reflected in the files Bauer received from Viennese prosecutors.28 In September 1957, one year after taking over the case, Bauer’s office received its first indications as to Eichmann’s whereabouts. It came from a Jewish man living in Argentina. Lothar Hermann, who had spent a year in the Dachau concentration camp, had taken notice when his daughter told him of someone she knew called Klaus Eichmann. Hermann could have asked the German Foreign Office to have its embassy in Argentina check this piece of information. But he mistrusted the West German bureaucracy, preferring to work together with Israeli authorities. He contacted the director of the Israeli mission in Germany, who passed on the information to the Israeli intelligence service. In November, Bauer met with Mossad agents, with the former asking that the identity of the man Hermann identified as Eichmann be checked.29 According to Isser Harel, the director of Mossad, 26 Wojak, Bauer, pp. 265-283. 27 Rigoll, Staatsschutz. 28 Wojak, Bauer, p. 289. 29 Here and in the following Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren, pp. 26-42; Wojak, Bauer, pp. 293-316.

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Bauer was considering filing an extradition request with the Argentinian government if the check came back positive. But Harel also cited Bauer as saying that he wouldn’t discount the idea of Israeli agents using ‘their own methods for getting him to Israel’.30 Harel took Bauer’s information seriously. People at Mossad also assumed that Eichmann still represented a threat. In January 1958, Harel sent an agent to Buenos Aires to check out the information. But the simple house he found at the address Hermann had specified in no way conformed to how those at Mossad imagined Eichmann living. ‘At that time,’ Harel would later recall, ‘people still thought that the Nazi criminals who had succeeded in escaping from Germany had considerable financial means. According to rumours which had been widely circulating for many years, when the Third Reich began to totter the leaders secreted valuables and large sums of money in various hiding places both inside and outside of Germany, and this treasure was being used to support them and to finance the activities of the Nazis who went underground. As for Eichmann, it was presumed that at the time of his flight he had managed to take with him a mint of money looted from the Jews in Europe.31 Harel was sceptical. Although he didn’t completely stop following the trail, his further efforts were only half-hearted, and he relied on Hermann, who was blind, to carry out further research. In May 1958, Hermann reported that there were two people living as tenants at the suspected address, one under the name of Clement and another under the name of Francisco Schmidt. The latter came from Austria and was, in fact, Eichmann. Still Harel was unconvinced and broke off contact with Hermann for several months. After some time had passed without Hermann having heard anything new about the investigations’ progress, he concluded that his information had got nowhere and that he needed to try another path. He took his information to Tuviah Friedman, the head of a documentation centre in Haifa, who had also been involved for years in the search for Eichmann. Friedman enquired at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg as to the state of the investigation and was told that, according to confidential sources, the fugitive was living in Kuwait. To lend additional weight to his belief that Eichmann should be tried and convicted by an Israeli court, Friedman published this information in a newspaper article in the fall of 1959, setting off another avalanche of global news reports.32 30 Harel, Garibaldi Street, p. 10. 31 Ibidem, p. 19. 32 Wojak, Eichmanns Memoiren, pp. 32-35.

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Bauer was irritated by the amount of attention the Eichmann case was suddenly attracting. In the meantime, he had heard from another source, independent of Hermann, that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires and was living under the name Clement, as the blind Jewish émigré had said. In December 1959, he flew to Israel with this information to visit his friend, Israeli General Prosecutor Haim Cohn. Bauer tried to convince him that Israel had to take an active role in the Eichmann case. Bauer greatly distrusted German authorities, of which Cohn recalled him speaking ‘very much and extraordinarily critically’. Cohn cited Bauer as saying he had ‘contacted all the relevant authorities’, including the Justice Minister and even the Chancellor, but none of them had wanted to take responsibility for ‘the forcible abduction or conviction’ of Eichmann.33 It’s questionable whether Bauer ever spoke with Adenauer, and it’s highly unlikely that he tried to suggest that German authorities abduct Eichmann. On the contrary, we can assume that the German Justice Ministry advised him against filing an extradition request. The experience with such requests between Germany and Argentina in the 1950s had been anything but positive. In 1958, the responsible section of the Foreign Ministry noted that authorities from the federal states had filed extradition requests, ‘particularly with Argentina’, but the eight cases had yet to receive a professional answer, to say nothing of the people sought being actually turned over. For that reason, the national justice ministry had told prosecutors that such requests weren’t worth filing.34 It’s entirely possible that Bauer was told the same thing. Worries that Argentina wouldn’t approve extradition requests were strengthened by another case that had been occupying Israeli and German authorities, as well as victims’ associations, for quite some time. In late 1958, two witnesses gave testimony independently of one another about Dr Josef Mengele, who had carried out medical experiments on human beings and participated in the selection process at Auschwitz. One of the witnesses was Hermann Langbein, the chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee. He had taken an intense interest in Mengele and was able to tell prosecutors that the doctor had divorced his wife in front of a Düsseldorf court in 1954. His hunch that the files would contain Mengele’s current address proved to be correct.35 33 Cited in ibidem, pp. 40 ff. 34 Vermerk Grützner (BMJ), 13 June 1958, in Barch, B 141, vol. 92460. Not all of these extradition requests concerned Nazi perpetrators. 35 Langbein (Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee) to Justizminister Schleswig-Holstein, 15 December 1958, in ibidem, Handakten Mengele vol. 1; Kripo Düsseldorf to Kripo-Außenstelle Günzburg, 23 August 1958, in ibidem, vol. 1.

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In 1959, the prosecutor’s office in Freiburg, which had assumed responsibility for the case, applied for Mengele’s extradition. Investigators knew that federal authorities had only had negative experiences with extradition requests, but they thought it prudent to try. In a statement to the foreign office, they argued: For the orientation of people over there, it was noted that there is extremely incriminating testimony against Mengele, that he has been repeatedly named in the investigative literature, and that Auschwitz survivors are convinced he was one of the main figures responsible for the horrors that occurred in Auschwitz. There is thus a significant political interest in apprehending him.36

The arguments convinced the Foreign Ministry’s legal department, and a recommendation was issued to the national Justice Ministry ‘to consider an extradition request despite the experiences with the case of Rademacher […] in light of the explanations given by prosecutors and the significant political interest in seeing Mengele punished’.37 Nevertheless, when the German embassy tried to present the extradition application in late August, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry said that it was incomplete. The responsible prosecutors, the ministry claimed, ‘would possibly object that this was a political case – justice authorities generally tended not to approve extraditions’.38 Despite these words of caution, the German embassy submitted a revised request one month later, but the general prosecutor, Ramón Lascano, who always insisted on minute legal formalities, still wasn’t satisf ied. Argentinian law stipulated that the extradition request be made by a judge and not a member of the executive branch, he claimed. He also demanded that the pertinent passages of German criminal law be included. If these demands were met, he wrote, the request could be granted.39 The German embassy saw Lascano’s demands as evidence for the Foreign Ministry’s belief that Argentinian judicial authorities were loath to extradite Nazi war criminals and deemed the case hopeless. In January 36 Schowingen (StA Freiburg) to Auswärtiges Amt, 3 March 1959, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929. 37 AA to BMJ, 16 March 1959, copy in: HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Handakten Mengele vol. 1. 38 Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 27 August 1959, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929. 39 Lascano (Procurador General de la Nación) to Ministro de RREEyC, 17 November 1959, in AT, ADAAA 006, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 113.

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1960, Ambassador Junker informed Bonn that Mengele no longer resided at the address listed on the warrant and had probably left Buenos Aires. 40 He concluded by writing that ‘Argentinian authorities are hardly swift in processing extradition requests and their prospects for success can be deemed doubtful’. 41 Bauer had experience with problems like these. In August 1959, the Central Off ice in Ludwigsburg and prosecutors in Freiburg and Frankfurt had agreed to transfer the Mengele case to Frankfurt where Bauer was planning comprehensive charges against the personnel at Auschwitz. For the time being, it seemed sensible to end the extradition process. 42 Israeli authorities also received detailed information. Frankfurt authorities maintained close contact with Langbein and kept him apprised on the specifics of the investigation. That was how he learned about the pessimistic report filed by the German embassy in August after conversations with the Argentinian Foreign Ministry. He in turn told Wiesenthal and the director of Yad Vashem that the Argentinian Foreign Ministry had reached ‘a less than encouraging preliminary decision’. 43 Langbein had already approached Wiesenthal in October 1959 and asked him to use his connections to help ensure the German request was approved. 44 Wiesenthal had written to the Israeli embassy in Argentina, demanding that it get involved in the case.45 In late November, the embassy did indeed contact the Argentinian Foreign Ministry with the information that Mengele was in the country. But investigations by the Argentinian Security Service yielded no results. 46 In December, when Bauer met with Cohn and Harel during a trip to Israel, the less than promising case of Mengele was on the agenda. By contrast, new information about Eichmann’s whereabouts gave cause for hope. Harel became convinced that the fugitive was in Buenos Aires and decided to send his agent Zvi Aharoni to Argentina to investigate further. 47 But there 40 On the following see Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 30 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931. 41 Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 7 Janurary 1960, in ibidem, vol. 929. 42 Vogel (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to Schowingen (StA Freiburg), 6 August 1959, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Handakten vol. 1. 43 Langbein (Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee) to Kermisz (Yad Vashem), z.I. to Wiesenthal, 30 October 1959, in SWA, Akt Mengele 2. 44 Langbein (Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee) to Wiesenthal, 1 October 1959, in ibidem. 45 Wiesenthal to Sahar (Israeli Ambassador in Vienna) 2 October 1959, in ibidem. 46 Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 30 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931. 47 Aharoni and Dietl, Jäger, p. 128.

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was no consensus about the next step. Cohn was against trying Eichmann in Israel because he thought that would be judicially impossible. Instead, over Bauer’s objections, he favoured Germany filing an extradition request.48 For Harel, this was much more than a legal case. In his eyes, Eichmann represented a threat to Israel’s security, and the fact that the fugitive was in Argentina made the matter especially urgent. Wiesenthal wasn’t the only one who had told Mossad that fugitive Nazis in Argentina had brought large sums of money with them, which they wanted to use to bring National Socialism back to power. In the Israeli press as well, South American Jews had reprised the earlier anti-Peronist contention that German émigrés had played a substantive role in the ‘Nazi-fascist’ regime and had huge funds at their disposal. 49 Moreover, Israeli agents hadn’t failed to note all the other reports going around in the 1940s and 1950s about connections between National Socialists and Perón’s Argentina. In Harel’s view, the ‘Nazi colony in Argentina’ was not just an ‘unknown force’ but a ‘dangerous enemy’ of Israel. The fact that Eichmann was in Argentina made him especially threatening, but it also meant that he could be an immensely valuable source. As shown by Mossad’s earlier reaction to the less than affluent circumstances in which Eichmann lived, Harel assumed that Nazis abroad had lots of money. He was convinced that Eichmann was a key figure among exiled Nazis and could provide crucial information about the activities of the National Socialist underground.50 For Harel it was clear that they could risk an extradition request whose outcome was uncertain. At this juncture, Harel enjoyed the complete trust of Ben Gurion. In a conversation he and Cohn had in early December 1959 with the Israeli prime minister, they convinced him that Eichmann would have to be abducted, even if this violated the sovereignty of a foreign state.51 For Ben Gurion it was a question of national security. In an interview one year later with the New York Times about the rationale behind the Eichmann kidnapping, he said: It may be that Eichmann’s trial will help to ferret out other Nazis – for example the connection between Nazis and some Arab rulers. For what we hear on the Egyptian propaganda is conducted on purely Nazi lines. The Egyptians charge that Jews – they usually say “Zionist” but they mean Jews – dominate the United States, Jews dominate England, Jews 48 Segev, Siebte Million, p. 430. 49 Rein, Argentina, p. 115. 50 Harel, Garibaldi Street, p. 172. 51 Segev, Siebte Million, p. 430.

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dominate France, and they must be fought. I have no doubt that the Egyptian dictatorship is being instructed by the large number of Nazis who are there.52

At first glance it might seem strange to expect information from a fugitive in Argentina about the relationship between Nazis and Arabs, but in the late 1950s it didn’t seem illogical to assume that Nazis in exile in Argentina and the Arab states would have connections to one another. In 1956, it had emerged that Johann von Leers, one of the most prolific anti-Semitic propagandists of the Third Reich, had moved from Buenos Aires to Cairo. The media reported that he was advising the Nasser regime on how to use anti-Semitic propaganda and was part of a group of Nazis who had become very influential in Egypt. The goal of this group was said to lay the groundwork for a return to power. There were also reports of Rudel travelling to Egypt.53 More than a few people assumed that there was such a thing as the ‘fascist international’, which was coordinating the work of Nazis all over the world.54 Taken together, all of this made Harel and Ben Gurion assume that Eichmann would have specific information about the connections between Argentina and Egypt. Against the backdrop of a series of anti-Semitic incidents reported in a variety of countries in late 1959, efforts to get to the bottom of the international Nazi network seemed even more crucial. Harel would later note: On 20 January, speaking in the Knesset about hte wave of anti-Semitism engulfing the world, the Prime Minister said that ‘one of our services, which has the facilities for it’ had been entrusted to make inquiries in various countries about the possible existence of an international organization that had a hand in these outbreaks. The inquiry entrusted to us was not inconsistent with our efforts to catch Eichmann. On the contrary, the new wave of Nazism made our operation a matter of paramount importance. It was clear to me that Eichmann’s capture and his judgment in Israel would constitute a crushing counteraction to the Nazi monster’s attempt to rear its head once more.55 52 New York Times, 8 December 1960. Only after this justification did he add: ‘Finally one of our motives in bringing Eichmann to trial is to make the details of his case known to the generations of Israeli who have grown up since the Holocaust’. 53 Becker (Ambassador Kairo) to AA, 21 August 1956, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 18933. 54 Finkenberger, ‘Leers’, pp. 522-525. 55 Harel, Garibaldi Street, pp. 28 ff.

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In late February 1960, Aharoni left for Argentina, where, with the help of Jewish volunteers with whom the Israeli embassy had provided him, he would try to track down Eichmann. As it quickly emerged, he no longer resided at the address where he had lived under the assumed name of Hermann. But after two weeks, Aharoni was back on Eichmann’s trail. The fugitive was living in a plain brick building in a thinly settled, reclaimed area of swampland to the northwest of Buenos Aires. Following this discovery, a team of agents proceeded to Argentina where they overpowered Eichmann near his home on the evening of 11 May. Several days later an El Al airplane brought him to Israel. But in one respect Mossad had not succeeded. Harel had decided that if Israeli agents were in Argentina, they might as well abduct Mengele as well since by then it looked unlikely that his extradition would be approved. But attempts to locate him failed, and Ben Gurion had to be content with appearing before the Knesset on 23 May to announce that Eichmann had been captured.56 Ex post facto resistance The news of Eichmann’s capture shot around the world, and the media were desperate for information about what had happened, but the Mossad agents who could have provided information were sworn to secrecy. In Argentina, conservative circles were outraged at the violation of their country’s sovereignty. The director of the influential Argentinian Conference of Bishops, for instance, declared that Eichmann had come to Argentina to seek forgiveness, which he could not be denied. Argentinian President Arturo Frondizi, whose government was on good terms with Israel, wanted a quick end to the affair. In order to avoid offending nationalist camps, he decided to bring the matter up before the United Nations, where it would hopefully ‘sink into the archives’. But he hadn’t counted on the head of the Argentinian consulate in New York who became a central figure in the story. Mario Amadeo, a diplomat who had sympathized with the fascist regimes of the axis during the Second World War and had picked up Daye at the airport after the Belgian had been sentenced to death, had become a convert to democracy. But he didn’t think the cause of bringing Nazi criminals to justice justified a violation of Argentinian sovereignty. He demanded that Israel return Eichmann immediately and refused to budge from this position, earning him widespread approval among the conservative camp and the military in Argentina.57 56 Aharoni and Dietl, Jäger; Harel, Garibaldi Street. 57 Rein, Argentina, pp. 174-184, quotation on p. 180; Klich, ‘Eichmann’, pp. 224-246.

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To defuse the conflict with Argentina, the Israeli government stressed that the abduction had been carried out by ‘volunteers’. Every detail indicating the involvement of Mossad would have further strained Israeli-Argentinian relations. In order to get information about this spectacular event, the media had to find other channels. After a report on the news wire Reuters, Wiesenthal was suddenly in the spotlight. In contrast to others who had pursued Eichmann, he could say that he had been pointing the finger at Argentina for years. Since Mossad’s involvement wasn’t publically acknowledged, he emphasized his own role in the hunt for Eichmann. Yad Vashem supported this depiction of events by inviting him to speak about the search, while telling him not to mention any Israeli state institutions. The result was that the media so exaggerated his involvement in the capture of Eichmann that he was later forced to correct their erroneous reporting.58 Wiesenthal’s sudden fame opened up new possibilities. After conferring with the Israeli embassy in Austria, the Israeli cultural community in Vienna decided to set up a documentary centre. The centre, which began its work in October 1961, was intended to do three things: fight anti-Semitism, collect testimony about the attempted extermination of Jews, and try to bring Nazi criminals to justice. The third of these tasks would become the focus both of public perceptions and the self-understanding of the centre.59 In German, Wiesenthal described his activities as a ‘Nazi hunt’, a phrase that would quickly gain currency. And indeed it accurately described what Wiesenthal was attempting to do: to take the initiative in dealing with Nazi criminals and to hunt down the former oppressors, not giving them a minute’s peace. Explicitly declaring this goal was, among other things, a reaction to questions often levelled at Holocaust survivors. Why had they submitted to their fate without fighting back? Shouldn’t they have put up more resistance?60 Wiesenthal saw hunting for Nazis as a way of countering such accusations. The first pages of his book Ich jagte Eichmann (translated into English as I Chased Eichmann) were devoted to his work immediately after the Second World War for the War Crimes Office. In them, he describes how he, together with American Officers, arrested SS henchmen who had been so omnipotent only a short time before. ‘So this was what the elite of a nation looked like!’ Wiesenthal wrote. ‘The Jews they so despised had behaved very differently when they were arrested! Although innocent, they showed far greater bearing and surrendered to their fate. By contrast, 58 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 186 ff.; Wiesenthal, Recht, p. 114. 59 Segev, Wiesenthal, p. 197 ff. 60 Ibidem, pp. 12-14.

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the SS men begged for their lives which, as it later turned out, were by no means under threat.’61 Wiesenthal wanted people to see the hunt for Nazis as a reaction of victims who had borne their fate with dignity and went after their lawless former oppressors by legal means. Staying consistent, he ended his story about the hunt for Eichmann by describing meeting a man who had understood his message of ex post facto resistance. Wiesenthal quoted the man as saying: ‘I went to Auschwitz, where I had been through hell. What I saw there I’ll never forget for my entire life. I was just a child. Back then, I swore that I would pay back these murderers and criminals for everything, as soon as the time came. But I was just a child. I had half-starved in Auschwitz and was sick. Then they sent me from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. There too I starved and there too I was sick. But I never forgot the murderers. I was just so helpless. The end of the war came, and we were liberated, but I was sick. They took me to Sweden to get over my illness and recover. Several years later, I went from there with the Aliah Youth to Israel […] Now I’ve grown out of my childhood. I work, but all of these years I’ve carried a feeling of guilt around in me because I haven’t been able to do anything against the murderers of my family. I told myself I wasn’t able to do anything. After all, I was so weak and sick after the war. I can still see my murdered parents and siblings, they never leave me in peace. And now I’ve heard about you in the newspapers and I wanted to thank you. You didn’t forget my parents, either.’ We looked each other in the eye, full of tears. Young Hubermann had described in his own simple words what thousands of Jewish hearts felt when they heard that Eichmann had been successfully captured.62

The experiences of most survivors hardly bore out Wiesenthal’s claim that the victims were using the instruments of the law to go after their former torturers. At trials of former Nazis in West Germany and Austria, victims were often unable to affect the course of the proceedings. In the best-case scenario, they could be called to testify as witnesses in front of judges who often had themselves been complicit in National Socialism. The hunt for Nazis offered a way out of this unsatisfactory situation. Unlike in strictly regulated trials controlled by lawyers, anyone – even non-lawyers like 61 Wiesenthal, Eichmann, p. 20. This and other citations are translated from the original German version of Wiesenthal’s memoirs. 62 Ibidem, p. 255.

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Wiesenthal – was free to try to track down criminals. The Eichmann case had revealed how passively state and international institutions had acted and how much more needed to be done in hunting down Nazis. Even before Eichmann’s capture, a member of the Frankfurt Prosecutor’s Office had told Wiesenthal that Interpol had declared the case outside of its jurisdiction because it was a ‘political matter’.63 Positions like these were one reason Wiesenthal declared the hunt for Nazi perpetrators to be one of the missions of the documentary centre.64 For its part, Interpol didn’t change its assessment of Nazi crimes after the Eichmann abduction. In 1961, when the Central Office in Ludwigsburg tried to get the Federal Criminal Prosecutions Office (BKA) to convince the international police authorities to act,65 it encountered determined resistance. BKA President Reinhard Dullien declared that the response had always been ‘frosty’ to such ideas, and the Federal Republic’s standing with Interpol could be damaged by any further attempts. Dullien himself saw nothing wrong with the attitudes of the Interpol’s general secretary. The fact was worth mentioning, he wrote, that ‘violent war crimes and Nazi crimes as a rule are handled by the prosecutor’s offices and the political divisions of the criminal police’. That was an expression of the idea that ‘these deeds are seen as political matters or at least that their processing and prosecution are political matters’.66 Paul Dickopf, the head of Interpol’s German office, was deeply irritated about the initiative from Ludwigsburg and threatened consequences. Previously, he had ignored Interpol’s general secretary in Paris when looking for witnesses against Nazi perpetrators and had cooperated with Interpol offices in other countries. In future, he threatened, he would discontinue this practice entirely.67 Ultimately Jean Népote, the deputy general secretary of the international authority succeeded in convincing the German Justice Ministry that there was no way Interpol was going to re-evaluate Nazi crimes.68 One year later, the World Jewish Congress tried via the Canadian and British police to get Interpol to participate in global manhunts for Nazis. 63 Gedächtnisprotokoll über Gespräch mit Steinbacher (StA Frankfurt a.M.) on 12 November 1959, in SWA, Akt Eichmann 1. 64 Wiesenthal to John E. Moss (Member of the US House of Representatives), 12 February 1975, in ibidem, Akt Interpol 4. 65 Weida (LKA BW) to BKA, 13 March 1961, in ZSL, GA 46-24. 66 Dullien (BKA) to BMI, 30 May 1961, in Barch, B 141, vol. 104091. 67 Dickopf (Präsident BKA) to LKA BW, 7 April 1961, in ZSL, GA 46-24. 68 Dallinger (BMJ) to HMJ, 12 July 1961; Ruf (StA Bremen) to GStA Stuttgart, 20 September 1961, in ibidem.

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Once again the argument was that these were offences of ‘common character’ and not war crimes. Interpol’s executive committee met to discuss this idea in mid-1962. The British president declared that it wasn’t normal for an ‘external organization’ to intervene in such questions. Israel, he added, which actually should have taken the initiative, had never shown any interest in it. Dickopf, also a member of the committee, saw no reason to contradict this position and draw attention to the interest shown on multiple occasions by German prosecuting authorities.69 Marcel Sicot, who had dealt with the request for an international manhunt in the Rademacher case and thus had experienced at least one instance of German desire for greater Interpol involvement, was acquainted with the West German judicial system’s position. But instead of drawing attention to this fact, he, too, criticized the WJC’s request. Why, he asked, should war crimes be prosecuted ‘when the victors always impose their laws anyway?’ He added: ‘There’s no international authority that can define the concept of the “war criminal.”’ Both he and Dickopf knew only too well that neither the WJC nor German prosecutors had invoked the idea of war criminals. Instead they had referred to regular criminal law and levelled accusations of murder. Sicot’s rhetorical question made it clear that the issue of whether war crimes were inherently political was of secondary importance. He wasn’t primarily interested in upholding Interpol statutes when he, as in the Rademacher case, used the argument that the mass murder of Jews was racially motivated and thus a political crime as justification for his refusal to initiate manhunts for Nazi suspects. The main motivation for his refusals was his belief that the prosecution of Nazi crimes was a form of ‘victors’ justice’ and thus illegitimate. Those who went on the hunt for Nazi perpetrators gone underground thus had to do it without the support of Interpol’s well-oiled apparatus. According to statistics published by the BKA in 1964, Interpol had apprehended 153 suspects abroad for German authorities in the year of 1962 alone. The statistics don’t include figures of how many warrants were issued, but that number alone tells us that international arrest warrants were no trifling matter.70 Their effectiveness came down to, among other things, the non-bureaucratic way in which they were issued. In order to start an international manhunt leading to a subsequent arrest, it was enough for Interpol headquarters to forward a warrant on to its offices everywhere it 69 Here and in the following: Auszug aus der Niederschrift über die Sitzung des Exekutivkomitees der Interpol, 2-5 May 1962, in Barch, B 141, vol. 104091. 70 Hoeveler, ‘Auslieferungsverkehr’, p. 2.

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operated. This was sufficient basis for a suspect to be apprehended abroad. Only when the fugitive was in police custody did the cumbersome process of extradition commence. Interpol manhunts were thus considered, ‘effective, secure, and quick’.71 The alternative manhunt methods German judicial authorities used could rely on none of these qualities. If, as was the case with Argentina, the government first had to allow extradition requests to be filed before the responsible judge could issue an arrest warrant, the process could be neither secure nor quick. Too many institutions – the German Foreign Ministry, the German embassy in Argentina, the Argentinean general prosecutor, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry, and the judge – had to be involved. Delays were inevitable, and leaks could hardly be prevented. Still, while the capture and prosecution of Eichmann didn’t change Interpol’s position, this event had other profound consequences. The mass murder of Jews was now being thoroughly reported upon in Europe and the Americas. For the first time, there was an international consciousness about the dimensions of and horrors entailed by the Nazi extermination of Jews. This was an important precondition for the memory of the Holocaust gaining significance in increasing numbers of countries in the years that followed.72 But promoting the politics of remembrance wasn’t the primary force behind Eichmann’s capture. As in West Germany, where investigations of the Nazi past were greatly influenced by present-day security concerns,73 the Eichmann trial was the result of Israel’s desire to be safe. It wasn’t solely Eichmann’s earlier deeds that attracted the attention of intelligence services, investigators, and survivors like Wiesenthal to the former head of the Jewish division. The threatening scenario put forward by Perón’s adversaries of an active National Socialism in exile in Argentina and rumours about Eichmann’s role in the Nazi underground after the Second World War also spurred people to search for him. The Eichmann case was not only a significant benchmark in an increasingly intense investigation of Nazi crimes. It was also an after-effect of the conflicts surrounding Peronism. Eichmann’s capture initiated a number of changes in the search for Nazi fugitives in South America. Wiesenthal defined the hunt for Nazis as an ex post facto act of resistance against the National Socialists and devoted his whole life to this cause. From that moment on, private activists and non-governmental institutions would exert an ever greater influence on 71 Singer, Rechtshilfeverkehr, pp. 46-49, quotation on p. 49. 72 Eckel and Moisel, ‘Einleitung’, pp. 12 ff. 73 Rigoll, Staatschutz.

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manhunts and extradition proceedings. Mossad formed a special unit to track down Nazi fugitives.74 And West German authorities were forced to acknowledge that the international community now took a keen interest in German legal assistance with South America.

2

West German Reactions

After Eichmann was apprehended, the West German government was afraid it would have to justify why it hadn’t gone after the former head of the ‘Jewish division’ earlier. Six months previously, in late 1959, a wave of anti-Semitic graffiti had led to international criticism of how West Germany was coming to grips with the Nazi past. Now, there threatened to be a repeat of that criticism.75 And indeed the West German Foreign Ministry soon learned details that raised critical questions. For example, Fritz Ehlert, an informer for the West German intelligence service and a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, who was in close contact with the West German embassy in Argentina, had found out that Eichmann’s wife and sons had travelled to the country under their real names.76 That revelation made Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano order an immediate review of all the government’s information. He reckoned that he would be ‘compelled in the near future […] to give detailed answers to questions in this area’.77 Above all, he wanted to know ‘if the embassy had neglected anything’.78 The embassy forwarded the passport applications submitted by Eichmann’s wife and sons, which confirmed the identity of the man abducted. The applications had in fact been made using the name Eichmann.79 That information occasioned further questions in the Foreign Ministry. Why had the ministry not been informed that Eichmann’s sons were living in Argentina after an international warrant for Eichmann’s arrest had been issued in 1957? The embassy answered that it had only heard about the possibility that Eichmann might be in Argentina in 1958 in conjunction with a query from West Germany’s Verfassungsschutz. ‘The whole tenor’ of 74 Aharoni and Dietl, Jäger, p. 287. 75 Vgl. Conze/Frei/Hayes and Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 600-614. 76 FS Ehlert (FAZ, Buenos Aires) to FAZ-Redaktion Politik, 31 May 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 54. 77 Limbourg (Ministerbüro AA) to Direktor der Abteilung 5, 3 June 1960, in ibidem. 78 Protokoll der 47. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 23 June 1960, in AADB, vol. 13/III, p. 956. 79 FS Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 8 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 54.

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that query, the embassy wrote, had ‘hardly made the scope of the question recognizable’. Before the abduction, the embassy added, only one of its staff members had ever heard the name Eichmann. Eichmann’s inclusion in the record of wanted persons hadn’t changed anything since thousands of other people had also been named. For that reason, the embassy claimed, it hadn’t drawn a connection between the entry on the wanted list and the passports it had previously issued to Eichmann family members.80 There is no concrete evidence to support historian Bettina Stangneth’s conclusion that embassy staff should have known more about Eichmann.81 But the way the embassy treated the case of Eichmann definitely reflects the West German government and legal system’s abiding disinterest in following up on Nazi crimes. The frantic activities and investigations that followed Eichmann’s abduction highlighted West German indifference to manhunt and extradition efforts, even if none of those concerned was willing to admit that fact. Suddenly the issue of an extradition treaty between West Germany and Argentina, which the West German Justice Ministry had put on the back burner for ‘a long time’, was back on the agenda. As early as 1958, Justice Ministry Permanent Secretary Heinrich Grützner had already considered taking the draft treaty out of his desk drawer. From the ‘criminal prosecutions and political standpoint’, he wrote, it was necessary to have such a treaty. Otherwise, extradition requests were practically impossible between Argentina and Germany. For instance, there was no way of keeping people in pre-extradition custody, and the formal requirements for getting someone extradited were forbidding.82 In 1958, Grützner still thought that West Germany should continue to wait for Argentina to seize the initiative.83 After the Eichmann abduction, however, West German authorities became willing to take the first step. In the run-up to the visit by the Argentinian president, the legal department of the German Foreign Ministry planned to draw attention to the fact that Argentina ‘had in the preceding years not reacted to our suggestion’ of an extradition treaty and that the Federal Republic of Germany would ‘enthusiastically welcome’ it, ‘if we could now return to the topic’.84 That made it sound as if Argentina was solely to blame for the negotiations coming to a halt. West German Justice Minister Fritz 80 Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 1 September 1960, in ibidem, vol. 55. 81 Stangneth, Eichmann, pp. 451 ff. 82 Vermerk Grützner (BMJ), 13 June 1958, in Barch, B 141, vol. 92460. 83 Vermerk Grützner (BMJ), 2 June 1958, in ibidem. 84 Marmann (Ref. 503, AA) to Dg 50, 18 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 102.

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Schäffer suggested something similar when he declared that he assumed ‘the Argentinian government to be able in the present situation of re-engaging in negotiations about the extradition of war criminals’.85 Two internally commissioned investigations illustrate how little the German side had done to ensure the apprehension of Nazi criminals abroad. At a meeting of the foreign relations committee of the Bundestag, Foreign Minister Brentano had declared in response to a query from members of the SPD that the German government had known nothing about Eichmann’s presence in Argentina. That caused the Social Democrat Herbert Wehner to ask whether ‘the federal government had kept the activities of people who had formerly belonged to the NSDAP’ under careful scrutiny. Brentano admitted that there had been occasions when the ministry had heard ‘which of the former Nazis, insofar as it could be determined, were residing in Argentina’. For example, the ministry knew that Mengele was living there.86 But that was the extent of the information that the Foreign Ministry was able to collect about Nazis in Argentina. The notorious concentration camp doctor and Klingenfuss were the only people of whom details were known. The fact that the ministry’s report to the committee mentioned Syria, Egypt, and Libya along with Argentina is not a sign of any profound knowledge. On the contrary, it was an attempt to cover up the ministry’s own ignorance by bolstering the meagre report with additional information, which hadn’t been object of the inquiry.87 The results were likewise meagre when the Foreign Ministry was asked to collect material about West German efforts to track down Nazi criminals. In an attempt to counter anticipated criticism in the wake of the Eichmann abduction, the Foreign Ministry formed a working group to draw up a list of positive examples of Germany’s ‘getting a grip on the past’ for foreign embassies. However, the legal department was forced to acknowledge that ‘efforts to extradite war criminals for the purposes of prosecution had only been made in a few cases’. Aside from the requests for Mengele’s extradition, the list only contained an extradition request to Egypt and Syria for the concentration camp doctor Hans Eisele.88 By contrast, the West German Justice Minister was of the opinion that he could not fail to mention the fugitives. In a pamphlet, he tried to dispel 85 BT-Berichte 3. WP, 22 June 1960, p. 6797. 86 Protokoll der 47. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 23 June 1960, in AADB, vol. 13/III, pp. 955 f. 87 Protokoll der 59. Sitzung des Auswärtigen Ausschusses, 9 February 1961, in ibidem, pp. 1418-1423. 88 Marmann (Ref. 503, AA) to ZRS, 10 February 1961, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 55.

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the impression that the West German judicial system had refused to pursue Nazi crimes for political reasons. To do that, he had to explain why so few Nazi criminals had been convicted between 1953 and 1958. To that end, indications that many of them had gone underground abroad, as in the case of the prominent example of Eichmann, were quite useful. ‘The real reasons for the decline in the numbers of convictions in these years’, wrote the ministry, ‘were the death or incarceration as POWs of many of those accused, the lack of witnesses, the fact that incriminating documents were in foreign hands, the perpetrators’ use of aliases or the suspects’ flight’.89 The ministry ignored the fact that there were few cases in which prosecutors had truly been hindered by suspects fleeing abroad. Amidst such meagre numbers, the West German government benefited from all the attention being paid to its extradition request for Mengele. That suggested that Bonn had made significant efforts abroad in the search for Nazi perpetrators even before Eichmann was apprehended. For example, the German embassy in Stockholm wrote: ‘The reports about German extradition requests regarding former war criminals have been received with interest in the Swedish press and strengthen the impression that the Federal Republic, together with all upstanding democratic states, wants to put those guilty of crimes during the National Socialist regime before a judge’.90 The Israeli government and those who supported Eichmann’s abduction also cited the West German extradition requests for Mengele to justify Mossad’s activities. In its reaction to the German request, the Israelis argued, Argentina had shown itself unwilling to hand over the perpetrators. Thus in June 1960, when Argentina did approve the extradition of Mengele to Germany, it looked like a reaction to international criticism. The West German Justice Ministry saw the situation that way as well, noting that the extradition approvals ‘can be traced back to the special aspects of the Eichmann case’.91 That was untrue. The Argentinian general prosecutor’s demand in November 1959 that the extradition request be made by a judge and not the West German executive may have looked like a ploy, but it originated in Lascano’s insistence on the letter of the law. Simultaneously, Argentina was processing three further extradition requests from Czechoslovakia. In 1958, after the request for Pavelić was approved, the Czechoslovak government renewed its request for the extradition of Ján Ďurčanský and added two further collaborators, Vojtech Hora and Jan Pekar. The lesson from the 89 BMJ, ed., Verfolgung, 1st ed., pp. 14-16. 90 Botschaft Stockholm to AA, 28 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 54. 91 BMJ to Arndt (SPD), Entwurf Grützners, June 1960, in Barch, B 141, vol. 104091.

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Pavelić case was not to ask for extradition on the ground of war crimes, but rather on common crimes. In March 1960, after refusing the Czechoslovakian requests twice on formal grounds, Lascano declared that they were in accordance with Argentinian law and that a court could be asked to decide upon it. As was also true in the Pavelić case, he did not classify the crimes the Czechoslovakian collaborators were accused of committing as political ones.92 In all probability, the German embassy would have received a likewise positive response concerning Mengele even before the Eichmann abduction, if it hadn’t taken so long to process Lascano’s demands. After all, Lascano had written that the request had chances of success, once the paperwork was complete. But translating the documents he demanded and getting them attested by the Argentinian consulate in Munich proved complicated and time-consuming. It wasn’t until mid-May, exactly one day before the Eichmann abduction, that Bonn was able to send the documents to Buenos Aires.93 And although the legal department at Germany’s embassy in Argentina had impatiently asked where they were,94 they weren’t sent to the Foreign Ministry until 2 June – at which point everybody was already talking about Eichmann and Mengele.95 Lascano’s positive response two weeks later followed the same logic as his judgement about the Czechoslovakians requests, which he had rendered before the Eichmann abduction.96 Indeed, it is surprising how little Argentinian judicial authorities were intimidated by international criticism of the country’s extradition practices. In the extradition proceedings against Ďurčanský, Hora, and Jan Pekar, which took place immediately before the abduction, Argentinian judges and prosecutors argued that Argentinian law was also relevant to whether the statute of limitations applied to the crimes of which the three men were accused. Since the Argentinian statute of limitations had in fact expired, the reasoning went, the extradition request could not be approved.97 There were 92 Lascano (Procurador General de la Nación) to Ministro de RREEyC, 22 March 1960, in AT, Caja Eichmann et al., MREC, Exp. 27598/58; Warszawski, Testimonio II, p. 95. Concerning the whole process see also ibidem, pp. 85-107. 93 Marmann (Ref.503, AA) to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 10 May 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929. 94 Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 9 May 1960, in ibidem. 95 Embajada de la República Federal de Alemania to MREC, 2 June 1960, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 114 f. 96 Lascano (Procurador General de la Nación) to Ministro de RREEyC, 24 June 1960, in ibidem, p. 117. 97 Concerning Durcansky see Voto de D’Albora (Procurador Fiscal), 13 June 1960; Fallo del Juez Isaurralde, 18 July 1960, in AT, Caja Durcansky, Juzgado Nacional, Exp. 13373. Concerning Hora and Pekar see procedures in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 99-104.

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good reasons to challenge this view. Argentinian law merely specified that extradition was impermissible if the statute of limitations in the country seeking the extradition had expired.98 A widespread doctrine that had influenced the formulation of this law and one of the major commentaries upon it, however, had supported the judge’s position. The suspicion that his controversial verdict expressed more than just fealty to precedent is confirmed by two newspaper clipping contained in the file he kept about Ďurčanský. They depicted the Czechoslovakian extradition request as an attempt by a Communist state to exploit the spirit of the hour after the Eichmann abduction to take revenge on its political opponents.99 While the Argentinian judicial system remained unimpressed by the resurgent interest in Nazi fugitives, West German authorities were more active than ever before. Foreign Minister Brentano was still busy getting an overview of the Eichmann case and other extradition proceedings in South America, when he formulated the principle: We can’t give the impression that people accused of such crimes are being protected in any way. If we don’t succeed in apprehending these people, it must be clearly proven that the West German government has done everything it can and that responsibilities rest in other places, over which we have no influence.100

The immediate focus of West German efforts was Mengele, who stood in the centre of the public spotlight after Eichmann’s abduction. A physician who had violated the Hippocratic oath in carrying out horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners and evaded prosecution by fleeing to South America, was a great subject for extensive reports in the press. Mengele’s disappearance somewhere in the vast stretches of South America gave the case an additional appeal. The former concentration camp doctor seems to have noticed early on that he was the focus of attention of West German prosecutors. By September 1958, he had already given his second wife power of attorney over all his affairs. Apparently, his family, who still lived in the town of Günzburg in West Germany, had tipped him off that the newspapers had mentioned his name in conjunction with the murder of Anne Frank, whose fate was considered in the late 1950s to 98 Ley Nr. 1612, Art.3, 5. 99 ‘La Extradición, Arma Jurídica de la Arteria Roja’, o.A.; Freie Presse, 21 June 1960, copies in AT, Caja Durcansky, Juzgado Nacional, Exp. 13373. 100 Brentano (Foreign Minister FRG) to Direktor Abt. 5, AA, 21 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 54.

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be emblematic of the crimes of the Nazis. Shortly before the warrant for his arrest was issued in February 1959, he withdrew from the company Fadrofarm, which he co-owned, and went underground. He would return several times to Argentina, but from that point on, he was on the run.101 When West Germany’s extradition request was granted, all the Argentinian policy could do was question his wife and stepson. They said that he had gone abroad.102 Mengele’s police files contained an indication of where he might have gone. In January 1960, as a matter of common procedure, Paraguayan police had informed their Argentinian colleagues that Mengele had received Paraguayan citizenship the preceding November. But this information was never passed along to the German embassy.103 We have no way of knowing whether this was down to the politics of the head of the Buenos Aires police, who had told a judge he wouldn’t waste his officers’ time looking for a foreigner who had committed no crimes in Argentina.104 Rumours soon arose that Mengele was hiding out in Brazil or Chile. Normally such vague information wouldn’t have been enough to prompt an extradition request, but the West German Justice Ministry ordered the relevant paperwork to be sent to the German embassies in Santiago and Rio de Janeiro.105 Without an Interpol manhunt, it was difficult to find out anything to substantiate the rumours. So the Justice Ministry proposed that the director of Interpol’s German office, Paul Dickopf, use his international contacts and get in touch from office to office, bypassing Interpol headquarters in Paris. Dickopf promised to speak with his Chilean and Brazilian colleagues before Interpol general meeting coming up in Washington.106 In January 1961, Fritz Bauer, who was closely following the search for Mengele as he prepared for the so-called Auschwitz trial, suggested another way of intensifying the search: putting out a reward for information leading to Mengele’s capture. But the case was still the responsibility of the Freiburg prosecutor’s office and not yet under his control.107 Bauer then learned that film producer Artur Brauner, a Polish Jew who had made films critical of 101 Völklein, Mengele, pp. 250-262; Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 117-132. 102 Memorandum de Gonzales para el Director de Coordinación Federal, 29 June 1960, in AT, BAAAA 036-038. 103 Jefe de Investigaciones (Asunción) to Quintana (Policia Federal Argentina), 26 January 1960, in ibidem, BAAAA 011. 104 Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 157. 105 BMJ to AA, 4 July 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929. 106 Vermerk BKA, 23 September 1960, in Barch, B 131, vol. 158. 107 Vermerk Großmann (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 25 January 1961, in HStA Wiesbaden, MengeleVerfahren, Sonderheft betreffend Auslobung.

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the Nazi era in the 1940s and 1950s, was willing to pay 10,000 Deutschmarks for Mengele’s apprehension. In late February, Bauer took over the case and informed the press that he was doubling the reward money. The idea was to prevent the reward from being a solely private initiative.108 Once it was announced, tips came flooding in from all over the world to the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, and the West German government sent extradition request forms to increasing numbers of embassies. Ambassador Junker and the fugitives The sudden interest in Nazi criminals in South America didn’t invariably intensify efforts to apprehend fugitives. In the discussions about Argentina’s extradition policies after the Eichmann abduction, the topic of Klingenfuss was raised. On 7 June 1960, AP news agency contacted the Bamberg prosecutor’s office requesting information about the case and was told that an extradition request for Klingenfuss had been rejected. It added that there were reasons anyway to fear that Klingenfuss would simply blame Rademacher, who was still in Syria at the time, and that in the event the case was dismissed it could have ‘legal consequences that could hardly be made up for’. Amidst criticism of Argentina’s extradition policies, the prosecutors office’s explanations were ignored, while the news that the German extradition request had been denied was reported by other journalistic agencies.109 The West German ambassador in Buenos Aires was anything but pleased. Terdenge had vigorously intervened on Klingenfuss’ behalf, and his successor Werner Junker also got involved. Whereas the former had served at the German embassy in Paris and diplomatic headquarters in Berlin between 1943 and 1945, the latter had worked in Belgrade for the Special Commission for Southeast Europe, whose primary duties included fighting Communist partisans. Although he was a former Nazi Party member, Junker succeeded in getting himself readmitted to the diplomatic corps directly after the re-establishment of the Foreign Ministry in early 1951. In 1956, he was named the head of West Germany’s mission in Buenos Aires.110 In 1958, when the Bamberg prosecutor’s office took over the Klingenfuss case and asked the embassy where he was, Junker intervened on behalf of his former colleague. Klingenfuss, Junker said while Globke’s deputy was 108 Vermerk Großmann (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 18 February 1961, in ibidem. 109 Fick (GStA Bamberg) to Kümpel (Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Justiz), 15 June 1960, copy in PAAA, B 83, vol. 76. 110 Auswärtiges Amt, Handbuch, pp. 452 f.; Conze, Frei, Hayes, Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 258 ff.

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on a visit to Argentina, was ‘personally held in high regard by all sides, particularly by émigrés’. With a view toward tensions within the German community in Argentina, he added: ‘Putting Klingenfuss on trial with all the press polemics that would entail would disrupt things in Argentina and destroy a lot of the painstaking work that has been done’. The embassy and the Foreign Ministry should rethink ‘how they wanted to act in this case’.111 A short time later, the Bavarian Justice Ministry told the Foreign Ministry that it was putting the case on ice for the foreseeable future.112 Junker was thus all the more irritated when Klingenfuss’ name was once again brought up after Eichmann’s abduction. The same day that newspapers began to report about West Germany’s extradition request from 1953, he demanded to know where the information had come from. Klingenfuss, he protested, occupied a ‘prominent position’ within the German-Argentinian chamber of commerce, and the news about Argentina’s rejection of the request for his extradition ‘must be considered biased at this moment’.113 But Junker was upset about more than just the public interest being shown in Klingenfuss. He also wasn’t happy that, after the Eichmann abduction, the Nazi past was once more a hot topic. In a draft letter to the state secretary of the Foreign Ministry, Hilger van Scherpenberg, Junker argued that it was ‘unnatural and an affront to human dignity that a people should be required to approve of the public display and listing of its […] historical detours’.114 Entirely in the tradition of Terdenge, he used tension between various groups of German émigrés in Argentina to argue against bringing up the Nazi past. The ‘bridges between long-term German Argentinians and the émigrés’, he wrote, were still ‘very delicate’.115 Foreign Minister Brentano, who found the international interest in German extradition requests quite useful and didn’t entirely trust the ambassador in Buenos Aires, couldn’t understand Junker’s anger. ‘I don’t understand why it’s biased […] to mention that an extradition request has been denied’, Brentano wrote. He feared that Klingenfuss’ influential position within the chamber of commerce might give the impression that German authorities were protecting a fugitive from justice. That impression had to be avoided. That’s why Brentano demanded: ‘If well-founded accusations 111 Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to Janz (Bundeskanzleramt), 15 August 1958, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76; Barch, B 136, vol. 3809. See also Conze/Frei/Hayes and Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 604-607. 112 StS Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Justiz to AA, 11 September 1959, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76. 113 FS Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 8 June 1960, in ibidem. 114 Briefentwurf Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to Scherpenberg (StS AA), 13 March 1961, in ibidem, AV NEUES AMT 5532. 115 Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to Scherpenberg (StS AA), 20 March 1961, inibidem.

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are raised against [Klingenfuss], it’s no longer acceptable to keep him in this position’.116 The Social Democrats had also been keenly following reports about Klingenfuss. When the Bundestag convened for the first time after the Eichmann abduction, they took up the issue and asked whether anything had been undertaken after the rejection of 1953 ‘to substantiate the accusations, so that the Argentinian government […] would be willing to allow extradition’. When West German Justice Minister Schäffer countered that his ministry was not allowed to issue orders to Bavarian authorities, the SPD demanded that the government at least advise the Bavarian Justice Ministry that it pursue its investigations of Klingenfuss so that the Argentinian government could no longer say that the case was only one of ‘incomplete incitement’, not punishable under the law. The minister promised that he would ‘sound people out on the issue’.117 The Bamberg prosecutor’s office wasn’t capable of the investigative progress the SPD demanded. Only a few days after the Social Democrats spoke out in the Bundestag, the responsible prosecutor told the legal division of the Foreign Ministry that criminal intervention against Klingenfuss had no prospects of success. If he were to return to Germany, the prosecutor wrote, the case against him would likely be dropped.118 The basis of this opinion was a judgement of the Federal Court of Justice in the case of Rademacher, rendered months before Eichmann’s abduction, in which the judges had concluded that one could not be an accessory to attempted incitement to murder.119 Because the charges against Klingenfuss were based on the orders which he had composed but which were never carried out, the judgement was relevant to the case against him. None of the other charges raised in 1950, the prosecutor wrote, could be maintained. His reasoning shows that investigators had discovered little new since the Rademacher judgement of 1952. Klingenfuss’ involvement in the deportation of Bulgarian Jews wasn’t even mentioned. Moreover, the Bamberg superior prosecutor declared that it had been determined at the time that ‘deportations of Jews from Romania to Auschwitz or other death camps’ could not be proven. He also said that they had never been able to answer the question of whether Romanian Jews living in the Third Reich had

116 117 118 119

Brentano (Foreing Minister FRG) to Direktor Abt. 5, AA, 21 June 1960, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 76. BT-Bericht, 3. WP, 22 June 1960, p. 6797. Vermerk Marmann (Ref. 503, AA), 27 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 54. Urteil des 5. Strafsenats, 1 March 1960, in BGHSt 14, pp. 156-158.

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been deported after the negotiations in which Klingenfuss had taken part. Consequently, the reasoning ran, the defendant’s actions had had no effects.120 In 1960, however, it was far easier than eight years previously to gain access to documents concerning German diplomats’ participation in the Holocaust. In the mid-1950s, the Allies returned the pre-1945 contents of the Foreign Ministry archive, and the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, which was investigating ministry member Adolf Beckerle, got hold of significant amounts of documents as early as 1956.121 If the Bamberg prosecutor’s offices had followed suit, it would have learned that the attempt to deport Romanian Jews, in which Klingenfuss was involved, had failed. They would also have come across a document that would play a role in Rademacher’s trial eight years later. It was a letter by Klingenfuss, in which he informed the German embassy in Paris that Romania had agreed to the deportation of all Romanian Jews living in the Third Reich and that there were thus no qualms about similar deportations from occupied France. In the wake of this letter, two thousand Romanians had been deported.122 But it would have been too late in 1960 to expand the arrest warrant. Since it could never be proven that Klingenfuss had acted on his own will, the law at the time automatically classified his actions as being an accessory to murder, and the statute of limitations on that crime had run out months ago. The development of the Klingenfuss case was welcome news to the German embassy in Buenos Aires, which, after an intervention by the leadership of the German-Argentinian Chamber of Commerce,123 re-emphasized its opinion in a further letter. The embassy said it considered an ‘accelerated handling of the procedure […] utterly urgent’. The result of such handling was, in the embassy’s eyes, a foregone conclusion. The ambassador wrote: After studying the documents here, I have come to the conclusion that Dr Klingenfuss, who is highly regarded throughout the German community, should be protected against the possibility of getting sucked into the uproar created by the cases of Mengele and Eichmann since he is obviously, at most, only slightly culpable.124

120 Hoffmann (StA Bamberg) to GStA Bamberg, 1 October 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76. 121 Weinke, Verfolgung, p. 262; Wojak, Bauer, p. 410. 122 Browning, Foreign Office, p. 198. 123 Deutsch-Argentinische Handelskammer to Brückmann (Botschaftsrat Buenos Aires), 30 June 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 76. 124 Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 30 June 1960, in ibidem, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532.

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The embassy didn’t confine itself to words alone. The former chamber of commerce president Rastalsky found himself in Germany in October of that year. On Junker’s advice, he took the opportunity to appear at the Bamberg prosecutor’s office to plead for the investigations to be put to rest. He was welcomed with open arms. The Bamberg superior prosecutor had already come out in favour of clearing Klingenfuss at the start of the month,125 and thus the conversation on 24 October took place ‘in an atmosphere of cordial agreement’. Rastalsky learned that a request to rescind the arrest warrant against Klingenfuss had already been issued, and he was told that a final decision was on its way. The prosecutor assumed that ‘the verdict would result in the procedure being discontinued once and for all’. The only worry, the prosecutor said, was that ‘the favourable course of things might be influenced by considerations of politics or convenience’.126 Junker, however, wasn’t satisfied with these reassurances. In order to ‘speed up the court’s decision’, he wrote a report about the conversation with Rastalsky for the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Bonn, highlighting the political implications of the case.127 ‘Above all for political reasons, I think it’s important for the arrest warrant to be reviewed soon’, he wrote. We have to reckon at any time with a renewed interest in the Klingenfuss case by the press, which would harm Germany’s reputation. With reference to the cases of Mengele and Eichmann, the embassy has every reason to ensure that all the formalities of the case of Klingenfuss, which is often cited in this context, is speedily resolved.128

In fact, everything did proceed swiftly. By early December, the Foreign Ministry was already informed that the manhunt for Klingenfuss had been called off. Klingenfuss had never acted on his own initiative, so the reasoning ran, but rather always upon orders from others. For that reason, he could only be considered an accessory to murder – and attempted murder at that.129 Klingenfuss wouldn’t be the only fugitive on behalf of whom Junker intervened. In May 1962, the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office asked the embassy to review information about Josef Schwammberger, who had been the head of the Przemyśl ghetto and the Mielec labour camp in Poland during the 125 Hoffman (StA Bamberg) to Fick (GStA Bamberg), 1 October 1960, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 76. 126 FS Memorandum betr. Klingenfuss, 23 November 1960, in ibidem, AV Neues Amt, vol. 5532. 127 Vermerk Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires), 8 November 1960, in ibidem. 128 Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 24 November 1960, in ibidem, also in B 83, vol. 76. 129 Göhler (BMJ) to AA, 1 December 1960, in ibidem.

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war and who was allegedly working for Siemens in Argentina.130 The embassy contacted the director of the Siemens subsidiary in Argentina, who was none other than Konstantin von Neurath, the son of the identically named foreign minister of the Third Reich, whom the Allies had found guilty of war crimes. Together with Rudel, he had been one of the founding members of the Kamaradenwerk for émigré Nazis in Argentina after the war. Neurath confirmed to embassy members that he did indeed employ Schwammberger, in the province of Buenos Aires. In his report back to Bonn, Junker emphasized that Neurath had been ‘very worried since Schwammberger was a specialist for constructing an important cable network that would take years, was desperately needed and would create major difficulties for the company, if it weren’t built’. In Junker’s eyes, Neurath’s business concerns were an objection that deserved to be taken seriously. Junker wrote: ‘These perspectives should […] be taken into consideration in the decision as to whether to commence extradition proceedings’. In fact, the ambassador himself was already thinking about how to prevent West Germany from requesting extradition, adding a legal argument. Schwammberger’s deeds, he proposed, most likely fell under the Argentinian statute of limitations, so that his extradition would no longer be possible. Prosecutors, he wrote, should be told that.131 In light of Junker’s negative attitude to criminally prosecuting Schwammberger, it is no wonder that embassy didn’t pass along any information about where he was living to justice officials, although prosecutors had asked for it repeatedly and embassy employees had got such information from Neurath’s answer to their queries. Without a concrete address, Stuttgart prosecutors concluded that they were unable to request extradition. The investigations then petered out.132 The extradition procedures against Walther Rauff The cases of Klingenfuss and Schwammberger show that tracking down fugitives was not always the main problem in prosecuting Nazi criminals. Years of inactivity among investigative authorities, interpretations of laws that favoured perpetrators and continued resistance to the idea of punishing Nazi 130 StA Stuttgart to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 18 May 1962 and 30 November 1962, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18206. 131 Junker (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 13 December 1962, printed in AAPD 1962, pp. 2060 ff.; Stangneth, Eichmann, p. 452. 132 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 16 August 1963, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 440; StA Stuttgart to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 13 November 1963; StA Stuttgart to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 7 December 1964, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18207.

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crimes greatly hindered efforts to pursue those who had gone underground in South America. Proof of this are the proceedings against Walther Rauff. In 1941, as the director of the Division for Technical Affairs in Reich Main Security Office, Rauff had sought alternatives to mass shootings in Eastern Europe and was centrally responsible for the development of gas lorries in which people were murdered using the vehicles’ exhaust fumes. After the war, he went to Syria before emigrating to Ecuador a few years later. When the German judicial system took no steps toward finding him, he dropped his guard, applying for a passport from the German embassy and contacting government offices in West Germany on financial matters. Ultimately, he even began travelling to West Germany as a representative of various businesses. In 1958, he came to the attention of the BND. A former colleague in the Security Office, with whom he had worked on foreign espionage, had tipped off the intelligence service, which took a keen interest in Rauff’s past. A former Security Service man was likely to have valuable information about the situation in Latin America, especially about the extent to which it had been ‘Sovietized’. But Rauff failed to live up to expectations, and in October 1962, the BND severed its ties with him.133 In the meantime, German judicial authorities were investigating him, which probably played a role with the BND. Prosecutors in Hanover had already looked into the utilization of gas lorries, but the investigations were discontinued in 1955. It wasn’t until 1959, when the Central Office in Ludwigsburg commenced preliminary investigations of its own, that the case began to move again. One year later, authorities in Hanover were once more entrusted with the matter. Routine enquiries among German government off ices at the start of the investigation quickly uncovered Rauff’s correspondence with the Düsseldorf Superior Financial Directorship, which contained his address.134 After requesting the German embassy in Quito for more information, prosecutors were told that Rauff had moved to Chile, but not without leaving a forwarding address. The German embassy in Santiago confirmed that information.135

133 Cüppers, Walther Rauff, pp. 275-304; Jost Dülffer, ‘Im Einsatz für den BND’, in FAZ, 26 September 2011; Heidemann’s Interview with Wolff and Rauff in Santiago, June 1979 (2), in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 134 Auswertung der Akten der StA Hannover durch ZSL, Verfahren gegen Pradl, n.d. [ca. Februar 1960], in HStA Hannover, Nds.721 Hannover, Acc.97/99 no.10/9; Rauff, Quito, to Oberfinanzdirektion Düsseldorf, 1 July 1956, in ibidem, Acc.97/99 no.10/21. 135 Botschaft Quito to StA Hannover, 14 June 1960; Botschaft Santiago to StA Hannover, 1 August 1960, in ibidem.

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But prosecutors now encountered another problem. The first warrant for Rauff’s arrest had erroneously been issued for him being an accomplice to murder. Because the deeds he was accused of committing dated back to 1943, authorities in the early 1960s considered them to have fallen under the statute of limitations.136 This interpretation of the law would be dismissed by the Federal Court of Justice in 1962, but in mid-1960 there was no way of knowing this.137 In the short term, there was no possibility of introducing extradition proceedings. In this situation, efforts by the Central Office bore fruit. Office lawyers had travelled to archives in Washington and Arlington at the end of the summer and had made substantial film footage of primary source material. On the basis of this material, the accusations against Rauff were expanded to include murder, and a new warrant for his arrest was issued.138 No obstacles to extradition proceedings would have remained, had it not been for Hans Strack. Strack had obtained his position as ambassador in Santiago thanks to a conflict with three top off icials in the Foreign Ministry, Herbert Blankenhorn, Walter Hallstein, and Vollrath von Maltzan, whom he had accused of libelling him. The trial, which ended in 1959, had been about much more than this charge. Strack was a fervent opponent of reparations payments to Jewish victims of National Socialism and had taken the opportunity to voice his reservations and attack Blankenhorn, who was considered a main exponent of Germany’s reparations policy.139 It’s no surprise that Strack saw no need to prosecute crimes from the Nazi past. In June 1961, after a request of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice, when the Foreign Ministry instructed him to request Rauff’s extradition, he immediately began to undermine the initiative. Acting every bit the scrupulous bookkeeper, he objected that the embassy would have to engage an inordinately expensive lawyer.140 The Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice declared itself willing to assume responsibility for all costs, but Strack shot back that, ‘in light of the dubious prospects for success’, he would first need to hire a lawyer to draw up an evaluation. The man he hired, attorney Miguel Schweitzer, who, as Strack was at pains to point out, was Jewish, found that Chile’s highest court would probably recognize ‘not participation in murder’, 136 Vermerk StA Hannover, 15 September 1960, in ibidem, Acc.97/99 no.10/15. 137 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 208 ff. 138 Schüle (ZSL) to Landwehr (StA Hannover), 15 November 1960, in HStA Hannover, Acc.97/99 no.10/21; Haftbefehl des Amtsgerichts Hannover gegen Rauff, 13 March 1961, in ibidem, Acc 97/99 no.10/22. 139 Conze/Frei/Hayes and Zimmermann, Amt, pp. 581 ff.; procedure in PA AA, B 2 – VS, vol. 333A. 140 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 5 July 1961, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404.

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but rather ‘participation in the extermination of a racial group’. But since ethnic genocide wasn’t a crime when Rauff’s deeds were done, he couldn’t be legally prosecuted for them. And even if the court did recognize those deeds as murder, Chile’s statute of limitations applied. Instead of carrying out his orders from Bonn and applying for extradition, Strack asked for further instructions.141 Schweitzer’s arguments convinced neither the national Justice Ministry nor officials in Hanover. If the idea that Rauff’s deeds could be classified as genocide was absurd, considering that the arrest warrant said something completely different, the question of the statute of limitations was at least debatable.142 As was the case in Argentina, in Chile, too, opinions differed as to whether statutes of limitation only applied from the country making the request or whether both nations’ laws were applicable. When German officials on the ground failed to get a satisfactory answer to this question, the West German Justice Ministry told the Foreign Ministry that contentious issues would have to be ‘clarified bindingly with the Chilean High Court’. There was no reason, in the Justice Ministry’s eyes, for a lawyer to be hired. That ran contrary to international law and should be avoided on cost grounds.143 With that, the Justice Ministry had given Strack an excuse for further delays. The ambassador allowed a few months to pass before answering: ‘The prospect of the Chilean High Court rejecting the German interpretation cannot be dismissed outright. It wouldn’t serve the German perspective, if interested parties traced a negative conclusion to the proceedings back to the Federal Republic’s pursuing them without a lawyer and without exhausting all other possibilities’. Strack described another evaluation as an absolute necessity before asking for Rauff’s extradition. The embassy, however, would not be able to shoulder the high costs of a lawyer.144 Strack had good reason to assume that the proceedings were being observed by an ‘interested party’. The Chilean government in the early 1960s, which was run by a right-wing alliance, was coming in for ever increasing criticism while the left wing was growing more and more popular. Communist East Germany, which had thus far been unable to gain a foothold in South America, hoped to profit from this situation. In these circumstances, the so-called ‘brown book campaign’, which had proved successful in Europe 141 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 12 September 1961, in ibidem. 142 Dallinger (BMJ) to AA, 31 October 1961, in ibidem. 143 Grützner (BMJ) to AA, 7 February 1962, in ibidem. 144 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 15 June 1962, in ibidem.

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as well since 1962, came into play. Strack was accused of being involved in murder campaigns during the Second World War, and leftist publications picked up on these allegations as evidence of fascist sympathies among right-wing politicians with contacts in the German embassy. Strack was concerned about this development and took the opportunity at a reception to discuss the resurgence of the left wing with leading military officers. To his disappointment, he discovered that they had resigned themselves to a ‘political turnabout’ and there was no basis for ‘hopes uttered here and there that the military would intervene in time’.145 It’s entirely possible that the situation only hardened Strack’s resistance to the extradition initiative. A trial only would have provided the Chilean press with another occasion to write about the Nazi past. If an extradition request was rejected, an outcome he apparently considered likely, the right-wing parties he favoured would have been subjected to further criticism. The embassy, too, would be confronted with questions about whether it had pursued the request vigorously enough. The Justice Ministry was not deterred by Strack’s objections, nor did it lose patience, explaining to him that the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice had agreed to bear all costs the year before. Its communication concluded with the remark: ‘With a view toward the significance of the issue, the procedure cannot be delayed any longer, after more than a year has gone by since the extradition documents were sent’.146 Still, the embassy in Santiago would not be corrected and simply ignored the Foreign Ministry’s instructions not to commission any further evaluations. Instead, one of Strack’s co-workers reported having consulted the respected attorney Eduardo Novoa because Schweitzer’s evaluation was ‘apparently not without mistakes’. The Foreign Ministry was then told that Novoa had already been consulted a year previously and that he had deemed the ‘chances of the extradition request, also where the statute of limitations was concerned’ more promising than Schweitzer.147 It was only then, after Strack had sabotaged Rauff’s extradition and ignored numerous instructions for fourteen months, that the authorities in West Germany ran out of patience. The Foreign Ministry’s legal department got state secretary Karl Carstens involved, forwarding him its entire correspondence with the rebellious ambassador. That communication concluded with the remark that Lower Saxon judicial officials had ‘expressed utter 145 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 10 May 1962, in ibidem, B 101, vol. 243. 146 Grützner (BMJ) to AA, 4 August 1962, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 404. 147 Wallichs (Embassy Santiago) to AA, 30 August 1962, in ibidem.

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bewilderment that the embassy in Santiago had delayed such a politically important extradition request to this extent’.148 Carstens agreed to personally send instructions to Santiago. In mid-October, the embassy received a letter minutely detailing Strack’s bureaucratic disobedience and explaining yet again why now was the time to act: ‘Particularly in the case of a man accused of contributing with despicable acts to the murder of almost 100,000 people, the impression must be avoided that the embassy is not pursuing extradition proceedings with the appropriate emphasis’. Unlike Strack, Carstens wasn’t interested in the possible consequences of a rejected application for the Chilean government. He knew that the significance of the case went far beyond German-Chilean relations. ‘If the Chilean government should reject Rauff’s extradition’, Carstens wrote, ‘it will have to say why and possibly justify that decision to public opinion around the world’.149 The embassy rejected any notion that it was responsible for the delay, although its reasoning was lame. The delay, the embassy countered, was due to the fact ‘that the proceedings, given the current state of things, would have little chance of success without engaging a Chilean attorney versed in criminal law’. Moreover, the embassy claimed, ‘in the past sixteen months, new difficulties and doubts’ had arisen, and in the embassy’s view they needed to be ‘cleared up before an official request could be filed’. The embassy’s answer wisely didn’t address the questions of why the entire process had been handled so sluggishly, why the embassy had continued to pose questions already answered by the ministry and why for more than a year Bonn had not been informed about a positive assessment of the statute of limitations issue that had been in the embassy’s possession.150 Strack’s obstinacy discredits the explanation, favoured by some historians, that ‘legal and procedural complications’ had made the ‘sensitivity of the case both domestically and abroad’ unclear to some of embassy’s staff.151 After the state secretary’s stern words, the embassy now said it was prepared to launch extradition proceedings ‘immediately’. Before the application could be made, however, the lawyer Novoa required several additional documents. Thus it was another month before the extradition request was officially presented to the Chilean Foreign Ministry. A reaction came promptly. On 3 December 1962, only a few days after the ministry 148 Aufzeichnung Schwörbel (Abt. 5, AA), dem StS vorgelegt, 5 October 1962, in ibidem. 149 Carstens (StS AA) to Botschaft Santiago, 12 October 1962, in ibidem. 150 Wallichs (Embassy Santiago) to AA, 23 October 1962, in ibidem. 151 Schneppen, Rauff, pp. 120-128, especially p. 127. For a critical assessment of Strack’s role see Cüppers, Walther Rauff, pp. 305-313.

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had received the paperwork, Rauff was arrested. The extradition case that commenced quickly became, in Strack’s words, ‘the judicial sensation of the year’.152 The lawyers involved shared that assessment. Later, when Novoa published a book in which he recounted the ‘great trials’ he’d been involved in, the extradition proceedings against Rauff represented one of them.153 Both Novoa and Rauff’s attorney were among the top lawyers in Chile – not to mention the fact that the case was heard by the judges of Chile’s highest court, which had jurisdiction over extradition cases. That may explain why the cases became an exercise in legalese in the media. Did Chilean law allow Rauff to be extradited? The legal experts of the country’s various newspapers never tired of debating that question, with the majority concluding that Raff should not be handed over.154 Playing a role in these discussions was the fact that Rauff had repeatedly been in West Germany, the final time in 1962, when a warrant had been out for his arrest. The leftist press with its connections to East Germany particularly stressed this point. In response to the question of how this could have been the case, the embassy was told his name had not been included on the list of wanted persons. He had never been added to the list because his foreign address was known and it was believed that he lacked the financial means to travel to West Germany. This conclusion was based on the demands Rauff had made on German financial authorities. That lapse made Novoa’s job all the more difficult since it undermined the argument that the defendant’s absence had made prosecution in West Germany impossible, which in turn was why the Chilean statute of limitations didn’t apply to him.155 A further topic that influenced the framework of the discussions was the military’s duty to follow orders. One linchpin of Rauff’s defence strategy was the argument that as a member of the Wehrmacht he was duty-bound to obey his superiors. Particularly among Chilean officers, this idea elicited great understanding, and that was also due to the fact that Rauff had excellent contacts in the Chilean navy. His sons had attended the Chilean naval academy, and Rauff himself reiterated at every opportunity that he had served in this branch of the armed services. With this background he had been accepted as an honorary member in a Chilean association for former military men.156 For Chile’s officers, Rauff became a symbol of the loyal soldier, and 152 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 13 December 1962, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404. 153 Novoa, Procesos, pp. 59-105. 154 Wallichs (Embassy Santiago) to AA, 10 December 1962; Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 13 December 1962; 19 January 1962; 22 January 1962, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404. 155 FS Schwörbel (Abt. 5, AA) to Botschaft Santiago, 28 December 1962, in ibidem. 156 Soledad, Chile, p. 277; Raidt, ‘Karriere’, pp. 101 ff.

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not long after his arrest a group of officers visited him in jail.157 The German consul in northern Chile described two regimental commanders declaring ‘that it would be positive if the Chilean Army Supreme Command would intervene [with Chile’s High Court] to decide the question of discipline once and for all’. In their eyes, ‘the Nuremberg court was a mistake, and a further punishment of someone who was just following orders could undermine the whole principle of discipline in the Chilean army’.158 Both officers said that they knew Rauff personally. Since Rauff later told a German journalist that he had once met later dictator Augusto Pinochet during his time in a small Andean country north of Chile,159 it seems likely that Pinochet was one of the authors of this declaration. Pinochet was stationed in the north of the country at the time.160 To avoid the discussion about following orders, Novoa sought to prove that Rauff had committed his crimes not as a member of the Wehrmacht, but as an SS-man whose deeds had nothing to do with the fighting in the Second World War.161 In the foreground of his arguments was the question of the statute of limitations, which wasn’t easy to answer. There were two international treaties, the Código de Bustamente of 1927 and the Extradition Agreement of Montevideo between South American states in 1933, which served as an orientation for Chile’s policies on extradition. Novoa argued that according to the latter, the only statutes of limitations that applied were those of the country seeking extradition. But the Código de Bustamente, Novoa said, also precluded Rauff from invoking any limitations. This multilateral treaty may have mandated that the laws of the state granted extradition be taken into account, but it also specified that the rules concerning statutes of limitation at the time of the crime were to apply. According to Chilean law in 1942, the statute of limitations for the crimes Rauff was accused of committing was twenty years, which meant that the warrant for his arrest in 1962 had come in time. Thus, under both treaties, Rauff’s extradition was permissible.162 In the judgement he rendered in mid-February 1963, the president of Chile’s Supreme Court, Rafael Fontecilla, only partially accepted this 157 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 13 December 1962, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404. 158 Deutsches Konsulat Antofagasta to Botschaft Santiago, 4 March 1963, in ibidem, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12775. 159 Heidemann’s Interview with Wolff and Rauff, June 1979 (2), in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 160 Kletten, ‘Nachgeschichte’, p. 3; Cüppers, ‘Davongekommen’, pp. 80 ff. 161 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 6 December 1962, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404; Novoa, ‘Rauff’, pp. 102-105. 162 Novoa, ‘Rauff’, pp. 91-102. On the extradition procedure see Schneppen, Rauff, pp. 129-150.

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argumentation. Fontecilla was convinced that the increasing interaction between the two countries should lead to easier cooperation on the legal level, and he wanted to use his verdict in a high-profile trial to lend more weight to this view. Fontecilla thought that extradition procedures should prevent perpetrators of crimes from going unpunished. If push came to shove, this issue had to be viewed separately from questions of which rules governing statutes of limitations applied. It was only consistent to use those applicable in the country requesting extradition.163 Rauff immediately appealed, and the case was transferred to a legal chamber consisting of seven members of the Supreme Court. On 26 April 1963, it voted by a margin of six to one to reject the German extradition request. The majority favoured the argumentation of Rauff’s defence attorney that the Código de Bustamante required the application of the Chilean statute of limitations, not from 1942 but at the time extradition proceedings commenced. That was eight years. Therefore Rauff could not be extradited. His deeds were to be condemned morally, but the statute of limitations precluded prosecuting him for them.164 Novoa suspected that the two verdicts reflected the fundamental differences between Fontecilla, a liberal who stressed international cooperation, and conservative, nationalistic members of the chamber.165 It is possible, however, that Rauff’s attorney was able to use connections to influence the chamber’s judgement.166 Rauff was now beyond the reach of the West German judiciary. But his case would continue to capture public attention in the decades to come. A year and half later, amidst debates in Germany about the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes, the Justice Ministry once again published a pamphlet intended to counter those who said that the German judiciary had been too late in going after this sort of criminals. The decrease in the number of convictions in the 1950s, the ministry argued, had been the result of obstacles. Many of those accused of Nazi crimes had fled and escaped punishment. One of them, the pamphlet argued, was Walther Rauff, whom a Chilean court had refused to extradite.167 This argument allowed West German authorities to absolve themselves of responsibility by blaming the Chilean judiciary. But it was years of inactivity by the German judicial system, not Rauff’s flight to South America, which had meant that it had 163 Strack (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 22 January 1963, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 404. 164 Fallo de la Corte Suprema, 26 April 1963, in ibidem, vol. 405. 165 Novoa, ‘Rauff’, p. 67. 166 Raidt, ‘Karriere’, p. 103; Rauff to Zaugg, August 1980, in SWA, Akt Rauff 2; Heidemann’s Interview with Wolff and Rauff, June 1979 (2), in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 167 BMJ, Verfolgung, pp. 47-51.

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taken until 1960 to indict him.168 Delays of this sort were what had made it possible for the statute of limitations to come into play in the extradition proceedings and what had led the request being refused. Arrest warrants weren’t even issued for other Nazi criminals who fled to South America. The behaviour of the Justice Ministry was characteristic of West German authorities, which rarely wanted to admit that they had hardly done anything to apprehend fugitives before 1959. They also denied that West German attitudes toward the past in the 1950s had given rise to most of the obstacles that the gradually developing interest in prosecuting Nazi criminals would later face. It was the years of inaction by Bamberg prosecutors in dealing with proceedings against a former member of the Foreign Ministry that had allowed Klingenfuss to escape prosecution. Hanover prosecutors encountered difficulties less with the manhunt for Rauff and more for the common legal practice of classifying participation in Nazi crimes as being an accomplice. Moreover, the actions of the official ambassadors Junker and Strack in South America was nothing more than the continuation of the policies of amnesty by individuals – a policy that had enjoyed a broad political consensus in the 1950s. The momentum that developed in the early 1960s in the investigations of Nazi criminals not only highlighted the inactivity of the 1950s and the problems that had arisen as a result. The Eichmann abduction made Josef Mengele into a household name. Even in West German legal practice his indictment was airtight, and there was a high degree of cooperation between the authorities involved in tracking him down. Both Bauer, who viewed the prosecution of Nazi crimes as a fundamental imperative, and the government and its representatives who knew they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes in a manhunt as public as the one for Mengele, were extremely active in moving against him. That constellation of interests would remain intact in the years to come.

3

Mengele and the Statute of Limitations Debate

A group of men from German backgrounds regularly met up in the bar of the Hotel Vienna in southern Paraguay. They had founded a small settlement in the remote primeval forest on the border with Argentina. At one of their meetings in late 1960 or early 1961 they talked about Nazi criminals who had fled to South America. One of them was Alban Krug, who had harboured Mengele for 168 Raidt, ‘Karriere’, pp. 97 ff.

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a time after he had fled from Argentina. Apparently, that wasn’t spectacular enough for him. In any case, he bragged in front of the group that he had also given shelter to Martin Bormann, who had later died in Paraguay.169 The story made Krug’s friend Bruno Fricke prick up his ears. In 1928, Fricke had founded the first ever foreign chapter of the NSDAP in Paraguay. But he soon fell out with the party and joined Strasser’s Schwarze Front, after which he was stripped of his German citizenship. In 1960, he was working as a teacher at a German school in the south of Paraguay. It’s difficult to say whether he truly believed his friend’s bragging, but beyond doubt is that he told a correspondent from the German newspaper Bild about Bormann’s death in Paraguay. The grave was allegedly in the small city of Itá. Apparently Bild wasn’t interested in this information, so in search of a lucrative fee, the correspondent turned to his colleague Max Seelig, who worked for Stern magazine. Seelig went to Itá, but his first trip was in vain. Some time later, in a conversation with the cultural attaché to the German embassy in Paraguay, he once again heard the rumours about Bormann. Mengele’s name was also mentioned.170 Shortly after Eichmann’s abduction, members of the embassy heard from various sources that Mengele was in Paraguay. The embassy secretary, for example, had encountered the name while on a trip to the south of the country.171 Another person at the embassy was told by a member of Paraguay’s German community that the infamous Nazi doctor had eaten in his restaurant, but had subsequently returned to Argentina. Not long afterward, Fricke told an embassy employee that Mengele had resurfaced in the south of the country, also mentioning Bormann in passing.172 German ambassador Eckart Briest then informed the Foreign Ministry that rumours were swirling that Mengele had been paying a visit to Paraguay.173 But because Briest assumed that Mengele had left the country once more, no request for extradition was filed. The cultural attaché nonetheless followed up on hints about Mengele and Bormann and also informed Seelig about the rumours. Having once again had his attention drawn to Bormann’s possible presence in Paraguay, the journalist resumed his search and began to take an interest in Mengele as well. In March 1961, he succeeded in bribing officials to get 169 Konsulat Encarnación to Botschaft Asunción, 19 December 1962, copy in PA AA, B 33, vol. 358. 170 Fricke an Taegner, 29 April 1961, in CDyA, R 29, F 2336. 171 Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 154. 172 Protokoll der Vernehmung Habermanns (former chancellor of the German embassy in Asunción), 12 August 1964, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Fahndung Paraguay I, Hauptordner. 173 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 15 July 1960, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931.

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a look at Mengele’s police file and jotted down the dates on which he had entered Paraguay and when he had become a Paraguayan citizen.174 Seelig told Stern editor Reinhart Holl, who was in touch with Fritz Bauer, about the results of his research. Holl was interested in the trials of Nazis and wished to cooperate closely with state prosecutors.175 This was welcomed with open arms by Bauer who saw trials as acts of public education and was keenly aware of the importance of their media resonance. After Bauer had learned from Holl in March about the new developments in the Mengele case,176 a long letter from Seelig was passed on to him in mid-1961 containing all the information in possession of Paraguayan authorities.177 The letter said that a certain Werner Jung was harbouring Mengele, and Jung was planning to travel to West Germany. Jung knew a lot about Nazi criminals in Paraguay, the letter added, and should be arrested as soon as he arrived.178 Prosecutors only contacted the Foreign Ministry two months after they had received this information, asking for a review.179 That was probably due to Bauer’s scepticism toward German authorities, which had been further nourished by a question in Seelig’s letter. The journalist asked what to make of ambassador Briest, and it would be logical that Bauer would want this question resolved before he approached the Foreign Ministry. But at the latest when he received a letter from the ambassador, he was reassured. One of the embassy staff members had exploited his friendly relations with the secretary at the Paraguayan Supreme Court, which was responsible for citizenship questions. That granted him a look at Mengele’s filing card and confirmed the information prosecutors possessed. But the embassy member wasn’t allowed to make copies. Briest wrote that he had instructed to write an official diplomatic protocol to the Foreign Ministry and that in his experience ‘this would only lead to the desired result after a considerable delay’. The ‘Paraguayan tendency to conceal things’ was only too apparent, and Briest suspected that ‘Paraguayan Interior Minister Insfrán’ used his personal influence to get Mengele granted citizenship. Briest added that

174 Fricke to Taegner, 29 April 1961, in CDyA, R 29, F 2336. 175 Holl (Stern) to Kügler (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 24 March 1961, in HStA Wiesbaden, MengeleVerfahren, Fahndung, Allgemeiner Schriftverkehr. 176 Bauer (GStA Frankfurt a.M.) to Wolf (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 7 March 1961, in ibidem, Fahndung Paraguay I, Hauptordner. 177 Bauer (GStA Frankfurt a.M.) to Wolf (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 24 June 1961, in ibidem. 178 Seelig (Correspondent of the Stern) to Holl (Stern), 24 March 1961,in ibidem. 179 Wolf (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to AA, 17 August 1961, in ibidem.

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Mengele was probably in the south of the country, where Bormann was also rumoured to be hiding.180 Briest’s supposition that Edgar Insfrán had used his personal influence in Mengele’s naturalization cannot be dismissed out of hand. According to the law, it was impossible for the German to be granted citizenship without residing for five consecutive years in Paraguay, and his police file made it clear that he had only entered the country in 1959.181 Nonetheless, Mengele received citizenship in November 1960. Given that Rudel, whom Mengele had introduced to Paraguayan high society, was on friendly terms with Insfrán, it’s quite possible that this contact helped the Nazi doctor overcome the legal obstacles. But the interior minister would not have realized the political consequences this friendship would bring with it. At that point few people had ever heard of Mengele. As the ambassador in Paraguay began his follow-up research, German police had succeeded in locating and interrogating Werner Jung in Germany. He confirmed that the Mengele who had become a Paraguayan citizen was in fact the man authorities were looking for.182 In March 1962, extradition documents were sent to the embassy in Asunción. The embassy responded sceptically. Since Mengele had become a Paraguayan citizen he probably couldn’t be extradited. But before the West German Justice Ministry had a chance to examine this problem,183 the embassy received another tip concerning Mengele, which made Briest, without consulting with his bosses in Bonn, apply for extradition. The reaction from the Paraguayan side was positive. Foreign Minister Raúl Sapena Pastor pointed out that the two countries had no deportation agreement, but he also declared that the Paraguayan government was willing to help investigate and apprehend Mengele.184 Pastor set up a meeting with Insfrán, who proved astonishingly well informed. Mengele had been in Paraguay on numerous occasions, Insfrán said, but to the best of his knowledge, he had left the country. A member of the Paraguayan Interior Ministry told the journalist Gerald Posner years 180 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 3 November 1961, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931. See also Briest an AA, 26 October 1961, in ibidem. 181 Seelig (Correspondent of the Stern) to Holl (Stern), 24 March 1961, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Fahndung Paraguay I. 182 Protokoll der Zeugenvernehmung Jungs, 21 October 1961, in HStA Wiesbaden, MengeleVerfahren, Fahndung Paraguay, Hauptordner. 183 AA to Botschaft Asunción, 27 March 1962; Grützner (BMJ) an AA, 30 June 1962 (sent to the Embassy on 16 August 1960), in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931. 184 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 17 August 1962, in ibidem.

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later that Insfrán had called Rudel after the German extradition request had been received and that Rudel had informed him Mengele was already in Brazil. Insfrán, however, neglected to pass this piece of information on to the German ambassador. Apparently, he felt he owed it to Rudel as a former fighter pilot to keep his remarks in confidence. It was only in an interview four years later, when international pressure didn’t relent that he lost his patience and blurted out that Paraguayan investigations had uncovered Mengele in Brazil. Although Insfrán knew where Mengele really was, he issued an order in the ambassador’s presence to investigate the tips and arrest him.185 It wasn’t the first time that Paraguayan authorities had something to do with the concentration camp doctor. Pedro Prokopchuk, a Hungarian who had occupied a position under the Nazis in Poznan and who now ran the foreign division of the Paraguayan secret service,186 had already been contacted regarding refugees by the BND in mid-1961. After Eichmann’s abduction, Foreign Minister Brentano had pressured the BND to start a manhunt for Mengele, and the German intelligence service had received some early tips as to his whereabouts.187 Prokopchuk was now charged with reviewing some of those tips. In return, the BND promised to share information with the Paraguayan secret service. Again what the BND knew about Mengele in Paraguay, it got from Fricke – this time from his letters to a man named Taegner.188 We don’t know whether Taegner was a BND agent or whether this was one of Prokopchuk’s code names. In any case, Fricke had to leave the country in 1962 for espionage.189 By that point, Prokopchuk was dead. An attempt to play the interior minister and the head of the secret services off against one another likely cost him his life. A short time after he talked to the BND agent, he was found shot dead in the entrance to a cinema.190 Paraguayan intelligence services carried out no further research about either Bormann or Mengele. 185 Ibidem; Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 180; FS Botschaft Asunción to AA, 30 May 1966, in ibidem, vol. 933. 186 Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos (National Department for Special Affairs). 187 See Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Jagd auf Mengele’, in Spiegel 16/2011. 188 Prokopchuk’s report from 24 August 1961 disappeared from the so-called Archivo del Terror (CDyA) in the uproar his discovery caused in 1993. But photographs of the document and a transcription of its contents can be found in numerous newspaper articles, e.g. in El Diario, 24-25 February 1993. In SWA, Akt Bormann 1 there is a German translation. 189 Protocol of the interrogation of Habermann (former chancellor of the German embassy in Asunción), 12 August 1964, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Fahndung Paraguay I, Hauptordner. 190 El Diario, 25 February 1993.

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But Fricke’s loose lips had been heard by ever widening circles. Articles about the rumours he had spread had already appeared in the German-language Argentinisches Tageblatt and other newspapers. Soon Jewish volunteers from Argentina began searching for Bormann and Mengele. Alban Krug, who had been repeatedly named in newspaper reports, received warnings from police to watch out for Israeli agents.191 That was the result of some keen observations. One of the tasks given to Aharoni’s special unit within Mossad was to keep tabs on Krug.192 Other Nazi hunters were already following the trails Fricke had pointed out to them. One month after Insfrán officially ordered the manhunt for Mengele, Paraguayan police arrested an Argentinian Jew who said that he was looking for Nazis on behalf of a group called the Jewish Brotherhood.193 We don’t know what happened to him. It’s possible that he suffered the same fate as others who hunted Mengele and were apprehended and murdered by the Paraguayan apparatus of state repression.194 German-Paraguayan tensions While the Paraguayan police were hunting down Nazi hunters, the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry was neglecting to answer the German embassy’s dispatches. A resigned Briest informed the German Foreign Ministry that apparently ‘due to Insfrán’s powerful position’ the Paraguayan government was not prepared to carry out police raids.195 As a result, in December 1963, the trial of perpetrators from the Auschwitz concentration camp, which Fritz Bauer and his office had spent years preparing, had to begin without the most prominent defendant. Since Mengele was named in that trial, it wasn’t long until the talk turned to Paraguay. In an interview in early February 1964, the president of the Belgian resistance association took the first step, declaring that Mengele was hiding out in the land-locked South American country. The German Foreign Ministry then ordered the Paraguayan embassy to draw up another report on the situation. Briest succeeded in getting an audience with Paraguayan President Stroessner, but he dismissed the ambassador’s statement that the case had ‘global significance’ with the remark 191 Konsulat Encarnación to Botschaft Asunción, 19 December 1962, copy in PA AA, B 33, vol. 358. 192 Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 157. 193 Nomina de los Detenidos a cargo del Departamento de Investigaciones, Alberto Planás, Jefe dpto. Investigaciones, 8 September 1962, in CDyA, R 209, F 1644; printed in: Boccia Paz, Informe, pp. 97 ff. 194 ABC Color, 20 February 1993. The newspaper report is based on documents discovered by Paraguayan police in archives in late 1992, which can no longer be found. 195 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 29 March 1963, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 931.

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that it was merely a matter between Paraguay and Germany. Stroessner scoffed that the press coverage of Mengele was nothing more than ‘political rumours’, but he did say he would see to it that the German dispatches were answered.196 In a conversation with the Paraguayan foreign minister, Briest also emphasized the international interest in the Mengele case, explaining that ‘at the moment the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt is being followed by the entire world press’. It was crucial, Briest argued, that Paraguay declared its position.197 He soon received a letter from the Paraguayan Interior Ministry confirming all the details about Mengele’s naturalization and the news that it had thus far proved impossible to determine the fugitive’s whereabouts.198 Bauer didn’t believe this. The slow processing of the case and Briest’s detailed information about Insfrán’s role in Mengele’s naturalization convinced him that the Paraguayan government was protecting this Nazi criminal. But his avenues for gaining official information were exhausted after Paraguay’s official declaration of position. Within this situation, he would have welcomed the interest Germany’s Springer publishing empire began to take in the case. In mid-June, a reporter for Bild newspaper came calling, and Bauer provided him with information about the manhunt, including the role of Insfrán. Bauer also announced that he would be increasing the amount of the reward for useful information about Mengele’s whereabouts.199 Only then did he inform the Justice Ministry about his intention to do so, urging the ministry to approve the reward increase. The idea was not only to drive the manhunt in South America forward. The search for a fugitive who had sadistically tortured people and was living under the protection of a dictator with German roots in the South American jungle was capable of attracting the attention of Germany’s most read tabloid in a way that reports from inside German courtrooms could not. Bauer argued that the reward was ‘commensurate and appropriate’ given Bild’s huge circulation and the fact that the tabloid ‘had thus far not shown any special interest in the trials of Nazi criminals’. The sudden interest in Mengele fit in well with Bauer’s attempts to inform the public about Nazi crimes.200 After the Justice Ministry had agreed to raise the reward money, Bild put out a special edition with the headline: ‘Ministers protecting Mengele in Paraguay’. The report 196 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 6 February 1964, in ibidem. 197 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 18 February 1964, in ibidem. 198 Ministerio del Interior to Embajada Alemana, 10 February 1964, in MRREE, Caja 138, Caso Mengele, Antecedentes 1961. 199 Wojak, Bauer, pp. 313 ff. 200 Bauer (GStA Frankfurt a.M.) to HMJ, 22 June 1964, in HMJ, Mengele-Auslieferung, vol. 3.

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stated that the fugitive knew almost every member of the government in the South American country.201 The report attracted a lot of attention internationally, although the accusations concerning Paraguay were nothing new. Much to Bauer’s delight, other publications like Quick, Stern and Spiegel sent ‘trained reporters’ with ‘useful money’ to Paraguay.202 Apparently he had considerable faith in the financial and investigative powers of German journalists, after the Stern correspondent had succeeded in getting a look at Mengele’s immigration documents. Media interest in Mengele was no accident. A new generation of editors was changing the face of West German journalism, making it much more critical, and the scandalous nature of unpunished Nazi crimes was one of the central topics of this sort of reporting.203 But the Frankfurt prosecutor didn’t rely solely on journalists. On a visit to Bonn shortly after the Bild article was published, Bauer met with an SPD member of the Bundestag Gerhard Jahn, whose mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. They agreed that the Social Democrats would make a brief inquiry in parliament as a means of forcing Mengele’s extradition from Paraguay ‘even against the resistance of the government there’. The hope was that ‘the German government and the Foreign Ministry would disregard the expected public echo around the world, even if Prime Minister Stroessner [sic] merely knitted his brow’.204 Bauer’s strategy worked. After the Social Democrats demanded action to revoke Mengele’s naturalization,205 the embassy was issued orders to that end. Until now Briest had sought to avoid the question of citizenship so as not to provide the Paraguayan government with an argument for refusing an extradition request. Under Paraguayan law, citizens could not be extradited. But Briest, too, had not failed to note the attention the Bild article had attracted. Correspondents from the Daily Telegraph, Stern, and Columbia Broadcasting Service were only a few of the ‘trained reporters’ doing research in Paraguay in July, and Briest decided to do his bit to increase pressure on Stroessner. Because the Paraguayan foreign minister was out of the country, he contacted the president of the Paraguayan Supreme Court, whose body decided on extradition requests and denaturalization cases. Briest argued that ‘for the sake of Paraguay’s international prestige’ 201 Bild, 8 July 1964. 202 Vermerk HMJ, 29 July 1964, in HMJ, Mengele-Auslieferung, vol. 3. 203 Hodenberg, Konsens, pp. 245-301. 204 Vermerk HMJ, 29 July 1964, in HMJ, Mengele-Auslieferung, vol. 3. 205 BT-Drucksachen 4. WP, 21 July 1964, IV/2477. On the events that followed see Schneppen, ‘Diktatur’, pp. 312-315; Schneppen, ‘Paraguay’, pp. 311-315.

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there needed to be clarity about the court’s attitude toward Mengele and in particular toward the legal status of his naturalization, which had been acquired with false information.206 It was very unusual for an embassy to make demands on the constitutional organ of a foreign country, but the reaction was mild. The president of the Paraguayan Supreme Court explained that his body could not decide to take action on its own. It needed an application by the embassy. But the president added that his court ‘would, with a view toward German-Paraguayan friendship, look favourably upon the question of whether Mengele’s naturalization could be voided’. These positive statements, Briest hastened to caution the Foreign Ministry in Bonn, shouldn’t be taken as a binding position. Nonetheless, without delay, he formally requested that the Paraguayan judicial system revoke Mengele’s citizenship. He also asked the German Foreign Ministry to send investigators to Paraguay to track down Mengele. When he received no answer on revoking Mengele’s citizenship, Briest paid another visit to the Paraguayan foreign minister. After mentioning that West Germany had paid a significant amount of the capital in the Inter-American Development Bank, from which Paraguay had just got a loan, he got to his main point. In the interest of German-Paraguayan friendship, it was crucial for the Paraguayan government to take a stance. The German government, he argued, had provided ‘long-term help for the development’ of Paraguay, but now had reason to fear that ‘the German people’s friendly feelings could be negatively affected’. The delay in answering Germany’s diplomatic dispatch, he added, allowed for the ‘misinterpretation that Paraguay wanted to protect Mengele’. Paraguayan Foreign Minister Sapena Pastor answered him ‘seriously and with unusual formality’ that Mengele’s whereabouts remained unknown and that Paraguay would not let itself be pressured by either the international press or West Germany. Pastor pointed out that Paraguay had refused extradition requests in the past, and that it was up to the government whether or not it wanted to answer dispatches. With that, Pastor declared the conversation over. That convinced the ambassador that Mengele ‘was being protected by the Stroessner government’. And he confirmed this conviction in a confidential message stating that the preceding February Insfrán had categorically told the general director of the German Foreign Ministry that ‘in the event Mengele turns up in Paraguay, in accordance with the Paraguayan constitution, he will never be extradited’. Under these circumstances, Briest thought it 206 Here and in the following Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 31 July 1964, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929 and 931.

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appropriate to defer inviting Stroessner to visit West Germany, something that had been under discussion for two years and that the ambassador had always supported.207 In a conversation a few days later, the Paraguayan foreign minister adopted a sharper tone. The German embassy had queried several people to establish that Mengele had not arrived in Paraguay five years prior to his naturalization. Now Pastor demanded an end to such queries because the subject was a Paraguayan citizen. Shocked by the foreign minister’s suddenly icy tone, Briest sought to win over the German Foreign Ministry for a moderate course. ‘Bringing to bear foreign policy pressure will automatically rebound against the German and German-Jewish community’, he warned. Under these circumstances, the idea of ‘West German authorities conducting investigations and a manhunt against Mengele in Paraguay, as advocated by the embassy’, had been put on ice.208 But it was too late for de-escalation. The Paraguayan Foreign Ministry saw itself as the victim of German colonialism. The same day he spoke with Briest, Pastor wrote to the Paraguayan ambassador in Bonn, Jorge López Moreira. The letter was angry, if not analytically keen, accusing the ‘treacherous campaign by the German press’ of being politically motivated. Pastor suggested that the press reports might be aimed at concealing the true ‘interests of the Germans’. Paraguay, he wrote was ‘an independent country and not a German colony, and would not issue any declaration simply to placate the German government or its ambassador’. Briest had shown a lack of tact, Pastor complained, by using economic arguments to apply pressure. Should López Moreira have the opportunity to pass along these sentiments to the German Foreign Ministry, Pastor concluded, he should do so.209 At first, the Paraguayan ambassador in Bonn made no use of this letter. But media reports about Mengele being in Paraguay kept coming, and gradually it was clear that Briest wasn’t the only one exerting pressure on the Stroessner government. In a conversation with the deputy head of protocol in the German Foreign Ministry, López Moreira confirmed that Stroessner’s visit was in danger of being cancelled because of the Mengele affair.210 Bundestag President Heinrich Lübke, who had always been in favour of a state reception for Stroessner, also withdrew his support. At a trade fair 207 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 18 August 1964, in ibidem, vol. 932. 208 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 6 October 1964, in ibidem, vol. 929. 209 Sapena Pastor (Ministro de RREE) to Moreira (Paraguayan Ambassador Bonn), 28 August 1964, in MRREE, Caja 138, Caso Mengele, Antecedentes 1961. 210 Aufzeichnung des Stellvertretenden Chef des Protokolls, 8 September 1964, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 359.

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in late September, he met with the Paraguayan minister of industry and commerce, telling him directly that there could be problems ‘if the matter of Mengele isn’t resolved to the satisfaction of the German public’.211 With the situation deteriorating, López Moreira requested an audience at the German Foreign Office and was received in early December by State Secretary Karl Carstens. The aide mémoire the ambassador submitted was, aside from a few details, basically the letter Pastor had written a few months previously. But instead of speaking of ‘the interests of the Germans’, López Moreria opted for a more precise wording. The Paraguayan government, he wrote, believed ‘that the malevolent campaign is pursuing political goals that have nothing to do with Paraguayan-German relations and are perhaps a cover for German domestic political interests’.212 López Moreira was most likely referring to the ongoing debate in Germany about statutes of limitations being applied to Nazi crimes. In any case, that was how Carstens understood that phrase. In conversation with López Moreira, he tried to explain that the heated debate over statutes of limitation did not indicate a lack of consensus that Nazi crimes should be condemned. ‘The outrage in Germany over the crimes committed by the National Socialist regime is general and by no means an object of domestic political discussion’, Carstens said. For that reason, the German ambassador to Paraguay had not been acting alone. ‘If Mr Briest tried to determine Mengele’s whereabouts’, Carstens said, ‘he was following the instructions of his government’.213 Carstens’ remark about the general outrage of German society was at best a mistaken impression. Nonetheless, the words did make clear how the German government wished the pressure it was applying to Paraguay to be understood: as a sign it was doing everything it could to apprehend Nazi criminals at the same time it was advocating statutes of limitations. This message was not primarily addressed at Paraguayans, and thus López Moreira was right when he speculated that the German Foreign Ministry was motivated by concerns unrelated to German-Paraguayan relations. In early 1964, the World Jewish Congress and Communist East Germany had already called upon the West German government to rescind the statute of limitation on all murders committed in Nazi Germany, which were set 211 Vermerk AA, 30 September 1964, in ibidem. 212 Aide-memoire der Paraguayischen Botschaft, n.d., original text and translation in: PA AA, B 33, vol. 359. 213 Gespräch des StS Carstens mit dem paraguayischen Botschafter Moreira, 4 December 1964, in ibidem. Printed in: AAPD 1964/2, pp. 1440-1442.

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to become exempt from prosecution on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, 8 May 1965. With a view toward upcoming elections, the government under Ludwig Erhard wanted to draw a line under the Nazi past and countered all demands for a suspension of the statute of limitations with the legally debatable argument that such changes to the law would violate the ban on retroactively valid legislation. To head off the expected criticism of the ‘world community’, which had been repeatedly invoked during the Mengele affair, the Erhard government called upon all countries to provide access to incriminating documents. By pressing charges in the greatest number of cases, the government could interrupt the statute of limitations since it no longer applied once charges had been filed.214 The conspicuous diplomatic activity on Mengele was part of this strategy, intended on the one hand to demonstrate Germany’s eagerness to deal with the past while on the other trying to draw a line under it. This dual emphasis was particularly evident in one of the main protagonists at the Foreign Ministry. Hans Gawlik didn’t have his roots in diplomacy. During the war, he was a prosecutor at the special court in Breslau (Wroclaw), where he tried to silence critics of National Socialism. He was one of the defence attorneys at the Nuremberg Trials and later helped form a network of lawyers who argued under the Adenauer government for amnesty for former Nazis. Starting in 1949, he was head of the Coordination Office for the Promotion of Legal Protection for German Persons Abroad, which primarily intervened on behalf of convicted Nazis outside Germany. In 1956, the office was made part of the Foreign Ministry. That gave Gawlik a comprehensive overview of all Germans convicted of crimes by the Allies. Nonetheless, when the Central Office in Ludwigsburg asked to review this information in order to advance its own inquiries into Nazi crimes, Gawlik refused to cooperate in any way.215 The Foreign Ministry nonetheless entrusted Gawlik with responsibility for matters concerning criminal prosecutions. Ultimately, the logic ran, there was a close connection between the tasks of the Office for Legal Protection and the criminal code. Thus it happened that a committed advocate of amnesty for Nazi perpetrators dealt with the Mengele case and helped move forward West Germany’s course of confrontation with Paraguay.216 By no means did Gawlik lose sight of his own agenda, but he was all too aware of the significance the opinion of the ‘world community’ had in questions of 214 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 224-284. 215 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 229 ff.; Weinke, Gesellschaft, pp. 31 ff. 216 Aktenvermerk Meyer-Lohses (Ref. IB2, AA), 24 July 1964, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 359.

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dealing with the German past. Following the Eichmann abduction, Gawlik was very involved in the campaign for responding to charges that West Germany wasn’t trying to apprehend Nazi criminals and the strategy of showing a demonstrative dedication to duty in prosecuting offenders.217 Mengele offered a welcome opportunity to highlight West Germany’s efforts to track down Nazi wrongdoers. Yet it was Gawlik, who in early 1965, after the statute of limitations had been pushed back to 1969, tried to find ways of shaping a conservative-backed immunity law without destroying the positive impression that the extension had created abroad.218 The fight against the statute of limitations Wiesenthal wasn’t just one of the main figures in the fight against the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes. He also helped make the search for fugitive Nazi criminals into a perfect demonstration of West German efforts to apprehend perpetrators to the ‘world community’.219 The fugitives were an important element in Wiesenthal’s campaign against the West German government’s plans. Shortly before the debate about the statute of limitations, he received information from Silvano Santander that made him prick up his ears. The Argentinian member of parliament had continued to take an interest in Nazi criminals who had gone underground in Argentina and had an extensive network outside the country as well. Santander was a member of the Union Internationale de la Résistance et de la Déportation (UIRD), which Wiesenthal had also joined in 1962. In 1963, when the two men met at a UIRD conference,220 Wiesenthal learned that Odilo Globocnik was apparently on a list of an investigative commission that had been appointed after Perón’s fall from power. As the director of the Aktion Reinhard, he had been responsible for the murder of Jews and Sinti and Roma in the General Government of Poland. His name had been mentioned frequently during Eichmann’s trial. Santander believed that he had fled to Argentina.221 Coming as it did directly before the statute of limitations was set to kick in, this information created a particular narrative. Globocnik had been officially declared dead soon after the war so no steps had been taken to interrupt the statute of limitations. If they were to apply, Globocnik could 217 See precedures in ibidem, B 83, vol. 55. 218 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 309 ff. 219 Weinke, Gesellschaft, pp. 78 ff. 220 Santander to Wiesenthal, 15 April 1964, in SWA, Akt Bormann 1. 221 Wiesenthal to Broda (Minister of Justice, Austria), 2 June 1964, in ibidem, Akt Globocnik.

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emerge from hiding in South America without having to fear criminal prosecution. Wiesenthal presumed that Globocnik was not a unique case. The circumstances that had allowed Nazi criminals to flee and the consequences they had for those criminals being tracked down became central arguments against the statute of limitations. In a letter to the Austrian minister of justice, who like his colleague in Bonn was confronted with an anti-statute movement, Wiesenthal argued: Today, after twenty years of research, we know that once Germany’s defeat became apparent, the bearers of the secrets of the Third Reich did everything in their power to get through the difficult period they were facing. Today we know that, at the latest by the spring of 1945, the Main Reich Security Office and other agencies of the Third Reich provided a certain circle of people with false identity papers. It was easy for such people to have themselves declared dead.222

Wiesenthal cited Globocnik as a cautionary example, using his disappearance in South America to argue in the press against the statute of limitations.223 Under pressure from Wiesenthal, the Austrian Interior Ministry reviewed the case and succeeded in proving that Globocnik was in fact dead.224 Nonetheless, criminals using death certificates to evade justice became an integral Wiesenthal argument against the statute of limitations. In a widely circulated letter, in which he called upon public servants to state their positions on the statute, he employed it to define Nazi perpetrators as a special category of criminal. Wiesenthal distinguished them from other sorts of mass murders who didn’t enjoy any support in society. He wrote: ‘The National Socialist mass murderers had behind them an organization, a whole society, which gave them papers after the war and allowed them to go underground. These are all possibilities that aren’t open to “normal” murderers. These advantages make it all the harder to apprehend Nazi mass murderers’.225 Wiesenthal had concrete ideas about the organization allegedly behind the flight of Nazi criminals. He envisioned it as a conspiratorial association

222 Wiesenthal to Broda (Minister of Justice, Austria), 1 June 1964, in ibidem, Akt Verjährung 9. 223 Interview with Wiesenthal, Quick, 18 October 1964. 224 See procedure in SWA, Akt Globocnik. 225 Wiesenthal Rundbrief, 2 November 1964, in Barch, B 141, 25721. Printed in: Wiesenthal, Verjährung.

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of former SS men that operated under the code name ‘Odessa’226 and helped fugitives evade manhunts.227 The numerous reports in the media about the extensive but fruitless searches for Mengele and Bormann in South America seemed to confirm that both men enjoyed the protection of some sort of organization. In the wake of the statute of limitations debate, the fear was repeatedly voiced that if the statute kicked in, these Nazi criminals could come out of hiding with impunity. Chancellor Erhard, who in contrast to most of his cabinet was against any such statute for Nazi crimes, used this argument, after which he was told that the fact that charges had been filed prevented the statute from applying to Mengele and Bormann.228 In Wiesenthal’s eyes, Odessa was not just responsible for dragging out the legal pursuit of Nazi criminals. He was also convinced that the organization still posed a concrete threat. Wiesenthal wrote: What can the world expect from people who, although they have committed such crimes, will be immune from prosecution as of May 1965? If they no longer have anything to fear, such people will openly ally themselves with the enemies of democracy, freely distribute propaganda among our youth and do immeasurable damage.229

In June 1965, together with the UIRD, Wiesenthal organized a conference in the Strassbourg hotel Maison Rouge. The location was symbolic. In 1944, a conference of German industrialists had allegedly funnelled capital into neutral countries from this very hotel. Both the choice of location and the goal of Wiesenthal’s conference made it plain how much the secret service reports during the 1940s about the transfer of capital and the conflicts with the Perón regime had shaped the concept of a secret SS organization. The event was intended to ‘organize the investigation of secret and quite sizeable Nazi wealth’. In his own conference presentation, Wiesenthal formulated a number of questions to be answered: ‘Who finances the publishing houses that have specialized in neo-Nazi propaganda literature? […] Who finances the meetings of former Nazis in various European cities? […] Who pays for the underground activities of neo-Nazi groups in various countries?’ The 226 Organisation der Ehemaligen Angehörigen der SS (Organization of Former Members of the SS). 227 Wiesenthal, Eichmann, pp. 185-187. 228 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 238 f. 229 Wiesenthal Rundbrief, 2 November 1964, in Barch, B 141, 25721. Printed in: Wiesenthal (Hg.): Verjährung.

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fear that Nazism could be revitalized was very palpable for those who had been persecuted by it.230 Wiesenthal didn’t ever answer those questions. While he did repeatedly stumble across information that supported his assumptions,231 he never found conclusive evidence of a globally active organization that was protecting Nazi criminals and propagating National Socialism. It didn’t stop Odessa from playing a prominent part in his campaigns against a statute of limitations for Nazi crimes. Not only was he convinced of the organization’s existence, over the course of the 1950s, the idea that something had to be done against the propagation of Nazi ideology established itself in West Germany.232 With his thesis that organized Nazi criminals posed the threat of Nazi infiltration, Wiesenthal tried to exploit this societal consensus and use it to combat the statute of limitations. The Odessa theory also offered an explanation for why there had been such delays in prosecuting Nazi crimes. Delays were an important argument for suspending the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes. At the same time, Wiesenthal had to avoid making the West German judicial system the sole scapegoat. He was by no means willing to repeat the line advanced by West German ministries in its entirety, but he also needed their cooperation. A confrontational approach would have hurt his own cause. The Odessa theory, which partially blamed the perpetrators themselves for the delays in prosecution, helped Wiesenthal out of this dilemma. The statute of limitations debate did not only give the fugitives major significance in West Germany. Like the West German government, although for diametrically opposed reasons, Mossad stepped up its efforts to apprehend fugitive Nazi criminals. The manhunts concentrating on prominent figures like Bormann, Mengele, and former Gestapo head Heinrich Müller, which had begun in 1960, hadn’t yielded any results. In 1962, after Mossad agents had failed to turn up any further enemies by staging a manhunt in Paraguay or keeping Mengele’s relatives under observation, Aharoni contacted Willem Sassen. The former Dutch SS man, who now worked as a journalist in South America and had contact with the extreme Right, had conducted a number of interviews with Eichmann in the 1950s. Mossad hoped that he could give them some information as to Mengele’s whereabouts. In return for five thousand dollars, Sassen provided a tip that could have led to Mengele’s 230 Wiesenthal, Mörder, p. 115; Sitzungsprotokoll des Experten-Komitees zur Bekämpfung des Neonazismus in Strassburg, 25 June 1965, in SWA, Akt Straßburg/Hotel Maison Rouge. 231 Stahl, ‘Odessa’, pp. 350 ff. 232 Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik, pp. 307-396.

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capture. Wolfgang Gerhard, a German living in São Paulo, was in contact with the concentration camp doctor. This information helped to locate a livestock farm near São Paulo, where Mengele was living. But instead of pursuing this lead, Harel withdrew his agents from South America and deployed them to locate a kidnapped boy – a case that caused public anger in Israel in 1962.233 For unknown reasons, this lead was never taken up again. Thus Mossad was still feeling its way around in the dark in 1964. Harel’s successor, Meir Amit, and quite possibly one of the members of the Israeli government, was convinced that a second abduction like that of Eichmann might be helpful to beat the quickly approaching statute of limitations in West Germany. In early 1964, a Mossad agent was summoned to Paris where the Israeli department for hunting Nazis had its main headquarters. He was told that West Germany was half-hearted about prosecuting Nazi crimes and that many of them would soon fall under the statute of limitations. The trial of Eichmann had ‘strengthened the consciousness of Nazi terror in the world’, but its effects were fading. Something had to be done. How to proceed on the statute of limitations issue depended greatly on foreign reactions. For those reasons, the abduction of another Nazi criminal would no doubt be an effective means of blocking any plans by the West German government to draw a line under the Nazi past.234 But since the whereabouts of Mengele, Bormann, and Müller hadn’t been ascertained, Mossad had to make do with other Nazi criminals. That was how the Nazi hunters agreed on Herbert Cukurs. Since the 1948 campaign initiated by Wiesenthal, Jews living in Brazil had never lost sight of the Eastern European collaborator, who had been a member of the Latvian execution commandoes. People in Europe had also engaged with his case. In 1949, legal proceedings were initiated in the British occupation zone for crimes committed around Riga, in which the Latvian commandoes had been a main participant. The case had been given to Hamburg prosecutors. Cukurs had been one of the defendants, but because of his absence the investigation against him had been dropped.235 The Central Office in Ludwigsburg had only just resumed investigating the Riga murders, when Eichmann’s abduction served to remind people in Brazil of Cukurs. He was once again in the headlines, and Jewish émigrés to Brazil gave West German authorities his address.236 233 Aharoni and Dietl, Jäger, pp. 233 ff. 234 Künzle, Henker, pp. 17-21, quotation on pp. 19 ff. 235 Schlußbericht der ZSL, 22 March 1960, in Barch, B 162, vol. 2993. 236 Neublum (São Paulo) to Werner (ZSL), 7 June 1960, in ibidem.

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But the investigation wasn’t over, and responsibility was transferred to the Hamburg prosecutor’s office. The accusations against Cukurs were based on the testimony of three witnesses, which was very general and needed to be made more precise.237 In late 1963, when the Foreign Ministry asked whether an application for extradition should be made, the superior prosecutor who was responsible said that investigations were ongoing. The prosecutor added that an application wasn’t expected to have any success since serious suspicions only existed with reference to the first mass murders in Latvia in 1941. The prosecutor wrote: ‘For crimes committed elsewhere German criminal law doesn’t apply, nor would the jurisdiction of German court be justified. At the beginning of the Russian campaign, only Latvian Jews were killed in Riga, and the perpetrators weren’t people who possessed German citizenship.’238 Thus, Cukurs remained beyond the reach of criminal investigators until Mossad began to plan its second abduction in 1964. His whereabouts were no secret, and Mossad agents were able to start planning the second phase of the operation right away. Their plan was to get Cukurs to leave Brazil since if the worst came to the worst, foreign agents could be charged with the death penalty there. A Mossad agent from Vienna, who went by the name of Anton Künzle, had succeeded in establishing a friendship with Cukurs and convinced him to go on a business trip to Uruguay. Whether what happened next was planned is doubtful, although Künzle later insisted that everything went off without a hitch. On 23 February 1965, Cukurs entered a hotel room in Montevideo which Künzle had booked for him. Behind the door waited Mossad agents who attacked him. But Cukurs resisted, and when the agents failed to subdue him, they killed him, put his body in a wooden crate and left Uruguay. Künzle later claimed on another occasion that the plan was to read Cukurs a list of charges and then execute him.239 The Uruguayan police reached different conclusions when, following up on a tip from Germany, they began investigating some days later. The Bonn office of Reuters news agency had received a letter claiming responsibility for Cukurs’ death. It was signed with the words ‘those who can never forget’. The authors claimed that Cukurs had been executed as punishment for the murder of 30,000 Jews. Police officials found the hotel room covered in blood. The wooden crate in which the body rested had holes in the side to 237 Grützner (BMJ) to AA, 23 February 1961, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 442. 238 Krüger (Landesjustizverwaltung Hamburg) to BMJ, 22 November 1963, in ibidem. 239 Künzle, Henker, pp. 211-227. A police report can be found in the Simon Wiesenthal Archive. (Die Spinne, Informationen BKA, in SWA, Akt Cukurs).

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allow air in. Mossad agents had constructed exactly the same sort of crate for the Eichmann abduction but hadn’t used it. For Uruguayan investigators, it was clear that this was a botched abduction.240 This assumption is the only plausible one, if we take Künzle’s statements about the goal of the operation seriously. It is highly unlikely that the Israeli government thought it could use a bloody act of violence attributed to a group of volunteers to block the plans of the West German government concerning the statute of limitations. An abduction and a trial in Jerusalem, on the other hand, would have presented Bonn with significant problems. The Brazilian police, which stepped up its manhunt for Mengele in 1964 in response to pressure from the media, had as little success as Mossad. In Brazil, the only South American country that had supported the Allies with troops of its own during the Second World War, the hunt for Nazi criminals attracted lively public interest. Rumours had swirled about Mengele ever since Eichmann’s abduction, with the media reporting regular sightings of the prominent Nazi. Such reports greatly encouraged Brazilian police to intensify their manhunt efforts. Delgado Amoroso, the director of Interpol’s Brazilian office, followed up on numerous published tips, personally interrogated several suspects and confronted them with Holocaust survivors living in Brazil. Amoroso knew that Interpol headquarters in Paris considered Nazi crimes political and thus outside the agency’s jurisdiction, but he didn’t share that view. For him, Nazi crimes were wrongdoings that fell under the conventional criminal code.241 As the Mengele case began to attract growing public interest in the wake of the Auschwitz trial, Interpol’s Brazilian office increased its efforts. The rumour that Mengele was hiding somewhere near the Brazilian-Paraguayan border led Brazilian police to contact the Stroessner govermment. Even before West Germany began to apply pressure to Paraguay, Brazilian police demanded an official statement about Mengele’s whereabouts and wanted to know if the information about his naturalization was accurate.242 They also took up the West German Criminal Office’s offer to bypass Interpol headquarters and directly exchange information.243 As the Auschwitz trial 240 Weber, ‘Geschichtsfälschung’, pp. 3 ff.; Aharoni and Dietl, Jäger, pp. 243 ff. 241 Anonym an Just-Dahlmann, 7 February 1962, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Fahndung, Brasilien 1. The author of the letter is an acquaintance of Barbara Just-Dahlmann, state prosecutor at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, who had criticized the lax treatment of Nazi criminals since 1961. The author visited Amoroso personally in his office and spoke with him about the manhunt for Mengele. 242 AJN, 21 April 1964. 243 FS IP Brasilia to IP Wiesbaden, 6 March 1964 and FS IP Wiesbaden to IP Brasilia, 20 March 1964, in Barch, B 131, vol. 158.

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led to waves of media reports, the Brazilian Interpol office announced the start of a major manhunt.244 Still, Mengele’s hiding place near São Paulo wasn’t discovered in time. Thus in October at the general Interpol conference in Caracas, the Brazilian delegates demanded the organization concern itself with the hunt for Nazi criminals in order to function better across national borders.245 But the general secretary refused to budge. The German delegate brought information on the case for his Brazilian colleague with him to Caracas.246 But no one dared to put pressure on Interpol headquarters. Several months later, when prosecutors dealing with Nazi cases used ‘global interest’ to try to get Interpol as a whole to support ‘a new initiative’,247 the German Interior Ministry objected. The ministry cited a statement from German Criminal Investigations Office President Reinhard Dullien, who supported the secretary general’s position and wanted to avoid conflicts.248 Interpol’s strict refusal to get involved in cases involving former Nazis doesn’t fit in with the overall picture of the 1960s as a decade of manhunts for prominent fugitives. Against the backdrop of the Auschwitz trial and the debate about the statute of limitations, discussions of varying intensity were begun about Nazi criminals going underground in South America, and various state institutions intensified their efforts to track down the perpetrators. But the motives behind this activity could not have been more different. On the one hand were Bauer, Wiesenthal, and the Israeli secret service who wanted to ensure that Nazi criminals would be prosecuted. By contrast, the demonstrative activity of the German ministries in hunting for Mengele aimed to justify a statute of limitations. But how did German authorities act when the Nazi perpetrators being hunted were less well known?

4

Extradition Proceedings During the 1960s

In 1952, Georg Michaelis, a resident of Berlin, was on a business trip in Argentina, when he was introduced to a certain Andrés Ricardo Olmo who, despite his name, spoke far better German than Spanish. He had grown up with his German mother, the man explained. The two fellows hit it off and 244 Briest (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 6 October 1964, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 929. 245 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 October 1964. 246 IP Wiesbaden to BMI, 22 September 1964, in Barch, B 131, vol. 158. 247 Vermerk BMJ, 18 May 1965, in ibidem, B 141, vol. 104091. 248 BMI to BMJ, 2 June 1965, in ibidem.

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quickly became friends. After a while Olmo confided in Michaelis that his real name was Walter Kutschmann and that he was wanted for theft in France. Nine years later, Michaelis was once again in Buenos Aires and took the opportunity to visit his friend. Eichmann had just been abducted, and Mengele was everywhere in the media. Kutschmann cautiously inquired whether the West German government was also looking for him. Michaelis saw no reason to keep this question to himself, and as soon as he returned to Berlin, he went to the police and told them everything he knew about Olmo alias Kutschmann.249 In this fashion, the Central Office in Ludwigsburg learned of Kutschmann’s whereabouts. Earlier that year the office had put him under investigation for crimes committed in Galicia during the Second World War. Kutschmann was suspected of being in charge of the mass shootings in Drohobycz in November 1941.250 But the prosecutor’s office in Waldshut, which was first given jurisdiction over the case, had decided after conferring with Central Office head Erwin Schüle, that in Argentina Kutschmann was beyond the reach of the West German judicial system and that there was no choice but to put the case on ice.251 The case was nonetheless transferred to the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office, which had offered to assume responsibility for it. The prosecutor who ended up with it was surprised that the Central Off ice had accepted the resignation coming out of Waldshut so easily. After all, hadn’t prosecutors succeeded in getting an extradition order for Mengele?252 Schüle, who was in charge not just of the Central Office but also the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office itself, didn’t disagree with that line of argumentation. He, too, thought that the Argentinian government would grant West Germany’s extradition request, but he doubted it would be possible, given ‘the conditions in South America’, to ‘determine the whereabouts and identity of this person beyond the shadow of a doubt’.253 For that reason, the Kutschmann investigations ground to a halt. Schüle’s estimation of the chance of success for extradition requests made to Argentina had implications for other cases. In taking over the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office, Schüle had also accrued responsibility for 249 Noack (ZSL) to LKA BW, Sonderkommission Zentrale Stelle, 31 October 1963, in Barch, B 162, vol. 5833; Vernehmungsniederschrift des Zeugen Michaelis, 17 February 1965, in ibidem, B 141, vol. 45628. 250 Wiesenthal to ZSL, 12 January 1962, in ibidem, B 162, vol. 5833; Abschlussbericht zum Vorermittlungsverfahren der NSG in Drohobycz/Galizien, 29 November 1963, in ibidem, vol. 5834. 251 ZSL to StA Waldshut, 14 June 1965, in ibidem, vol. 5838. 252 StA Stuttgart to ZSL, 1 July 1965, in ibidem. 253 Schüle (ZSL) to StA Stuttgart, 2 July 1965, in ibidem.

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proceedings against the former concentration camp and ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger. In late1964, by which point Ernst-Günter Mohr had replaced the obstructionist Junker as West German ambassador in Buenos Aires, Stuttgart prosecutors received a tip from the Argentine capital that Schwammberger’s wife was living near Heidelberg. Investigations showed that she had received a letter from San Isidro, Argentina.254 But the letter didn’t contain an exact address, and with Schüle’s scepticism about ‘South American conditions’, no extradition request was filed. Other prosecutor’s offices also decided against filing extradition requests because of the difficulties concerning legal assistance in Argentina. The work involved in drawing up requests, getting them translated and notarized, and monitoring the subsequent proceedings abroad was disproportionate, in the view of many prosecutors, to the chances of success. For example, since 1963, Munich and Mannheim prosecutors knew that the former SS man Ludolph von Alvensleben was living in Argentina. Alvensleben was the leader of the ‘West Prussian Self-Defence’, which had murdered thousands of people in occupied Poland. Later he was transferred as an SS and police leader to Simferopol in Crimea, where he presided over mass executions. In 1949, he had succeeded in fleeing across the Atlantic. He quickly acclimatized to his new home and served over the course of the following years in a number of public offices, including that of the mayor of Villa General Belgrano, where many Germans lived. He kept in contact with numerous other fascists. For instance, in 1957, he took part in a number of discussion sessions with Eichmann which Sassen organized at his house. He maintained an ambivalent relationship to the Nazis, idolizing Himmler and continuing to use the ‘Hitler greeting’ while rejecting the murder of Jews as brutal and inhumane.255 After the West German consulate in Córdoba had confirmed to investigators that Alvensleben was in Argentina,256 Mannheim prosecutors, who were pursuing a case in conjunction with the murder of Poles in the Western Prussian town of Tuchel, considered filing an extradition request together with the justice ministries of Baden-Württemberg and the Federal Republic. There were two sticky points. The warrants issued in Mannheim and Munich for Alvensleben’s arrest had first been filed in 1964, which meant that the 254 Sonderkommission ZSL, LKA BW, to StA Stuttgart, 21 Janaury 1965 and 3 March 1965, in ibidem, vol. 1404. 255 Stangneth, Eichmann, pp. 371-380. 256 Stanglmair (StA München I) to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 29nMarch 1963, in Staatsarchiv München, Staatsanwaltschaften, 33025/12; Kick (Konsul in Cordoba) to Stanglmair, 23 April 1963, in ibidem and Barch, B 162, vol. 19256.

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crimes he was accused of committing fell under the Argentinian statute of limitations. He also had Argentinian citizenship, and under Argentinian law, citizens could not be extradited. Nonetheless, people in the federal Ministry of Justice were optimistic. As far as the statute of limitations was concerned, they argued, Argentinian law stipulated that the rules in the country filing the request were what mattered. This line of argument, they added, was supported by the fact that Argentina had approved the extradition request for Mengele even though his crimes would have fallen under the Argentinian statute of limitations.257 The citizenship issue was more difficult. Argentinian law stipulated that extradition requests were only to be rejected out of hand if the crimes concerned had been committed after a person had been naturalized. But West German law prohibited the extradition of its own citizens. That was problematic because in the absence of an extradition treaty, there would have to be a declaration of reciprocity in which the state filing the request promised to honour similar requests from the other state. That was deemed impossible in Alvensleben’s case. Nonetheless, the Federal Ministry of Justice came out in favour of an extradition request. It was uncertain, the ministry admitted, whether Argentinian authorities would apply the condition of reciprocity to the extradition of an Argentinian citizen, but ‘this uncertainty should not be the reason for refusing to file an extradition application’. There was no way of knowing whether his Argentinian citizenship might not be revoked ‘after the crimes the fugitive is accused of committing become known’. The only caveat was that the request would have to make clear that the ‘West German government would not be in a position to extradite a German citizen even if that person had only acquired citizenship after the crime for which the extradition request was made had been committed’.258 In the meantime, however, the Tuchel shootings trial in Mannheim had been concluded without Alvensleben. Mannheim prosecutors no longer had jurisdiction, so in mid-1965 the case was transferred to the Munich I prosecutor’s office, which saw no chance of ‘immediately pursuing’ Alvensleben.259 It is unclear from the files how this assessment was arrived at,260 but it was probably down, at least in part, to the argument that a request 257 BMJ to Justizministerium BW, 3 August 1964, copy in: Barch, B 141, vol. 92462. 258 BMJ to Justizministerium BW, 9 February 1965, copy in: ibidem. 259 Hatzelmann (StA München I) to Keller (Frankfurter Rundschau), 2 May 1965, in ibidem, B 162, vol. 19156. 260 See procedure in Staatsarchiv München, Staatsanwaltschaften, 33025/12.

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based on limited reciprocity, as the federal Justice Ministry, had suggested, wasn’t very promising. Alvensleben notwithstanding, Munich prosecutors were out of their depth with Nazi cases. By late 1966, they still hadn’t issued an arrest warrant for Erich Müller, the leader of Einsatzkommando 12, despite having taken over the case five years previously, having received information that Müller was living in Argentina and being encouraged to file charges by the federal Criminal Office.261 While the manhunts for Mengele and Bormann were underway at full speed, the Foreign Minsitry and the federal Justice Ministry did nothing to encourage prosecutors to pursue other fugitives. While the ministries had no right to issue orders to prosecutors, it was customary for them to make recommendations in politically significant cases. Yet the only time the ministries exercised any influence was the advice they gave to Mannheim prosecutors. One of the reasons was that, unlike the Mengele case, public pressure was absent. The media took little to no interest in the cases of Kutschlmann, Schwammberger, and Alvensleben. Victims’ organizations, to whom hardly anyone listened in West Germany anyway, conf ined themselves to reiterating their interest in those cases by writing letters to prosecutors. They had good reason to keep things low-key. Bringing public pressure to bear on a manhunt was a double-edged sword. In the case of Mengele, who was already a fugitive, it was a sensible option. But it was less productive to put a fugitive who believed himself safe on guard with a public campaign and perhaps cause him to go underground. Wiesenthal knew this. He had learned about Schwammberger’s flight to Argentina from an acquaintance in Vienna all the way back in 1962.262 He found out that Kutschmann was working for Osram in Buenos Aires in 1965, and he was informed about Alvensleben’s whereabouts at the latest by 1967, and probably earlier.263 But there was nothing much he could do beyond getting people he knew in Argentina to check his information and pass along the results to the Central Office. The lack of results often drove him to despair. After Hardy Swarsensky, the publisher of a German-language Jewish weekly, confirmed that Kutschmann was employed by Osram, he vented his frustration about the stagnating hunt for Nazis in a letter to the Central Office. Argentina had thus far not extradited anyone, he complained, so he was now planning to approach the Argentinian embassy. He himself 261 Bericht der ZSL über Besprechung mit den Beamten des Bayerischen LKA und dem IfZ, 11-12 October 1966, in Barch, B 162, vol. 1142. 262 Wiesenthal to ZSL, 27 March 1962, in SWA, Akt Schwammberger 2. 263 Wiesenthal to Santander, 24 November 1967, in ibidem, Akt Alvensleben.

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couldn’t say what this would accomplish, but he saw no other way forward. ‘I don’t want to fold my hands and say I can’t do anything’, he wrote. Even if I can’t do anything, I want to compromise these people and at least disrupt their existence. That is what I intend to do in the case of Kutschmann […] Maybe we should do things the other way around. Maybe for once the Argentinians should contact the German embassy and offer them Kutschmann. All the other paths we’ve tried, in other cases as well, have failed.264

But Wiesenthal hadn’t completely given up hope. Silvano Santander, with whom he had kept in touch, had been named Argentinian ambassador to Mexico and possessed good contacts in the government under Argentinian President Arturo Illia. Investigators in Ludwigsburg answered Wiesenthal that very day and tried to dissuade him, arguing that all such plans would succeed in doing would be to make Kutschmann go underground.265 Wiesenthal’s letter makes it clear that, in his eyes, the main problem was not German authorities’ inaction, but the attitude of Argentina, which in most of the cases that emerged in the 1960s, was the place to which Nazi fugitives had fled. Wiesenthal was not alone in this view. Robert Keller, who wrote an article about Alvensleben for the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper after the end of the Tuchel trial in Mannheim, agreed with Wiesenthal and posed provocative questions: Is Argentina protecting a thousandfold murderer? Is a mass murderer cloaking himself in his citizenship? Is it not high time that Argentina eradicates this badge of shame and extradites the mass murderer Ludolf von Alevensleben so that he can be punished as he deserves? The honourable Argentinian ambassador in Bonn should answer these questions.266

Keller sent his article with a request for a response to the Argentinian embassy and the Munich prosecutor’s office.267 The reasons that the problems in apprehending fugitives were blamed mainly on Argentina had to do with the country’s notorious history. But West German authorities’ policies toward information were also at fault. For example, the prosecutor responsible for 264 Wiesenthal to Sichting (ZSL), 25 April 1966, in ibidem, Akt Kutschmann 1. 265 Sichting (ZSL) to Wiesenthal, 25 April 1966, in ibidem. 266 Frankfurter Rundschau, 20 April 1965. 267 Keller (Frankfurter Rundschau) to StA München I, 24 April 1965, in Barch, B 162, vol. 19156.

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the case in Munich told Keller that he had ‘up until now seen no possibility of proceeding directly against Alvensleben’.268 With this less than enlightening formulation, he suggested that everything had been done by the German side to apprehend Alvensleben. Likewise in 1964, when the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime enquired about the Schwammberger case with the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, it was told that an extradition request had thus far had no success.269 What it wasn’t told was that the problem lay with the passivity of the German authorities and not the lack of cooperation of the Argentinian government. German-Argentinean legal assistance In fact, the signals coming from Argentina in the mid-1960s made it clear that there was political will within the government to extradite Nazi criminals. In late 1963, Arturo Illia was elected president. The two years before that were full of unrest. In 1961, Illia’s predecessor Frondizi had legalized the Peronist party, which had been banned in 1955, and the following year it celebrated an electoral victory. The military, which had been instrumental in bringing down Perón and who considered him a communist, didn’t want to respect that result. A military junta toppled Frondizi, dissolved the Argentinian Congress and named a provisional president. It wasn’t until mid-1963 that fresh elections were held – both the Peronists and Frondizi were prohibited from standing. As a result, the door was opened for the group within the Unión Cívica Radical which had always supported a clear distinction from Peronism and whose ranks included a number of politicians who considered it a covert form of fascism. Santander, who was long past his political zenith, owed his post as ambassador to Mexico to Argentinian Foreign Minister Zavala Ortiz, with whom he had collaborated on a number of actions against the Peronist government in the 1950s.270 Another dyed-in-the-wool anti-Peronist who now took centre stage was the respected lawyer Carlos Sánchez Viamonte. In the late 1930s, he had joined the Committee for Fighting Racism and Anti-Semitism,271 which warned that Nazism was infiltrating Argentina. He was also a member of the circle of authors who wrote for Argentina Libre magazine, the predecessor

268 Hatzelmann (StA München I) to Keller (Frankfurter Rundschau), 10 May 1965, in ibidem. 269 Blank (ZSL) to VVN, 28 December 1964, in ibidem, vol. 1404. 270 Galasso, Perón, p. 582; Larraquy, Galimberti, p. 37. 271 Comité de Lucha contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo.

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of Antinazi, which united the anti-fascist opposition.272 Illia, also a former member of the committee, named Viamonte Argentina’s Special Envoy to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. Shortly after being named, following a motion by Poland, the committee began deliberating a resolution rescinding all statutes of limitations for war crimes. The Argentinian delegate Viamonte was heavily involved in these discussions and offered crucial support for the motion.273 It’s possible that the West German government didn’t pick up on Argentina’s support for thorough legal pursuit of Nazi crimes because West Germany wasn’t yet a member of the United Nations. But at the very latest, extradition proceedings against Gerhard Bohne made it unmistakable that the Argentinian government was serious about not hindering the prosecution of Nazi criminals. In 1955, six years after fleeing to Argentina, Bohne was convinced he had nothing to fear in the Federal Republic and returned to Germany. But around that time, West German authorities began to investigate the Nazi euthanasia murders. Bohne, who was one of the main organizers of the so-called ‘T4 Action’, was arrested in 1959. The following year, Fritz Bauer got the case transferred to Frankfurt, but before it could come to the main hearing, Bohne was released from custody on health grounds, and he took the opportunity once again to flee to Argentina. A letter he wrote to an acquaintance shortly after he arrived in Buenos Aires allowed investigators to quickly determine his whereabouts.274 In contrast to many of his colleagues, Bauer didn’t hesitate in f iling an extradition request, although its chances of success were uncertain. Bohne’s crimes fell under the Argentinian statute of limitations. In October 1963, the Foreign Office was asked to file the request.275 At this point, the German embassy in Buenos Aires was quite short-handed. Because of a major medical operation, the embassy lawyer responsible for legal assistance wasn’t available for several months, while his deputy was on leave back in West Germany. The social attaché had no experience with such requests and apparently didn’t see the need to involve the new ambassador Mohr, who arrived in June. Only when the embassy lawyer returned to work the following February, did he learn about the request and discovered that nothing had been done about it.276 272 Nállim, ‘Antifascismo’, p. 82; Newton, Menace, pp. 207 ff. 273 Quijano (Encargado de Negocios a.I. de la Misión Permanente), al Ministro de RREEyC, 25 October 1966, in AMREC, Caja Extradición de Nazis Nr. 2, Exp. 316. 274 Wojak, Bauer, pp. 381-386. 275 Grützner (BMJ) to AA, 31 October 1963, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 449. 276 FS Brückmann (Botschaftsrat Buenos Aires) to AA, 13 February 1964, in ibidem.

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He now hurried to rectify that situation. Although Argentinian courts had previously ruled in the cases of Ďurćanský, Hora, and Pekar that the statute of limitations of the extraditing country as well as that of the requesting country applied, this time around the government only took account of the German statute of limitations. The request was accepted, and on 27 February, Bohne was arrested.277 Santander wrote triumphantly to Wiesenthal: As you can see, things are changing in our country. A war criminal has been arrested, and we hope that he won’t escape this time. That’s the result of our work. Now we’ll be fighting to get the government to ignore local laws and legal codes and fulfil its international duties as a member of the United Nations by granting the extradition.278

Yet regardless of whom Santander meant with the word ‘we’, they didn’t succeed in getting the Illia government, which was known for its fussily precise adherence to democratic rules, to ignore valid laws. After the government had accepted West Germany’s request, the case was handed over to the Argentinian judicial system, and the chances to influence it were scant. Nonetheless, Santander’s letter does show that there was a group within the government that thought it desirable to extradite Bohne. And the Argentinian Foreign Ministry would soon show its willingness to use all the latitude it possessed to remove obstacles to extraditing Nazi criminals. This was quite necessary. For his part, Bohne used every possibility open to him under Argentinian law to drag out the case. Repeatedly, his attorney requested further documents and pieces of evidence from Germany, which always delayed proceedings. The director of the legal division of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry felt compelled to assure the German embassy that the government was trying to see the request got a speedy, affirmative answer.279 These weren’t just empty promises. The legal division contacted the judge in the case personally, and when Bohne’s defence once again requested documents, the embassy was given a copy of the strictly confidential request for legal assistance although it had not even officially been filed. A translation had also been prepared in advance, despite the difficulties in doing this. The Foreign Ministry didn’t want to use anyone from the Argentinian German community as a translator since many of the 277 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 28 February 1964, in ibidem. 278 Santander to Wiesenthal, 3 March 1964, in SWA, Akt Bormann 1. 279 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 2 September 1964, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 449.

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German expatriates were vehement Bohne supporters.280 The legal division decided not to wait for the judge’s decision about whether the documents provided by German authorities conformed to Argentinian regulations. It assumed responsibility for reviewing them itself, and when several mistakes were discovered, the ministry itself made the corrections wherever possible.281 Although the ministry showed great initiative in trying to speed up the proceedings, it wouldn’t be until December 1965 that a first ruling on the case was issued. In it, the judge wrote in detail about the defence counsel’s objections that Bohne’s crimes fell under the Argentinian statute of limitations. After a discussion of the Argentinian legal situation, its history, and various international treaties, he arrived at the conclusion that the wording of Law 1612 was decisive, according to which only the statute of limitations of the requesting country was to be considered. The judge also rejected that the crimes in question were political in nature and ordered Bohne extradited.282 Bohne appealed, but the appeals court also concluded that the West German request should be granted. The relevant legal questions, the court wrote ‘had been exhaustively and objectively reviewed’ in the initial verdict.283 However, before the Argentinian Supreme Court was able to take a position on the case and order extradition as well, there was a change of power in Argentina. In mid-June 1966, the military staged a putsch, and Juan Carlos Onganía, the commander of the armed forces, assumed the powers of the presidency. Bohne and his attorneys seemed to hope that the new military government would prove sympathetic to their cause. Even as the country’s highest legal institution was confirming the legality of Bohne’s extradition,284 he asked Onganía for clemency, arguing that his crimes were covered by Argentina’s statute of limitations and that the case was political. But the new Argentinian foreign minister assured the German embassy that a statement was already being drawn up rejecting the clemency request. The Argentinian government did not agree with Bohne’s arguments, nor did the president have any jurisdiction over matters like this.285 The reason why the Argentinian Foreign Ministry rejected Bohne’s request was likely the desire after the political upheaval to head off international criticism of how Argentina handled Nazi crimes. That was shown by a letter 280 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 26 November 1964, in ibidem. 281 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 15 March 1965, in ibidem. 282 Unofficial translation of the judgement of 15 December 1965, in ibidem. 283 Unofficial translation of the judgement of 22 March 1966, in ibidem. 284 Fallo de la Corte Suprema, 24 de agosto de 1966, in ibidem. 285 FS Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 24 October 1966, in ibidem.

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from the managing director of the Argentinian consulate at the UN in New York, which reached the foreign ministry shortly after Bohne’s request and which discussed the negotiations about the convention to suspend the statute of limitations for war crimes. The envoy requested a briefing on how Argentina was going to prevent crimes against humanity from falling under the country’s statute of limitations. Every member country was free to inform the UN human rights commission independently about what it had done, but the envoy considered an Argentinian report urgently necessary. The interest the world community had taken in the ‘two or three cases’ of German war criminals ‘who have been arrested in our country’, wrote the envoy, simply had to be taken into account.286 The Argentinian Foreign Ministry tried to fulfil this request. In their statements about the measures Argentina had taken, the various offices involved referred to Bohne’s extradition.287 The German embassy appreciated the efforts made by the Argentinean side on the Bohne case and told the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn that both the Illas and Onganía governments had shown that ‘Argentina was no longer willing to protect people who committed crimes in Germany during the National socialist period’.288 But although Bohne was handed over to German authorities, he was never convicted. After he had remained absent from the court hearings, a doctor attested in 1968 that he was in danger of suffering a heart attack if proceedings continued. In mid-1969, the case was permanently laid to rest, and Bohne lived out the remaining twelve years of his life in freedom. He died at the age of 79.289 Bohne’s apprehension did, however, give new impetus to negotiations about an extradition agreement between West Germany and Argentina. With the Eichmann abduction having put the issue on the international relations agenda, negotiations had been drawn out over many years by the Argentinian side, which had failed to react to Various suggestions by German authorities for setting up meetings.290 But the apprehension of Bohne and the subsequent problems with legal verification of German documents had reminded the Illia government about the outstanding treaty. All of a sudden the political division of the foreign ministry couldn’t act quickly enough. 286 Quijano (Encargado de Negocios a.I. de la Misión Permanente) to Ministro de RREEyC, 25 October 1966, in AMREC, Caja Extradición de Nazis Nr. 2, Exp. 316. 287 Carbo (Director General de Justicia) to Secretario de Estado, 5 June 1967, in ibidem. 288 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 15 November 1966, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 449. 289 Klee, Was sie taten, pp. 73 ff. 290 See procedure in PA AA, B 83, vol. 485.

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Its state secretary told the German embassy that he wanted negotiations to commence that month if possible, so that the treaty could be signed during a state visit by the German president to maximize the publicity value.291 But the legal divisions of both ministries weren’t quite up to that challenge. It wouldn’t be until February 1965, that the West German and Argentinian delegates met in Bonn. By this point, it must have been clear that it was crucially important which country’s statute of limitation rules applied for the extradition of Nazi criminals. The legal division of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry charged with the negotiations had been confronted with the issue only a few months before in connection with the Bohne case. The German delegation, which was led by Gawlik from the Foreign Ministry and Grützner from the Justice Ministry, additionally knew that statutes of limitations were relevant not just for the ongoing extradition cases but generally because Germany was slow to prosecute. It had taken until August of the preceding year for Grützner – citing the fact that the Argentinian Foreign Ministry had granted such requests in the Mengele and Bohne cases despite their crimes falling under the Argentinian statute of limitations – to advise Mannheim prosecutors to request Alvensleben’s extradition.292 Nonetheless, neither of the two sides saw any reason to emphasize this issue when negotiating the wording of the agreement. Instead they agreed that, in keeping with the drafts drawn up on the model of previous agreements, statute of limitations legislation in both countries should be taken into account in extradition cases. The problems that this would cause for the extradition of Nazi criminals weren’t even deemed worthy of discussion.293 This group of perpetrators was apparently not the main focus of the treaty, although extradition requests for Nazi fugitives had been what had kicked off the negotiations. The emphasis was on simplifying legal assistance between West Germany and Argentina as quickly as possible and making it more economical. To achieve this aim, the parties were willing to make compromises concerning the legal pursuit of Nazi criminals. It was no surprise that Gawlik, who was against prosecuting such people anyway, would have taken this view. But it’s hard to understand the lack of protest from Grützner since he had been the one who in 1953, reacting to the efforts 291 FS Brückmann (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 3 March 1964; Mohr (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 13 May 1964, in ibidem, vol. 615. 292 BMJ to JM BW, 3 August 1964, copy in Barch, B 141, vol. 92462. 293 Niederschrift über die deutsch-argentinischen Verhandlungen betreffend den Abschluß eines Auslieferungs- und Rechtshilfevertrages in Strafsachen, 17-26 February 1965 in Bonn, in ibidem, vol. 92461 and PA AA, B 83, vol. 615.

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to get hold of Klingenfuss and Rademacher, had suggested negotiating the treaty and who had, only a couple of months previously, come out in support of an extradition request in the case of Alvensleben. The statute of limitations issue wasn’t the only problem with extraditing Nazi criminals that was worsened by the German-Argentinian legal assistance treaty. One week before the negotiations in Bonn, the German Justice Ministry had examined the issue of Alvensleben’s Argentinian citizenship and concluded that it didn’t necessarily represent an obstacle. Argentinian law allowed for the extradition of naturalized Argentinians, if the crimes in question had been committed before they gained citizenship. The German side hoped that it could restrict the declaration of reciprocity Argentina required for requests from countries with which it had no extradition treaty to non-German nationals. The German constitution forbade the extradition of German citizens.294 The assumption that a declaration of limited reciprocity would be enough was very optimistic, but the Justice Ministry seems to have felt it was a viable option. The draft treaty negotiated a week later stipulated that neither side would extradite its own nationals. The Argentinians said that it was possible under their laws if certain conditions were met, but Grützner explained that the German constitution didn’t permit that. In response, the delegation said that it would take German constitutional difficulties into consideration.295 After the initial round of negotiations, the individual federal German states were called upon to state their positions regarding the draft treaty. But even the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Justice, which had extensive experience with German-Argentinian extradition issues, had no problems with the wording that made it so difficult to prosecute Nazi crimes. The federal review process took months.296 Meanwhile the Illia government saw the chance diminish for a speedy conclusion that would generate good publicity. In December 1965, when the first verdict allowing Bohne to be extradited was rendered, the Illia government announced that the treaty was about to be signed.297 But that was not the case. It was only in July 1966, after the Argentinian military had forcibly removed Illia and taken over, that West German Justice Ministry sent the Foreign Ministry a list of suggested 294 BMJ to AA, 9 February 1965, in Barch, B 141, vol. 92462. 295 Niederschrift über die deutsch-argentinischen Verhandlungen betreffend den Abschluß eines Auslieferungs- und Rechtshilfevertrages in Strafsachen, 17-26 February 1965 in Bonn, in ibidem, vol. 92461 und PA AA, B 83, vol. 615. See also GG, Art.16. 296 See procedure in Barch, B 141, vol. 92462. 297 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 22 December 1965, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 615.

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improvements to the treaty from all the individual state justice ministries. Later, it took three months for the German embassy to send this document to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry. By that time, there was no longer anyone in power in Argentina pressing for the matter to be concluded swiftly. The legal division of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry misplaced the documents it received from the German embassy and had to ask for them to be resent in November 1967.298 In the meantime, the citizenship question was proving an increasingly fundamental problem for German-Argentinian legal assistance. This was particularly evident in the Kutschmann case. The investigations by Waldshut prosecutors, which had been discontinued in 1965, weren’t the end of the story. Since 1967, he had been under investigation by Berlin prosecutors for the murder of Galician Jews. Berlin prosecutors once again questioned Michaelis, who repeated the information he had given about Kutschmann’s whereabouts, adding that Olmo was an Argentinian citizen.299 That information was confirmed by the personnel division at Osram, which had its headquarters in Munich. But that didn’t put off Berlin’s head prosecutor. Because of the ‘gravity of the accusations’, he decided to pursue the case further and succeeded in getting a warrant for Kutschmann’s arrest.300 To decide how to proceed, the Berlin and the federal ministries of justice were consulted. ‘A review is necessary to determine whether the conditions exist that are needed for an extradition of the person brought from Argentina to Germany’, Berlin’s head prosecutor declared before discussing the prerequisites for an extradition in Argentina. As an Argentinian citizen, Kutschmann had the right to demand to be put on trial in Argentina on all the charges levelled against him. In that case, he would be found innocent on the basis of the statute of limitations. Even if an extradition request made it as far as the review stage, there was no ruling out the possibility that, in line with the Treaty of Montevideo, the Argentinian statute of limitations would apply. Berlin prosecutors seem not to have been registered the Bohne case. An unlimited declaration of reciprocity, the head prosecutor wrote, was not possible because West Germany wasn’t allowed to extradite its own citizens. He therefore asked for a decision to be made ‘whether the extradition of the person should be requested’.301 Berlin judicial authorities 298 BMJ to AA, 5 December 1966; Verbalnote der Botschaft Buenos Aires to MREC, 2 March 1967; Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 8 November 1967, in ibidem. 299 Vernehmungsniederschrift des Zeugen Michaelis, 3 March 1967, in Barch, B 162, vol. 5836. 300 Prutz (StA Berlin) to GStA Kammergericht, 27 July 1967; Haftbefehl des Amtsgerichts Tiergarten gegen Walter Kutschmann, 17 August 1967, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624. 301 Radke (StA Berlin) to Senator für Justiz, 19 September 1967, in ibidem.

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responded that they could follow the prosecutor’s argumentation but found it necessary to determine whether the person sought was in fact an Argentinian citizen. ‘Should it turn out that Kutschmann alias Olmo does in fact possess Argentinian citizenship’, the justice ministry wrote, ‘we must […] forgo an extradition request’.302 Grützner, who had pushed for extradition in the similar case of Alvensleben, expressed understanding for these scruples but wanted to hear the opinion of the embassy in Buenos Aires, hoping that it would be able to evaluate the complex legal situation in Argentina. Ambassador Mohr wrote that he didn’t see why the ‘basic analysis’ of Berlin authorities should be wrong. He declared: ‘I don’t think it’s right to force Argentina, formally speaking, into a negative decision by making such a request because it might cause a disagreement that would unnecessarily burden the good relations between the embassy and the legal department of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry’. Nonetheless, he promised to pursue all avenues and discuss the matter without naming names with members of the ministry.303 The results of those discussions surprised Mohr. He was told that the statute of limitations need not necessarily lead to the rejection of an extradition request. Even if the draft of the German-Argentinian extradition treaty took account of the laws in both countries, until it was ratified the principle remained in force that, as had been used in the case of Bohne, only the statute of limitations in the requesting country applied. Nor was Argentinian citizenship an absolute obstacle. The Argentinian law on extradition explicitly stated that the only nationality that mattered was the one the suspect possessed at the time a crime was committed. The West German government merely had to promise, in return, to extradite German citizens who had held Argentinian passports at the time when crimes were committed. In short, an application for extradition was by no means hopeless.304 The member of the foreign office who answered Mohr had more in mind than just German-Argentinian legal assistance. The states of the Warsaw Pact were pushing, in addition to the UN Human Rights Commission’s 1966 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutes of Limitation to War Crimes, for the UN General Assembly to pass a binding convention.305 That went too far for the conservative decision-makers in the Argentinian Foreign Ministry, who worried about encroachments upon their national 302 Derge (Berliner Justizsenat) to BMJ, 12 October 1967, in ibidem. 303 Mohr (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 23 February 1968, in Barch, B 141, vol. 45628. 304 Mohr (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 11 March 1968, in ibidem. 305 Miquel, Ahnden, p. 320.

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sovereignty. The draft convention, so they argued in negotiations, was incompatible with Argentinian law because it would suspend the statute of limitations retroactively. At the same time, Argentina wanted not to further stoke arguments that the country sympathized with and offered asylum to former Nazis. ‘The comprehensive revulsion for and rejection of the deeds of the National Socialists, which have been […] so elegantly expressed by other delegations, are shared by my government’, the Argentinian delegate declared. But there was surely a number of ways, he added, to prosecute those crimes. Bohne’s extradition was an example that there were always legal instruments, if there was an ‘awareness of the gravity of certain crimes and the need to mete out punishment for them’.306 The line of reasoning Argentina advanced in New York, which was intended to legitimize the country’s opposition to a convention generally lifting statutes of limitations, was in keeping with the information that Mohr received from the foreign ministry’s legal department. However, Berlin prosecutors ignored Mohr’s report and declared their intention to suspend proceedings, arguing that ‘all relevant authorities’ had deemed them ‘without chance of success’.307 The general prosecutor’s office, which assumed responsibility for the case, came to a similar conclusion. Economic considerations played a major role. The ‘substantial effort required for extradition from Argentina’, it was argued, were only justified if it was clear that the German government could assure the Argentinians reciprocity.308 This didn’t seem to be the case, which was why the in absentia proceedings against Kutschmann had been discontinued.309 This decision was passed on to Mohr, who vigorously protested against the phrase ‘all relevant authorities’. An extradition request, he countered, ‘was in our estimation not at all hopeless as long as the German-Argentinian extradition treaty was still being negotiated’.310 Berlin would not be dissuaded. The Kutschmann case was closed. Mohr’s objections illustrate the paradoxical situation that had arisen in conjunction with the German-Argentinian negotiations. Work on the 306 FS Goyeneche (Delegación Argentina ante las Naciones Unidas) to Ministro de RREEyC, 17 March 1967, in AMREC, Caja Extradición de Nazis Nr. 2, Exp. 316. 307 Stamer (StA Berlin) to Dezernenten für Internationale Rechtshilfe, Justizsenat, 11 April 1968, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no.2624. 308 Seeber (StA bei der GstA KG Berlin) to Dezernenten für Personal und Haushalt, 10 May 1968, in ibidem. 309 Derge (Berliner Justizsenat) to BMJ, 5 June 1968, in Barch, B 141, vol. 45628. 310 Mohr (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 28 June 1968, in ibidem (quotation marks in the original,).

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treaty, which had been motivated by the difficulties in extraditing Nazi criminals, threatened to scupper attempts to bring those very fugitives to justice. Nonetheless, the West German Justice Ministry saw no reason to change its strategy. On the contrary, ministry members thought it was important to anticipate the changes that would inevitably come when the treaty was passed. In January 1969, when the second round of negotiations was set to commence after years of delay, the Justice Ministry advised Munich prosecutors, who were still investigating Alvensleben, not to seek extradition. Although nothing had changed during 1964 and 1965, when Grützner had recommended seeking Alvensleben’s extradition to Mannheim prosecutors, the soon-to-be-agreed treaty created a new situation ‘concerning citizenship and the statute of limitations’. Under these new circumstances, the Justice Ministry said, prosecutors should tend not to pursue extradition.311 But the embassy in Buenos Aires refused to keep its peace. With references to the cases of Kutschmann and Alvensleben, it asked for the rules concerning statutes of limitations in the draft treaty to be re-evaluated to see if they really would decrease the chances of extradition. ‘The question is whether such a lessening of chances can be accepted with an eye toward the statute of limitations debate in Germany’, the embassy wrote, while acknowledging that it would be difficult at that point to change the wording of the treaty. The treaty encouraged judges to take account of the statutes of limitations in both countries, which gave additional weight to Argentinian law in extradition requests filed by West Germany. ‘Nationalistic thinking circles’ could interpret demands for changes as a ‘lack of regard for the standpoint of Argentinian law’. In light of this, it seemed worth checking ‘whether the Argentinian Foreign Ministry’s delays in handling the treaty negotiations should be accepted’ so as not to ‘transfer the legal thinking of the draft to this matter’. The embassy included in its letter an evaluation by German-Argentinian lawyer Ulrico Rentsch confirming what the foreign ministry legal department had found the previous year: requests for extradition were by no means hopeless.312 The reactions to the embassy’s letter show the influence that such initiatives, which had been so lacking under Mohr’s predecessors Terdenge and Junker, could have. The West German Justice Ministry changed its course and called upon Bavarian prosecutors to apply for Alvensleben’s extradition. In the case of Kutschmann, though, the ministry was more 311 Pötz (BMJ) to Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Justiz, 16 January 1969, in ibidem, vol. 92462. 312 Halter (Counsellor of the Embassy in Buenos Aires) to AA, 21 May 1969, in ibidem and PA AA, B 83, vol. 615.

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reticent. Although Berlin prosecutors had received the embassy’s March 1968 report deeming the chances of extradition positive, Berlin’s justice senator had decided against filing an application. For the employees of the Justice Ministry, that meant that the case had been closed once and for all.313 For the upcoming negotiations, Grützner opted for an offensive strategy unlike the one suggested by the embassy with reference to Alvensleben. In August 1969, when the second round of negotiations took place in Buenos Aires, he directly broached the topic, arguing ‘in all openness’ that Alvensleben’s deeds fell under the Argentinian statute of limitations. It could not be ruled out, Grützner added, that ‘other Nazi criminals either were already in Argentina or could go there’. For that reason, he suggested the following formulation: ‘If the prosecution or execution of justice in the state making the request has been effectively interrupted, the state to which the request is made shall take this into account’. But that did nothing to resolve the problems of citizenship with which the German Basic Law left hardly any room to manoeuvre.314 The embassy attributed the fact that, after lengthy discussion, the Argentinian delegation agreed to the suggestion of ‘Grützner’s skilled handling of the negotiations’.315 Apparently, the view of the Illia government that this was a significant treaty concerning Nazi criminals hadn’t left any traces in the foreign ministry’s legal department. In years to come, work on the treaty would encounter repeated delays, and the Argentinian side kept suggesting fundamental changes, much to the chagrin of the West German Justice Ministry. Ultimately, nothing came of the whole matter. No treaty was ever signed.316 And even if the West German Foreign Ministry had had a change of heart in the course of the treaty negotiations, that didn’t mean that any extradition requests were made to Argentina. Alvensleben died in 1970 at the age of 69, before Munich prosecutors, acting on the request of the federal authorities, could contact the Argentinian Foreign Ministry about him. The negotiations over the German-Argentinean extradition treaty and the simultaneous considerations whether or not to ask for the extradition of Alvensleben, Kutschmann, and Schwammberger made one thing clear. Hardly anyone within the various ministries and governmental offices concerned considered the apprehension of fugitive Nazi criminals who didn’t create Mengele-like headlines important enough to justify major 313 Auslieferungsverfahren mit Argentinien, n.d., in Barch, B 141, vol. 92462. 314 Niederschrift über deutsch-argentinische Verhandlungen betreffend den Abschluß eines Auslieferungs- und Rechtshilfevertrages in Strafsachen, 4 August 1969 in Buenos Aires, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 615. 315 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 5 August 1969, in ibidem. 316 See procedures in Barch, B 141, vol. 92463 f.

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expenses or tension with foreign countries, particularly as the results of extradition proceedings were anything but certain. Most fugitives weren’t subjects of extensive media coverage. This was related to a fundamental problem in the pursuit of criminals. If investigators wanted to avoid the risk of fugitives being warned and fleeing again, they couldn’t be subjected to any publicity. There was no way to creating public pressure, as Bauer had so skillfully done with Mengele. The difficulties regarding extradition and the economic considerations judicial authorities made as a result weren’t the only obstacles to filing requests with South American countries. The usual problem with the verdicts rendered by West German courts and with West German legislation also played a role. Although the lengthy and fruitless searches for Mengele and Bormann suggested otherwise, tracking down fugitives wasn’t usually the main obstacle. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, investigators determined the whereabouts of numerous fugitives. For example, they knew since 1978 that Erich Priebke, who had taken part in the shootings of hostages as a member of the Security Police’s Security Service in Rome, was living in Bariloche, Argentina. But by that point the investigations against him had already been concluded. The central office in Dortmund considered his crimes, as was standard at that time, those of an accessory to manslaughter.317 West German authorities also knew by late 1965, after journalists began taking an interest in the case, that Hans Fischböck had fled to Argentina. During the Second World War, in his function as general commissioner, he had been responsible for Aryanization and obtaining forced labourers in the Netherlands. But the Central Office in Ludwigsburg concluded that even if his function were interpreted as entailing participation in the Final Solution, there was no chance of proving that he was guilty ‘subjectively of the qualified criteria of murder or assisting murder’. The most that could be hoped for were charges of manslaughter or negligent homicide, both of which were subject to the statute of limitations.318 The list of such cases could go on and on. The extradition of Franz Stangl A lot of factors had to come together for a fugitive to be brought up before a court. A good example of this is Franz Stangl, the first Nazi criminal who 317 Vermerk Hesse (ZS Dortmund), 18 February 1971, in Barch, B 162, vol. 6069. 318 Vermerk Artzt (ZSL), 19 January 1966, in ibidem, vol. 25132. Fischböck had already emigrated once before to Argentina in 1951. In the late 1950s he returned to Europe and settled in Essen, where he worked as a financial consultant.

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had fled to South America to in fact be put on trial in Germany. Once again, Simon Wiesenthal played a crucial role in bringing him to justice. In 1961, Wiesenthal began investigating the Nazi killings of handicapped people in the Hartheim euthanasia centre, which he described as a ‘school for murderers’. Here, those who would later carry out the annihilation of Jews practiced by killing handicapped Gentiles. Wiesenthal saw this as proof for his thesis that the Nazi policies of destruction were an attack on humanity in general, with which he hoped to persuade the people of Germany to legally prosecute Nazi crimes. During one of his attempts to publicize this line of argument, Wiesenthal mentioned Stangl, who been active at Hartheim between 1940 and 1941. In February 1964, a few days after newspapers had reported on his statements, a woman came to his office and told him that her cousin had married Stangl and was living in Brazil. One day later a man appeared and, in return for payment, informed him that Stangl was living in Sau Paolo and working for Volkswagen there. Many people have suspected, including Stangl’s own family, that Wiesenthal’s informant was Stangl’s former son-in-law. After separating from his wife, he had allegedly threatened to contact the famous Nazi hunter. But the son-in-law himself always disputed this.319 By this point, Stangl lived in constant fear of being arrested, but Wiesenthal was unable to confirm the information he had been given. None of his contacts in São Paulo succeeded in locating the fugitive. The problem, it turned out, was simply that Stangl was going by his middle name of Paul.320 The breakthrough in the case didn’t come until summer 1966. The Eastern European Holocaust survivor Voytech Winterstein, the chairman of the Latin American division of the World Jewish Congress, was accompanying a Brazilian delegation to Europe. During their stay in Brussels, he met Wiesenthal and introduced him to the Brazilian parliamentary deputy Aaron Steinbruch, who was also Jewish. The conversation quickly turned to Stangl, and Wiesenthal promised that he would see what could be done.321 By December, having spoken with ‘contacts in the Austrian judicial system’, he told the Brazilian MP that Austria would file an extradition request, if Stangl were apprehended.322 Steinbruch then contacted a police officer he knew, a Jew who had fled from Austria to South America before the war. After working for the American and Uruguayan secret services during 319 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 255-262. 320 See correspondence in SWA, Akt Stangl 1. 321 Winterstein to Wiesenthal, 24 February 1967, in ibidem. 322 Wiesenthal to Steinbruch, 22 December 1966, in ibidem.

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that conflict, he had joined the police in São Paulo. Using the information provided by Wiesenthal, he spotted the name of the fugitive on VW’s list of employees.323 In the meantime, Wiesenthal had succeeded in talking to the Austrian minister of justice, whom he informed that Stangl’s precise whereabouts were now known. The minister promptly ordered all necessary steps to be taken for the man’s extradition. However, at a meeting of investigating state prosecutors at the Justice Ministry in January 1967, it became clear that the extradition application would take some time. The prosecutor in Linz, who was responsible for all matters connected with Hartheim, had already issued a warrant for Stangl’s arrest but had only deemed the chances of success for an extradition ‘moderate’ because of ‘the lack of proof of Franz Stangl’s direct involvement in the euthanasia measures’.324 Stangl, however, had not only received ‘training’ in Hartheim. After the end of the euthanasia programme there, he was made commandant of the Sobibór death camp and had later assumed responsibility for Treblinka. Investigations about these activities, which were conducted by prosecutors in Vienna, were only just beginning. Only after Wiesenthal started exerting pressure, did prosecutors contact their colleagues in Düsseldorf and Dortmund, who were also investigating Stangl, with the request that they share information. The data provided would take time to analyse, those at the Austrian Justice Ministry meeting agreed. For that reason, a request to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry for Stangl’s extradition should be deferred. Wiesenthal was becoming increasingly agitated. In mid-January an associate had flown to São Paulo to coordinate things on-site, but she had left after two weeks because the extradition application had yet to be filed.325 On 20 February, the Viennese district court finally issued a warrant for Stangl’s arrest, citing crimes he had committed at Sobibór and Treblinka. That allowed the Austria government to request for Stangl’s preliminary detention with an eye toward extradition.326 But it took a week for the corresponding order to reach the Austrian embassy in Rio de Janeiro. That same day Steinbruch turned up there, saying Vienna had informed him, as the honorary president of the Jewish community in São Paolo, that the extradition request was arriving imminently. In response to his question 323 Winterstein to Wiesenthal, 11 January 1967, in ibidem; Erdstein and Bean, Fourth Reich, pp. 91-93. 324 Here and in the following: Vermerk BMfJ, 24 January 1967, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71. 325 Wiesenthal to Winterstein, 16 January 1967 and 8 February 1967, in SWA, Akt Stangl 1. 326 Vermerk Gonsa (BMfJ), 22 February 1967, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71.

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when the request would be delivered to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, he was told that an appointment had been scheduled for the following day. Steinbruch declared that he would use his influence on Brazilian authorities and pressure them to arrest Stangl immediately.327 In fact, the following day, the governor of São Paulo, whose private secretary was friends with Winterstein,328 went before the press and announced he would shortly be making public ‘a piece of news of global interest’.329 A few hours later, Stangl was summoned at the VW plant and was told that his daughter had been hospitalized. He immediately went to the hospital, where he was arrested by a commando from the notorious DOPS, the Brazilian police’s Department for Political and Social Order, which had been given responsibility for fugitive war criminals in 1946 in the wake of the Mexico City Conference.330 The announcement of Stangl’s arrest a few days later made headlines around the world. Overnight, Stangl became a famous Nazi criminal. Wiesenthal had meanwhile become a familiar name not only in Europe and Israel but in the United States as well. His hunt for Nazis as a kind of ex post facto resistance captured a broad public interest. In 1964, as reports that Mengele was hiding out in Paraguay were going around the world, he had tracked down Hermine Braunsteiner, a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp, in a New York suburb. The fact that the man who had hunted down Eichmann had discovered a Nazi criminal not in Argentina, but in the US unleashed a new debate about how America dealt with the National Socialist past. That attracted the notice of entrepreneur Hermann Katz who liked the fact that there were also Jews who didn’t accept the injustice done to them without resistance. Katz provided the funds for Wiesenthal to search for Stangl, and as of the late 1960s, he was crucial in ensuring that the world’s most prominent Nazi hunter went on regular lecture tours in the USA.331 In early March, Wiesenthal was about to undertake one of his first trips to the US to promote his book The Murderers Among Us. He was about to take off from the airport in Amsterdam when he learned that Stangl had been apprehended. Now that the fugitive was no longer capable to fleeing, Wiesenthal was able to bring public pressure to bear. While still at the airport, he organized demonstrations in front of the Brazilian embassies in 327 Illsinger (Austrian Embassy in Rio de Janeiro) to BMfaA, 2 March 1967, in ibidem. 328 Hoolwerf (Staff of Wiesenthal’s office) to Wiesenthal, 27 January 1967, in SWA, Akt Stangl 1. 329 Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 15 March 1967, in Barch, B 141, vol. 24456. 330 Wiesenthal, Recht, p. 117. 331 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 424-426.

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a number of countries. He also contacted the justice minister of the West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia who was responsible for two cases against the former concentration camp commandant.332 Previously, the authorities had known nothing about the fugitive’s whereabouts. The Düsseldorf prosecutor’s office, which had been investigating the personnel at the Treblinka concentration camp since 1959, had only received several vague hints that Stangl had fled after the war. In 1961, for instance, a member of the personnel at the Sobibór concentration camp reported hearing that Stangl had gone first to Syria and then to Central America. The detail about Syria shows how good communication between Nazi criminals must have been as they were beginning to take flight.333 The trail to Syria was also confirmed that same year by information from Austrian authorities who said that Stangl’s wife and children had registered their new residence there in 1949.334 Immediately after talking to Wiesenthal, and without soliciting advice on the prospects for success, the North Rhine-Westphalian Justice Ministry instructed Düsseldorf prosecutors to draw up an extradition request, saying ‘money is no object’. The prosecutor’s office was also told to get in touch with the central office in Dortmund, which was investigating Stangl in conjunction with Sobibór. But that investigation was still in a preliminary stage. In 1963, when the central office learned that prosecutors in Vienna were investigating Stangl’s alleged crimes in Sobibór, they had put their own case on ice.335 For that reason, the judicial officials in North Rhine-Westphalia now decided to make crimes committed in Sobibór the focus of a separate extradition request to be filed later.336 The federal Justice Department was informed about the extradition request that was going to be made imminently.337 But it took several weeks to get all the paperwork together, and the delays caused worry and dismay among Jewish institutions, which were carefully following the proceedings. Winterstein had consulted the attorney Evaristo Moraes after the Austrian embassy’s request that Stangl be held in temporary 332 Wiesenthal, Recht, pp. 118 ff. 333 Verhörprotokoll Kurt Bolender, 15 September 1961, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 388, vol. 238. 334 JM NRW to BMJ, 28 April 1967, in Barch, B 141, vol. 24456. 335 Vfg. Fricke (ZS Dortmund), 10 July 1963, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, vol. 4650. 336 Vermerk Spieß (StA Düsseldorf), 3 March 1967, in HStA Düsseldorf, Gerichte Rep. 388, vol. 244. 337 Vermerk Pötz (BMJ), 3 March 1967, in Barch, B 141, vol. 24456.

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custody, and on Winterstein’s advice, the embassy also retained Moraes, as Brazilian law stipulated that it should have its own lawyer.338 Moraes soon concluded that the Viennese prosecutors’ arrest warrant for crimes committed in Sobibór and Treblinka fell under the Brazilian statute of limitations. Only in conjunction with Stangl’s deeds in Hartheim was an interruption registered in time. But Stangl had only been in a subordinate position in Hartheim.339 Poland could also claim jurisdiction as the crimes had been committed there and had immediately filed for extradition after Stangl was apprehended in Brazil. But the chances of this request being granted were even worse. There had been no interruption of the statute of limitations in Poland that would have justified extending the deadline. That had to do with how the legal prosecution of Nazi crimes developed in that country. In the early postwar era, Poland had succeeded in getting a few Nazi criminals apprehended in West Germany by the Western Allies extradited. But that was no longer possible with the consolidation of the Communist and capitalist blocs and the establishment of the two post-war Germanys. Prosecution of Nazi criminals was henceforth limited to people in prosecutors’ own countries. As of 1950, the founding of Communist East Germany also brought severe restrictions on the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitler’s Crimes in Poland. By the end of the 1950s, after amnesty was decreed, the age of the Polish judicial system prosecuting Nazi criminals seemed to have come to an end.340 Nonetheless, East Germany’s campaigns against West Germany, in which Poland also participated, made the Main Commission resume its work. In 1964, with the statute of limitations scheduled to elapse for Nazi crimes in West Germany, Poland made a point of passing a law that revoked the statute for the worst crimes committed in the Second World War. In the years that followed, the Polish government also lobbied the United Nations to ratify a treaty along those lines. But the chances that Nazi criminals would be brought to justice in Poland were slim. Those criminals who were still alive and who attracted the attention of the Main Commission resided in West Germany, and Bonn didn’t extradite its own citizens. Against this backdrop, the apprehension of Stangl was a welcome chance to demonstrate Poland’s

338 Illsinger (Austrian Embassy in Rio de Janeiro) to BMfaA, 2 March 1967, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71. 339 Vermerk Botschaft Rio de Janeiro, 4 April 1967, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 934. 340 Here and in the following Borodziej, ‘Verbrechen’.

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own willingness to prosecute a prominent criminal, even if the chances of Poland’s extradition request were extremely poor. The only place a warrant had been issued for Stangl’s arrest in 1960 – a point at which the statute of limitations had yet to elapse in Brazil – was West Germany. For that reason, the Israelite Cultural Community in São Paulo and Winterstein as a representative of the WJC threw their full support behind the West German extradition request. When the necessary paperwork finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Winterstein contacted the West German embassy and recommended Moraes as an attorney. The embassy told headquarters in Bonn that it was ‘urgently necessary’ to take up the idea because people had been put off by the ‘relatively late’ extradition request.341 But Austria and West Germany were rivals in the eyes of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which had jurisdiction over extradition requests, and thus couldn’t be represented by the same attorney. Moraes told the Austrian embassy, as reported by the Austrian Foreign Ministry: His actual clients […] the Israelite Cultural Community of Brazil and the Jewish organizations working with it […] have no interest in Stangl being extradited only to be put on trial for the crimes committed at Hartheim since this will likely see him acquitted or given a very mild sentence. He therefore asked in his own name and the name of the Israelite Cultural Community to be able to hand back his mandate from Austria in order to be able to represent the German extradition request, which seemed likely to be a success, as he had been already asked to do so by the German ambassador.342

Moraes made it clear that Brazilian Jews, among whom were many Holocaust survivors, took a personal interest in Stangl’s extradition. Winterstein was also speaking in their name, when he called the embassy that same day to express support for Moraes’ request. ‘Austria’s energetic attitude was appreciated, and the country was thanked for its efforts’, he said. The embassy replied that it ‘completely understood’ the request. It would ‘contradict a sense of justice and would be unpleasant for Austria, in view of both domestic and foreign popular opinion, if Stangl were to be acquitted or given a short sentence’. Therefore, the West German request should take priority. Still, the embassy wanted to continue its request concerning crimes committed 341 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 12 April 1967, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 934. 342 Here and in the following: Krippl-Redlich (BMfaA) to Drechsler (BMfJ), 27 April 1967, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71.

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in Treblinka and Sobibór. Together with its new attorney, the embassy decided to adopt the ‘admittedly disputable’ argument of the Polish request, which held that a crime could not fall under the statute of limitations of one country while being outside it in another. The Brazilian statute of limitations wasn’t the only problem the extradition request faced. Under Brazilian law, extradition requests had to be legally processed within sixty days. If there was no verdict within that time, the suspect was to be set free. It was difficult to meet this deadline in a complex case involving three main parties. Even within the Brazilian Justice Ministry, it was unclear how to interpret the rule. Did the clock start ticking when a suspect was apprehended or when each individual extradition request was received?343 The Ministry decided upon the latter. In the eyes of the Austrian embassy this was legally disputable, but it did prevent Stangl from being released late that April. The delay in West Germany filing its request until April turned out to be a strike of good fortune. The Austrian embassy suspected that Steinbruch had played a role in the decision, but that conclusion is dubious.344 As a senator he was not without power and he was also a member of the foreign relations committee, but as an adherent of the only legal opposition party in Brazil, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro,345 his influence on the authoritarian regime was certainly limited. The Justice Ministry’s decision in favour of the countries making the requests was, among other things, a reaction to enormous international pressure that had built up. No sooner had Wiesenthal arrived in New York than he had the chance to brief prominent senator Robert Kennedy about Stangl’s arrest. Kennedy then called Brazil’s ambassador to the US and urged him to extradite the suspect.346 Wiesenthal’s trip also gave him the chance to mobilize a number of American institutions. Representatives of various Jewish victims’ associations spoke with the Brazilian ambassador. Brazilian embassies in Europe were also subject to concentrated pressure.347 Brazilian diplomats by no means rejected such petitions out of hand. Brazil’s US ambassador assured victims’ associations:

343 Vermerk AA, 30 March 1967; Vermerk Botschaft Rio de Janeiro, 4 April 1965, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 934. 344 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA und BMJ, 3 March 1967, in ibidem; Krippl-Redlich (BMfaA) to BMfJ, 8 May 1967, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71. 345 Democratic Movement of Brazil. 346 Wiesenthal, Recht, p. 118. 347 See procedures in SWA, Akt Stangl 1.

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With regard to your visit concerning the request for the extradition of Franz Stangl, I shall convey to my government your deep concern in this matter. As of now I can assure you that the Brazilian Government has the deepest sympathy for the plight of the Nazis’ victims and will be very willing to see that justice is promoted in this particular case.348

The Brazilian ambassador in Vienna told Wiesenthal’s Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime that his government had empowered him to pass on the message that it was aware of the global interest in Stangl case. ‘The verdict of the Brazilian Supreme Court will be a just one’, he said.349 Nonetheless, it was anything but a foregone conclusion that the Brazilian Supreme Court would grant an extradition request. In an interview in mid-March, Nélson Hungria, a former president of the court and the author of Brazil’s criminal code, had said there was little chance of extraditing Stangl.350 Most other commentators shared this assessment. Above all, the international pressure on the Brazilian judicial system was a cause for concern. People were particularly irritated with Poland, which had hired an attorney for the case who then proceeded to give numerous public interviews.351 The Israeli embassy took a different tack in an effort to influence judicial opinion. It asked the German embassy for copies of the extradition request with the idea of distributing them to expert attorneys and interested Brazilian members of parliament. The case, in the words of the German embassy, was ‘completely unique’ in the annals of the Brazilian judicial system. For that reason, it was critical to ‘directly influence’ the opinion of the highest court.352 In the end, Moraes succeeded in arranging an appointment with Nélson Hungria to go through the paperwork together. The former judge changed his mind, coming to the conclusion that the request did meet the requirements of Brazilian law. Hungria offered to write an evaluation supporting the West German position for the court. Moraes, who believed that the judge had considerable influence on his former colleagues, leapt at the chance and commissioned the evaluation.353

348 Leitão da Cunha (Brazilian Ambassador in Washington) to Jewish Victims Organizations of America, 14 March 1967, in ibidem. 349 Vermerk Bund Jüdischer Verfolgter des Naziregimes, 22 March 1967, in ibidem. 350 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 17 May 1967, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 934. 351 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 27 April 1967, in ibidem. 352 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 13 April 1967, in ibidem. 353 FS Botschaft Rio de Janeiro to AA, 17 May 1967, in ibidem.

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On 7 June 1967, just before the 60-day deadline was about to expire, the case was heard. With reference to the Polish and Austrian requests, Stangl’s lawyer argued that the statute of limitations applied, while in response to the West German request, he said that Stangl faced life imprisonment – a punishment not admissible under Brazilian law. The state prosecutor rejected the argument that the Austrian arrest warrant had been issued too late to claim an interruption of the statute of limitations. Both the German and Austrian requests, he argued, were in accordance with Brazilian law, and the former should be given precedence because it had been received first. The spokesman among the judges saw things differently. He said that the Austrian request could only be considered in reference to the euthanasia crimes. Because of the severity of deeds Stangl was accused of, the West German request had priority – under the proviso that potential life imprisonment was converted to a fixed sentence and that Stangl be delivered to Austria once he had served it. The other judges concurred with this reasoning. The extradition request filed by the central prosecutor’s office in Dortmund, which had only just arrived before the start of the trial, was not considered,354 and since it fell under the statute of limitations, the embassy withdrew it voluntarily. This helped avoid a negative verdict which could have stirred up anger abroad during a trial about deeds committed in Sobibór.355 But things never got that far. In mid-1971, one and a half years after a Düsseldorf court sentenced Stangl to life in prison for his crimes in Treblinka, he died while in custody. After Stangl, Wiesenthal hoped that enlisting authorities on both sides of the Atlantic might prove an effective tool in apprehending fugitive Nazi criminals. He approached Santander, suggesting that they go after Alvensleben. Santander was to engage his influential friends and develop a plan for Alvensleben’s arrest. As soon as Santander was sure an arrest could be made, he was to give word. Then Wiesenthal would make sure that the necessary official letters were sent to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry.356 Santander answered immediately. He warned against getting the Argentinian Foreign Ministry and the embassy involved since both institutions were known for their sympathy toward former Nazis. All he needed was a copy of the accusations that had been levelled against Alvensleben in Argentina.357 354 Holleben (Embassy Rio de Janeiro) to AA, 12 June 1967, in ibidem, vol. 935; Übersetzung des Relatoriums der Verhandlung über den Auslieferungsantrag im Fall Stangl, in ÖStA, AdR, BMJ, Sektion IV, 86.237/71; Revista Trimestral de Jusiprudencia, 43 (January 1968), pp. 168-220. 355 See procedure in Barch, B 141, vol. 24456. 356 Wiesenthal to Santander, 24 November 1967, in SWA, Akt Alvensleben. 357 Santander to Wiesenthal, 3 December 1967, in ibidem.

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Wiesenthal then proposed, as in the case of Stangl, to look for a trusty contact within the police who would ensure Alvensleben was arrested.358 But no further reaction came from Argentina. After three months of silence, Santander finally returned from the beach and said that he would soon be going to Brussels with two members of the Jewish umbrella organization in Argentina, the DAIA. There, everything could be discussed further.359 Nothing came of these plans – for reasons unknown. Wiesenthal turned to Hardy Swarensky, an acquaintance of his in Buenos Aries who’d often supplied him with important information. On this occasion, too, he was able to give Wiesenthal details about Alvensleben’s whereabouts, but before the latter could be arrested, Swarensky died. Wiesenthal quickly found a replacement in José Moskovits. A German-speaking Jew who had already helped Mossad abduct Eichmann, he was president of the Argentinian Sherit Hapletah, an organization of Holocaust survivors. Wiesenthal learned from him that the West Germans were about to f ile an extradition request,360 whereupon he discontinued all further actions. But his hope that Alvensleben, who was suspected of serious Nazi crimes, would face trial was disappointed the following year. In mid-1970 Moskovits informed him that Alvensleben was dead. Contrary to Wiesenthal’s hopes, the extraditions of Bohne and Stangl within seven months didn’t represent his great breakthrough. They were the results of the convergence of a number of lucky factors. In Bohne’s case, a prosecutor who didn’t shy back from obstacles was in charge, while at the same time supporters of extraditing Nazi criminals were gaining influence within the government in Argentina. In Stangl’s case, at the time the request was made, Jewish organizations had influential relationships and Wiesenthal succeeded in coordinating public pressure on both sides of the Atlantic so that the suspect was unable to flee. As a rule, however, the situation was different. Although West German authorities had stepped up their pursuit of Nazi criminals since the mid-1950s, fugitives seldomly were seriously troubled. They benefited from the fact that the West German judicial system and laws were full of obstacles hindering the pursuit of Nazi criminals. They also profited from the fact that authorities rarely found such cases important enough to spend signif icant time and money on them – especially when the end results were so uncertain.

358 Wiesenthal to Santander,5 January 1967, in ibidem. 359 Santander to Wiesenthal, 11 March 1967, in ibidem. 360 Moskovits to Wiesenthal, 22 May 1969; Wiesenthal to Rückerl (ZSL), 4 June 1969, in ibidem.

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The primary reason why West German federal ministries were so supportive of Bauer’s pursuit of Mengele and Bormann was that they hoped to legitimize the statute of limitations with spectacular individual actions. Moreover, the hunt for the handful of prominent Nazi criminals living abroad diverted attention from those living, exempt from punishment, in West Germany. As attempts to apprehend Mengele were making the headlines, many people ignored the fact that several of Mengele’s former colleagues, who had also carried out experiments on human beings, were pursuing their careers in the Federal Republic of Germany.361 Beate Klarsfeld, who had criticized how West Germany dealt with the Nazi past since the late 1960s, concluded: Nazi hunter is an expression that was invented at a time when people believed that Nazi criminals all lived far away in South America, where they were being pursued by secret services. People closed their eyes to the fact that many of those who were extremely culpable had stayed in Germany and were living under the protection not of some South American dictator, but of the German government.362

These words can also be interpreted as a criticism of Wiesenthal, who took every conceivable opportunity to draw attention to the Nazi fugitives in South America since they played such an important role in his conspiracy theories.

361 Klee, Auschwitz. 362 WDR-Interview with Beate Klarsfeld, 22 March 2006, www1.wdr.de/themen/politik/ klarsfeld102.html.

III Nazi Hunting as Political Opposition In the film Manhunt, which depicts the attempts to apprehend Klaus Barbie, the former head of the Security Service’s Security Police in Lyon, there is an interesting transition between two scenes. The first shows Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who were instrumental in capturing the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’, finding a document in an archive, a telegram from April 1944 in which the SS man informs his superiors that 41 children have been deported from a Jewish orphanage in Izieu in southern France. After a close-up of the document there’s a cut, and two sleeping children can be seen. Suddenly, the door to their room is thrown open, and a police commando in La Paz, where Barbie fled to in 1951, rudely awakens them. They’re dragged into the living room with their family, where the leader of the commando aims his pistol at the children’s chests. The makers of the film, which was released in 2007, weren’t the first ones to draw connections between the crimes committed in Europe by fugitive Nazis and oppression under South American dictatorships. As early as 1972, when Barbie’s capture made headlines around the world, it was reported that he had been the instigator of the putsch that had brought German-Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer to power in Bolivia. The Bolivian government was also reputed to have used Barbie as an advisor on interrogation techniques. For Juan José Torres, the former Bolivian president who had fled Banzer’s coup in 1971, it was obvious why Barbie was in the Andean mountain state. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that the Bolivian government would harbour the torturer and war criminal Klaus Barbie’, Torres was quoted as saying: ‘This position reflects the logic of the system. The same fascism that yesterday wanted to subject the French people to slavery, today keeps down the Bolivian people. The circumstances may be different, but the methods are the same’.1 In 1973, the Banzer putsch was followed by the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the establishment of a dictatorship in Uruguay. In 1976, after a three-year civilian intermezzo, a military junta once again seized power in Argentina. With Brazil and Paraguay having been ruled by the military for quite some time, almost all of South America was in the hands of right-wing dictators. Barbie wasn’t the only former Nazi suspected of assisting the juntas’ mechanisms of repression. Before long, the fugitives had not only to worry about Wiesenthal, Klarsfeld, and the German judicial

1

Cited in Klarsfeld, Barbie-Altmann, p. 55.

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system but also the political dissidents and human rights activists protesting against South American political oppression. As right-wing dictatorships established themselves throughout South America, attempts to punish Nazi crimes became more and more important. In the early 1970s, a debate commenced in France about the Second World War. It made clear how actively the Vichy Regime had participated in Nazi crimes. The cherished notion that most French people had resisted German occupation began to wobble.2 At the same time, American Jews were beginning to attach more importance to the Holocaust. They succeeded in attracting attention to the topic beyond Jewish institutions and to ensconce it as part of Americans’ memories of the Second World War.3 Thanks to the American-made mini-series ‘Holocaust’, by the late 1970s, the murder of millions of Jews enjoyed an unprecedented prominence in various European countries.4 What effects did the gradual internationalization of memories of the Holocaust and the simultaneous establishment of right-wing dictatorships have on the hunt for Nazis? How did fugitive Nazi criminals become an issue that had significance beyond the history of the Third Reich and take on a political importance in South America?

1

Recidivists in the Service of South America’s Dictators

Klaus Altmann was no favourite among the employees of the West German embassy in La Paz. When he visited the German Club, whose regulars also included many embassy staff members, Altmann made no bones about his continuing National Socialist sympathies, even greeting the staff members with ‘Heil Hitler’. At the very least since Eichmann’s abduction, a German behaving this way was highly suspicious. In early 1965, after he began to increasingly insult and threaten Jewish émigrés5 and complaints about his behaviour piled up, West German diplomats took a closer look at Altmann’s past. The embassy staff member charged with carrying out this research found out that Altmann had been a member of the SS during the war and had caught spies in southern France. ‘There is no information about any crimes’, the embassy member noted. Bolivian authorities told him that 2 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 98-216; Wolf, Harnessing, pp. 62-71. 3 Novick, Holocaust, pp. 195-263. 4 For a short overview of the internationalization of Holocaust remembrance, see Eckel and Moisel, ‘Einleitung’. 5 Vargas (New York) to Wiesenthal, 16 March 1972, in SWA, Akt Barbie 2.

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Altmann had immigrated to Bolivia in May 1951 and had been a Bolivian citizen since 1957.6 Ambassador Günter Motz had no idea what to do with this information. ‘Catching spies’ wasn’t a crime, and nothing more concrete was known. ‘We could do nothing’, Motz noted. ‘Send a photo to Bonn, notify the Foreign Ministry of the rumours and ask for legal assistance, or prevent the last two points’.7 After discussing the matter with his deputy, Motz indeed decided to do nothing. He thought the problem had been solved. After one of the complaints, Altmann had quit the club. However, a few months later, the ambassador learned that with the help of his many friends, Altmann had been readmitted. Motz again contacted the board, saying ‘The matter has come to a head again and really doesn’t put the German Club in a good light’. Once, when Motz’s deputy had gone to the club with an American colleague, Altmann had shouted out: ‘Over there sits one of the heads of the embassy with his Jewish friends’.8 Altmann reacted aggressively to a renewed attempt to ban him from the club, threatening not only to sue for defamation of character but also to use his government contacts to set the secret police on his enemies and damage them economically. He personally contacted Motz and said that there would be consequences if people continued to try to get him excluded, saying that ‘It’s well known what the German community is capable of’.9 These were more than just empty threats by some con artist. After the Bolivian military had taken power in 1964, Altmann had established good connections with government circles. According to a 1982 report by the Bolivian Interior Ministry, military leaders considered him a valuable advisor in their attempts to combat partisans. In the mid-1960s, he allegedly advised the army in its fight against Che Guevara.10 Similar information is contained in a letter one of Altmann’s friends wrote in the late 1960s, which said that ‘Altmann is greatly valued by the military as a trusted advisor’.11 His activities meant that he met a lot of important people. His circle of friends 6 Vermerk Schröder (Embassy La Paz), 22 February 1965, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 20243. 7 Handschriftliche Notiz Motz (Ambassador La Paz), n.d., in ibidem. 8 Motz (Ambassador La Paz) to Willi Bauer (President of the Deutscher Club), 22 November 1965, in ibidem. 9 Vermerk Motz (Ambassador La Paz), 31 December 1965, in ibidem; Motz to AA, 25 January 1966, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 1351. 10 Linklater, Fourth Reich, p. 265. 11 Schwend (Lima) to Huber (Zürich), 28 September 1969, in AHIS, Archiv Schwend, 36/58. The letter was a piece of correspondence written to a Swiss company, in which Schwend recommended Altmann as a business partner in Bolivia.

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included Alfredo Ovando12 and René Barrientos,13 the two presidents who controlled Bolivia’s destiny between 1964 and 1971. He also maintained cordial relations with the head of Bolivia’s secret service and its interior minister.14 His connections allowed him to get himself put in charge of the prestigious ‘transmaritima project’ to build up a fleet of Bolivian commercial ships. In Bolivia, which had lost its access to the ocean in two wars, this public-private partnership possessed huge symbolic significance since it embodied the Andean nation’s maritime claims. Altmann’s contacts with ranking members of the government even attracted the attention of American intelligence officials, and a US informant from La Paz recommended recruiting him as a source. The CIA knew about Altmann’s past – it had helped him flee from Europe – but in order to avoid problems, the CIA decided not to employ him.15 Because of Altmann’s influential contacts, the West German ambassador decided to get the Foreign Ministry in Bonn involved. According to ‘statements that have become known and that were made to various members of the German community’, Altmann was using an alias ‘presumably to protect him from people researching his background’. Nothing concrete could be said about ‘possible crimes committed during the war’, but several of his statements gave reason to believe that he had acted as ‘a high-ranking officer of the SS, particularly in France’. After describing Altmann’s unsavoury behaviour, Motz concluded his dispatch by asking the ministry to determine ‘if there were any documents concerning Mr Altmann at the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Pursuit of War Crimes or other institutions’. The rumour was going around in Bolivia, Motz wrote, that Altmann was ‘wanted for crimes committed in France’. His wife should also be looked into, Motz added, since she ‘was allegedly involved in the euthanasia action during the war’.16 But Motz’s dispatch didn’t contain details like place and date of birth that would have allowed West German investigators to cross-check with records. The ministry thus instructed Motz to find out more about Altmann.17 While the embassy was investigating Altmann, Wilhelm Holm arrived in La Paz. A businessman, Holm also worked for the BND, which he supplied 12 Vargas (New York) to Wiesenthal, 16 March 1972, in SWA, Akt Barbie 2. 13 Linklater, Fourth Reich, p. 225. 14 Hammerschmidt, ‘Hauptsturmführer’, p. 337. 15 US Department of Justice, ed., Barbie, pp. 168-179. On the contacts between the American Intelligence Service and Barbie see especially the new findings in Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 55-178, 286-292. 16 Motz (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 14 January 1966, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1351. 17 AA to Botschaft La Paz, 21 January 1966, in ibidem.

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with information about people abroad who might make useful agents. A mutual acquaintance introduced him to Altmann, and after a while the two became friends. During Holm’s four-week stay in the Bolivian capital, they shared meals almost every day, and in the process Holm learned a lot about Altmann. With pride, Altmann told him that Jews were excluded from joining the German Club, and Altmann’s wife showed him Nazi literature belonging to the society. But Altmann didn’t reveal any concrete details about his past. All he said was that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS and that he’d fled Communist East Germany in 1950. Holm ultimately found him to be ‘upstanding’ and ‘German to the core’ and recommended he be recruited as an agent. The BND’s headquarters took his advice and sent a handler to Bolivia in May 1966 to instruct their new helper as to his responsibilities.18 Altmann was designated a political source, but it seems as though he was primarily used as an arms dealer. In any case, a few weeks after his recruitment, he became a representative of the Merex corporation, which sold off spare Bundeswehr equipment on behalf of the BND. But this business relationship didn’t last long. The BND felt initial qualms when it learned about the squabbles between Altmann and the embassy. It emerged that the agent had received incriminating information from East Germany about Motz’s past, a dissertation written by the ambassador in 1935 that had defended the Nazis ‘cleansing of the professional secret service’. Collecting information about a West German civil servant’s past was hardly an expression of a ‘German-to-the-core’ attitude. A short time later, BND headquarters told Altmann to come to West Germany for training, which he flatly refused to do. ‘Because of an ongoing investigation against him in Ludwigsburg’, he wrote he was unable to travel to the Federal Republic. A check revealed that there was indeed an investigation being conducted of the agent, whereupon the BND decided to cut him loose. However, it didn’t occur to the intelligence service to inform investigators about this fact.19 And Merex continued to cooperate with Altmann’s company Estrella.20 In the meantime, Motz had been recalled, and under his successor, the embassy didn’t pursue the matter of Altmann any longer. It wouldn’t be for several years after a quarrel between Altmann’s friend Friedrich Schwend and an acquaintance, that the case would once again be put on the diplomatic 18 Hammerschmidt, ‘Hauptsturmführer’, p. 336. See also Georg Bönisch and Klaus Wiegrefe, ‘Kerndeutsche Gesinnung’, in Spiegel, 3/2011. 19 Hammerschmidt, ‘Haupsturmführer’, quotations on pp. 345 and 344, Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 223-249. 20 Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 249-272; see also procedure in AHIS, Bestand Schwend, Ordner 4/30.

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agenda. In 1959, journalist Herbert John came to Peru. Upon his arrival, he had worked together closely with Schwend, who had been involved during the war in the Third Reich’s secret service’s counterfeit money operations. Schwend provided John with purported inside information and contacts from Nazi circles in South American exile. Among other things, he told John about an Odessa conference that had supposedly taken place in Spain. John, who hoped to make his journalistic breakthrough by researching Bormann and Mengele’s whereabouts, took an interest in the story and asked to see the protocol.21 A short time later the two men broke with one another. Deprived of Schwend’s ‘information’, John had to hunt for the two prominent Nazis on his own, and he began to follow up on a hunch he had had for some time. Schwend’s business partner Altmann, John suspected, was living under an assumed name. In June 1969, John travelled to Bolivia with a film crew from the German public broadcaster Saarländischer Rundfunk in order to find out Altmann’s true identity. He contacted the German embassy in La Paz and announced that he knew for sure that Altmann was in reality Theodor Dannecker, an important henchman of Eichmann in France. In order to avoid ‘bad press’, Ambassador Karl Hampe told John about the problems German diplomats had encountered with Altmann and about his predecessor’s investigations.22 More importantly, he also told the Foreign Ministry in Bonn about the new information, which he had received in an ‘unconfirmed statement’. Altmann, he said, possessed ‘what were apparently good contacts in Bolivian government circles and with other former Nazis living in South America, like Mr Schwend in Lima’. Hampe included in his report two newspaper photos of Altmann with the board of Transmaritima.23 As if it were providence, a few days later, Altmann’s daughter turned up at the embassy to apply for a residence permit in West Germany. She had been born in Kassel and had lived there until 1945.24 With the help of this information, the Central Office in Ludwigsburg could do more precise research at the public registry in Kassel. It turned out that Ute Altmann’s date of birth was identical with that of Ute Barbie and that ‘to a high degree of probability’ Altmann was actually Klaus Barbie, the former commander of Security Police in Lyon.25 21 John to Schwend, n.d., in ibidem, Ordner 38/27; Protokoll der Odessa-Konferenz, Ordner 18/95. 22 Vermerk Poddey (Embassy La Paz), 15 August 1965, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 20243. 23 FS Hampe (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 7 July 1969, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 1351. 24 FS Hampe (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 19 August 1969, in ibidem. 25 Rückerl (ZSL) to JM BW, February 4, 1970, in Barch, B 162, vol. 3397.

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Investigators in Ludwigsburg had been after Barbie since 1959. In 1961, prosecutors had succeeded in locating and interrogating his cousin in Kassel. Under oath, she had given up her initial resistance and testified that Barbie’s wife had visited her parents several years previously and told them that she would be returning to Bolivia. Post for the Barbie family had also been delivered from Bolivia.26 But although authorities now had concrete evidence of where Barbie was, they didn’t file an extradition request. Instead, the many obstacles to prosecuting Nazi crimes in West Germany once again became apparent. It took one and a half years for an authority with investigative powers, the Augsburg Prosecutor’s Office, to take over the case. And no sooner had it been done, than there was a decisive change in West German legal jurisprudence with the Überleitungsvertrag, or ‘transitional treaty’. With the 1955 treaty, West Germany assumed complete responsibility for prosecuting Nazi crimes from the Western Allies. To prevent West Germany from revising previous verdicts, the Western Allies had stipulated that cases heard in front of occupational courts weren’t allowed to be reopened. The FDP member of the Bundestag Ernst Achenbach, who himself had been involved in the deportation of Jews as a member of the Nazi German embassy in Paris and who after 1949 became one of the most influential advocates of a blanket amnesty, soon recognized that the treaty could be interpreted to benefit Nazi criminals. He argued that the treaty not only prohibited cases heard before Allied courts from being reopened but also meant that people who had been convicted by French courts in absentia could not be tried elsewhere. This argumentation was upheld in February 1966 by the West German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) – not the first time this body aligned itself with the opponents of prosecuting former Nazis. That meant that anyone who had been convicted in France had nothing more to fear from West German authorities.27 The new rules applied to Barbie, who had been sentenced to death in France, so Ausgburg prosecutors discontinued their investigations. They had no choice but to assume, they wrote, that ‘the object of the investigation would not go any further […] than what had already been dealt with by French proceedings’.28 The Central Office in Ludwigsburg arrived at the same conclusion, although it only suspended investigations temporarily.29 Protest from the French at the BGH’s decision was as ineffective as French 26 Vernehmung der Zeugin Carole Buness, 12 April 1961, in ibidem, vol. 3395. 27 Brunner, Frankreich-Komplex, pp. 206-215; Moisel, Frankreich, pp. 196-210. 28 Heiligmann (StA Augsburg), 20 March 1967, in Barch, B 162, vol. 3396. 29 Rückerl (ZSL) to JM BW, 7 July 1970, in ibidem, B 141, vol. 25639/a.

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authorities’ subsequent refusal to let the German investigators see criminal files. The West German Justice Ministry began work on a supplemental French-German treaty intended to solve the problems German jurisprudence had caused for the prosecution of Nazi crimes committed in France.30 Therefore, there was still hope that cases that had been discontinued because of the BGH’s decision might someday be taken up again. Munich prosecutors who were investigating Barbie’s role in the deportation of Jews saw things differently. They argued that the transitional treaty hadn’t been the only reason to discontinue legal proceedings against him. They claimed that documents showed that Barbie didn’t know for certain what fate those deported faced. Moreover, they argued, telegrams like the one in which the suspect had reported on the deportation of the 41 children from the orphanage in Izieu didn’t prove that he had been personally involved in their deportation. Various witnesses, most of whom were former colleagues of Barbie, had exonerated him from further blame.31 Investigators in Ludwigsburg were anything but happy with this line of argument. Their preliminary investigation had concluded that Barbie did indeed know about what awaited the deported children. But they had no authority to influence the decision reached in Munich.32 The order to suspend the investigation made its way to the Jewish Documentation Centre in Paris, where Beate Klarsfeld read it. Born in Berlin, she was married to Serge Klarsfeld, the son of a Jewish man murdered at Auschwitz. Their marriage was in one sense a result of the Franco-German friendship advocated by Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. As part of an exchange programme supported by both governments, the young German woman had come to Paris in the early 1960s, where she had met the man who would become her husband. This Franco-German marriage was to present relations between the two countries with some significant challenges in the years to come. Politicized by the student protests of the decade and sensitized to the significance of the Holocaust by the debates surrounded the Six Day War in 1967, the Klarsfelds began to get involved in the issue of personnel continuities between the Third Reich and post-war West Germany. An article by Beate Klarsfeld in the Résistance magazine Combat about West German Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger had cost her her job at the Franco-German Youth Works. This became one of the pivotal moments of her life. In the years that followed she never ceased 30 Brunner, Frankreich-Komplex, pp. 262-279. 31 Einstellungsverfügung Rabl (StA München I), 22 June 1971, in Barch, B 162, vol. 3396. 32 Vermerk Artzt (ZSL), 10 October 1960, in ibidem, vol. 3395.

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condemning Kiesinger for his past. Her most famous act was no doubt slapping the chancellor’s face during a CDU party convention in late 1968. The West German judicial system, which two decades after the Third Reich still hadn’t brought many Nazi criminals to trial, swiftly sentenced her to two years in prison.33 The Klarsfelds’ experience of how directly and rigorously West German institutions opposed their efforts to start a discussion about personnel continuities with the Third Reich stood in stark contrast to the ease with which the former Nazi elite could make careers for themselves in West Germany and Nazi criminals could live in freedom, with nothing to fear from the West German judicial system. The couple made it their life’s mission to draw attention to these examples of injustice. They were particularly interested in bringing people to justice who had been involved in crimes committed in France. The first person who came into their focus was Kurt Lischka, who had been instrumental to the deportation of French Jews. In April 1971, together with several Holocaust survivors and friends, the Klarsfelds made an initial attempt to apprehend him and take him to France in the hope that he would be put on trial there. But the abduction didn’t come off, whereupon they tried to get West German authorities to put Lischka and his former superior Herbert Hagen on trial. When Beate Klarsfeld read the documents from Munich prosecutors ending proceedings against Barbie, she felt that her life’s work was in danger. She feared that the argument that Barbie had known nothing about the fact of those deported could also be applied to Lischka and Hagen.34 The Klarsfelds immediately informed Résistance fighter groups, whose role model, Jean Moulin, Barbie had tortured to death, and organized opposition to the Munich prosecutors. Everywhere in France, newspapers reported that the case against Barbie had been dropped, and there were a number of protest demonstrations. With public pressure mounting in France, Superior Prosecutor Manfred Ludolph decided to signal his willingness to compromise, inviting Beate Klarsfeld to his office and offering to cooperate with her. If she could succeed in proving that Barbie knew what would happen to the deportees, he would reopen the proceedings against him. As a sign of good will, Ludolph shared information about the case with her. That was how Klarsfeld learned that the suspect was living in Bolivia under the name of Altmann. She even received a copy of the photo the embassy 33 Here and in the following Klarsfeld, Wherever, pp. 3-159; Klarsfeld/Klarsfeld, Erinnerungen, pp. 298-322; Brunner, Frankreich-Komplex, pp. 280-314; Klein, ‘Repräsentationen’. 34 Stahl’s Interview with Beate Klarsfeld, 25 May 2010.

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had passed along. Ludoph also gave her John’s contact details, and friends of his informed the couple that Altmann had recently moved to Peru.35 A short time later, the Klarsfelds presented Ludolph with a witness who said he had heard Barbie say: ‘Shot dead or deported, it makes no difference’. The case was reopened.36 But West German authorities still believed that they couldn’t take any further measure before the transitional treaty came into force in France and the Federal Republic. As a result, the Klarsfelds decided to demand that the French government file for Barbie’s extradition. Serge Klarsfeld approached the military commissioner in the French prime minister’s cabinet, who had been his superior officer during his own military service, and gave him the information from Munich, hoping that he would pass it on to the military court.37 It wasn’t the first time French authorities had heard that Barbie was in South America. Back in 1963, in the course of queries toward France, the Central Office in Ludwigsburg had shared the results of the interrogation of Barbie’s cousin.38 But at that juncture, the pursuit of war crimes had hit its preliminary zenith in France. In December 1962, after pressure from Bonn, France had pardoned and released the last two Germans it had imprisoned as war criminals, the former head of police in Paris, Carl Oberg, and the former commander of the Security Service in the French capital, Helmut Knochen. Both had been involved in the deportation of Jews and fight against the Résistance and had been sentenced to death – a sentence that was later commuted into imprisonment.39 It’s understandable that no one in the French government wanted to stir up a problem that had just been laid to rest. But in the early 1970s, the past once again intruded upon the present. In April 1971, the film Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), which dealt with the Vichy regime and French collaboration with the Nazis, met with great resonance, causing a controversy about French history. At the end of that year, shortly before Serge Klarsfeld approached the government, French President Georges Pompidou further fuelled the debate with a dismissive remark about the Résistance, putting himself under pressure. 40 35 Klarsfeld, Wherever, pp. 225-246. 36 Rabl (StA München II) to ZSL, 26 January 1972, in Barch, B 162, vol. 3396. 37 Klarsfeld, Wherever, pp. 246 ff. 38 Hoyos, Barbie, pp. 175 ff. 39 Moisel, Frankreich, pp. 159-167. 40 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 98-116.

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The Klarsfelds hoped to profit from this situation since it was unlikely that Pompidou, who had not been part of the Résistance, would dare risk another such affront. But at first nothing happened. In mid-January 1972, when Serge Klarsfeld repeated his request, the files he had passed along were still at the Defence Ministry. Because he and his wife, having subjected the photographs to biometric evaluation, now had positive proof that Altmann and Barbie were one and the same person, they succeeded in convincing the editors of L’Aurore to run an article with a picture of Altmann. On 19 January 1972, the newspaper proclaimed: ‘The former Nazi Klaus Barbie has fled to Peru after being a resident in Bolivia for a long time – will France request his extradition?’41 The report attracted attention around the world, and that had an effect. President Pompidou and his foreign minister, who were on a trip to Africa at the time, immediately ordered that France would apply for Barbie’s extradition. 42 The Klarsfelds now saw their task as to convince Peruvian authorities that Altmann was Barbie and to approve his extradition. In late January, Beate Klarsfeld travelled to Lima, where she presented government representatives and the press with her evidence of Altmann’s real identity and the crimes he had committed.43 But her trip didn’t have the intended effect. Before she arrived in Lima, the police showed up at Barbie’s friend Schwend’s house and told Barbie to leave the country, because a woman was coming from France to stir up trouble. He was brought to the border with Bolivia, where a police commando met him and took him to La Paz. 44 When Beate Klarsfeld heard of his flight, she followed him but was deported a short time later. Three weeks afterwards, she again set off for Bolivia to lend her support to the extradition request, which Pompidou had personally made to the Bolivian government in early February. This time she was accompanied by Itta Halaunbrenner, who had lost several of her children to anti-Jewish persecution. Again, Klarsfeld didn’t restrict her activities to traditional forms of exerting political influence like press conferences and lobbying, availing herself of methods from the student protest movement as well. Together with the almost 70-year-old Madame Halaunbrenner, she chained herself to a bench in front of Transmaritima headquarters and held up signs describing Barbie’s crimes and calling on the government to extradite him. 45 41 Klarsfeld, Wherever, p. 248. 42 FS Botschaft Paris to AA und BMJ, 4 February 1972, in Barch, B 141, vol. 25693/b. 43 Klarsfeld, Wherever, pp. 250-252. 44 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Barbie, August 1979, in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 45 Klarsfeld, Wherever, pp. 263-273.

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Wiesenthal, who initially approved of this second generation of Nazi hunters, was less than pleased about these new methods. He complained to a friend: You can’t solve these matters in the manner of partisans […] A government apparatus never responds as quickly as you’d like, so it would have been important to get prominent members of the Résistance in France to pressure the government into taking energetic action […] If we had used Klarsfeld’s methods in the case of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, he’d still be living in São Paulo. 46

The dividing lines were clear: using various forms of public protest versus behind-the-scenes lobbying, blaming-and-shaming strategies versus covert influence on the work of responsible governmental departments. Nazi hunters would continually fight about the proper way to proceed in the years that followed. The politicization of the Barbie case in Bolivia Herbert John found the public attention Klarsfeld’s action generated for the topic of Nazi fugitives very convenient. In January 1972, Luis Banchero, the owner of the Peruvian newspaper John worked for, had been murdered. John suspected a Nazi organization of being behind the killing. He had been convinced for years that such an organization existed and believed that it included Barbie, Schwend, Mengele, and Bormann. The reports accompanying the location of Barbie gave him the opportunity to generate publicity for his conspiracy theory. In early March, a Lima newspaper ran with the headline: ‘The feared Dr Mengele may have been involved in Luis Banchero’s murder.’47 At first this was nothing more than a rumour among many. But in midApril, John succeeded in convincing a former business partner of Schwend to testify in front of the investigating judge in the Banchero case. The witness may have been unable to give any details about the murder, but his testimony was enough for a search warrant. He and his former partner had been involved in illegal business dealings. 48 The papers the police confiscated in Schwend’s house didn’t provide any clarity about Banchero’s killing, but 46 Wiesenthal to Moskovits, 19 April 1972, in SWA, Akt Barbie 2. 47 Expreso (Lima), 4 March 1972. 48 Linklater, Fourth Reich, pp. 249-254; Thorndike, Banchero, S. 392-394.

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they seemed to confirm that, as John had maintained, there was a band of Nazis operating throughout South America under the business name Estrella. Authorities not only found a list of addresses including those of many Nazi criminals and activists, including Rudel, Skorzeny, and Rauff, but also a protocol of what was allegedly an Odessa meeting. The documents also showed that Schwend and Barbie had been involved with Estrella in Merex’s arms deals. 49 John had no access to the confiscated documents, but with the help of an informant, he succeeded in learning the details that interested him.50 When the Klarsfelds learned about the cache of information, the Barbie case, which had receded somewhat in the eye of the French public, once again came into the spotlight. Back in late 1971, she’d received a memorandum from a friend of John in Munich in which John expounded his theory.51 Beate Klarsfeld now went public with that memo. By late May, newspapers around the world were reporting about it.52 John’s contention that there were connections between former Nazis and South American governments and the information from Schwend’s archive were of interest not only to the French public but also, and perhaps primarily, to representatives of the South American political Left. In August 1971, right-wing Bolivian soldiers had toppled the leftist military junta under President Juan José Torres and installed Hugo Banzer as head of state, whose regime sought to solidify itself with a number of repressive measures. The idea that this right-wing dictatorship might be in cahoots with fugitive Nazis seemed plausible and soon began to spread. One good example of this is an article by a correspondent for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, which ran two weeks after Klarsfeld’s press conference about John’s memorandum in Die Tat – the newspaper for victims of the Nazi regime and one of the few German press organs that was critical of Nazi elites being reintegrated into German society. The correspondent wrote that Barbie was playing a major role in Bolivian politics. The former SS man was dealing in weapons – an assertion based on the documents seized from Schwend – and there were indications that he had supplied Banzer, 49 Adressliste und Odessa-Protokoll, in AHIS, Schwend-Archiv, Ordner 18/95; See procedure in ibidem, Ordner 4/30. The files confiscated in 1972 were sold to the AHIS in the 1990s. Copies of them are located in the Fritz Bauer Institute. On Barbie’s involvement in the arms trade see Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 249-272. 50 Gedächtnisprotokoll Schneider-Merck (Lima) ‘Angelegenheit Schwend’, 31 May 1972, in SWA, Akt Barbie 3. 51 Klarsfeld, Wherever, p. 265, printed in Klarsfeld, Barbie-Altmann, pp. 139-143. 52 ANSA, May 30, 1972 and 3 June 1965.

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too. Following John’s memorandum, the author claims that together with hundreds of ‘prominent ex-Nazis’ in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, Barbie was part of an organization for ‘protecting people from having their pasts examined’. The author concluded his article by asking: ‘What powers are represented by Altmann-Barbie, himself just a cog in the machine, so that the current Bolivian regime deems it “generous” to take up his cause?’53 With no end to the reports about the Bolivian government cooperating with reputed Nazi organizations, the Banzer regime felt compelled to publish a denial. In it, the government argued that it had ‘nothing to do with any groups or organizations’ that agitated for ‘German National Socialism’. The government also explicitly denied supporting or being supported by such organizations.54 But soon reports based on eyewitness testimony appeared that the former head of the Security Police in Lyon was working for the Banzer regime – as an advisor on interrogation methods. Die Tat, which was following the Barbie case with keen interest, concluded from this that ‘Gestapo practices […] made in Germany’ had established themselves in Bolivia.55 From Chilean exile, Bolivia’s ex-president Juan José Torres even spoke of concentration camps the Bolivian government had allegedly set up, concluding that the same sort of fascism that had once subdued Europe had come to power in his own country.56 The comparisons weren’t completely pulled from thin air. Ten years later, after a change of political power, the Bolivian Interior Ministry investigated Barbie’s activities in the country and found that he had in fact advised the Bolivian army on questions of domestic security. Barbie had enjoyed the rank of a colonel.57 Just as Wiesenthal and the anti-Peronists in Argentina had perceived Nazi criminals as a threat, the Bolivian opposition saw them as a danger for their country’s domestic security. The Barbie case was no longer only about the European past. It concerned current political conditions in Bolivia. The significance it had for Bolivian dissidents dovetailed with the Klarsfelds’ interests. On her trips to South America, Beate Klarsfeld had been forced to acknowledge that journalists there knew very little about the Second World War and the kind of crimes Barbie was accused of committing. She concluded: 53 Die Tat, June 17, 1972. 54 Cited in Soledad, Chile, p. 338. 55 Die Tat, 5 May 1972. 56 Klarsfeld, Barbie-Altmann, p. 55. 57 Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 316-323; Linklater, Fourth Reich, p. 267; Sánchez, Barbie, pp. 157 ff.

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We had long talks, and I told them about the Gestapo, National Socialism, the Résistance, and the concentration camps […] How could I expect the Bolivians to extradite Altmann if they weren’t convinced that he was in fact Barbie, a criminal who had done what he had done within a pitiless police machinery and a hated dictatorship?’

By comparing the Banzer and Hitler regimes, she hoped she could solve this problem.58 That was precisely what she did. After several months passed since the French request for extradition without a Bolivian response, the Klarsfelds decided to try to abduct him. Fortunately for them, they knew Régis Debray, a Frenchman with excellent contacts in the Bolivian underground. The guerilla theorist had fought at Che Guevara’s side for the communist National Liberation Army59 and had been imprisoned after Guevara’s murder in 1967. It wasn’t until late 1971 that he was released after French government intervention and gone into Chilean exile as many Bolivian critics of Banzer had done. At the Klarsfelds’ request, he recruited a small group of dissidents to kidnap Barbie. The men Debray found were less interested in apprehending a Nazi criminal than getting hold of a member of the Bolivian apparatus of repression. But just as Beate Klarsfeld had used analogies between Bolivia and the Third Reich to sensitize the public to the Barbie case, the South American underground f ighters wanted to use the abduction to draw Europe’s attention to the problems in their country. Debray later said that they had wanted to win the ‘solidarity of foreign countries’ and to gain international recognition for the National Liberation Army.60 But the mission was destined to fail. During the preparations for the abduction, one of the participants was involved in a serious car accident. A short time later, a military junta under Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile, depriving the transatlantic alliance of Barbie hunters of their operational basis.61 Nonetheless, momentum was gradually building for Barbie’s extradition. In August 1972, Bolivia’s highest court ruled that the district court in La Paz had jurisdiction over the case.62 The prosecutor assigned to it concluded that Altmann and Barbie must be one and the same person. In early March 1973, more than a year after the French extradition request had been filed, 58 Klarsfeld, Barbie-Altmann, p. 106. 59 Ejército de Liberación Nacional. 60 Cited in Schreiber, Ertl, p. 261. 61 Sánchez, Barbie, pp. 57-66; Klarsfeld/Klarsfeld, Erinnerungen, pp. 349-351. 62 Informe de la Corte Superior del Distrito de La Paz to Corte Suprema de Justicia, 8 August 1973, printed in Torre, Altmann/Barbie, pp. 105-112.

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he summoned Barbie for questioning and subsequently had him arrested. In his report to the district court, he felt compelled to justify himself as only following the law: ‘After the true identity of Klaus Altmann had been credibly determined, I couldn’t do anything else.’63 In jail, Barbie was initially left to fend entirely for himself in the prison yard. Ultimately a fellow prisoner would offer him a cell in exchange for money, but he would have to provide the door lock himself. A friend brought Barbie mattresses and blankets. In mid-July, he was temporarily freed when the Supreme Court ruled his incarceration illegal because Bolivia had no extradition treaty with France. The prosecutor who had ordered his arrest had, in Barbie’s words, ‘got it rammed down his throat’ by the judges. But Barbie’s illegal business dealings, which had come to light when Schwend’s house was searched, had led to a further case against him in Peru. Peru had also filed an extradition request, so Barbie was re-arrested.64 The second arrest shattered Barbie’s confidence. He was convinced that the French government had bribed prosecutors.65 When he was released in October 1973, after the Peruvian extradition request had been denied, he began to use his connections to counteract what he thought were the machinations of bribed officials. He contacted a friend and was told that the prosecutor who worked with the Supreme Court in Sucre, which he presumed would be responsible for extradition requests, belonged to a secret lodge. Barbie asked his friend to talk to Admiral Orlando Roca, with whom he had worked together in establishing the Transmaritima. He had great influence on the lodge, Barbie said, adding that ‘as long as things in Sucre hadn’t been officially settled’, he would have no peace of mind.66 The friend did as he was asked and found Roca to be completely amenable. Roca also tried to convince the French vice-consul in Sucre that the extradition request was doomed to fail. Barbie was very happy about that. He wrote: ‘I hope the vice consul is sensible and reads through the relevant Bolivian laws. Then he’ll see that, judicially, the case is clear (in my favour) and tell his ambassador as much’.67 Barbie’s correspondence from this period doesn’t give any indication of whether these activities were the end of his attempts to intervene in the case against him and whether they had any success. The idea of things being 63 Informe de Ledezma Rojas (Fiscal de Distrito to Corte Superior del distrito de La Paz), 8 March 1973, printed in: ibidem, p. 104. 64 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Barbie, August,1979, vol. 3, in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 65 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Barbie, August 1979, vol. 6, in ibidem. 66 Barbie to Gwinner (Bolivia), 22 November 1973, in Barch, NL 1886/1. 67 Barbie to Gwinner (Bolivia), 1 December 1973, in ibidem.

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‘officially settled’ suggests that some sort of unofficial agreement had been reached. But his letters also show that the outcome of the extradition request was not a foregone conclusion. Although he may have been promised that his case would be dealt with favourably and he seems to have felt the law was on his side, he didn’t think he was home and dry. In fact, Barbie’s legal situation was nowhere near as favourable as he may have believed. The new legal code, which had come into force in March 1974 a few months before his case was heard, contained several new rules concerning extradition – and they favoured the French position. Since there was no formal extradition treaty between the two countries, the proceedings focused on the question of whether extradition was even possible. The criminal code specified that extradition could only take place if ‘an international treaty or reciprocity agreement’ was in place. The formulation in the rules governing criminal trials was similar. The Bolivian government was allowed to deport people to states that had given ‘reciprocity assurances’ if ‘the crime was one covered under international treaties’.68 The French prosecutor believed that these criteria had been fulfilled since the French request had been made together with assurances that France would extradite to Bolivia under similar circumstances. In international legal assistance, such formulations are common instruments allowing for extradition in the absence of larger treaties. Moreover, the prosecutor argued, the extradition of war criminals had been the subject of numerous international treaties, such as the Mexico City Agreement, which Bolivia had signed. Conversely, Barbie’s defense lawyers argued that in requests for extradition in the absence of an extradition treaty Bolivian law had to be respected, and according to it, Barbie’s crimes fell under the statute of limitations. But this line of reasoning was based on a paragraph from the previous criminal code that had not been retained in the new one.69 The Bolivian prosecutor general came to a completely different conclusion. Without reference to the wording of the paragraphs concerned, he declared that under Bolivian criminal law and regulations, a formal extradition treaty was absolutely necessary. He also dismissed the relevance of the Mexico City Agreement since it included a clause stating that it was only applicable if it led to the conclusion of a formal extradition treaty. That argument was no more accurate to the wording of the sources than the first one. In Mexico, 68 Cited in Torre, Altmann/Barbie, pp. 26 and 28. 69 Here and in the following Requerimiento de Baldivieso Guzmán (Fiscal General de la República), 8 March 1974, in: ibidem, pp. 113-127.

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the signees had agreed to translate the agreement into national law. There was no mention of the necessity of any extradition treaty.70 The judges at the Bolivian Supreme Court argued with greater transparency although the end result remained the same. In contrast to the French perspective, they thought that the reciprocity agreement mentioned in the criminal code could only be valid in the form of a law. In any case, a declaration issued by the French government didn’t suffice. This very narrow definition of the term ‘agreement’71 is surprising since it was also used to describe far less formal arrangements between two states. The Supreme Court also rejected the possibility admitted under the criminal procedure code of a reciprocity declaration. The relevant article in the code, argued the judges, didn’t establish a ‘compelling’ norm. On the contrary it allowed ‘room for interpretation’ in how or even whether it should be applied. For that reason, it had to be considered part of the ‘system of diplomatic or administrative extradition’ that Bolivia didn’t recognize. Bolivia, the judges found, was governed by the ‘judiciary system’ which required the ratification of a contract or treaty as a basis for extradition.72 In light of the fact that both Bolivia’s prosecutor general and its highest judges ignored and invalidated the letter of the law in their arguments, it’s impossible not to think that they wanted to prevent Barbie’s extradition at all costs. It’s quite possible of course that Barbie’s defense strategy to the media had had the desired effect on judges appointed by the Banzer government, which like Beate Klarsfeld and the Bolivian opposition drew comparisons between events in Europe and South America. Just as Bolivian security forces had defeated the guerilla of Che Guevara, Barbie had once saved a country from communism.73 It was possible that his contacts with the military had helped him. In any case, the Supreme Court’s judgement confirmed the beliefs of those convinced that South American dictators were protecting Nazi criminals and using their know-how. Shortly after the proceedings, Barbie once again caused a stir. Journalists had spotted him in Paraguay together with Rudel, a close friend of President Stroessner. For Gustavo Sánchez, an oppositional Bolivian journalist who had been involved in the preparations to abduct Barbie, it was obvious why Barbie would be in Paraguay: ‘The trips that Barbie alias Altmann undertook 70 Resolución 6 del Acta Final de la Conferencia Interamericana, in, AMREC, accessed 4 January 2011, http://archivo.cancilleria.gov.ar/documentos_noticias/octubre_09/actachapultepec.pdf. 71 Convenio. 72 Auto Supremo, 6 December 1974, in Torre, Altmann/Barbie, pp. 129-135. 73 Pappenheim (Embassy La Paz) to AA, 4 February 1972, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1351.

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[…] were always connected with the fascist cooperation in America […] Meetings like this don’t bother American authorities. But for Latin Americans they represented a danger. The fascists will never stop being enemies of peoples and democracy.’74 France used the report as an occasion to request Barbie’s extradition of Paraguay as well.75 As a result the Paraguayan Interior Ministry 76 charged the notoriously repressive Investigations Division with looking into the evidence against Barbie. The division member who did this research learned that Rudel had reserved Barbie’s room in the Grand Hotel Paraguay. But it turned out that the suspect had returned to Bolivia on 14 February, two days before the French request had been received.77 Those results were in a way problematic for the Paraguayan government and they were passed on in their entirety to the French embassy.78 But no mention was made of the fact, as Barbie testified later, that both he and Rudel had been received by the Paraguayan president.79 Human rights activism and the hunt for Nazis Barbie wasn’t the only Nazi criminal whose connections to the right-wing military dictatorships of South America commanded public attention in 1974. Schwend’s files also focused the spotlight on another criminal, whose name was found on an address list in the confiscated archive but who had almost been forgotten: Walther Rauff.80 In august 1972, a Daily Mail article speculating on the connections between the South American ‘Nazi mafia’ and the drug trade, Rauff was named as a possible member of the organization.81 Wiesenthal decided the time was ripe to go after him again and immediately wrote to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg: ‘I think that now there’s a certain chance of putting pressure on the socialist

74 Sánchez, Barbie, pp. 157 ff. 75 Embassade de France au Paraguay, 16 February 1974, in MRREE, DPI, Notas recibidas y remitidas 1974, Embapar/Belgica/Francia/et al. 76 Departamento de Investigaciones. 77 Nuñez (Director Registro de Extranjeros) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 28 February 1974, in CDyA, 25 F 1380 f. 78 MRREE to Embajada de Francia, 8 March 1974, in MRREE, DPI, Notas recibidas y remitidas 1974, Embapar/Belgica/Francia/et al. 79 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Barbie, August 1979, vol. 1, in Privatarchiv Heidemann. 80 Adressliste, in AHIS, Schwend-Archiv, Ordner 18/95. Rauff and Schwend had met in the late 1950s in Lima. 81 Daily Mail, 7 August 1972.

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government in Chile’.82 Because Rauff’s whereabouts were already known, Wiesenthal didn’t have to worry about secrecy and initiated a campaign against him. The first step was a letter personally addressed to President Salvador Allende, asking him to review the decision from 1963.83 Wiesenthal also paid visits to the Chilean ambassador to Austria and his deputy – a Jew, as he noted with confidence – in Vienna and had a long conversation with them about Rauff.84 It seems that the politically conservative Nazi hunter enjoyed putting pressure on Allende’s left-wing alliance, which had come to power in 1970. In any case, he sought to exploit the Chilean government’s political orientation. After sending off his letter to Allende, he also contacted the president of the Socialist International, Austria’s Bruno Pittermann. It had always been speculated, Wiesenthal wrote, ‘that the prevailing political conditions in Chile were the reason’ that extradition requests had been refused. But now there was ‘a democratic government in Chile with a socialist as president’ and a governing coalition containing a party that was a member of the International. Wiesenthal asked Pittermann to use his influence to ensure that Rauff, who was ‘in close contact with the National Socialist community all over South America’, would not escape his just punishment.85 Wiesenthal also told Israel’s ambassador in Vienna that the members of Allende’s Frente Popular now had ‘the chance to show that they’re true democrats’ after ‘always complaining that Chile only ever had undemocratic and dictatorial governments at the helm’.86 Chile took Wiesenthal’s letters very seriously, which is probably why Allende’s response was so cryptic. In order for the case to be reopened, Allende wrote, a new extradition request would have to be filed via diplomatic channels, and the Chilean judicial system alone would decide upon it. He as president could not exert any influence whatsoever. It was also not in his power to reinstigate proceedings that had been concluded. Nonetheless, Allende wrote, that should not prevent ‘the heinous crimes committed by National Socialism and its servants from being brought to justice’. Allende assured Wiesenthal he had always admired his ‘stubbornness in the pursuit of criminals’, but didn’t know what else he could do. Allende concluded: 82 Wiesenthal to Rückerl (ZSL), 9 August 1972, in SWA, Akt Rauff 1. 83 Wiesenthal to Allende, 21 August 1972, in ibidem. The correspondence between Wiesenthal and Allende are reprinted in Farías, Nazis, p. 294. 84 Wiesenthal to Patisch (Israeli Ambassador, Vienna), 19 August 1972, in SWA, Akt Rauff 1. 85 Wiesenthal to Pittermann (President of the Socialist International), 29 August 1972, in ibidem. 86 Wiesenthal to Patisch (Israeli Ambassador, Vienna), 29 August 1972, in ibidem.

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‘I truly regret it, my dear Mr Wiesenthal, that my answer to your request has to be negative’.87 Allende’s letter left room for the interpretation that a further official extradition request might have chances of success. In the absence of any other alternatives, Wiesenthal sent an as optimistic as possible summary of Allende’s letter to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. ‘As you’ll see from its contents’, wrote Wiesenthal, ‘Allende encourages us to f ile another extradition request’.88 German justice officials didn’t interpret the letter as positively as Wiesenthal and got the embassy in Santiago involved.89 At a meeting with the Chilean foreign minister, an embassy member was told that the Foreign Ministry was prepared to forward an extradition request to the judicial system, but that the courts considered the case closed and probably wouldn’t agree to reopen it. Novoa, who had represented the embassy in the first proceedings against Rauff also considered a second request hopeless. For that reason, embassy members considered whether it was possible to get Rauff’s Chilean residence permit revoked.90 But this option, too, was discarded after a confidential talk with the Chilean Foreign Ministry. For a criminal to be deported, it had to be shown that he had committed crimes in Chile. Even if a ‘leftist state administrator’ approved of revoking Rauff’s right of residence, he could always appeal. The Foreign Ministry also noted that Wiesenthal had given an unfortunate recent press conference, in which he had declared: ‘It’s well known that South American presidents constantly give instructions to their courts’. Moreover, Wiesenthal had accused Allende of being complicit with the National Socialists. Such statements weren’t heard favourably in Chile, the foreign ministry stressed.91 The Chilean philosopher Victor Farías has levelled precisely these charges in his most recent publications, which read Allende’s academic writings from the 1930s for similarities to Nazi ideology. Farías sees the Rauff episode as proof of the former president’s ideological proximity to National Socialism and even claims that Allende presented himself as a ‘committed beneficiary of one of the greatest Nazi criminals humanity has ever known’ and that he ‘directly and intentionally protected Rauff’.92 But Farías overlooks the fact 87 Allende to Wiesenthal, n.d., in ibidem. On the following see Schneppen, Rauff, pp.161-167. 88 Wiesenthal to Rückerl (ZSL), 24 October 1972, in SWA, Akt Rauff 1. 89 BMJ to AA, 3 January 1973, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 90 Vermerk Kaufmann-Bühler (Embassy Santiago), 19 January 1973; Kaufmann-Bühler an AA, 29 January 1973, in ibidem. 91 Botschaft Santiago to AA, 16 March 1973, in ibidem. 92 Farías, Allende, pp. 14 and 17. His judgement was somewhat more moderate in his previous work, see Farías, Nazis, pp. 291-314. Cüppers does not take up Farías’ argument of ideological

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that for legal reasons a West German extradition request was hopeless and that in all probability Rauff would have been able to successfully appeal against any attempt to deport him.93 Leaving aside the legal obstacles, the political conditions in 1973 – and not the ideological aff inities – were likely the reason why the Allende government wasn’t interested in a West German request that Rauff be stripped of Chilean citizenship. It’s entirely possible that the information the foreign ministry gave to the West German embassy was intended to avoid the conflict with the Chilean judicial system, which such a request would have inevitably caused. Even before the confidential conversation, embassy members had speculated that an executive order stripping Rauff of his citizenship could be interpreted as an ‘insult to the Supreme Court by the government’.94 By making such a decision, the government would have further fuelled an ongoing debate about the Chilean judicial system, which left-wingers criticized as a relic from earlier eras biased toward the bourgeoisie. The Rauff case was part of this debate. In July 1972, even before Wiesenthal’s campaign, a play entitled ‘The Giant Statute of Limitations’ by the German émigré Gerardo Werner had been performed in Santiago’s most prestigious theatre. The play, which was about the extradition proceedings against Rauff, had got massive publicity and had been critical of the Chilean judicial system.95 The majority of the judges on the Supreme Court were every sceptical about Allende and sympathized with the conservative forces for whom the military was increasingly acting as a mouthpiece.96 In mid-1973, the Chilean government was in an extremely precarious position. It hadn’t succeeded in winning a congressional majority in elections that March, and Chilean society was becoming frightfully polarized. In this situation, the government couldn’t afford a conflict with the highest judicial authorities. That would only have offered the government’s numerous critics another issue with which to delegitimize the socialist project. The same was true of the government’s relationship to the military, which, because of the tension, also took on government functions as of late 1972 and which had proximity but he attests Allende’s desinterest in the case, which he explains with the fact that Allende and Rauff knew each other. However, he does not take into consideration the serious obstacles against a process of expatriation (Cüppers, Walther Rauff, pp. 348-352). 93 Kletten, ‘Nachgeschichte’, pp. 6 ff. 94 Kaufmann-Bühler (Embassy Santiago) to AA, 29 January 1973, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 95 Botschaft Santiago to AA, 11 July 1972, in ibidem. 96 Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, Tomo 1, pp. 35 and 85 ff.

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already made it clear after the first extradition request in the early 1960s that it attached considerable symbolic value to Rauff not being extradited. In the second half of 1973, social tension in Chile worsened, and on 11 September, the military staged a putsch against Allende. Against the backdrop of the military junta’s extraordinarily brutal attacks on supporters and members of the deposed government, Rauff’s presence in Chile accrued a new significance. In late May 1974, reports appeared in various newspapers around the world that Rauff had been appointed a main advisor to Colonel Hector Sepúlveda, the director of the DINA.97 In subsequent years, this nascent intelligence service would be the main instrument of Chile’s new rulers for fighting ‘subversive elements’. The mistaken reference to Hector Sepólveda, and not the actual head of DINA Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, shows how unknown this apparatus of repression was at this point.98 The reports attracted particular interest in the United States, where criticism was growing of the US government’s policy toward Chile. Information had surfaced that the CIA had been involved in destabilizing the Allende government. This sort of intervention in the affairs of other countries in the interests of ‘containing Communism’ were nothing new – they were part of Washington’s political repertoire. But the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974 had sensitized the American public to the CIA’s illegal activities. It became known that former intelligence service operatives had been working for the government as so-called plumbers, using illegal methods to prevent potentially damaging information from leaking. Nixon had asked the CIA to help conceal their activity. At precisely the zenith of the debate about the CIA, the intelligence service’s attempt to destabilize Chile emerged. Together with the Watergate scandal, it suggested that the government was conducting illegal operations at home and abroad in an effort to shore up its own power. In this context, the mere hint that Rauff had worked for the military junta suff iced to underscore the sort of company Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger kept. Critics of the Republican government often mentioned Rauff. At a demonstration in Boston, for instance, two students performed an imaginary conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in which the former congratulated the latter on ruling Chile with an iron fist and availing himself of help from a Nazi criminal.99 97 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional. 98 Subkomitee, Rauff, S. 3. 99 The Harvard Crimson, 26 October 1974, accessed 4 January 2011, www.thecrimson.com/ article/1974/10/26/a-new-life-pbabt-a-demonstration.

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The US debate about the change of power in Chile also resonated elsewhere. In the early 1970s, government representatives, commentators, and political activists increasingly emphasized that human rights should determine foreign policy and that benefited the causes of transnational human rights organizations. For them, protest against the oppressive policies of the Chilean military junta was a watershed. On the one hand, it created or cemented networks that crossed national boundaries and included a wide variety of organizations. On the other, it gave their demands a broad public echo – something that was not only a consequence of the debates about CIA activities. Many leftist groups and members of the generation that had been politically socialized by the student protests of the late 1960s had hoped that Allende’s socialist project would succeed and refused simply to accept that those hopes had been dashed. As a result, initiatives of solidarity with the approximately 200,000 Chilean refugees and the campaigns against the regime in Santiago arose in Europe, North and South America, and even Australia. The Chile solidarity movement was no longer prepared to adhere to the established structures of the Cold War and worked together with institutions in the Warsaw Pact, where many of the Chilean exiles had found sanctuary.100 One of the movement’s initiatives was the International Commission on the Investigation of Junta Crimes in Chile,101 which brought together NGOs like Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, Chilean exiles, and influential people from both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the 1970 and 1980s, the commission staged a number of public tribunals with representatives from both the West and the East who tried to uncover human rights violations in Chile.102 During these events, the name Rauff also cropped up. In late February 1975, at a commission conference in Mexico City, several Chilean exiles appeared as witnesses and testified that Rauff was working as DINA advisor. One of the lawyers who supported the commission’s work was the New York law professor John H.E. Fried, who had emigrated to the US during the Second World War and had served as an advisor at the Nuremberg Trials. After hearing the testimony, he contacted Wiesenthal and asked him to share his expertise concerning fugitive Nazi criminals.103 100 Eckel, ‘Lupe’; Kelly, ‘Awake’; Stern, Battling, pp. 33-76; Nolte, ‘Cono Sur’, pp. 40 ff.; Berger, Solidarität; Wurm, ‘Solidarität’. 101 Comisión Internacional Investigadora de los Crímenes de la Junta Militar en Chile. 102 Kelly, ‘Awake’, pp. 14-21; Stuby, ‘Unterdrückung’, pp. 774 ff. 103 Fried to Wiesenthal, 3 March 1975, in SWA, Akt Rauff 1.

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Wiesenthal had a hard time believing the rumours and considered them a product of ‘Communist propaganda’. After all, East German media had helped spread the reports.104 He also didn’t believe that a South American country would need the help of a 69-year-old ‘to be skilled in barbarism’.105 On that score he was right. It was by no means necessary to point to Rauff to explain the junta’s brutal treatment of supporters of the deposed government, and the military’s policies of repression were odious enough without any participation by the former SS man. Nonetheless, the Rauff case was important to the Chile solidarity movement. The established Jewish institutions were able to use reports about Rauff’s activities to aid their own efforts to see that Nazi criminals were punished. American anthropologist and Chile activist John Cole approached Wiesenthal, declaring: I share your interest in bringing war criminals to justice, and I am also personally concerned about the rise of neo-Nazis such as the junta in Chile where friends have been imprisoned, tortured and killed for political and religious reasons. If this story [about Rauff’s activities] could be confirmed and exposed I think it would be worthwhile for both of these goals.106

For that reason, he asked for help in checking and publishing the information. Although Wiesenthal had no means of carrying out investigations of his own in Chile, Cole’s request did not go unheard. Despite his scepticism about the reports, Wiesenthal became convinced that the public interest in the case represented an opportunity to force the US government to act. When he heard Kissinger was planning a South American trip in April 1975, he wrote and asked him to raise the subject of Rauff during his stop in Chile.107 But the State Department thought it inappropriate to get involved, arguing that the extradition of the Nazi criminal was solely a matter for the West German and Chilean justice systems.108 Allusions to Rauff’s activities for DINA did more than just mobilize further activists. They also illustrated the idea that the Chilean military was a fascist regime in the tradition of National Socialism. This argument was key to the Chile solidarity movement’s strategy. By appealing to the anti-Nazi 104 Wiesenthal to Fried, 10 March 1975, in ibidem. 105 Wiesenthal to Cole (Instructor at the Hartwick College), 11 November 1974, in ibidem. 106 Cole (Instructor at the Hartwick College) to Wiesenthal, 31 October 1974, in ibidem. 107 Wiesenthal to Kissinger (Secretary of State), 1 April 1975, in ibidem. 108 Isaacs (Chilean Political Affairs at the State Department) to Wiesenthal, 17 April 1975, in ibidem.

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consensus that was part of the identity of both East and West, the movement could discredit the anti-Communist junta on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The relationship between the junta and National Socialism came to an especial head during the meeting of the International Commission on the Investigation of the Junta in 1976, which was held in Nuremberg no less. In his address about the Chilean policy of disappearance in light of the Nuremberg verdicts, Fried compared the arrests of opposition figures in Chile with the mass deportations under the Nazis and called for criminal prosecution of those responsible along the lines of the Nuremberg Trials.109 Journalist Karl Schabrod, who spent nearly the entirety of the Third Reich opposing the Nazi regime, continued the comparison in his talk about the Gestapo and the DINA.110 At the conclusion of the event, the participants, including Allende’s widow, issued a declaration. It contained the words: ‘The fascist barbarism of National Socialism found its judges. The warning from the Nuremberg Trials never again to allow fascism is a duty for all of humanity.’111 The news about Rauff made this line of argumentation seem plausible. An article in Amnesty International’s magazine read: [The] methods of General Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta, evoke the memory of Hitler’s methods. Indeed, they seem a replica – and not by coincidence: Pinochet belonged to a secret Nazi organization within the armed forces of Chile long before he overthrew the democratically elected Allende government. And he is now aided by at least one of Hitler’s concentration camp administrators [sic!].112

The Chile Solidarity Front in Austria publicly called for action, citing the Nazi criminal’s activities for the Chilean intelligence service. The Front not only demanded a new request for Rauff’s extradition but insisted that an international delegation should visit the torture centres in Chile. Their demands included the appeal: ‘Indifference to events in Chile amounts to complicity in a system that uses the techniques of terror and domination of the Third Reich!’113 109 Fried, ‘Rechtssprechung’. 110 Schabrod, ‘Gestapo’. 111 Abschlusserklärung der Nürnberger Verhandlungen gegen die Verbrechen der Militärjunta in Chile, in Stuby and Wulff, Militärjunta, S. 261. 112 Matchbox. An International Journal on Human Rights, I, 3 (1975), p. 77. 113 SS-Off izier Chefberater des Geheimdienstes der Chilenischen Militärjunta, Aufruf der Chile-Solidaritätsfront, n.d. (ca. Mai 1974) in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777.

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The International Commission took the opportunity presented by the many mentions of Rauff to publish a report on the ‘Chilean junta’s advisor for preparing legal cases against political dissidents’. In it, the commission criticized the Chilean Supreme Court’s decision not to extradite Rauff in 1963 and concluded that it was ‘an expression of fundamental political stance of this organization’. That stance, the commission added, had to be the reason why the commission had ‘hindered the Allende government from exercising its legitimate rights’ and had legitimized a rule of terror. The commission wrote: ‘Things have come full circle: from the exoneration of the Nazi criminal Rauff to support for fascism in its own country and the integration of a mass murderer himself into the junta’s repressive machinery.’114 The former member of the Reich Main Security Office wasn’t the only one whose connections with the junta seemed to prove that the Pinochet regime was following in the tradition of the Third Reich. In the late 1970s, the German-speaking settlement Colonia Dignidad, founded by the sect leader Paul Schäfer, came under suspicion of being both a DINA torture centre and a place of refuge for Nazi criminals. In Bonn, representatives of the settlement had tried to sue Amnesty International for protesting against the colony’s cooperation with the junta. During proceedings in December 1978, a witness who had been imprisoned in the colony testified to a DINA member telling him: ‘Because you’ll never get out of here alive, I can tell you that there’s […] a whole bunch of people who worked together with the Gestapo in the Second World War.’115 One year later, Wiesenthal approached the press, announcing that Mengele was being hidden by Schäfer and his people. Rauff, too, was thought to be connected with the sect.116 There’s no way to say for certain how much truth there was in the reports about the military junta cooperating with Nazi criminals.117 That’s unlikely to change in future since many of the files from Chile’s apparatus of repression have been lost. Historians are forced to rely on oral statements, such as those by the Chilean journalist León Gómez who claimed that he had been tortured by someone with a foreign accent and that after his blindfold slipped he had seen that it was Rauff.118 John Cole told Wiesenthal that a Chilean officer had received orders from Rauff.119 Other reports had Rauff checking through lists of detainees and sending prisoners to camps, 114 Subkomitee, Rauff, p. 4. 115 Cited in Heller, Colonia, p. 186. 116 Soledad, Chile, pp. 301 and 328. 117 About Rauffs contacts with the DINA sie also Schneppen, Rauff, pp. 168-170. 118 Kletten, ‘Nachgeschichte’, p. 7. 119 Cole (Instructor at the Hartwick College) to Wiesenthal, 17 March 1975, in SWA, Akt Rauff 1.

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including the Colonia Dignidad.120 DINA head Manuel Contreras was also said to have given Rauff a list of the military regime’s crimes as a bit of insurance in case he ever lost the favour of those in power.121 Those who find intelligence service reports more trustworthy than oral claims will discover interesting material in the files of the CIA, which began to track press reports of Nazi fugitives in the mid-1970s. One from April 1976 includes the information that according to Chilean émigrés Rauff was working for the Chilean interior Ministry.122 It’s simpler to evaluate the rumours about Mengele since we know today that he lived out his life in constant fear of being discovered in a house on the fringes of São Paulo. Nonetheless, the reports about Barbie and Rauff working for South American military dictatorships created a topos that seemed plausible for Mengele too. People assumed that he spent at least part of his time in Paraguay. The interest people in Europe and North America took in human rights abuses in Latin America had increased markedly since Pinochet’s putsch in Chile, and Stroessner’s dictatorship, which was twenty years old, also started attracting international attention. Within this context, the persecution of Paraguay’s Aché Indians made headlines in the mid-1970s. As a result of land reclamation in the northeast of the country, this tribe, which lived in the wilderness, came under increasing pressure. Large estate owners went after the original inhabitants of the land with help from the military. There were executions, deportations, rapes, and cases of enslavement.123 Richard Arens, a US law professor and member of the International League for Human Rights, reacted to these reports by visiting the country to get an idea of the brutal methods being used against the tribe. What he saw reminded him – a Jew who was born in Lithuania and who fled to the USA in the 1930s – of what he had heard about the Holocaust. A ‘final solution of the Aché question’ was underway, Arens would write. Arens believed that those who called the shots in Paraguay were followers of Nazi ideology, which had been spread in South America by Germans during the Second World War.124 120 Soledad, Chile, p. 301. 121 Heller, Colonia, p. 191. 122 Breitman, ‘Gestapo’, p. 156; Schneppen, Rauff, p. 169. A bit later an agent reported that Rauff had never been politically active or maintained contacts with illegal groups. Breitman is of the opinion that the two reports contradict one another. But working for a state institution is not the same as being politically active, and it’s very questionable whether the author of the CIA report or his informant considered the DINA as an ‘illegal group’. 123 Comisión de Verdad y Justicia, Informe III, pp. 176-192. 124 Arens, ‘Summation’, pp. 140 ff.

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Arens, who would also serve as the Achés’ advocate in the United Nations in the following years, succeeded in convincing leading Jewish personalities to raise their voices on behalf of the threatened Indio tribe. Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, one of the most important pioneers of institutionalized Holocaust remembrance in the US, declared himself willing to write an epilogue for the 1976 International League for Human Rights collection of essays about ‘the genocide in Paraguay’. In it, while rejecting comparisons with the Holocaust, he stated that ‘I read the stories of the suffering and death of the Aché tribe in Paraguay and recognize familiar signs’. He added: ‘Is it pure chance that this is happening in Paraguay? Josef Mengele, the exterminating angel of Birkenau, lives there in peace as an honoured guest. Other Nazi potentates have also found refuge there. To what extent do they collaborate with their protectors?’ That was a rhetorical question. Wiesel went on: ‘How happy they must be to be able to place their talent and experience in the interest of another Final Solution.’125 Wiesel’s words echoed in the media. One 1977 Time magazine article reprinted by a host of other newspapers read: The ugliest speculation about Mengele is that once again he may be involved in the destruction of a people – though on a much smaller scale. Despite Paraguayan denials, TIME’s sources believe that he serves as an adviser to the Paraguayan police and frequently travels to the remote Chaco region where the Ache Indians are being hunted down or reduced to slave labor through techniques that are chillingly reminiscent of those of the German work camps. A high Paraguayan police official boasted to a visiting investigator that his government uses ‘German methods’ in dealing with the Indians.126

The intervention of one of the leading Jewish personalities helped human rights activists get heard, and conversely participating in the campaign on behalf of the Achés was not without significance for Wiesel himself. Events in Paraguay seemed to confirm the idea that universal lessons could be learned from the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, which was how Wiesel sought to establish the significance of Holocaust remembrance. He entitled his epilogue ‘Now We Know’. In Wiesel’s view, people were supposed to learn from the experiences of the Third Reich and avoid repeating the mistake of silently pretending not to see an ongoing genocide.127 Wiesel clearly thought 125 Wiesel, ‘We Know’, p. 166. 126 Time, 27 September 1977. 127 Wiesel, ‘We Know’.

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the arguments he advanced in this short text were important128 because he included it in two compilations of his major writings.129 Noam Chomsky, one of the most important left-wing American intellectuals and critics of the US government, was also happy to adopt Wiesel’s surmises about Mengele’s collaboration with Stroessner. What was for Holocaust remembrance activists an argument for the need to memorialize the mass murder of Jews was for Chomsky proof of the criminal nature of US foreign policy. Chomsky wrote: ‘With a combination of Nazi advisors and racist missionaries acting with the complicity of international corporations, the US government and the press, the future looks bleak for the Aché.’130 When a military junta seized power in Argentina in 1976, it seemed to be only a matter of time until fascism fully conquered South America. Dictators who considered human rights a Communist invention ran governments in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Brasilia, Asunción, and La Paz. The debate over whether South American militaries were employing Nazi fugitives unfolded parallel to this development, so there was every reason to connect the flights of National Socialists to South America and the continent’s lurch to the political right. One good example is the 1977 book Dossier Neo-Nazisme. In it, French reporter and former intelligence service member Patrice Chairoff reprised Wiesenthal’s Odessa theory with references to current events around the world. With the help of SS organizations that aimed at keeping Nazi ideology alive, Chairoff argued, a number of Nazis had gone to South America and infiltrated the continent. They were now involved in fighting leftist guerillas. Barbie, Rauff, and Mengele were only three of the men in question. Nazi criminals were living in other countries as well. In Argentina, for example, Schwammberger, Kutschmann, Ďurćanský, Klingenfuss, Rademacher, and Sepp Janko had all found refuge.131 Harald Frederik Skappel, who was accused of participating in the mass shootings of Jews at Babi Yar, was living in Brazil. Chairoff wasn’t able to say precisely what these fugitives were doing in South America, but that no longer seemed vital to specify. It was generally accepted that Nazi criminals and South American military leaders were natural allies.132 It wasn’t the weight of evidence that had spread this notion. In the 1970s, the public had only isolated indications that Barbie and Rauff were working 128 Chmiel, Wiesel, pp. 52-56. 129 Wiesel, Jew, pp. 38-40; Abrahamson, Silence, pp. 371 ff. 130 Chomsky and Hermann, Washington, p. 113. 131 Sepp Janko was accused by the Yugoslav government of being complicit in the crime of the National Socialists as a ‘people’s group leader’ in Banat, Serbia. 132 Chairoff, Dossier, pp. 4-16 and 389-406.

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for the apparatus of repression in the countries that had taken them in. Everything else was speculation, based on reports about these two Nazi criminals. Nonetheless, the assertion that fugitives from justice were helping the military juntas oppress their own peoples fit in well with the arguments of both human rights activists and dissidents protesting against abuses in Latin America and remembrance activists trying to get people to engage with and learn from the Holocaust. Both groups succeeded in increasingly attracting attention to their causes in the culture of debate in the 1970s when they argued that the Nazi fugitives were reprising their crimes for South American dictators. The demands that Nazi criminals living in South America be prosecuted and the criticism of countries that offered them refuge was no longer just an expression of the public’s increasing interest in the German past. They were also a major element of criticism of South American military juntas’ human rights abuses.

2

Military Junta and Nazi Extradition

The great attention attracted by Nazi fugitives in South America since the discovery of Barbie didn’t fail to have an effect on the attempts of the West German judicial system to pursue them. The reaction of South American government bureaucracies to extradition requests now being filed seemed to confirm that Nazi criminals enjoyed the protection of the military junta. In late 1972, the English thriller writer Frederick Forsyth published his novel The Odessa File, which immediately leapt into the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for weeks. It told the story of a young German journalist hunting for a Nazi who was part of the leadership of an organization of war criminals going by the name Odessa. The goal of this wealthy organization, which was headed by Bormann and located in South America, was the eradication of Israel, toward which it was working with Egypt. The name of the fictional fugitive was taken from Eduard Roschmann, who had been the commandant of the Riga ghetto during the war but who had gone underground years ago. Wiesenthal had been responsible for Forsyth’s decision to use the name of an actual Nazi criminal. His assertion that there was such an SS organization had given the author the idea for his novel, and Forsyth had visited Wiesenthal in 1972 to get more information about Nazi fugitives. Wiesenthal agreed to help but insisted that Forsyth make a real person a central character in his book. In that way, he hoped to draw public attention to the Roschmann case. The publicity, he thought,

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might lead to new tips from the public and put pressure on both the West German judicial system and South American governments.133 The name Roschmann and the description of what he had done in Riga weren’t the only elements of the novel based on real events that would have been familiar to readers in 1972 and 1973. In Britain’s Daily Express, Ladislas Farago, a journalist who was considered an expert on secret services, published an investigative series on ‘Bormann’s Gang’ that attracted global notice. In it, he took up Herbert John’s claim that a Nazi organization was at work in South America. Farago’s articles were based on significant research he had done with John’s help. Among other things, the journalist had got to look at documents that Peruvian authorities had seized from Friedrich Schwend. These journalistic articles contributed to the success of Forsyth’s novels.134 Two years later, the book was made into a film – and the debate about Nazi fugitives still continued and was focusing primarily on Rauff. The huge interest in the purported Nazi organization in South America, which had justified the copious reporting by journalists and had helped make The Odessa File so popular, was an expression of the increasing importance of the Holocaust since the Six Day War. Israel’s war against a supposedly militarily superior alliance of Arab states had called forth renewed fears of a new campaign of annihilation among European and American Jews. Many people saw it as the fulfilment of the scenario that Hitler’s henchmen would become active again someday. In Forsyth’s novel and elsewhere, the activities of German military experts in Egypt had been repeatedly mentioned. The reports about a Nazi organization in South America fit in seamlessly with the idea of an ongoing threat posed by former Nazi elites, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 only made it appear even more pertinent.135 The extradition requests for Eduard Roschmann and Josef Schwammberger The Odessa File’s success had a major impact on the pursuit of Nazi criminals. Even though the many tips that had poured in to Wiesenthal after the publication of the novel hadn’t done much except to fatten up the rather thin file on Roschmann, the case had gained new prominence, and this fact was not lost on Hamburg prosecutors. For ten years they had been investigating the former commandant of the Riga ghetto. Following a tip 133 Wiesenthal, Recht, pp. 129-133; Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 317-321; Walters, Evil, pp. 344-347. 134 Daily Express, 1 December 1972; Der Spiegel, 52/1972. 135 Novick, Holocaust, pp. 195-224; Segev, Siebte Million, pp. 509-520.

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given to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, West German investigators had found out that Roschmann had gone to Argentina after the war and had used a Brazilian address to correspond in 1966. An extradition request to Brazil had been fruitless. Authorities had been unable to locate the fugitive. Since then, nothing more had been done to capture him.136 The lead prosecutor who took over the case in 1973 couldn’t understand why his predecessor had not continued investigating in Argentina after the failed extradition request to Brazil. After all there was evidence of Roschmann’s presence there until 1966.137 He contacted the West German embassy in Buenos Aires and requested that new research be carried out and an evaluation be done of the chances for an extradition request.138 The answer he received in May 1974 gave cause for hope. An embassy member had found out from police that Roschmann had been given Argentinian citizenship in 1968 under the name Federico Wegener. Argentina didn’t extradite its own citizens, but since naturalization had taken place under false circumstances, it could be legally challenged.139 The prosecutor then asked the Federal Justice Ministry and the Foreign Ministry whether they had any objections to filing an extradition request. The prosecutor’s office explicitly stressed that this was an exceptionally important case, writing: ‘Roschmann faces accusations of the most serious crimes in the ongoing investigation of Nazi violence in Riga, Latvia. He’s become internationally known because of the book The Odessa File. This book is being turned into a film’.140 The Hamburg Justice Ministry also stressed to the federal authorities that the book had leant urgency to this case.141 People in the northern German city had every reason to pay attention to the novel. Forsyth’s depiction of Hamburg prosecutors had been anything but flattering, depicting them as corrupt bureaucrats with no genuine interest in prosecuting Nazi criminals. Because the novel was full of well researched facts, it wasn’t easy for readers to distinguish whether this characterization was truth or fiction. Sooner or later, it was felt, the public would want to know what prosecutors had done in the Roschmann case. Forsyth’s novel hadn’t gone unnoticed in the Federal Ministry of Justice either, which often had been told that the book was a best-seller and contained 136 Schneppen, Roschmann, pp. 255-271. 137 Klemm (StA Hamburg) to LKA Niedersachsen, 9 January 1974, in StAHH, 213-12, 0042/008. 138 Klemm (StA Hamburg) to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 10 January 1974, in ibidem. 139 Birmans (Botschaft Buenos Aires) to StA Hamburg, 23 June 1974, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1373. 140 Vermerk Klemm (StA Hamburg), 11 June 1974, in ibidem. 141 Stellwag (Justizamt Hamburg) to BMJ, 28 June 1974, in Justizamt Hamburg, 9351 E – A9 – 1.2.

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content that threatened ‘Germany’s good name’.142 But no one was in a hurry to do anything. While the Justice Ministry also came to the conclusion that it was possible to extradite Roschmann if his naturalization could be revoked or if, as was doubtlessly the case, it had occurred after the deeds he was accused of committing. But it was uncertain ‘whether Argentinian authorities would in fact decide to follow the letter of Argentinian law where the country’s own citizens were concerned’. For that reason the ministry suggested that the embassy commission an evaluation.143 Prosecutors were none too thrilled about the delay this caused and pressed for immediate action. ‘The “Rossmann case”’, they warned, ‘could gain special significance if there were more publications in the press’.144 But such warnings fell on deaf ears. Before the order for an evaluation could be sent from the Justice Ministry to the Foreign Ministry, another month had passed, and when the embassy contacted their usual attorney in Argentina, the German-Argentinian Ulrich Rentsch, it turned out that he was away from work on a visit to the Federal Republic.145 It wasn’t until May 1975, almost one year since the Justice Ministry had raised the matter, that Rentsch was able to start on his evaluation. All the way back in 1969, when West German authorities were considering requesting the extradition of Kutschmann and Alvensleben, he had investigated the issue and come to the conclusion that such a request could succeed even if the men in question had been naturalized. Nothing had changed his opinion in the meantime. While Rentsch conceded that precedent actually ruled out the extradition of Argentinian citizens, even if the crimes they stood accused of committing happened before their naturalization, he thought it would be possible to get their citizenship nullified. To do that, both requests, for extradition and denaturalization, needed to be coupled with one another.146 West German authorities were afraid that Roschmann could only be apprehended after he was stripped of his Argentinian citizenship, but a member of Argentina’s Supreme Court told the embassy that a candidate for extradition could be detained until the final court decision if the Foreign Ministry approved a request that he be turned over.147

142 Consulate New York to AA, 24 January 1973, in Barch, B 141, vol. 34817. See also further correspondence in this file. 143 Vermerk BMJ, 5 July 1974, in ibidem, vol. 24465. 144 Klemm (StA Hamburg) to Justizamt Hamburg, 22 November 74, in StAHH, 213-12, 0042/009. 145 Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 8 May 1975, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1373. 146 Rentsch (Lawyer Buenos Aires) to Botschaft Buenos Aires, 30 June 1975, in ibidem. 147 Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 7 August 1975, in ibidem.

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With the Argentinian legal situation so explicated, prosecutors once more urged immediate action. Again they drew the Hamburg Ministry of Justice’s attention to Forsyth’s novel and the severity of the crimes Roschmann was accused of committing.148 But again others failed to heed the alarm. The Federal Ministry of Justice thought that it wouldn’t hurt the Roschmann case to solicit another opinion or two. So it asked prosecutors in Berlin to forward an evaluation made in 1967 about the chances of an extradition request in the Kutschmann case. Back then Berlin prosecutors had come to the conclusion that such a request would fail because Kutschmann was an Argentinian citizen, a condition that also applied to Roschmann. Because the West German Basic Law forbade the state from extraditing its own citizens, there was no way of issuing the required declaration of reciprocity.149 That was a serious objection. Rentsch, however, had recommended asking not just for Roschmann’s extradition, but his denaturalization as well. After some hemming and hawing, Hamburg prosecutors decided to proceed with the request as planned.150 In August 1976, the Federal Ministry of Justice finally had the complete extradition request. They too concluded that a declaration of reciprocity could be issued once Roschmann was no longer an Argentinian citizen.151 The request stated that ‘in a comparable case in the other direction’ Germany would extradite an Argentinian ‘on the condition that the suspect did not possess Argentinian citizenship at the time when the extradition decision was made and the extradition itself was carried out’.152 In the meantime, a military junta had come to power in Argentina, but there was no visible change in attitude at the legal department of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry. It continued issuing encouraging signals for the West German extradition request just as it had done previously. The director of the legal department of the West Germany embassy, who had requested a face-to-face meeting, was assured that the planned two-prong strategy of simultaneously pursuing extradition and denaturalization might well work. The Argentinian Foreign Ministry also thought it entirely possible that the two proceedings could be coupled so as to prevent Roschmann

148 Klemm (StA Hamburg) to Justizamt Hamburg, 13 August 1975, in HStAHH, 213-12, 0042/009. 149 GStA Berlin to Berliner Senator für Justiz, 19 September 1967, in Justizamt Hamburg, 9351 E – A9 – 1.2. 150 Reitmann (StA Hamburg) to Richter (OstA Hamburg), 16 January 1976, in HStAHH, 213-12, 0042/009. 151 Vermerk Pötz (BMJ) 24 August 1976, in Barch, B 141, vol. 24465. 152 BMJ to AA, 24 August 1976, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1373.

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from being temporarily released from custody. Jörg Kastl, the German embassador, wrote back to Bonn: On the one hand it’s no problem to approach the judge assigned the case via the Ministry of Justice and the prosecutor and ask him not to release Roschmann, even temporarily, once he’s been apprehended. The judge is of course free to make up his own mind […] But if things proceed normally, it would be expected that the judge, once apprised of the entire problematic of the case, would act accordingly.

Kastl also asked the Argentinian side for more time before he officially filed his request, saying he first wanted to consult with the judicial authorities concerned. In October 1976, once he had done so, the official extradition request was made.153 Communication between the West German embassy and the legal division of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry had been good. But communication between Argentinian authorities seemed to be anything but that. At first everything ran smoothly. Denaturalization proceedings were begun, while the relevant presidential office delayed its decision on extradition. In June 1977, when Roschmann was about to be stripped of citizenship, the office decided that the time had come to commence extradition proceedings. Apparently, with a verdict forthcoming in the near future, the Argentinians felt able to accept the complexly worded West German reciprocity declaration. But before this procedure could be brought before the judge appointed to oversee it, the office published its decision in a press statement.154 When Kastl learned of this communiqué, he immediately asked the Foreign Ministry for details, but no one there knew anything. A call to the police stoked fears that Roschmann would flee. The press was already diligently researching the background of the government’s announcement, and the suspect hadn’t even been apprehended yet. Kastl tried in vain to contact the responsible state secretary at the presidential office. He only succeeded in reaching an assistant whom he asked to do everything in his power to keep Roschmann from fleeing.155 A day later, Kastl finally had personal assurances from the state secretary that he would provide the embassy with ‘any and all forms of help’ in the case. The ambassador saw this as a positive sign. He reported to Bonn 153 Kastl (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 21 October 1976, in ibidem. 154 FS Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 6 July 1977, in ibidem. 155 FS Kastl (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 4 July 1977, in ibidem.

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that the ‘extraordinary handling of the extradition request’ quite possibly reflected Argentina’s wish to ‘bury the suspicions of anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi sympathies’ abroad. The breakdown in communications had been the result of an ‘administrative incompetence’ that was not uncommon in Argentina.156 A short time later, the director of the political division of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry called Kastl to express his regret at the ‘mishandling of the case’. The director said he hoped that the mistakes ‘could be repaired by timely action by Argentinian authorities’.157 Nothing of the sort happened. As the Argentinian Foreign Ministry was trying to limit the damage, Roschmann was already on his way to Paraguay, where he arrived on 6 July. But the media whirlwind and his flight had taken their toll on the aged fugitive. For three weeks he resided incognito at a guesthouse in central Asunción, after which his landlady’s son had him admitted to hospital. Two weeks later he died. The very day after his death, the newspaper ABC Color, which was critical of the government, learned who the deceased man really was. Reports now began to surface that made the already problematic activities of Argentinian authorities seem even more dubious. The banned news bulletin of the Montoneros, a left-wing resistance group, wrote that the day before he fled Roschmann had been apprehended by police in Buenos Aires only to be set free. Kastl, who deemed this publication ‘often well informed’, began to doubt the Argentinian government’s good faith. On 6 July the spokesman for the Buenos Aires police denied reports, obviously based on a press statement by a criminal investigator, that police had succeeded in apprehending Roschmann.158 That denial and the Montonero report made it seem ‘plausible’ in Kastl’s eyes that ‘Roschmann had in fact been in hands of the police’, who ‘constantly proved able to act even without an arrest warrant’. The possibility could not be excluded, Kastl wrote, that the premature announcement of the extradition decree was not just the result of incompetent administration but ‘the conscious desire to help Mr Roschmann’ by ‘Argentinian elements’.159 It’s uncertain whether the office of the president responsible for the press statement in fact wanted to give Roschmann the opportunity to flee. Another explanation seems just as plausible. Conventional extradition proceedings were preceded by Interpol issuing an international arrest warrant, so police authorities were already informed before the government 156 FS Kastl (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 5 July 1977, in ibidem. 157 FS Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 6 July 1977, in ibidem. 158 Camarasa, Odessa, p. 253. 159 Kastl (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 8 September 1977, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1373.

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decided on the request and possessed a legal basis for arresting the subject. For that reason, it wasn’t usually necessary for the office of the president to wait to publish a decree until the documents reached the responsible judge, who was then charged with issuing an Argentinian arrest warrant. Officials in the presidential palace may simply have overlooked the fact that in Roschmann’s case Interpol hadn’t issued any arrest warrant. In that case, several days after the approval of the request, an extradition decree would have been published in the off icial government registry. In any case, the premature announcement of the decree concerning Roschmann illustrated the problems that could arise if Interpol refused to cooperate in the pursuit of Nazi criminals. While that may mean that the presidential office didn’t purposely make mistakes in the processing of the extradition request, there is plenty of evidence to suggest at least parts of the police helped Roschmann flee. Among the few things Roschmann left behind was a document that identified him as a member of the Friends of the Argentinian Police.160 And he was by no means the only fugitive who had contacts of this sort. The former ghetto commandant Josef Schwammberger and Josef Vötterl, a former member of an SS Einsatzkommando, also maintained cordial relations with Argentinian law enforcement. Dutchman Jan Olij, who took part in the mass executions in Eastern Europe as a member of the Waffen SS, even served as a police officer.161 The mutual cordiality was not only based on a common professional identity but also on ideological agreement. Under the military dictatorship, sympathy for the Nazi regime was widespread among Argentinian police. Ramón Camps, the police chief of Buenos Aires, was an out-and-out anti-Semite, and many of his subordinates shared his views.162 That was how Jacobo Timerman, a Jewish-Argentinian journalist who was imprisoned by the military junta between 1977 and 1979, learned about the West German extradition request for Roschmann. When it became know that the Argentinian government had approved the request, a number of Timerman’s tormentors came to his cell and tortured him.163 We can thus safely assume that part of the police fore weren’t prepared to arrest Roschmann. 160 Wilker (Embassy Asunción) to StA Hamburg, 8 September 1977, in HStAHH, 213-12, 0042/009. 161 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Vötterl, Juli 1979, in Privatarchiv Heidemann; FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 7 February 1986, in Barch B 162, vol. 18227; Declaración de Olij al Juéz Sanudo, 7 December 1988, in AT, ADAAH, 11-14. 162 CONADEP, Nunca Más, pp. 69-75. See also Schneppen, Roschmann, pp. 292 ff. 163 Timermann, Preso, pp. 99 ff.

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The result of the extradition process completely confirmed, in human rights activists’ eyes, the military junta’s connections with Nazis. That very year, the American liberation theologist and activist Penny Lernoux published her widely regarded book Cry of the People, which excoriated the junta’s anti-Semitism. Argentina, Lernoux argued, was harbouring a number of war criminals who were freely allowed to spread their views. The military junta had led to an outburst of Jew hatred, and while the government persecuted Jews, it allowed Nazi criminals like Roschmann to flee.164 The Argentinian authorities’ handling of the Roschmann case bore a lot of similarities to the processing of West German requests for the extradition of Schwammberger, which had taken place a few years previously under the government of General Alejandro Augustín Lanusse. Lanusse was the last in a series of de facto presidents during the so-called Argentinian revolution, which had deposed the democratically elected government of Arturo Illia in 1966. Lanusse’s government was trying to restore democracy, when in 1973 the extradition request for Schwammberger arrived. Again it was Wiesenthal who got the ball rolling. At some point in 1971, one of his informants had told him that Schwammberger’s son was about to move to Argentina to be with his father, who was probably living in La Plata.165 Wiesenthal passed this information on to the Argentinian organization of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, who with the help of a private detective, succeeded in locating the former concentration camp commandant. He was living openly under his true name.166 Much to Wiesenthal’s irritation, the Argentinian Jews took it upon themselves to act upon this information, going to the Austrian embassy and demanding that Austria request Schwammberger’s extradition.167 Because Schwammberger was no longer an Austrian citizen, authorities in that country were unable to file an extradition request.168 Instead, the West German Interior Ministry forwarded the embassy’s information to prosecutors in Stuttgart. The investigation of Schwammberger, which had been dormant since the mid-1960s, was reopened. Prosecutors prepared an extradition request, which the Foreign Ministry handed over to the embassy in Buenos Aires in January 1973. But this case too showed how easy to disrupt extradition requests were without the support of Interpol. 164 Lernoux, Cry, pp. 341-349. 165 Notiz, n., d., in SWA, Akt Schwammberger 2. 166 Moskovits to Wiesenthal, 4 November 1971 and 11 November 1971, in ibidem. 167 Fajnland (Vice President of the Sh’erit ha-Pletah in Buenos Aires) to Wiesenthal, 16 December 1971, in ibidem. 168 Blaschitz, ‘Austrian National Socialists’, pp. 230-232.

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In late March, the Argentinian government granted the request by decree. At that point the files could be sent to the judge whose task it was to issue an arrest warrant. In this case, authorities seem to have been unaware that there was no international warrant out for Schwammberger, and as a result several days before the request was approved, the decree granting extradition was published. More than a week after that, the director of Interpol’s Argentinian division learned of the decree from that announcement. Taken aback, he contacted the Foreign Ministry and asked whether Schwammberger had been located or arrested.169 Only then did he receive the information contained within the request, including Schwammberger’s address in La Plata.170 Authorities were actually quite fortunate that the suspect hadn’t gone underground after all the reports about the extradition proceedings against him. But Schwammberger had good friends within the Argentinian police, who saw him not as a criminal, but as a guarantor of order who had only done his duty during the Third Reich. A half hour before his planned arrest, they warned him, and he was able to disappear. A subsequent manhunter hunted in vain.171 Walter Kutschmann Walther Kutschmann was another Nazi criminal who profited from South American authorities’ solicitude. Kutschmann had been living openly in Argentina since 1968, when Berlin prosecutors had decided to ignore the recommendation of the Argentinian Foreign Ministry and declined to file an extradition request. In 1973, Wiesenthal began another attempt to force West German authorities to move against him. First he got José Moskovits involved. The president of the Argentinian Sh’erit ha-Pletah checked whether the information provided by the Jewish émigré Hardy Swarsensky about Kutschmann in 1965 was still current. In early 1975, after a private detective engaged by Moskovits succeeded in taking pictures of Kutschmann alias Olmo,172 Wiesenthal contacted Berlin prosecutors, offering to ‘intervene with leading people on extraditions’. That, he said required coordination with West German judicial authorities so that he ‘could take the necessary steps with the Argentinian government’ before an extradition request 169 MREC to Dep. Interpol, Policía Federal, 11 April 1973, in AT, ADAAB 027. 170 Möller (BMJ) to JM BW, 20 April 1974, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18227. 171 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, February 7, 1986, in ibidem. 172 Moskovits an Wiesenthal, 8 July 1974, in SWA, Akt Kutschmann 1.

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arrived.173 It is unclear from Wiesenthal’s files what he meant precisely. The only contacts he had with Argentina at the time seemed to be with Moskovits and the local Sh’erit ha-Pletah. Berlin prosecutors took another look at why proceedings had been suspended in 1968, but they also concluded that there was no way ‘Dr Wiesenthal would be capable of offering any help that would be useful within our legal framework’.174 Prosecutors told the Nazi hunter that, after carefully considering the legal situation, they saw no possibility of filing an extradition request.175 Wiesenthal sought to bring public pressure to bear. People were once again discussing allegations brought by Communist East Germany that the former Minister for Displaced Persons, Theodor Oberländer, had helped murder intellectuals in occupied Lviv. In 1975, when the German public broadcaster ZDF asked Wiesenthal for a statement on Oberländer, he used the opportunity to exonerate the former minister and blame Kutschmann instead for the execution of professors in the Ukrainian city. In this way, he tried to frame the Kutschmann case as a western response to the East German campaign. Immediately after the interview was broadcast, he wrote to the head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery, who passed on his letter to the Social Democratic mayor. Wiesenthal argued that it was high time, ‘not only from the standpoint of justice’ but also ‘from the standpoint of the current political situation’, to demand Kutschmann’s extradition.176 Wiesenthal also sought to use the interview to put pressure on prosecutors. ‘Now that the matter has been broached with the rehabilitation of Oberländer’, he warned, ‘public attention is focused on Kutschmann’.177 Since Kutschmann was planning to come to Europe, Wiesenthal argued, an international manhunt should be launched via Interpol. That would be one way of apprehending the suspect without having to file for extradition. Wiesenthal’s information was in fact completely baseless, but it still spurred Berlin prosecutors into action in support of the demand for an Interpol manhunt. The authorities in Berlin were apparently unaware that Interpol had steadfastly refused to pursue Nazi criminals.178 Amazingly, the Federal Criminal Office offered no objections. Previously, West German criminal investigators had rejected all calls for international manhunts by pointing out that the General Secretary of Interpol had refused 173 Wiesenthal to Stief (StA LG Berlin), 12 February 1975, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624. 174 Vermerk Stief (StA LG Berlin), 8 April 1975, in ibidem. 175 Stief (StA LG Berlin) to Wiesenthal, 8 April 1975, in SWA, Akt Kutschmann 2. 176 Wiesenthal to Herz (Berliner Staatskanzlei), 6 June 1975, in ibidem. 177 Wiesenthal to Stief (StA LG Berlin), 6 June 1975, in ibidem. 178 Vermerk Stief (StA LG Berlin), 5 June 1975, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624.

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to initiate one for Rademacher in 1953. Yet there had been a change of generations within European authorities, and the West German Interpol division in Wiesbaden had got new leadership after Dickopf’s retirement in 1971. Civil servants who had started their police careers as part of the Nazi security apparatus and had shown no understanding for attempts to bring Nazi criminals to justice were now a minority. Their successors may not have been particularly interested in the past, but they did take a more pragmatic approach toward the treatment of Nazi crimes with the public growing ever more critical.179 That’s one explanation, in any case, for why the German Interpol division passed along an international arrest warrant without any resistance. Still, it had no effect on Kutschmann since Interpol’s General Secretary Jean Népote immediately declared it invalid. Népote had been in a position of leadership since the 1950s. He was all too comfortable with the argument that Nazi crimes were political in nature and saw no reason to deviate from the line established by his predecessor Marcel Sicot and himself.180 After three weeks had passed since his intervention with Berlin judicial authorities without any progress, the frustrated Nazi hunter became desperate, holding a press conference during which he revealed Kutschmann’s whereabouts. ‘If Kutschmann couldn’t be arrested, at least he should lose his Argentinian citizenship and the life he’s built’, Wiesenthal said to justify this step.181 He told the Argentinian newspaper La Razón that one of his ‘associates’ in Buenos Aires had already given police in Buenos Aires incriminating information.182 A few days after the press conference, Wiesenthal gave an interview to West German public radio in which he revealed potentially explosive information again. Following newspaper reports on the case, he said, Kutschmann had been arrested and kept in custody for several hours. But because the West German Criminal Office and embassy had failed to react, Argentinian police had had no choice but to release him.183 The press immediately pounced on this accusation, and the 179 Baumann, Reinke, Stephan and Wagner, Vergangenheit, pp. 87-137. 180 Gattei (Jefe del Departamento de Asuntos Extranjeros, Policía Federal de Argentina) to Departamento Despacho General, 4 August 1975, in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 144 ff. Nepoté was a member of the French police during the Vichy regime. For that reason, he was repeatedly accused of being involved in collaboration with the Germans (Deflem, Policing, pp. 191 ff.). He himself always claimed to have taken in the resistance while he was with the police (Greilsamer, Policiers, pp. 101 ff.). 181 Presseerklärung für eine Pressekonferenz am 27. Juni 1975, 20 June 1975, in SWA, Akt Kutschmann 2. 182 La Razón, 27 June 1975. 183 DLF-Interview with Wiesenthal, 30 June 1975, transcription in: PA AA, B 83, vol. 1124.

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city’s Social Democratic government was forced to field critical questions even from within its own party.184 Wiesenthal’s announcement was nothing more than a manoeuvre designed to get the case moving again. In his interview, he had referred to information provided by an ‘associate’ in Buenos Aires who turned out to be none other than Moskovits, who was trying his best to keep pace with developments in the case. On the day of the interview, the Sh’erit ha-Pletah told the German embassy what Wiesenthal had said.185 In fact, Moskovits knew nothing but what he read in the newspapers. So he bombarded Wiesenthal with questions: ‘Where did you learn that the suspect was arrested? Newspaper reports have you saying at a press conference that Kutschmann-Olmo was being arrested in Buenos Aires as you spoke’. Moskovits concluded with a remark that could have been easily interpreted as criticism: ‘It’s a shame that the matter was so badly coordinated that a criminal succeeded in fleeing’.186 Argentinian police had no information whatsoever. In response to a question from the Interior Ministry, the police said that nothing had happened since the receipt of the warrant from Wiesbaden and its revocation on the following day.187 In fact, if Kutschmann had been arrested, neither the West German embassy nor the Criminal Investigations Office would have been able to intervene with Argentinian police. That would have required an extradition order, and since Berlin prosecutors had declined to file a request in 1968 and proceedings had been suspended because of Kutschmann’s absence, all other authorities had their hands tied. Nonetheless, Wiesenthal had succeeded in stirring things up with his improvised, uncoordinated gesture of desperation. The embassy had lost all interest in Kutschmann after his case was dropped. It wasn’t until media interest perked up that embassy staff took up the cause again, even though the parallels with the Roschmann case were obvious. The same day the interview with Wiesenthal was broadcast, the embassy informed Berlin prosecutors that their attorney Rentsch was preparing an evaluation that would clarify the status of people who ‘acquired Argentinian citizenship under a false name’ according to Argentinian law.188 As a consequence, officials in Berlin began preparing a new extradition request.’189 184 Kurt Mattick (MdB) to Bundesregierung, 1 July 1975, and Manfred Geßner (MdB) to Bundesregierung, 1 July 1975, in Barch, B 141, vol. 45628. 185 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to StA KG Berlin, 30 June 1975, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624. 186 Moskovits to Wiesenthal, 3 July 1975, in SWA, Akt Kutschmann 2. 187 Gattei (Jefe del Departamento de Asuntos Extranjeros, Policía Federal de Argentina) to Departamento Despacho General, 4 August 1975, printed in: Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 144 ff. 188 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to StA KG Berlin, 30 June 1975, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624. 189 Seeber (Erster StA KG Berlin) to StA LG Berlin, 1 July 1975, in ibidem.

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There was no end to the criticism of German authorities for their inactivity. Spiegel magazine ran an article reporting that after news broke of Kutschmann living in Argentina, the deputy director of the embassy had taken two days to ask the Foreign Minister how to respond.190 The embassy tried to convince Bonn that everything possible had been done to apprehend Kutschmann, repeatedly stressing that in contrast to the authorities involved, it had supported filing an extradition request in 1968.191 While the embassy tried to counter the criticism it was receiving by pushing harder for Kutschmann’s extradition, Rentsch’s evaluation failed to settle all the questions, and the federal Justice Ministry once again prepared to expand its collection of official statements of position on German-Argentinian extradition assistance. The embassy did everything it could to clear up the situation, but it also criticized the delays that this caused. ‘The embassy realizes the political explosiveness of the Kutschmann case in light of Mr Wiesenthal’s publication’, the embassy leadership declared. Instead of drawing up evaluations, the embassy recommended considering other options: ‘In the view of the embassy, we should ask whether it even makes sense to commission an evaluation without the binding participation of the one truly decisive party, the Argentinian judicial system’. The embassy added that German authorities had done without complicated evaluations in the Schwammberger case, and the Argentinian government had still accepted the extradition request.192 In the meantime, however, Berlin prosecutors had uncovered wholly different problems. In drawing up the extradition request documents, it had become clear that since the 1967 arrest warrant for being an accessory to murder, Kutschmann’s legal situation had changed. Based on eyewitness testimony, it could not be ruled out that he had merely been acting on orders. If so, his deeds could only be punished by a term of imprisonment of three to fifteen years,193 putting them squarely within the ‘cold statute of limitations’. The terms ‘cold statute of limitations’ and ‘silent amnesty’ were used to describe the consequences of West Germany’s 1968 Misdemeanour Law and its interpretation by the country’s highest court for the legal pursuit of Nazi criminals. This new law put accessory to murder charges before 1960 under the statute of limitations, if there were no ‘special personal qualities, 190 Der Spiegel, 28/1975. 191 FS Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 3 July 1975 no.281 and no.282, also 7 July 1975, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1124. 192 Vacano (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 7 August 1975, in ibidem. 193 Stamer (StA LG Berlin) to Senator für Justiz, 22 July 1977, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624.

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relationships or circumstances, especially political’, that justified punishing the perpetrator. In the context of Nazi crimes, that meant that racist motives, which were considered ‘base motivations’, had to be proven. Since West German courts and prosecutors generally considered Nazi criminals as being accessories to murder and it was difficult to prove ‘base motivations’, this ‘cold statute of limitations’ meant that several hundred investigations were discontinued. There is some evidence, if not any positive proof, that this was not an unintentional oversight on the part of legislators, but rather the initiative of a circle of still influential amnesty supporters.194 Back in 1969, Berlin prosecutors had already drawn their conclusions from the law and discontinued their investigation of leading members of the Reich Main Security Office – a move that had drawn criticism.195 Now that situation threatened to repeat itself. Within a short time, the Kutschmann case achieved prominence, and the discontinuation of investigations against him was bound to create fresh outrage. For that reason, the Berlin Ministry of Justice and the prosecutor’s office at the superior court of justice got involved. Both declared that they did not want ‘to be presented with a fait accompli by reports […] of the proceedings being partially discontinued’. Instead, they want to be kept informed about how the case was preceding.196 A meeting was called, and it was agreed that prosecutors should go back and check the files at the regional court for indications of base motivations and additional incriminating material.197 Nothing new surfaced. Still Berlin’s justice senator didn’t want to simply accept that the case would have to be put on ice. He wrote: ‘While I tend toward the opinion that the crimes the suspect is accused of committing in the warrant fall under the statute of limitations, so that the warrant should be withdrawn, that doesn’t mean that all suspicions of criminal activity have been dispelled’. Kutschmann, the senator argued, should be interrogated.198 Because Kutschmann refused to contact the embassy, the diplomats turned to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry and asked it to interrogate the suspect.199 Alfredo Olivan, the investigating judge who processed this request, saw nothing illegitimate about state oppression. A few months previously, he had rejected a habeas corpus application filed by family members trying to 194 Miquel, Ahnden, pp. 327-343, quotation on p. 329; Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 301-306; Weinke, Gesellschaft, pp. 135-141. 195 Weinke, Verfolgung, pp. 303-306. 196 Vermerk Stief (StA LG Berlin), 22 July 1975, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no. 2624. 197 Vermerk Spletzer (Senatsrat), 29 July 1975, in ibidem. 198 Senator für Justiz to StA LG Berlin, 8 August 1975, in ibidem. 199 Kastl (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 2 June 1977, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1124.

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determine the fate of a person who had been abducted by the military junta’s security forces.200 His attitude to state violence would never change. Around the turn of the millennium, when more and more junta crimes were being prosecuted, Olivan became one of the most coveted defence attorneys for former represores. Above all, he made his name by demanding a revival of a pair of amnesty laws from the 1980s for two police officers who had been involved in torture and kidnapping. They were known as the ‘full stop law’ and ‘law of due obedience’.201 His decision on the West German request for legal assistance reflected this orientation. It was apparently not easy to find a line of reasoning to refuse the request, but Olivan was determined to protect Kutschmann from German investigators. If Ricardo Olmo was truly Kutschmann, Olivan argued, demanding that he testify would violate his constitutionally guaranteed rights because he would be forced to swear an oath under the name Olmo and thereby perjure himself. For that reason, the case had to be suspended until such a time when Olmo’s identity could be determined beyond the shadow of a doubt.202 Olmo’s true identity was in fact investigated, but the process dragged on and on despite frequent queries by the West German embassy. Olivan declined to respond to information from West German authorities that Olmo had admitted in a newspaper interview to taking part in the mass executions.203 Gustav Wagner The Supreme Court of Brazil – where military leaders under President Ernesto Geisel, who had been in power since 1964, were tentatively liberalizing the country – also prevented the punishment of Nazi criminals in 1979 with a questionable judgment on an extradition request for Gustav Wagner. It had been suspected that Wagner was in Brazil ever since Stangl had been apprehended in 1967. Wagner, who had been Stangl’s deputy at Sobibór before Stangl was transferred to Treblinka, was a close friend of his former boss. Investigators at the Central Office of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund, who were responsible for dealing with crimes at Sobibór, knew this, and had applied for an arrest warrant for Wagner immediately after 200 www.desaparecidos.org/arg/doc/escuadron/escua46.htm, accessed 28 January 2011. 201 Ley de Punto Final and Ley de Obediencia Debida. 202 Resolución de Olivan (Juez de Instrucción), 28 July 1977, printed in: Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 150-152. 203 See procedure in ibidem, pp. 156-161.

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Stangl’s arrest was announced.204 Unfortunately, the prosecutor in charge had neglected to question Stangl about his friend’s whereabouts after the former had been extradited to West Germany.205 It wasn’t until 1973 that the prosecutor’s successor noticed that Stangl had inexplicably never been interrogated about Wagner. By that point it was too late. Stangl was dead. Austrian authorities also had no information on Wagner’s whereabouts, so the Dortmund Central Office had dismissed the warrant and discontinued proceedings against him since ‘there were no longer any concrete leads that could have helped to apprehend the suspect’.206 Wiesenthal refused to give up. Over the course of the 1970s, he made a number of attempts to locate the former Sobibór deputy commandant but met with no success. Finally, in September 1978, he read in a newspaper that various former Nazis had met for a celebration in Brazil. Convinced that Wagner had to be among the guests, Wiesenthal had a reporter from the renowned Journal do Brasil show him a photo of the participants. His hopes were shattered, but he didn’t want to let the opportunity pass and claimed randomly that one of the people photographed was Wagner. Late in May, the paper published an article about Wagner attending the celebration and recommended that West German authorities apply for his extradition.207 The report caused a stir in Brazil. A number of newspapers that in the wake of Geisel’s course of liberalization were beginning to express some criticism of the government complained that a country that had fought with Allies against the Nazis shouldn’t be tolerating people like Wagner on its soil.208 São Paulo police, who had succeeded in apprehending Stangl in 1967, were irked by this criticism. Three days after the article was published, they located Wagner’s house. The suspect wasn’t present, but he turned himself in the following day to police who immediately took him into custody despite having no extradition order or arrest warrant. Authorities tried to sell this as a success story. The West German consul general in São Paulo reported: ‘The police had no compunctions about presenting him multiple times to the press and confronting him with a former prisoner at Sobibór. The police used this to bolster their not exactly over-abundant popularity with the press’.209

204 Vfg. ZS Dortmund, 20 March 1967, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, vol. 4650. 205 Weissing (ZS Dortmund) to GStA Hamm, 20 July 1978, in ibidem. 206 Vfg. Hegel (ZS Dortmund), 3 May 1974, in ibidem. See also Vfg. Hegel, 22 August 1973, in ibidem. 207 Wiesenthal, Recht, pp. 120-126; Journal do Brasil, 24 April 1978, in SWA, Akt Wagner 1. 208 Kastl (Ambassador Brasilia) to AA, 30 May 1978, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1148. 209 Generalkonsulat São Paulo to AA, 6 June 1978, in ibidem.

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The Central Office in Dortmund reacted immediately once the Foreign Ministry informed them what was going on in Brazil. Time was of the essence. It wasn’t clear how long Wagner could be kept in custody without an arrest warrant. Still, it took days to draw up a new one. The German diplomats in Brasilia were getting impatient and asked for the procedure to be sped up. The case, they wrote, had ‘a political import in addition to the legal aspect’, which could tarnish Germany’s good name. Poland and Israel had also signalled a willingness to file extradition requests, and the diplomats feared that if no warrant were forthcoming, people would start to ask why the Germans weren’t doing anything. If the warrant wasn’t issued soon, they would urgently need explanations why not for their press and publicity work.210 The Central Office tried to reassure the embassy that both prosecutors and the Federal Ministry of Justice agreed about the need for prompt action.211 German justice officials rarely faced any competition over prosecuting a Nazi criminal with other states, but they had no automatic right of first refusal where South American fugitives were concerned. Whereas Nazi criminals living in the Federal Republic could not be extradited if they were West German citizens, those who had fled attracted the interest of other nations. There were several such countries. Poland could claim jurisdiction as the location where the crimes had been committed, and Wagner offered that country’s still active Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerean Crimes a rare opportunity to go after a high-ranking Nazi criminal. Moreover, Austria, Wagner’s country of birth, was also investigating crimes committed at Sobibór. In Israel, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had been in office for a year. Appropriating the Holocaust played an important part in the policies of his right-wing coalition. The Holocaust, so the reasoning ran, had shown that Jews had to be vigilant in combating all threats to their existence. This argument helped hardliners justify the Begin government’s military action against Arabs.212 For this reason, Begin would have loved to put a Nazi criminal on trial. His press secretary declared later in an interview: I remember the Prime Minister saying this kind of criminal should be brought to justice. He did refer to Mengele in particular and he certainly wanted his case looked into. His view was that major criminals like this should not only not be free, but that younger generations should be educated by a trial not to forget. 210 Vermerk Kröger (AA), 30 May 1978, in ibidem. 211 AA to Botschaft Brasilia, 31 May 1978, in ibidem. 212 Segev, Siebte Million, pp. 525-528.

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Begin assumed that people would draw the lessons he wanted from such a trial. From the very moment he took office, he demanded that Mossad should give the hunt for Nazi criminals the same sort of priority Harel had. With Mengele having proved impossible to locate, Wagner provided a welcome alternative.213 The Brazilian judicial system had to decide on the many applications for Wagner’s extradition, and initially the situation didn’t look good for any of them. All four countries’ arrest warrants had been issued after the expiration of the twenty-year deadline proscribed by Brazilian law. The legal division of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry confidentially told members of the German embassy that because of public pressure the request had little chance of succeeding before Brazilian Supreme Court. Wagner’s extradition seemed increasingly unlikely. Previously German diplomats had always advised against making extradition requests in comparable cases, out of respect for the other country. The embassy position illustrated that public interest had forced its priorities to change. Kastl, who by then had been made West Germany’s ambassador to Brazil, cabled back to Bonn: ‘I’d advise checking whether an extradition request can be made anyway so that in case of later public criticism the Brazilian government will be the one that has to defend itself for failing to act’.214 The legal problems with the German request were soon solved. Under Brazilian law, charges raised against an accomplice were grounds for interrupting the statute of limitations, and the Central Office in Dortmund soon turned up just such an accomplice. All the way back in 1950, a superior court in Frankfurt had sentenced a member of the Sobibór camp personnel to life in prison. The verdict was reversed in 1977, but it could still be seen as a legitimate interruption of the statute of limitations under Brazilian law.215 For that reason the German request had relatively good prospects compared to those of the other countries. The situation was heating up for the West German government. The statute of limitations was again threatening to run out on Nazi crimes, and those pushing for Nazi criminals to be punished were turning up the pressure. In this situation, the government couldn’t afford to make any mistakes in going after a former Nazi as prominent as Wagner. For Wiesenthal, who was playing just as important a role in the fight against the 213 Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 307, quotation ibidem. 214 FS Kastl (Ambassador Brasilia) to AA, 5 July 1978, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1148. 215 Rohübersetzung eines Gutachtens des StA Reszek, n.d., Weissing (ZS Dortmund) to BMJ, 21 July 1978, in ibidem.

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statute as he had in the 1960s, the Wagner case was especially significant. For the first time since Stangl, information he had provided had led to the apprehension of a Nazi criminal in South America. Moreover, the case seemed to be evidence for his belief in an Odessa network. The argument that Nazi criminals were different from conventional murderers because they could rely on an organization’s help to evade justice was a significant element in Wiesenthal’s arguments against the statute of limitations in 1978, and he repeatedly invoked Wagner to argue for his views. The Nazi hunter had become an established moral institution in both Europe and the United States and had no trouble attracting public interest.216 Two years previously, Rabbi Marvin Hier, also no slouch when it came to publicity, had named a centre he founded in Los Angeles after Wiesenthal. It offered valuable assistance in the campaign against the statute of limitations.217 To avoid the impression that not everything had been done to apprehend Wagner, the director of the Central Office in Dortmund went with two representatives of the Federal Ministry of Justice to Brazil in early December 1978 to hold talks with members of the Brazilian Justice and Foreign Ministries. The West German delegation declared that because of the debate about the statute of limitations, the German judicial system and government were ‘under particular public scrutiny at home and abroad’ on the issue of prosecuting Nazi criminals. Fulfilling the country’s ‘moral duty’ would have an effect on how it was seen. The head of the legal division of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry promised the West German officials his ministry’s support as far as its jurisdiction went and expressed the hope that the extradition request would be successful. That decision lay solely with the Supreme Court. But the prompt action by the executive branch, especially in arresting Wagner, had demonstrated its good will.218 But all the good will in the world couldn’t change the fact that the Brazilian judicial system deemed Wagner’s extradition to be incompatible with Brazilian law. In June 1979, more than a year after Wagner’s arrest, the Brazilian Supreme Court rejected all requests for him to be handed over. That may not have been a surprise in the cases of the Polish, Austrian, and Israeli applications, but the reasoning used to deny the West German request was more than a little strange. The court found that the Federal Republic had not made it clear enough that the deeds Wagner was accused 216 See press releases, news articles, and radio transctiptions in SWA, Verjährungsartikel und Interviews. 217 Segev, Wiesenthal, pp. 431-436. 218 Vermerk BMJ für Minister, 8 December 1978, copy in: PA AA, B 83, vol. 1148.

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of committing had not been covered by the statute of limitations in 1967, when the first warrant for his arrest was issued. The basis of this line of argumentation first became clear in the written version of the verdict. The request referred to a decree by the Allied military government from 1947 as a measure introduced to allow for the suspension of the statute of limitations. The Portugese translator had mistakenly given that date as 1974, not 1947.219 Evidence soon accumulated that this was just an excuse. The German embassy learned from circles close to the Supreme Court that internally one of the ten judges had drawn attention to the fact that the date 1974 couldn’t possibly be right. But that hadn’t changed his colleagues’ verdicts.220 They weren’t really interested in the correct year. Supreme Court president Antonio Neder had argued in a conversation with the ambassadors of Britain, Belgium, and Australia that Wagner hadn’t had any genuine power to make decisions or issue orders at Sobibór and that his deeds fell under the Brazilian statute of limitations.221 It was the fact that Wagner had done what he did at the behest of the state which spoke against his extradition in the eyes of the court. The judge interpreting the case with reference to the Brazilian statute of limitations supported Kastl’s conclusion that the verdict had been influenced by domestic politics. In mid-1979 Brazil was on the verge of passing a comprehensive amnesty law. It went back to an initiative of the opposition, which felt emboldened by the tentative liberalization under Geisel to work toward getting all political prisoners released. For its part, the Brazilian government saw the initiative as an opportunity to prevent members of the military junta from being prosecuted for their crimes. For that reason, they adopted the opposition’s initiative and expanded it to include all ‘political criminals’.222 While the opposition sought to fend off this act of appropriation and continued to demand that the ‘torturadores’ be punished, a number of the Supreme Court judges supported the government’s amnesty plans. Within this constellation, Kastl speculated ‘the extradition of war criminals whose deeds were nearly 40 years old simply wouldn’t fit’. An extradition might give momentum to demands that crimes committed by the military and the police be prosecuted.223 The West German government made several further attempts to get the Brazilian court to rehear the extradition case on the grounds of procedural 219 FS Botschaft Brasilia to AA, 25 June 1979 and 30 June 1979, in ibidem. 220 Bericht über die Erörterung des Auslieferungsfalls Wagner in Brasilia, n.d., in ibidem. 221 FS Botschaft Brasilia to AA, 17 July 1979, in ibidem. 222 Fico, Anistia. 223 FS Kastl (Ambassador Brasilia) to AA, 22 June 1979, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1148.

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mistakes, but they were in vain. Federal Justice Minister Hans Jochen Vogel personally contacted his Brazilian counterpart and tried to explain why his government placed so much emphasis on the case. He explained the ongoing debate about the statute of limitations in West Germany, which had ‘particularly awakened memories of the crimes of the National Socialist rule of violence’, and asked whether the verdict could be appealed.224 A short time later two members of the West German Foreign Ministry went to Brasilia to talk to the general director of the Brazilian Justice Ministry about the possibility of nullifying the court ruling.225 The Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously rejected the objections filed by the West German embassy. Yet although the embassy now advised against any further political action, the German Foreign Ministry refused to give up. With reference to the fight against RAF terrorism, it was suggested that the government should check ‘whether other reactions might not be appropriate’. A note for the ministerial office read: ‘Given that we’re moving heaven and earth with the terrorists, the impression should not arise that we are pursuing a man accused of 150,000 cases of murder any less energetically’.226 At a meeting on 26 September 1979, the West German government cabinet decided to formally protest to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry against a Brazilian court deciding on a matter of West German law. The government of the Federal Republic, it was argued, had to be consulted in matters such as these.227 For the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which had completely taken up the campaign against Wagner initiated by its namesake, the reason behind the court’s verdict was clear. Hier was convinced that the Brazilian regime was purposely protecting Nazi criminals. The Center thus began drawing up a draft law that would have required states harbouring war criminals to be treated like states that sheltered terrorism when it came to receiving financial aid. Simultaneously the Center launched a broadly aimed campaign against the rejection of the West German request for an appeal. A delegation of high-ranking US politicians was put together to speak, along with Wiesenthal, to the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, and the Center organized protest actions at various locations.228 It’s no surprise that an unrepentant National Socialist like Wagner saw a conspiracy of ‘global Jewry’ at work and developed a persecution complex. A 224 Vogel (Bundesjustizminister) to Portella (Brazilian Minister of Justice), 29 June 1979, in ibidem. 225 FS Botschaft Brasilia to AA, 3 July 1979, in ibidem. 226 Vermerk Ref. 511, AA für Wallau (Ministerbüro), 21 September 1979, in ibidem. 227 Vermerk Ref.511, AA, 27 September 1979, in ibidem. 228 FS Botschaft Brasilia to AA, 24 September 1979, in ibidem.

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full year after the Brazilian Supreme Court had refused to hear an appeal in his case, at a point when public interest in him had noticeably diminished, the 69-year-old’s neighbours witnessed him running around outside his house, yelling ‘Beware of the Jews!’ When the police finally arrived to put a stop to this, they found him in his bathtub, covered in blood. Wagner had committed suicide, becoming the victim of his own anti-Semitism. The fact that he had died a free man did nothing to dispel the broadly accepted thesis that South American dictators and Nazi criminals were allies; nor did the failed attempts to apprehend Roschmann and Kutschmann. Public pressure had constantly increased during the 1970s and had forced West German authorities to reopen cases that had long been filed away, yet attempts to prosecute Nazi criminals had perennially failed because of the political circumstances under the military juntas. People quickly forgot that in the late 1960s the first extraditions of Nazi criminals from South America had taken place under two military governments. Despite what many people assumed, it wasn’t a governmental order to protect Nazi criminals in Brazil and Argentina that blocked them from being prosecuted. On the contrary, individual authorities in those two countries were willing to cooperate, and the Brazilian police even violated the law by arresting Wagner when the opportunity arose. Still, under dictatorships, among the many judicial and law enforcement authorities that came into play, there were likely to be people who shared the ideological beliefs of Nazi criminals or didn’t want to acknowledge that carrying out state orders could be a crime and thus didn’t want to see Nazi criminals be punished. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s, when South American countries became democratized, that there was a significant change in their attitudes toward extradition.

3

Klaus Barbie and Bolivia’s Democratization

Klaus Barbie was one of the first Nazi criminals to be linked with the oppression of South American military juntas, and he would also become the first to feel the consequences of the democratization process. But it was events in Europe that led to his case being reopened. In 1975, after years of delay, the French-German supplemental treaty came into force, allowing German judicial authorities to go after Nazi criminals who had been convicted in France. The Barbie case had played a prominent role in the campaign that the Klarsfelds had been waging for years for the treaty. So it wasn’t surprising that soon after the agreement took effect, the French embassy in Bonn approached the Foreign Ministry asking if West Germany

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would file an extradition request with Bolivia. The French diplomats said that there were ‘serious reservations’ against trying to get Barbie extradited to France. Evaluations had concluded that while Barbie had been naturalized under false pretenses in Bolivia, the offence had happened six years ago and thus his citizenship could not be revoked. That notwithstanding, the French government still had a major political interest in the case, so it was asking the West German government to act in its stead.229 It is doubtful whether legal obstacles in Bolivia were the only reason for the French reticence. The legal situation in France also presented a number of problems. It was no longer possible to try Barbie for murder or war crimes because the French statute of limitations had expired. The only option would have been to try him for crimes against humanity since according to a 1964 law they were exempt from the statute. But it was more than questionable whether French judges would have applied this category of crime retroactively to Barbie.230 Most likely French qualms were based on considerations like these. It would have caused a scandal in France had Barbie been tried and then acquitted. The French embassy’s initiative forced Munich prosecutors to take another look at Barbie, although they soon came to the conclusion that the evidence against him left a lot to be desired. The only crime well documented enough to apply for an arrest warrant was the murder of a fighter in Résistance. Prosecutors found that ‘by no means is it certain that filing public charges’ for this crime ‘would necessarily lead to a conviction’. But their investigations weren’t over yet. Once the treaty had come into effect, a number of German prosecutors started to comb French archives for evidence of Nazi crimes committed in France. ‘It seems most pragmatic to make the considerations about whether to apply for extradition dependent on the results of the examination of French documents’, advised the Bavarian Justice Minister under Alfred Seidl, who had served as an attorney for the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials and who lobbied for all his life for the release of Rudolf Hess from prison. ‘An acquittal of Altmann would hardly do much to promote French-German relations’.231 The Federal Justice Ministry and the Foreign Ministry concurred with this assessment. Barbie’s extradition was temporarily put on hold.232 229 Ref. 511, AA, to BMJ, 19 February 1976, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 20243. 230 Golsan, Memory, pp. 18 ff. 231 Froschauer (Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Justiz) to BMJ, 21 October 1976, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 20243; Vermerk Türk (AA), 11 November 1976, in ibidem, B 83, vol. 1628. 232 Pötz (BMJ) to AA, 21 November 1976, also Vermerk Türk (AA), 11 November 1976, in ibidem, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 20243.

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The search for evidence turned out to be difficult, not yielding the desired results. In 1978, as the debate commenced about the statute of limitations and Nazi crimes commenced and nothing had been done about Barbie, the pressure coming from France increased. Amidst growing criticism of the passivity of French and German authorities, the French ambassador once again turned to the West German Foreign Ministry, citing the intense public discussions in France and stressing that Barbie was the focus of attention. There was enough evidence in French archives to request Barbie’s extradition, he said, so that he failed to understand why nothing had been done thus far. To help German investigators, he handed over additional material from French archives, which, in his eyes, contained sufficient proof of Barbie’s crimes. As a result, the legal division of the Foreign Ministry contacted the Federal Justice Ministry and declared: The Foreign Ministry continues to be of the opinion that for general political reasons, especially with reference to the problem of the statute of limitations applying to Nazi crimes and the global public discussions it has occasioned, it’s become necessary to deliver a formal extradition request to Bolivia, although we must assume a priori that it will be rejected.’233

Munich prosecutors refused, saying that they still hadn’t succeeded in turning up further incriminating evidence and it was too uncertain whether Barbie would be convicted of murdering the resistance fighter. As things stood, the prosecutors argued, Barbie’s involvement in the killing of French Jews fell under the statute of limitations. While there were reports signed by Barbie referring to deportations, and eyewitnesses had testified that he knew what fate awaited the deportees, it had been impossible to prove that he had done anything that would satisfy the conditions for murder. Typically, in Germany, subordinates were considered to have merely followed orders and their deeds were therefore classified as complicity in murder, which was subject to the statute of limitations. The only exception was if prosecutors could prove that the person carrying out an action had been inspired by ‘base motivations’ like racial hatred or a lust to kill. Thus, prosecutors recommended more research in French archives since they feared that investigations of Barbie would fall victim to the statute of limitations, as had been the case with Kutschmann.234

233 Türk (AA) to BMJ, 15 November 1978, in ibidem. 234 Fendt (StA München I) to GStA München I, 18 January 1979, in ibidem.

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The debate ended when the statute was voided of murder cases. Tempers calmed somewhat, and the French government relented in their pressure on West Germany. Munich prosecutors continued their work in peace and concluded in 1981 that the French documents contained no new criminally relevant evidence and that the charges could not therefore be expanded. Both the Bavarian and the Federal Justice Ministries were inclined not to file an extradition request and to respond to any queries by the French government by pointing out the obstacles involved in such proceedings.235 The Foreign Ministry didn’t agree with this assessment. It was likely, the ministry argued, that the new French government under François Mitterrand would return to the West German government demanding to know what steps were being taken. German diplomats also had other worries: ‘The Klarsfelds have also taken up this cause in the past so that it cannot be ruled out that a campaign will be started in France that will accuse the West German government of shortcomings in connection with this case’. In the eyes of the Foreign Ministry, not even the many judicial obstacles that stood in the way of Barbie’s extradition outweighed public pressure. The ministry wrote: ‘Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing a successful German extradition, this matter cannot be handled sloppily. We must avoid giving France the impression that we’re not exhausting all the possibilities’.236 The Foreign Ministry recommended that the Federal Justice Ministry press for an extradition and the extension of the arrest warrant to include as many crimes as possible.237 Munich prosecutors only partially gave in to this pressure. In February 1982, they initiated extradition proceedings but only on the basis of the single charge of murder.238 The request arrived in Bolivia at a time of transition in the country. After a series of internal conflicts, the military regime had agreed to elections in 1979 and 1980. The leftist Hernán Siles Zuazo had emerged victorious, but the result wasn’t acceptable to the military, and there was a putsch. In July 1982, after various rival cliques in the military failed to form a stable government, General Guido Vildoso was installed as the leader and charged with organizing the transition to democracy. But pro-democracy advocates had little faith in this military officer. 235 Fleischhauer (Abt. 5, AA) to StS AA, 14 July 1981 (vom Staatssekretär gebilligt), in ibidem. 236 Ibidem. 237 Fleischhauer (Abt. 5, AA) to BMJ, 15 July 1981, in ibidem. 238 Fendt (StA München I), to AA, 17 February 1982, in ibidem.

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Around this time, a discussion began in Bolivia about the crimes of the junta, and Barbie too became the subject of public debate.239 The opposition had not forgotten the accusation that he had advised the Banzer regime. Barbie had continued these activities under the following governments and also contributed to organizing the putsch against Siles. Rumours about this involvement were spreading.240 Of course there were many people who had been far more important in the military regime’s oppression than the former SS man, but stressing Barbie’s role supported the idea that the various military governments had not acted in the interests of the Bolivian people, but under the direction of a foreign power. Highlighting Barbie also allowed the opposition to attract international attention to their cause. Barbie quickly became a symbol of oppression. The sceptically viewed transitional president Vildoso had hardly taken office when Bolivian newspapers reported – ‘in order to give an impression of the new dictator’ – that he had granted Barbie an audience.241 Trade unions launched an immediate protest and demanded that Barbie be extradited, declaring: ‘The Nazi criminal Klaus Altmann (Barbie) is the grey brain for the repressive groups with narco-fascist interests like the paramilitaries of the regime of General Luis García Meza Tejada’.242 Siles, who continued to harbour ambitions of the presidency, used the opportunity to score points domestically and abroad by promising the foreign and national media that if allowed to take power he would extradite the Nazi criminal in line with the law.243 In October 1982, Siles assumed the presidency at the head of the centre-left alliance, and it looked as though Barbie would soon be extradited. The Bolivian Foreign Minister assured West German Ambassador Hellmut Hoff that, while the independence of the Supreme Court would have to be observed, the Bolivian government would let the judges know that it was for handing Barbie over. Barbie, he said, was a ‘thorn in the flesh of Bolivia’.244 But the judges’ independence proved to be a problem. New judges were named to the Supreme Court, but Interior Minister Mario Roncal was forced to admit that they would probably orient themselves around the 1974 verdict and consider the Bolivian statute of limitations, which would mean 239 Cuya, ‘Comisiones’, p. 25; Mayorga, ‘Impunity’, pp. 73 ff. 240 Hammerschmidt, Deckname, pp. 323-341; Sánchez, Barbie, p. 145; Linklater, Fourth Reich, pp. 277-302. 241 Cited in: Sánchez, Barbie, p. 91; See also FS Botschaft La Paz to AA, 3 August 1982, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1627. 242 Botschaft La Paz to AA, 28 July 1982, in ibidem. 243 Gusavo Sánchez, Barbie, p. 6; Tom Bower, Lyon, Augsburg, La Paz, pp. 12 ff. 244 FS La Paz to AA, 20 October 1982, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1627.

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a negative ruling. Nonetheless, Bolivia was determined to get shot of Barbie. Roncal promised Hoff that ‘after the verdict Barbie’s falsely obtained Bolivian citizenship would be revoked and he would be arrested and deported as a foreign troublemaker’. Barbie could be sent to one of Bolivia’s neighbours, the Interior Minister said, or ‘to another country’.245 Reports about what was going on in Bolivia gave German authorities reason for hope. The damage that would have been done to West Germany’s image if such a prominent Nazi criminal were acquitted after extradition to the Federal Republic would have been enormous. Roncal’s proposal of possibly deporting Barbie to another country offered the Federal Justice Ministry a way out of this unpleasant situation. The Foreign Ministry was asked to ‘make it clearer to the French side that it should try to get Barbie deported from Bolivia to France’. The Justice Ministry added: ‘It would be very unfortunate if Altmann-Barbie were deported to Germany and acquitted here because of lack of evidence’. The Foreign Ministry’s legal division immediately contacted the French embassy in Bonn and informed it about the developments in Bolivia. The lawyers said that the West German government would have no objection ‘if the French government sought to get Altmann-Barbie deported to France – the main thing was to prevent the suspect […] from going underground in a third country’.246 France signalled that it was willing to receive Barbie if the extradition request were denied and Barbie were about to be deported, and the West German embassy in Bolivia was instructed ‘to encourage such a development in the appropriate manner’.247 There was only one way of understanding this order: West Germany was to undermine its own extradition request. The fact that German authorities encouraged France to declare itself willing to receive Barbie helped the Klarsfelds’ efforts. Since the 1970s, they had been working to get France to put Nazi criminals and French collaborators on trial. Historians have compared their efforts to clear up the crimes of the past with the first wave of such ‘cleansing’ in France directly after the Second World War.248 The change of power in Bolivia raised hopes that Barbie too could be made to answer for charges in a French court. To this end, Serge Klarsfeld contacted his old acquaintance Régis Debray, now an advisor of Mitterrand, who’d been involved in the failed attempt to abduct Barbie in 1972, arguing that there was a new chance to put him on 245 Hoff (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 16 November 1982, in ibidem. 246 Vermerk Schober (AA), 15 December 1982, in ibidem. 247 FS AA to Botschaft La Paz, 19 January 1983, in ibidem. 248 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 132-151; Rousso, ‘Justiz’.

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trial. Together, Debray and Klarsfeld succeeded in convincing the French President to file another extradition request. Since taking office, Mitterrand had been very keen on bolstering French memories of the Résistance. A trial of the man who murdered Jean Moulin, a prominent resistance fighter, was just what he needed.249 France wasn’t the only place where the people hunting Barbie were in stronger positions than before. In Bolivia, Gustavo Sánchez – whom Debray had hired for the failed abduction in 1972 – had returned from Cuban exile. His friend Mario Rueda, who had been made Bolivia’s Minister of Information, summoned Sánchez and promoted him to vice-minister, even though he himself had only assumed his current position in mid-January 1983. During his time in exile, Rueda had spent seven years in Communist East Germany and had been sensitized to the ‘fascist threat’ presented by former National Socialists. Rueda and Sánchez were both convinced that under the dictatorship in Bolivia there had been a ‘rebirth of the National Socialist ideology’ whose effects went beyond Bolivia itself. Sánchez wrote: ‘Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, to name just some of the countries, have experienced the horror of brutal oppression aided and abetted by Hitler’s henchmen’ Barbie was not just a means of attracting attention abroad. In the eyes of the new Bolivian government, in particularly its leftist components, he represented a threat to the freedom and security of the Bolivian people. The best evidence of this seemed to be his involvement in the 1980 putsch.250 For this reason, the Ministry of Information discussed the Barbie case in its very first meeting under Rueda in mid-January 1983. The ministry pledged to leave no stone unturned to arrest Barbie and prevent him from fleeing the country and finding ‘refuge – possibly in Pinochet’s Chile’. Rueda and Sánchez began to compile evidence for the many accusations that had been levelled against Barbie in Bolivia.251 It turned out that other ministries had already done some of this work. Even under Siles’ predecessor, charges had been filed against Barbie. A former business partner had accused him of owing 10,000 dollars to Bolivia’s state mining company.252 After the change of power in Bolivia, the Justice Ministry had used this fact to commence deportation proceedings as it had promised West Germany. Unlike extradition, which was a matter for the Bolivian Supreme Court, deportation could 249 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 200 ff. 250 Sánchez, Barbie, pp. 148, 151-162. 251 Ibidem, pp. 7 ff. 252 Linklater, Fourth Reich, pp. 312 ff.

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be ordered by decree. The Siles government had lots of room to manoeuvre. It only had to be proven that Barbie had committed a crime, and the legal case of Barbie’s debts was an opportunity to do just that. In December 1982, the Justice Ministry had approached the Ministry of Immigration, saying that it had learned that Barbie had displayed ‘inappropriate behaviour’. The residency law, it said, should be applied, and Barbie should be deported.253 The Immigration Ministry examined its f iles, and because Barbie had entered the country under the name Altmann, there was no record of him under his real name. The ministry therefore concluded that he should be deported as an ‘unregistered foreigner’.254 But in the immediate short term nothing happened. The government wanted to wait and see whether the Supreme Court might not rule favourably on the West German extradition request after all. Then, citing the danger of him fleeing, Rueda’s Information Ministry began to press for Barbie to be apprehended for his outstanding debts. On 25 January 1983, after he refused to pay the sum demanded, he was taken into custody.255 At a hastily called cabinet meeting, despite some reservations from conservative ministers, the Bolivian government decided to go ahead with Barbie’s deportation. Interior Minister Roncal who was put in charge of the matter immediately contacted the West German embassy and asked whether Barbie could be handed over the following day. A representative of Hoff told him that he didn’t have any personnel to receive the deportee and inquired whether Barbie might not also be sent to France. He was told, in contrast to the earlier information, that Bolivia could not deport people to just any country, only to its neighbours or the deportee’s country of origin.256 The West German Foreign Ministry decided to play for time and came up with the following strategy. The embassy was to tell the Bolivian government that Bonn was interested in the deportation, but that ‘other governments were possibly also interested in getting hold of Barbie’. Moreover, it was unclear whether ‘Barbie even came from Germany or not’. Finally, the embassy was also to point out that there was no non-stop flight from West Germany to La Paz, and since German police officials weren’t allowed to use force in foreign airports, there was no way to rule Barbie escaping during a stop-over. The Foreign Ministry also contacted the French embassy. The 253 Duchén Alcalá (Subsecretario de Justicia) to Subsecretario de Migraciones, 27 December 1982, in Torre, Altmann-Barbie, p. 137. 254 Ocampo Alvarez (Jefe Nacional de Extranjería) to Pérez Barrios (Subsecretario de Migraciones), 29 December 1982, in ibidem, p. 138. 255 Sánchez, Barbie, pp. 7 ff.; Linklater, Fourth Reich, pp. 313 ff. 256 FS Eickhoff (Embassy La Paz) to AA, 26 January 1983, in PA AA, B 83, 1627.

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diplomats had already been apprised of the difficulties Barbie’s sudden arrest represented for the West German judicial system, and the ministry reminded them of how much Franco-German relations would be burdened, if Barbie were to be acquitted, as expected, in a German trial. Although Bolivia had made it clear that deporting Barbie to France would violate Bolivian law, the West German Foreign Office recommended that their French counterparts press for his deportation nonetheless.257 The diplomats on the Quai d’Orsay did as Bonn suggested, but the Bolivian government insisted that the deportation be carried out in accordance with the law. Ambassador Hoff, who had interrupted his vacation and prematurely returned to La Paz, had to come up with new arguments to prevent Barbie from being deported to West Germany. When it emerged that an escape during a stop-over was unlikely since the plane’s pilot could simply order passengers to stay on board, Hoff shifted his focus to the safety of the other travellers. Barbie’s allies would no doubt try to free the prisoner, he argued. Meanwhile, the Siles government was running out of time. It repeatedly stressed to the French and West German ambassadors that it could not guarantee Barbie would be kept in captivity beyond 1 February. When that date arrived, it turned out that Barbie’s friends had paid his debts, and he was scheduled to be released the following day.258 State Secretary Berndt von Staden and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had taken over the decision-making process in the Barbie case from the Foreign Ministry’s legal department, and they decided to quit stalling. Bolivian interest in a swift deportation was all too obvious, and the damage to West Germany’s image that would have resulted from Barbie fleeing yet again outweighed that of a potential acquittal. Together with Deputy Justice Ministry Klaus Kinkel, who had worked for Genscher for years in the Foreign Minister, they agreed ‘to let things run their course as quickly as possible’. Should Hoff determine that Barbie was about to be released, he was to immediately inform the Bolivian government that West Germany was prepared to take him into custody in La Paz. The Bavarian Justice Ministry, which actually had jurisdiction over the case, was simply informed of this decision – the Federal Justice Ministry thought that the Bavarians would not be willing to receive Barbie because the outcome of a trial was so uncertain.259 257 FS Bertele (AA) to Botschaft La Paz, 27 January 1983, in ibidem. 258 FS Eickhoff (Embassy La Paz) to AA, 28 January 1983 and FS Hoff (Botschafter La Paz) to AA, 1 February 1983, in ibidem. 259 Vermerk für StS AA, 2 February 1983, see also Ministervorlage D5 (AA), 31 January 1983, in ibidem.

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Things never got that far. In response to the West German hesitancy, Siles’ cabinet approved Barbie’s deportation to France via a South American third country – to maintain at least the pretense that it was abiding by Bolivian law.260 On 4 February, Barbie was stripped of his Bolivian citizenship for being a ‘non-registered foreigner’ and having been involved, according to newspaper reports, in creating a paramilitary force after the 1980s putsch and dealing drugs.261 That same day, Bolivian police handed him over to French colleagues in Cayenne, French Guiana. Barbie’s fate was sealed by the fact that he got caught between two separate policies concerning the past. In France, thanks to the efforts of the Klarsfelds in the late 1970s, legal prosecution of those who collaborated with the Nazis under the Vichy regime was restarted after decades of dormancy. And on the Bolivian side, Barbie’s deportation was part of efforts to secure the transition to democracy. The Nazi criminal was not just a symbol of oppression by the military regime – people on the left considered him a real threat to Bolivia’s political transformation. The Siles government was also trying to present itself to the world as a reliable democratic force helping to ensure that Nazi crimes didn’t go unpunished. Otherwise it would have likely followed the preference of Vice President Jaime Paz Zamora from the revolutionary leftist movement,262 who wanted to see Barbie convicted in Bolivia for the crimes he committed under the dictatorship there.263 The Barbie case would nonetheless also have judicial repercussions in Bolivia. After Barbie’s deportation, the government kept investigating the accusations against him. Barbie’s lawyer was interrogated, and police searched the house where he had last lived.264 In this way, the government came into possession of a loyalty agreement from a few months before the 1980 Meza putsch between the fugitive and Luis Arce Gómez, who had commanded part of Bolivia’s armed forces and who had been promoted to interior minister under Meza. The contract read: ‘I, Klaus Altmann, commit myself without reservations to serve the intelligence division of the Bolivian army. I likewise commit myself to take part in plans and operations of the Bolivian army, if asked to do so’.265 In 1984, when efforts began to put those 260 FS Hoff (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 4 February 1983, in ibidem. 261 Rivero Boyán (Fiscal de Distrito en lo Penal, La Paz) to Ministro del Interior, 2 February 1983, and Resolución Ministerial 1156, 4 February 1983, in Torre, Barbie-Altmann, pp. 139-142. 262 Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. 263 FS Hoff (Ambassador La Paz) to AA, 4 February 1983, in PA AA, B 83, 1627. 264 Barbie to Gwinner (Bolivien), 27 January 1986, in Barch, N 1586/1. 265 Cited in Sánchez, Barbie, p. 151.

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responsible for human rights violations under the military dictatorship on trial, this document was used as evidence that Meza and his former interior minister had organized paramilitary units and thus violated the Bolivian constitution.266 The Supreme Court in Sucre, which rendered the final verdict on Meza and Arce Gómez in 1993, agreed with that assessment. Barbie’s name was thus connected with the legal aftermath of the Bolivian military dictatorship.267 The case of Barbie had profound implications, particularly in France. The Bolivian government’s attempt to deal with the crimes of the military junta, which ultimately ended in Barbie’s deportation, created the preconditions for a trial that became a milestone in the prosecution of Nazi crimes committed in France. The proceedings against the former head of the Security Police Security Service not only unleashed an intense debate about the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis. The verdict rendered in 1987 was the first time a French court used the legal concept of ‘crime against humanity’. All other descriptions of what Barbie had done would have fallen under the French statute of limitations. By contrast, ‘crimes against humanity’, which had been adopted into the French criminal code in 1964, weren’t subject to any such statutes. Until the moment the verdict was announced, it had been unclear whether courts would apply this legal category retroactively to crimes committed during the Second World War.268 After Barbie was sentenced to life in prison, prosecutors were able to cite the verdict in several cases against French collaborators as a precedent for deeds committed under the Vichy regime qualifying as ‘crimes against humanity’. In the 1990s, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon were convicted on this basis. The former had murdered Jews in France in 1944 as a member of pro-German militias, while the latter had been responsible for the deportation of Jews as a civil servant in the Vichy government. Meanwhile, the trials of Jean Leguay and René Bousquet, who as high-ranking police officials had been involved in arresting Jews, could not be brought to successful conclusions. Both died before verdicts were rendered, Leguay in 1989 and Bousquet in 1993.

266 Cuya, ‘Comisiones’, p. 27. 267 Excma. Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación: Sentencia pronunciada contra Luis Garcia Meza y sus colaboradores, 21 April 1993, accessed 3 May 2011, www.derechos.org/nizkor/bolivia/ doc/meza.html. 268 Here and in the following Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 211-216; Moisel, Frankreich, p. 280.

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Democrats and Nazi Hunters

The Barbie case was not just of interest to Bolivia and France. Shortly after his deportation, the news made headlines that he had worked for the American secret service after the war. American intelligence officials had been the ones who had prevented Barbie from being prosecuted in France in the 1940s and brought him to South America. There was nothing actually new about this information – the Klarsfelds had already drawn attention to it in 1972. But intelligence services were perceived differently back then. It wasn’t until oneand-a-half years later with the Watergate scandal that the American public began to discuss the accusation that the CIA was endangering democracy rather than protecting it – an accusation that seemed to be proven by the CIA’s action in South America against the Allende government. One of the members of the House Judiciary Committee, which had carried out the Watergate investigations, was Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman. Holtzman’s grandparents had immigrated to the United States as Russian Jews at the start of the twentieth century, and she had become politically active as part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. As a member of the House Immigration Committee in the mid-1970s, she began to examine the immigration of Nazis. In 1972, Hermine Braunsteiner, who had been discovered by Wiesenthal, had been extradited to West Germany, and in the wake of that case, a working group within the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization was charged with smoking out and denaturalizing Nazi criminals living incognito in the US. But until 1979, the group had brought only f ive cases to trial and lost every one. Moreover, when it emerged that the only successful denaturalization had mistakenly affected a former slave labourer, the group came under fire. Holtzman was one of its most vocal critics, and in 1979 she succeeded in getting it disbanded. The Office for Special Investigation (OSI) was founded under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department in order to continue the search for Nazi criminals in the US.269 In the course of her campaigns, Holtzman had stumbled across documents showing that the CIA had recruited Nazis and helped them immigrate to the United States.270 This revived a debate about the CIA’s relationship with Nazi criminals that had already been going on for a while by the time Barbie was deported in 1983. The US government was flooded by questions from 269 Holtzman, Who, pp. 90-98; MacQueen, ‘OSI’; Ryan, Neighbors, pp. 52-64. 270 Holtzman, Who, pp. 94-98; New York Times, 15 October 1976; 16 October 1976; 17 May 1978; 17 June 1978.

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journalists, with the media approaching the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and the OSI. To satisfy the public interest, the office decided to follow up on the accusations and succeeded in getting the government to allow it to publicly investigate the Barbie case.271 That wasn’t enough for critics. Holtzman, who was by this time a prosecutor in Brooklyn, demanded that the investigation be expanded to other Nazi criminals. With references to the cases that she had encountered during her work for the Immigration Committee, she declared that numerous Nazi criminals had profited from assistance provided by US intelligence services, who would stop at nothing in the fight against communism. She wrote in the New York Times: In addition, the Barbie case suggests ties between Government agencies and the large group of Nazi war criminals who escaped to South America after the war. If Klaus Barbie got American aid, did Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s murderous “doctor”, who carried out inhuman experiments on concentrate camp inmates, also get help? Did others?

In her eyes, the assistance provided to Nazi criminals said all anyone needed to know about the state of the US intelligence services: ‘These are no abstract questions of remote historical interest. The protection of Nazi mass murderers mocks the sacrifice of the Americans who fought Hitler, and of his victims. It suggests an acceptance of the premise that the ends justify the means, that expediency is the only morality’.272 Walther Rauff and the protests against the Pinochet regime Holtzman’s appeals were taken seriously. Although the OSI failed to uncover any other cases of American intelligence Services helping Nazi criminals flee to South America,273 the debate about Barbie had opened US officials’ eyes to the fact that fugitives from justice in South America were no longer just a matter between West Germany and various South American governments. The change of heart that entailed manifested itself is how the case of another fugitive was handled. The international attention that Barbie’s deportation had attracted to Nazi criminals in South America in general convinced Wiesenthal to reintroduce the case of Rauff to the media. A few days after 271 Ryan, Neighbors, pp. 280-287. 272 New York Times, 23 April 1983. 273 US Department of Justice, ed., Barbie, pp. 156 ff.

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Barbie arrived in France, he sent Pinochet a telegram, demanding that he hand over the fugitive Rauff, and immediately communicated the content of the telegram to the press.274 He also asked US President Ronald Reagan to press Pinochet to extradite Rauff.275 Several years earlier Wiesenthal’s attempt to get Henry Kissinger involved had failed. Back then, the State Department had argued that it was inappropriate for American authorities to interfere in the affairs of another county.276 Now Washington was singing a different tune. Although the acting director of the State Department’s Office of Southern Cone Affairs still said that he didn’t have jurisdiction, he added: ‘Please be assured, however, that I am informing our Embassy in Santiago of your request. We will continue to explore fully any possible Department of State role for assisting West Germany’s extradition request in order that Walther Rauff may be brought to justice.’277 And in fact the State Department began getting directly involved in the case. After the Barbie affair, it was logical to ask the CIA for information about whether it had any connections with Rauff. After checking its files, the US intelligence service gave the all clear. This time it had not got its hands dirty. Late that year, a State Department legal advisor travelled to West Germany with the files Wiesenthal had requested to ascertain whether anyone there was truly interested in prosecuting Rauff. The results of this trip sounded positive. Hamburg prosecutors showed intense interest and the Federal Interior Ministry declared that if the US exerted pressure, the ministry was prepared to pursue the matter further.278 In 1983, the Reagan government wasn’t the only one on the defensive who wanted to use the Rauff to demonstrate its good will. Three years earlier, the Israeli Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir government had stepped down. Early on in his career Tamir had made a name for himself by prosecuting Nazi crimes. In the mid-1950s, in the libel case against Malchiel Gruenewald, who had accused journalist and Zionist Rudolf Kasztner of collaborating with the Nazis, Tamir had defended Gruenewald and given Kasztner a going over in front of the court. He had also been in the Eichmann trial three years later. During his tenure as justice minister, his ministry had agitated for the extradition not just of Gustav Wagner but also Peter Menten, a Nazi collaborator from the Netherlands.279 274 FS Wiesenthal to Pinochet, 7 February 1983, in SWA, Akt Rauff 2. 275 Wiesenthal to Landgraf (StA Hamburg), 9 June 1983, in ibidem. 276 Isaacs (State Department) to Wiesenthal, 17 April 1975, in ibidem, Akt Rauff 1. 277 Howard (State Department) to Wiesenthal, 29 April 1983, in ibidem , Akt Rauff 2. 278 Breitman, ‘Gestapo’, pp. 156 ff. 279 Here and in the following Zuroff, Nazijäger, pp. 164-181.

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By contrast Tamir’s successor Moshe Nissim had no demonstrable records of prosecuting Nazi criminals. This became a problem when the American government asked whether Israel would be prepared to receive the Romanian Bishop Valerian Trifa, who was living in the US. During the Second World War, Trifa had encouraged and enabled the persecution of Jews in Romania with anti-Semitic tirades, and under the liberation policy of the 1950s, he and many other collaborators had acquired US citizenship.280 In 1983, after years of proceedings, the OSI had denaturalized him and was now looking for a country willing to receive him and put him on trial. When none of the countries to which American law allowed deportation stepped forward, the OSI turned to the Israeli government. After a meeting, however, the Israeli Foreign and Justice Ministries and the police concluded that in Israel Trifa could be charged at most with incitement, a crime that only carried a year in prison as a sentence. After that he could have lived as a free man in Israel, something that was to be avoided at all costs. Moreover, he could only be convicted of crimes committed in an enemy country, and Romania didn’t qualify. For that reason, Jerusalem intended to refuse the American request. Thanks to an informant who worked within the Israeli police, Efraim Zuroff learned of the result of the meeting, if not the rationale for it. In the late 1970s, Zuroff had worked for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, before going, as a member of the OSI, to Israel, where he was in charge of research in the Yad Vashem archive. He was outraged at the Israeli government’s plans. During his time in Israel, he had become increasingly convinced that the country wasn’t taking the prosecution of Nazi criminals seriously enough. In his eyes, after the Eichmann trial, Tamir had been a notable and noble exception. Now he saw an opportunity to change that and informed the press about the Israeli government’s intention to forego a trial of Trifa. That gave rise to a heated debate in the Israeli media about Israel’s role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice. Tamir and Gideon Hausner, the lead prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, were only two of the well-known figures who demanded that Trifa be convicted, which forced Nissim to declare the legal pursuit of Nazi criminals as Israel’s ‘historic responsibility’. The legal objections to putting Trifa on trial could not be simply swept away, and the government still didn’t want to allow him to be extradited to Israel. Instead, the Israeli prosecutor general announced that Israel would receive another Nazi criminal extradited from the US.

280 Stöver, Befreiung, pp. 283-340. Liberation Policy actively tried to free Communist-ruled states, for instance, by supporting politically oppressed Eastern Europeans.

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As this was going on, the campaign against Rauff, started by Wiesenthal and supported by various organizations and individuals, was making sure that the Nazi fugitive in Chile would not be forgotten. This campaign also echoed in Israel, where the Chile solidarity movement had several prominent adherents. Its president was none other than Abba Eban, who had been the Israeli Foreign Minister from 1966 to 1974 and still represented the Labour Party in the Knesset. The pro-Chile activists remembered the accusations that Rauff had assisted the military junta, and they kept trying to use the issue to build publicity.281 The debate about Israel’s responsibility to bring Nazi criminals to justice and the campaign against Rauff initiated by Wiesenthal formed the background for a visit by Chilean Foreign Minister Miguel Schweitzer, who came from a prominent Jewish family, to Israel in late November 1983. The prosecutor general, fresh from his announcement that Israel would try another war criminal but not Trifa, used the opportunity to call for Rauff’s extradition from Chile.282 In doing so, he was following a suggestion made by critics of the Chilean regime a few months before. The constitution introduced by Pinochet in 1980 had given the government the power to deport Chilean citizens who had made themselves unpopular, and the regime had done so on a number of occasions. So this was an unproblematic basis upon which to deport Rauff as well.283 But Schweitzer – who had written the negative evaluation of the prospects for the proposed West German request in 1961 which then ambassador Hans Strack had used to prevent Rauff’s extradition – rejected the Israeli government’s demand.284 Nonetheless, the international campaign was only now beginning to gain full momentum. The Klarsfelds, who had previously tended to be involved solely with cases that concerned France, seized the initiative. For them the Barbie case showed the way forward. Because the democratization of Bolivia had been needed to create the conditions for Barbie’s deportation, they also believed that they could only have success in Chile under a democracy. For that reason, it was essential that they worked together with Chilean opposition leaders. When they began preparing for a trip to the country, one of their first steps was to visit two exiled Chilean politicians, Andrés Zaldívar and Gabriel Valdés, and get them interested in the Rauff case. Both 281 See for example Julio Vega’s La caída de Allende (The Fall of Allende), published 1983 in Jerusalem. 282 Los Angeles Times, 29 November 1983. 283 Transcript of an interview by the British TV broadcaster Granada Television with Chilean attorney Alfredo Echteberry, in HStA Hannover, Nds.721 Hannover, Acc.97/99 no.10/11. 284 Los Angeles Times, 29 November 1983.

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had played major roles in Chilean governments before the Pinochet putsch and were considered leading lights in the Chilean opposition.285 Once she had arrived in Santiago, Beate Klarsfeld succeeded in securing the support of a group of family members of the arrested and disappeared,286 whose main goal was to force the government to tell them where the victims of state oppression were. The democratization processes in Chile’s neighbours Bolivia and Argentina had stirred the hopes of dissidents in the country. As of mid-1983, the number of protests in Chile rose constantly, and opponents of the regime were increasingly willing to demonstrate openly in the streets. Together with 30 or 40 family members, Beate Klarsfeld staged several protests in front of Rauff’s home and the presidential palace. She was arrested every time, but the regime didn’t dare to keep her in custody for any substantial length of time. Opposition political parties started taking an interest and invited Klarsfeld to speak at one of their events. But it was difficult to find common ground since she didn’t mention Rauff’s work for the junta. She would later write: ‘The problem was that I could introduce my cause, but these groups had other problems with the regime. These were people whose family members had disappeared. It was a big mix’.287 Chilean dissidents simply ignored this problem. For them, working together with Klarsfeld was an easy way of drawing the attention of international media to their fight against the Pinochet regime and win over allies abroad. The resonance of the campaign was impressive. Suddenly people around the world were reporting about events in Santiago. Human rights organizations weren’t the only ones to criticize the junta’s refusal to extradite. So, too, did organizations with good media contacts like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which started a global letter-writing campaign against Pinochet.288 The public pressure started to show results – at least outside Chile. While Klarsfeld was still in Santiago, the director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry paid her a surprise visit and once more demanded Rauff’s extradition. But again the Chilean government refused, saying it couldn’t deport a Chilean citizen who had lived peacefully in the country for twenty years.289 The European 285 FS AA to Botschaft Santiago, 23 January 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. See on the following also Klarsfeld/Klarsfeld, Erinnerungen, pp. 444-447. 286 Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos. 287 Interview Stahl with Beate Klarsfeld, 25 May 2010. See also Klarsfeld, Chronique, pp. 198-200 and FS Botschaft Santiago to AA, 10 February 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 288 Press Release of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, 19 March 1984, accessed 10 February 2011, www.coha.org/Press%20Release%20Archives/1984/012.pdf. 289 FS Holzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 2 February 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777.

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Parliament got involved. The socialist and communist parliamentary groups, many of whose member parties were also part of the Chilean solidarity network, put forward a resolution calling on Pinochet to extradite Rauff. The conservative parties, of which several considered the Chilean junta an ally, could hardly refuse to support this cause. The leftist camp exploited this and coupled their demands with criticism of the human rights situation in Chile. It was incomprehensible, they argued, that ‘Rauff could possibly leave Chile without the police authorities knowing about it’, while ‘since 1973 the Chilean authorities had introduced comprehensive measure to keep its citizens under surveillance’ and had reacted ‘extremely promptly to the slightest initiative for a return to democracy among the Chilean people’. Despite this explicit criticism of the Pinochet government, the resolution passed unanimously.290 The British parliament also took an interest in the Rauff case. In early 1983, when Wiesenthal again broached the name, the Labour parliamentary group held multiple speeches on the topic. The Labour Party joined the Chile solidarity network that year and took every opportunity that presented itself to attack the Chilean military junta, which enjoyed friendly relations with the Thatcher government. (Pinochet had been a reliable ally of the British in the Falklands War.) The Rauff case offered the chance of forcing Thatcher to take steps against this ally or morally delegitimize her foreign policy. In February 1983, with this in mind, Labour deputies demanded that she apply for the extradition of the fugitive Rauff. The British government saw no legal basis for prosecuting him in the country. But its response did read: ‘Her Majesty’s Government would respond positively to any request for assistance in bringing Walter Rauff to justice’.291 Nonetheless, with great tactical skill, the British government managed to evade all further calls from the opposition to apply pressure on the Chilean regime with the argument that Allende too had refused to reopen extradition proceedings.292 For the time being, the Labour Party dropped the issue. But in February 1984, when Klarsfeld’s trip revived the discussions surrounding Rauff, Labour deputies told the West German embassy in London about the British government’s promise to help in the Rauff case. They stressed that they would welcome the Federal Republic of Germany, with Britain’s support, encouraging the deportation or extradition of Rauff.293 290 Entschließung des Europäischen Parlaments zur Ausweisung von Walther Rauff, 16 February 1984, in ibidem. 291 House of Commons, 16 February 1983, vol. 37, c160W. 292 Ibidem, 9 March 1983, vol. 38, cc430-1W, and 14.5.1983, vol. 39, cc105 ff. 293 FS Botschaft London to AA, 23 February 1984 and 24 February 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777.

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The State Department also approached the German government with assurances it would support a new request for deportation or extradition. The American embassy in Santiago and the State Department’s own Latin America Division disagreed, but Secretary of State George Shultz took a different view. The debates in Congress and Wiesenthal’s personal intervention with Reagan had their mark on him.294 The West German government hadn’t failed to take note of the international interest Rauff was suddenly attracting. Even before it had received the statements of support from Britain and the US, the Federal Justice Ministry and the Foreign Ministry decided to take action.295 In late February, they ordered the embassy to demand Rauff’s deportation. Yet the meeting that then took place between West German Ambassador Hermann Holzheimer and the director general of the Chilean Foreign Ministry made it clear that despite the international pressure, Chile was not prepared to relent. Holzheimer was told that the Chilean government was about to declare the case res iudiacata. But it could be reopened anytime there was new evidence. The ambassador criticized that as a ‘shame’ since all the known evidence had been presented in the original extradition case in 1963. The fact that juridical excuses were being put forward, as the ambassador reported back to Bonn, was ample illustration that Rauff’s extradition was ‘not in Chile’s public interest’.296 What interest the Chilean government meant becomes clear, if we look at the meaning of the case for Pinochet. All the way back in 1963 during the original extradition proceedings, he had declared that ‘punishing someone bound to obey [his superiors] could undermine the whole principle of discipline in the Chilean army’.297 In the eyes of the Chilean military, the fugitive Rauff was a dutiful soldier who also had done nothing to blame in Chile. Thus Holzheimer was told: ‘Rauff has behaved diligently and correctly for 20 years. Moreover, three successive governments [Frei, Allende, and Pinochet] have all rejected deportation or extradition’.298 The Allende’s government decision in 1972 provided a welcome opportunity for the Chilean government to counter criticism of Chile’s refusal to hand over Rauff, which was always an implicit criticism of the authoritarian 294 Breitman, ‘Gestapo’, pp. 158 ff. 295 Vermerk Landgraf (StA Hannover), 17 February 1984, in HStA Hannover, Nds.721 Hannover, Acc.97/99 no.10/12. 296 FS Holzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 1 March 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 297 Cited in Kletten, ‘Nachgeschichte’, p. 3. 298 FS Holzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 1 March 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777.

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character of the regime. But the government studiously ignored the fact that between 1972 and 1973, as Allende’s administration considered the issue, actual judicial obstacles and his precarious hold on power had caused his guarded reaction to Wiesenthal’s request. In 1983, thanks to the state of emergency it had declared in the country, the junta could deport personae non grata with no further ado, as Holzheimer also knew.299 With the regime pretending in the Rauff case that it couldn’t violate the rule of law, the ambassador sought to provide his discussion partners in the Foreign Ministry with an argument to maintain that pretense. The Chilean government could draw attention to the fact that Rauff had concealed his crimes when he obtained his residency permit. But such objections went nowhere – a clear indication that the Chilean Foreign Ministry apparently had very precise instructions on this matter. While admitting that ‘there was something to this argument’, the director general only repeated that ‘the Chilean government will stick to the decision it had always supported and that had been affirmed by three governments’.300 Although this position could hardly have been less ambiguous and the junta’s official statements also left no doubt that it would not consider extraditing Rauff, Europe and the US continued to apply pressure, although not always with maximum force. A demand by the US House of Representatives to make the resumption of arms supplies to Chile contingent on the Rauff case went too far for the US government. The topic wasn’t raised when the Chilean and American planning staff met to discuss the arms delivery.301 In the meantime, the European Council of Ministers agreed to send a joint dispatch to the Chilean government reiterating the resolution of the European Parliament from February.302 Together with the French ambassador to Chile, he presented it to the new Chilean Foreign Minister Jaime de Valle, who made it known that ‘on the inside he was for prosecuting war criminals, including Rauff’.303 But Pinochet, whom Holzheimer subsequently met, categorically rejected any accommodation. A few days later, Rauff died of lung cancer – and pictures of aged men raising their arms in the Hitler greeting at his graveside went around the world.304

299 Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad in Reconciliación, Tomo 1, p. 64. 300 FS Holzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 1 March 1984, in PA AA, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 301 Holtzheimer (Botschafter Santiago) to AA, 20 March 1984, in ibidem. 302 FS AA to Botschaft Santiago, 26 April 1984, in ibidem. 303 Holtzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 15 May 1984, Bericht no. 549, in ibidem. 304 Holtzheimer (Ambassador Santiago) to AA, 15 May 1984, Bericht no. 543, in ibidem.

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The Mengele campaign Rauff’s death didn’t end the South America campaign that had been running since Barbie’s deportation. During a press conference concerning Barbie’s arrest in late January 1983, Wiesenthal had announced that Josef Mengele was residing in the village of Filadelfia in northern Paraguay. There, the Nazi hunter said, he was being protected by members of a Mennonite community formed by Russian immigrants. As so often was the case, this announcement, which he would repeat every time an opportunity arose in the months to come, was a manoeuvre to attract media attention to the Mengele case. Wiesenthal had no evidence for his assertion. Apparently his suspicion was based on information he had got about events in Filadelfia during the Second World War. Back then there had been a bitter conflict within the Mennonite community, after a large number of settlers had shown sympathy with the Third Reich.305 Beate Klarsfeld, too, revived the Mengele case. In early 1984, after her trip to Santiago, she travelled on to Asunción, where she also sought to make contact with dissidents. They were not entirely unfamiliar with the matter. They had noticed a while back that the hunt for Mengele was a way of getting support abroad and presenting themselves as reliable partners. Euclides Acevedo, one of the leaders of the leftist Partido Revolucionario Febrerista, had already been approached regarding Mengele during trips to Israel in 1972 1and 1974. At first the name had meant nothing to him, but he quickly realized how important this figure was to people abroad. So he used a trip to Vienna to contact Wiesenthal.306 After returning to Paraguay, he started to research the whereabouts of the concentration camp doctor on behalf of the Israeli embassy.307 Domingo Laíno, who had founded the most important Paraguayan opposition party in 1978, also took an interest in Mengele. In early 1978, while on a trip through Europe, he met a number of journalists who had investigated the case. After his return, he introduced a parliamentary query that attracted a lot of interest in the European press. Was it true, Laíno wanted to know, that Mengele was living in Paraguay?308

305 Bericht, 18 May 1983, in SWA, Akt Mengele 7. On events in Filadelf ia during the Second World War, see Klassen, Deutsch-völkische Zeit; Thiesen, Mennonite. 306 Correo Semanal (Asunción), 7 March 1992. 307 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 29 December 1981, in CDyA, R 176, F 986. 308 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 21 July 1978, in ibidem, R 172, F 1714-1719.

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The Paraguayan opposition supported Beate Klarsfeld right from the start. The PLRA made sure that at her first demonstration in front of the Palace of Justice, the home of the Paraguayan Supreme Court, Klarsfeld was accompanied by around twenty opponents of the Stroessner regime. Their cooperation wasn’t based on common concerns. The protest signs Klarsfeld had made hardly referred to the situation in Paraguay. ‘No protection for Mengele, the murderer of Jews’, they read, or ‘Josef Mengele is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews – he must be convicted’. Only one of the signs directly addressed the Paraguayan dictator: ‘General Stroessner, you have protected Mengele – now help bring him to justice’.309 Carmen de Lara Castro, the president of the Paraguayan Human Rights Commission, also granted Klarsfeld’s request for help, even though it wasn’t easy for her to connect the Mengele case to her organization’s work. She arranged an interview by the director of the radio station Ñanduti, which was known for its non-conformist reporting. At the very start of the broadcast, Castro declared: To start with, I’d like to clarify that she [Klarsfeld] approached the Human Rights Commission. The Commission actually has nothing to do with the case. The only thing it can say is that it regrets Mengele being granted Paraguayan citizenship while so many Paraguayans are being denied entry into the country. That’s the only thing I would stress. I want to personally help this woman conduct this interview.310

Ten years previously it hadn’t been difficult for Klarsfeld to connect her campaign with the situation in South America. Back then, she had helped Bolivian journalists draw parallels between the oppression by the Bolivian military regime and the crimes committed under the Nazi dictatorship by declaring both to be forms of fascism. Regime critics like Sánchez had gratefully adopted this interpretation. By the mid-1980s, it was no longer so easy to draw this connection. The picture of the Nazi era had changed. Prominent interpreters of the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel had placed great importance on its singularity as an event. The Klarsfelds, too, tried to convince the French public about the unique dimension of the Shoah. In the early 1970s, together with former resistance 309 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 17 February 1984, in ibidem, R 68, F 809 ff. 310 Nuñez (Jefe Comunicaciones) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 10 February 1984, in ibidem, R 192, F 1730.

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fighters and Holocaust survivors, they tried to use the memories of the French Résistance to encourage the prosecution of those responsible for Nazi crimes. But now they were more interested in giving Holocaust remembrance a place of its own in history, separate from the Résistance. After Barbie’s deportation, Serge Klarsfeld had publically stated: ‘Barbie’s real crimes against humanity […] were not his repression of the French resistants [sic], whose lives were often spared if they talked. His crimes were what he did to the Jews’.311 Against this backdrop comparing the human rights violations of a South American regime with the mass murder of Jews – the subject of most of Klarsfeld’s protest signs – was not an option.312 But her cooperation with regime opponents functioned even without a clear common cause. Mutual usefulness was more important than a mutual message. Because she helped political dissidents raise their profile abroad, she could be assured of their support for her protest activities in their home country. Demonstrations in states ruled by authoritarians were valuable in two senses. As they had in Chile, security forces also broke up Klarsfeld’s Paraguayan demonstrations. While they refrained from using violence against the prominent foreign activist, they forced the Paraguayan participants to leave the protests in front of the eyes of journalists who had travelled from all over the world.313 The images and television footage of these acts of oppression reinforced the public impression in the West that a refusal to help prosecute Nazi crimes was intrinsically connected with anti-democratic sentiment.314 That also put West Germany and France under indirect pressure to act on the many cases the Klarsfelds were trying to advance. By contrast, the Klarsfelds’ had no interest in staging a demonstration in a democratically governed South American country. That became evident when they stopped off in Argentina on a trip from Chile to Paraguay. Although the media was once again paying attention to the Kutschmann case since early 1983, the Klarsfelds didn’t want to put pressure on the government of Raúl Alfonsíns, which had been democratically elected only a few months before, so they refused to engage in any publicity-gathering activities.315 Moreover, jointly staged protests served to inculcate a cooperative attitude in terms of prosecuting Nazi criminals in the democratic opposition Klarsfeld 311 Cited in The Jerusalem Post Magazine, 18 March 1983. 312 Rousso, Syndrome, pp. 209 ff. 313 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 24 May 1985, in CDyA, R 160 F 1090-1091; Nuñez (Jefe Comunicaciones) to Pastor Coronel, 24 May 1985, in ibidem, R 65 F 722-729. 314 See some of these images in Klarsfeld, Chronique, p. 199. 315 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 22 February 1984, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1630.

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hoped would soon take power. Klarsfeld hardly believed that the dictatorial regimes would give in. She believed that extraditions had to be proceeded by democratization. At an event by Chilean opposition parties, she declared: ‘I work in the long term and put my faith in the opposition. That was the only way I was able to achieve the extradition of Klaus Barbie in Bolivia’.316 Yet Klarsfeld’s alliances with dissidents and her strategy of using demonstrations to publically pillory dictators closed doors to other potential allies. Wiesenthal had always been able to count on assistance from Jews living in South America for his research. Klarsfeld received no support from the various Jewish communities. They thought it was too risky to attract the wrath of those in power by cooperating with someone who was excoriating the policies of the various governments.317 After Klarsfeld returned from South America, the Mengele case disappeared from the headlines, but only temporarily. In July, Tuviah Friedman, the director of a documentary centre modelled after Wiesenthal’s in Haifa, created a stir by claiming that Mengele had travelled to the United States a number of times using an alias. Interest in the case peaked at the end of the year. January 1985 marked the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and various victims groups planned large-scale commemorations. What could have been more logical than to connect this event with the hunt for Mengele, the most prominent figure who had worked in the camps? In October 1984, the so-called ‘Candles’ – children of those who had survived the experiments on human beings in Auschwitz – went public and announced that they were preparing a Mengele tribunal at the Israeli memorial site Yad Vashem.318 With the support of people like Wiesenthal, Gideon Hausner, and Telford Taylor, the main prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, Mengele’s crimes were to be brought before a symbolic court. This was a form of communication that various NGOs had used since the end of the 1960s.319 One month after this announcement, Klarsfeld went back to Paraguay. But this time she wasn’t travelling alone. She was accompanied by journalists, Elizabeth Holtzman, the Catholic bishop of Brooklyn, and the president of the Association of the Children of Holocaust Survivors. The Paraguayan government, after twenty years of being criticized for Mengele, signalled a willingness to cooperate. Both Interior Minister Augusto Montanaro and 316 FS Botschaft Santiago to AA, 10 February 1984, in ibidem, AV NEUES AMT, vol. 12777. 317 Interview Stahl with Beate Klarsfeld, 25 May 2010. 318 Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. 319 Botschaft Tel Aviv to AA, 5 October 1984, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1630.

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Justice Minister Eugenio Jacquet, both close associates of Stroessner, as well as Supreme Court President Luis María Argaña met with the delegation. Montanaro assured Klarsfeld and her allies that he would found a commission to search for Mengele and that it would be monitored by international observers. But the delegation didn’t get to meet with President Stroessner, who had been kept informed about Klarsfeld’s first visit by the head of Paraguay’s intelligence agency.320 The government’s cooperativeness was nothing new. Five years previously, the government had also made a show of being helpful in the Mengele case. In May 1979, Wiesenthal had approached Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian Secretary General of the United Nations, and, citing the UN’s Year of the Child, asked him to intervene in the case of Mengele, who had murdered a great number of children.321 At the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched a major campaign in the US, which found an echo in Congress.322 In early August, Montanaro and his colleague from the Foreign Ministry in the government cabinet began considering whether to strip Mengele of his Paraguayan citizenship.323 In the 1960s, West Germany had repeatedly pressed Paraguay to do this since the country didn’t extradite its own citizens. But the West German demands fell on deaf ears. Now everything happened very quickly. On 5 August 1979, the prosecutor general applied for Mengele’s denaturalization, and three days later the Supreme Court issued an order to that effect. It was based on an unusual law that forbade Paraguayan citizens from spending more than two years outside the country without notifying the government.324 Several days later, Stroessner held a speech in which he insisted that Mengele was no longer in the country. The case had created a scandal, he said, blaming communists who had wanted to damage Paraguay’s reputation.325 By this time, Mengele had been dead for six months. He had died in February 1979 after suffering a heart attack while swimming in the Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. The news of his death almost broke that year. A short time after Mengele was denaturalized, the Stern magazine journalist Gerd Heidemann received a call from Karl Wolff, who had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1964 for his involvement in the murder of thousands 320 Gracher (Ambassador Asunción) to AA, 7 December 1984, in ibidem. 321 Wiesenthal to Waldheim (UN Secretary General), 17 May 1979, in SWA, Akt Mengele 6. 322 Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 296 ff.; FS Generalkonsulat Los Angeles to AA, 8 June 1979 and 19 June 1979 and Botschaft in Washington to AA, 22 June 1979, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1629. 323 FS Engels (Embassy Asunción) to AA, 2 August 1979, in ibidem. 324 Juicio de la Corte Suprema de Justicia, AIN 70, 8 August 1979, in MRREE, Caja 138, Caso Mengele. 325 Goda, ‘Search’, p. 431.

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of Jews. In mid-1979, having served out his sentence, he had travelled to South America to visit his former comrades who were living there. Heidemann, who was obsessed by the Nazi period, accompanied him. Heidemann was not only the proud owner of Hermann Göring’s former yacht; in the 1980s, he would also uncover the purported Hitler diaries, which would turn out to be fake. Thanks to Rudel, Wolff was granted an audience by Stroessner a few days before Mengele’s denaturalization. Once he had returned to West Germany, he received a visit from Alban Krug, who had sheltered Mengele in the late 1950s, and was also a personal friend of Stroessner. Krug told Wolf that Mengele was dead. The message was passed on to Heidemann: ‘Mengele is dead! That is the reason that he [Stroessner] has cut him loose – you understand? – stripped him of his citizenship. Because he’s dead!’326 But Heidemann’s attempts to publish the news of Mengele’s death were in vain. No one wanted to believe it.327 In fact, it’s probable that the Paraguayan president knew about Mengele’s death by mid-1979. Stroessner received regular visits from Rudel, who as a mediator between the fugitive and his family in West Germany was well informed. The two had also been in touch that July, when the former fighter pilot arranged the audience for Wolff. The subject of Mengele was likely to have come up, especially as he regularly was the source of pressure put on Stroessner. The former Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, Benno Weiser, assumed that Stroessner hindered Mengele’s denaturalization while the latter was alive as a personal favour to Rudel, and there’s much to support that assumption. The former concentration camp doctor always had the chance to seek shelter in Paraguay if he was threatened.328 When the Mengele campaign approached its zenith in late 1984, there was no reason any more to protect the fugitive, and Paraguayan ministers were given a free hand to prevent a foreign policy conflict. They didn’t completely succeed. No one believed them when they insisted that Paraguayan security forces had been unable to apprehend a murderer wanted around the world, especially since they weren’t bound by law to do so. After Klarsfeld and Holtzman had returned from Paraguay, pressure built even further. Wiesenthal and the centre named after him had been mistrustfully monitoring the competition from Paris and New York. Klarsfeld’s publicity-generating trips and demonstrations threatened to overshadow Wiesenthal, whose style 326 Heidemann im Gespräch mit Wolff und Krug, in Privatarchiv Heidemann, Recherchen in São Paulo. 327 Auskunft Heidemanns, 4 May 2010. 328 Weiser, ‘Hunters’, pp. 28 ff.

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was more that of a lobbyist. The Wiesenthal Center saw itself compelled to declare to New Yorker magazine that Wiesenthal had been the central figure in the hunt for Nazi criminals and that time would tell whose methods had been the right ones. Wiesenthal’s intervention with Reagan, the centre said, would definitely yield results.329 After Holtzman and Klarsfeld’s much reported-on trip, the Center and Wiesenthal urgently needed an action to generate positive publicity. They were helped to this end by the discovery of a set of files. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the Center received some documents about Mengele that had previously been kept secret and that seemed to show that the concentration camp doctor had been in American custody in 1947. The question was asked again whether the American secret services had cooperated with Mengele as they had with Barbie. Had Holtzman been correct in her assertion that there had been widespread cooperation between Nazi fugitives in South America and American authorities? Just as Klarsfeld’s trip to Paraguay had, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s discovery occasioned great resonance and put pressure on the US government to explain.330 Two weeks after the documents were published, the debate about Mengele got its next push with the Mengele tribunal in Jerusalem. In the presence of TV and reporter teams from Europe and American, 30 survivors described the horrific experiments that had been carried out on them in Auschwitz.331 The trial ended with an appeal to the world’s governments and to international organizations to help capture Mengele. Even the pope, who had just returned from a long trip to Latin American countries, was called upon to use his influence in Catholic South America to see that Mengele was apprehended.332 This appeal was no accident. Rauff had never made a secret of the fact that he had fled to South America with help from the Vatican. In 1984, when his case was attracting public interest, a report about the flight of Nazi fugitives from 1947 surfaced, in which the role of Bishop Alois Hudal was described. Since then, the Vatican was one of the countries criticized for helping Nazi criminals flee to South America.333 It didn’t take long for the tribunal to achieve results. The day of the event in Jerusalem, the US attorney general recommended that the Justice 329 Mendelsohn (SWC) to Kosner (Editor of the New Yorker Magazin), 16 March 1984, in SWA, Akt Rauff 2. 330 Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 306 ff.; Zuroff, Nazijäger, pp. 125-143. 331 See a.o. New York Times, 7 February 1985. 332 Botschaft in Tel Aviv to AA, 8 February 1985, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1630; Posner and Ware, Mengele, p. 307. 333 New York Times, 26 January 1984; Steinacher, Nazis, pp. 119 ff.

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Department take a closer look at the Mengele case. Immediately after the appeal, the formation of an investigatory committee was announced. It was charged with determining whether American authorities had been in contact with Mengele after the war and how he had been able to flee. Above all, it was to hunt for the fugitive and bring him to justice. Two days later, Israeli Minister of Justice Nissim announced the formation of an inter-ministerial special commission consisting of members of the police, the foreign ministry, and his own ministry. It, too, was charged with tracking down the concentration camp doctor.334 West German authorities were not caught unprepared by all this. Frankfurt prosecutors and the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Ministry had been following the tribunal closely since the planning stages. Citing that event, a documentary about Mengele planned by Wiesenthal and the 40th anniversary of Germany’s capitulation in the Second World War, West German police investigators declared that the search for Mengele was being supported ‘almost around the world’. The arrest of ‘this symbol of the horrific deeds of National Socialism’ would have had immense political and historic significance, and for that reason a ‘spectacular increase in the reward money’ and the intensification of the manhunt were suggested. With the cooperation of Italian police, Mengele’s wife, who lived in Meran, was to be kept under observation, and contact was maintained with Hans Sedlmeier, a general manager who worked for the entrepreneurial Mengele family and who had also been in South America in the 1960s. The idea was to show the public the intense interest in the case of ‘prosecutorial authorities including those in West Germany’ and to create incentives for people to give the police tips about Mengele’s whereabouts.335 Frankfurt prosecutors were less than thrilled about this police initiative, writing: ‘The news that the police intend to intensify their manhunt was surprising in that it was assumed the manhunt wasn’t proceeding with the greatest possible intensity’.336 The truth was that, since the early 1970s, after several interrogations and house searches had turned up nothing, hardly anything had been done to locate Mengele by examining his family.337 Prosecutors also criticized raising the reward money. That, too, could make the public think that not everything had been done to locate Mengele, and 334 Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 306-308. 335 Löw (HLKA) to Hessischen Minister des Innern, 28 January 1985, in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele Verfahren, Sonderheft Auslobung. 336 Haueisen (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to Hessischen Justizminister, in ibidem. 337 Tabellarische Zusammenstellung der Fahndungsmaßnahmen von 1959 bis 1984, in ibidem, Fahndung, Fahndungsunterlagen II.

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it could lead to more false leads. The increase, prosecutors felt, was ‘purely political’.338 Nonetheless, the Hessian Justice Ministry also felt that there was a ‘slight chance’ of the increased reward money leading to useful tips and raised the sum from the 50,000 Deutschmarks originally committed in 1964 to one million.339 With public pressure reaching a boil, new methods were being tried out for the manhunt in South America. Previously, tips about Mengele’s whereabouts had been merely communicated to the representatives of the countries in question who then engaged their own national authorities. After discussions with the West German intelligence service, members of the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, the Federal Criminal Office and the Hessian Regional Criminal Office succeeded in getting assurances that the service would also check information about Mengele’s whereabouts abroad. This was not a step the intelligence agents took lightly. Assisting in criminal investigations was not one of their usual duties. For that reason, they asked for their cooperation to be termed an ‘unofficial exchange of opinions’ and be kept from the public.340 Interpol, too, declared for the first time, after years of obstruction, that they would support the hunt for Nazi criminals. With the beginning of the tenure of Briton Raymond Kendall, the office of Interpol general secretary was out of French hands for the first time since the end of the Second World War. At a meeting of the organization shortly after the Mengele tribunal, Kendall declared that his agency would begin cooperating immediately.341 Both Israel and West Germany took the chance and issued an international warrant for Mengele’s arrest.342 This decision reflected a reorientation by Interpol which was increasingly feeling pressured by competition from other law enforcement organizations. In particular, the interpretation of the third article in Interpol’s charter, which prohibited it from getting involved in political matters and charged the secretary general with maintaining its neutrality, threatened to seal the authority’s fate. The general secretary’s office had always used this as a justification for not getting involved in terrorist crimes. But it’s insistence on neutrality was manoeuvring Interpol toward irrelevance, especially as terrorism often required transnational investigations. As a result, starting in the 1980s, Interpol narrowed its definition of what was political. At a 1984 338 Haueisen (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to Hessischen Justizminister, in ibidem, Sonderheft Auslobung. 339 Kuhlenkampff (HMJ) to Haueisen (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 31 January 1985, in ibidem. 340 Protokoll einer Besprechung beim BND, 13 May 1985, in ibidem, Fahndung, FO Paraguay I. 341 Langer (BKA) to HLKA, 20 March 1985, in ibidem; Greilsamer, Policiers, p. 206. 342 Haueisen (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to HMJ, 25 May 1985, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1631.

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general convention, this practice was formally legitimated, and the concept of ‘political crimes’ was officially redefined. Henceforth, Interpol was allowed to get involved in cases that were judged ‘mainly’ criminal and not political. While this change of course primarily aimed at allowing Interpol to participate in the fight against terrorism, it also created the conditions necessary for a re-evaluation of Nazi crimes, which were no longer classified as political.’343 Another signal that spoke volumes about what was possible if there was enough public interest was the policy of American authorities. They had no legal basis for taking action concerning the crimes Mengele had committed. But Friedman’s highly questionable announcement in July 1984 that Mengele had gone to the US was just what US authorities needed. It gave them the opportunity to begin investigating fake passports and deception at US immigration.344 In late March 1985, the US government decided to involve the intelligence services and start an operation to apprehend Mengele. No costs were to be spared. Primary responsibility for the operation was given to the US Marshals Service, a police force subordinate to the Justice Department that was charged with arresting suspects. It was promised assistance from the CIA and US embassies aboard.345 The Marshals Service got its most important information, however, from Frankfurt prosecutors at a meeting of West German, Israeli, and American investigators, called by the Service itself. The goal was to coordinate the search for Mengele.346 The only evidence prosecutors had about Mengele’s whereabouts that wasn’t based completely on rumour was the data concerning his naturalization in Paraguay, so the US marshals decided to focus their search in that country. In mid-May they met with CIA agents in the US embassy in Asunción. The marshals declared that they couldn’t count on the Paraguayan government’s cooperation, so all efforts to apprehend Mengele would have to be covert. There was more than enough financial means necessary. The CIA promised its full cooperation, while the embassy warned of the effect on US-Paraguayan relations, if the operation should be uncovered. Still the embassy didn’t object to the plans, demanding only that it be consulted about the individual steps in the operation and that certain rules be followed. Under no circumstances, for instance, were members of the Paraguayan opposition to be used as agents.347 343 Barnett and Coleman, ‘Police’, pp. 611 ff. 344 Haueisen (StA Frankfurt a.M.) to HMJ, 25 May 1985, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1631. 345 Goda, ‘Manhunts’, pp. 430-435. 346 Haueisen to HMJ, 25 May 1985, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1631. 347 Goda, ‘Manhunts’, pp. 434 ff.

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The US ambassador had good reason to mention the opposition. Paraguayans had paid close attention to the international interest in the hunt for Mengele, and Paraguayan dissidents did everything in their power to ensure it didn’t ebb away. Immediately after the Mengele tribunal, newspapers all over the world reported that the leader of the opposition, Laíno, who lived abroad, had confirmed that the concentration camp doctor was in Paraguay. On a trip to the US in mid-April, he noted with satisfaction: ‘Among other things, the Mengele case and Paraguay’s role in the drug trade have helped awaken public interest in Paraguay in the United States’.348 These topics were broached anytime an opportunity presented itself. For instance, at a demonstration of prominent Paraguayans in exile in Buenos Aires, Laíno proclaimed: ‘We want a Paraguay without drug dealers and without Mengele!’349 Before long dissidents saw Mengele as a cypher for the politics of oppression, and they combined their demands that Stroessner step down with calls for the concentration camp doctor to be deported. At demonstrations in Asunción, which became ever more frequent as the waves of democratization swept over South America, signs could be seen reading: ‘[Stroessner] should go with Mengele – let him stay with the Nazis’.350 Whereas Klarsfeld had always avoided comparing Stroessner’s dictatorship with National Socialism, Paraguayan dissidents made such comparisons with abandon. At public demonstrations, they chanted ‘Stroessner, Mengele, Somoza – three of a kind’.351 Referencing Mengele was so popular that he occasionally became a mythic, non-political figure. Paraguayans parents now no longer threatened disobedient children with Yasy Yateré, a yellow dwarf from a cornfield who kidnapped bad kids, but with Doctor Mengele. The deceased concentration camp sadist was becoming part of Paraguayan fable.352 In May 1985, when Beate Klarsfeld made her third visit to the country, she could rely on support from the Paraguayan opposition. Picking her up from the airport were well-known dissidents, including the human 348 Liberación, May 1985, copy in: CDyA, R 129, F 2213. 349 Ibidem, copy in: ibidem, R 150, F 2212. 350 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 14 May 1985, in ibidem, R 150, F 2152. 351 Ibidem, Transcripción de la Versión grabada de los discursos pronuncidos en el mitin político organizado por el Acuerdo Nacional, Plaza Italia, 14 May 1985, in ibidem, R 138, F 523: ‘Stroessner, Mengele, Somoza – los tres la misma cosa’. Anastasio Somoza led an authoritarian regime in Nicaragua that cost many people their lives. After the 1979 Sandinista putsch, he went into exile in Paraguay, where he was murdered in 1980. 352 I am grateful to Erik Schmidt for this reference.

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rights activist Lara Castro and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper ABC Color, which because it had been banned for years had become a symbol of anti-freedom-of-speech oppression. Leaders of the various opposition political parties also welcomed the Nazi hunter.353 Without any great fuss, the inter-party alliance, the Acuerdo National, which united the PLRA and MOPOCO, took over organizing a demonstration in front of the Palace of Justice and ensured that, along with prominent members of both parties, a small group of farmers from the interior of the country also showed up and held their signs aloft.354 Shortly after Klarsfeld left the country, a discovery by Hessian police put an abrupt end to the Mengele campaign and the incipient American intelligence services operations in Paraguay. It began with an interrogation of Hans Sedlmeier. The former manager at the Mengeles’ company had been suspected all the way back in the 1960s of being a go-between between Mengele and his family in West Germany. In 1964, when the general public began to concern itself for the first time with the concentration camp doctor, Bavarian police were instructed to search Sedlmeier’s apartment and office. On 9 March 1964, when the officers arrived at Sedlmeier’s home, his son and his housekeeper told them that he was travelling. It wasn’t until the next morning that the search could be carried out. Sedlmeier didn’t object. The search turned up nothing, nor did an interrogation of the suspect who, while admitting having visited the fugitive Mengele several times leading up to 1960, insisted that he was no longer in contact with him. Sedlmeier had said much the same thing when interrogated fifteen years previously.355 When he was interrogated in December 1984, though, a casual remark ushered in the end of this game of hide-and-seek. Sedlmeier told the prosecutor that he had asked Hans Münch, who had been with Mengele at Auschwitz, about the accusations against him. The prosecutor then interrogated Münch, who said that Sedlmeier and Mengele’s stepson had inquired about what he could be accused off, should he turn himself in. That might have been taken as an indication that Mengele was still alive

353 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 17 May 1985, in CDyA, R 24, F 1557. 354 Cantero (Director de Política y Af ines, Policía de la Capital) to Pastor Coronel (Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones), 24 May 1985, in ibidem, F 1507; and R 160, F 1090 ff.; Nuñez (Jefe Comunicaciones) to Pastor Coronel, 24 May 1985, in ibidem, R 65, F 722-729. 355 Ermittlungsbericht des Bayerischen LKA, 11 March 1964; Vernehmung Seldmeiers durch das Amtsgericht Ulm, 9 December 1971 in HStA Wiesbaden, Mengele-Verfahren, Fahndung, Durchsuchungen, and Ermittlungen in Günzburg et al.

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at the time of this conversation and had been in contact with Sedlmeier.356 A short time later, Frankfurt prosecutors got another tip. A professor from Giessen contacted the investigators and told of meeting Sedlmeier in 1982, saying the latter had told him under the influence of alcohol that he’d been flying to South America for years to bring Mengele money. The suspicions grew that Sedlmeier knew more than he was admitting, and prosecutors applied for permission for another house search.357 The regional court refused, saying that the professor’s testimony was nothing new and that it was well known that Sedlmeier had travelled to South America in the years leading up to 1960. A confession made under the influence of alcohol was also dubious, so that there was no reason to assume that another search would turn up new evidence. Prosecutors refused to accept this reasoning, which by no means did justice to Münch’s testimony, and appealed. Their protest bore fruit. The regional court’s criminal division, despite its personnel being almost the same as the other court, nonetheless came to the conclusion that the testimony of the two witnesses justified the belief that Sedlmeier’s files might reveal Mengele’s whereabouts.358 And indeed, the search of Sedlmeier’s home on 31 May 1985 turned up something spectacular. Officers found a number of letters revealing that Mengele had lived for years in São Paulo, where he had died in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming. Authorities in Brazil were immediately contacted, and together with their German colleagues, they began a concentrated action to check and confirm the information contained in the letters. They were able to discover and identify Mengele’s body.359 Stroessner was triumphant. Paraguayan embassies around the world were instructed to issue astatement stressing that Paraguay had insisted since the very first extradition requests that Mengele was no longer in the country.360 The Paraguayan prosecutor general’s office even announced that it would bring charges against Laíno for asserting the contrary.361

356 Vernehmung Seldmeiers durch Galm (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 6 December 1984; Vernehmung Seldmeiers durch StA Frankfurt a.M., 12 March 1985, in ibidem. 357 Vermerk Müller (StA Gießen), 7 March 1985; Vermerk Galm (StA Frankfurt a.M.), 29 March 1985, in ibidem. 358 Beschluß der 22. Strafkammer des LG Frankfurt a.M., 15 April 1985; Beschluß der 22. Strafkammer des LG Frankfurt a.M., 2 May 1985, in ibidem. 359 Posner and Ware, Mengele, pp. 314-321. 360 Orden circular del MRREE, 14 June 1985, in MRREE, Caja 138, Mengele/Junio 1985. 361 Gonzáles (Embajador del Paraguay en Buenos Aires) to Gainza (Director de La Prensa), 3 July 1985, in ibidem.

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The discovery of the body came as a bitter disappointment to all those who had supported the hunt for Mengele. For the second time within a year after Rauff, the enormous mobilization of efforts possible after Barbie’s extradition had come too late to bring a Nazi criminal to justice. But the hunt for Mengele did yield some positive results. Not all the activists who had participated all over the world in the hunt for Mengele allowed themselves to simply be demobilized. Much to his dismay, Efraim Zuroff, who was charged with investigating for the OSI the circumstances of Mengele’s 1947 arrest and the reasons he was released, came to the conclusion that the authorities at the time didn’t know who their prisoner was. But Zuroff stumbled across an interesting trail of evidence. Through his research he got his hands on files from the International Tracking Service. He determined that they did not just document the whereabouts of Holocaust survivors, but also Baltic and Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis. Zuroff quickly realized that many of them had fled to British Commonwealth countries, above all Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. This discovery made him quit the OSI and return to the Simon Wiesenthal Center so that he could also act outside the United States. He succeeded in convincing the Center’s founder Rabbi Hier to support his endeavours. The Center, which theretofore had primarily been interested in initiatives on holocaust memory, established a department for hunting down Nazis and commenced a large-scale campaign to bring Nazi collaborators, who had emigrated to Commonwealth countries, to justice.362 Extradition proceedings against Walter Kutschmann The Nazi criminals who had gone underground in South America continued to occupy Nazi hunters, prosecutors and the general public. With Argentina, the focus shifted to another young democracy. With its military defeat by Britain in the Falkland’s War in mid-1982, the military junta, which was already faltering, forfeited its last reserves of support among the populace and began to prepare a democratic transition. This process was going ahead full steam, when Wiesenthal publically reintroduced the Kutschmann case in February 1983. In early 1982, he had still been ‘racking his brains about how he could reheat the issue’.363 After Barbie’s deportation, he saw his opportunity and gave an interview to Argentinian media.364 In 362 Zuroff, Operation, pp. 49-89. 363 Wiesenthal to Kempner, 11 March 1982, in SWA, Akt Kutschmann 3. 364 Opinión, 23 February 1983.

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its wake, journalists for the newspaper El Atlántico succeeded in locating Kutschmann.365 The West German embassy immediately informed diplomatic headquarters in Bonn about this development and declared that, while, based on the evidence, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry considered the chances of an extradition remote, there was no reason this assessment had to be correct. The embassy wrote: ‘The democratization process and Bolivia’s behaviour in the Barbie case, which attracted considerable notice here, might change attitudes’.366 The West German Justice Ministry also concluded that ‘the suspect’s Argentinian citizenship doesn’t have to be an obstacle under the present circumstances’ and asked that a request be made for legal assistance.367 Apparently, the Justice Ministry had forgotten that the original problem hindering Kutschmann’s extradition had not been his citizenship but the West German judicial practice of classifying Nazi criminals as accessories to murder, which meant Kutschmann would be protected by the statute of limitations. That had supported the obstructionist policies of the Argentinian judicial system, which had brought the investigations to a complete stop. Berlin prosecutors recalled this all too well and declared that the evidentiary situation, which hadn’t changed since 1977, didn’t justify a resumption of proceedings.368 The Anti-Defamation League, however, didn’t lose sight of the case. Since the scandal surrounding mistakes made by American immigration authorities in denaturalizing Nazi criminals in 1979, the League had its own task force to deal with this group. Led by Elliot Welles, a survivor of the Riga ghetto and the Stutthof concentration camp, the League made it known at regular intervals to German and Argentinian officials how interested it was in this case. By early 1985, as still no extradition request had been made of Argentina, the League decided to step up the pressure. The task force sent a letter to West German Justice Minister Hans Engelhardt, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Berlin Justice Senator Hermann Oxfort, demanding that they apply for Kutschmann’s extradition.369 That had an effect. In mid-April, Oxfort and Welles met, and the latter brought up Wiesenthal, who had always claimed that he could prove that Kutschmann had been involved in the execution of intellectuals in Lviv. Together, they contacted the Nazi hunter who confirmed the information.370 365 El Atlántico, 2 March 1983. 366 Verbeek (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 3 March 1983, in PA AA, B 83, vol. 1755. 367 Justizsenator Berlin to StA LG Berlin, 2 March 1983, in ibidem. 368 StA LG Berlin to GStA KG Berlin, 28 March 1983, in ibidem. 369 Foxman (ADL) to Engelhardt, Genscher und Oxfort, 12 March 1985, in ibidem. 370 Vermerk Priestoph (StA LG Berlin), 24 April 1985, in LA Berlin, B Rep. 058, no.2625.

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Berlin’s superior prosecutor personally travelled to Vienna, only to find out that Wiesenthal didn’t have any incriminating evidence that wasn’t already known to the prosecutor’s office. Nonetheless, the Anti-Defamation League’s letter and Welles’ visit convinced Oxfort that the case against Kutschmann couldn’t simply be dropped. He ordered prosecutors to ‘re-examine the evidence with the goal of issuing an arrest warrant’ and ‘to carry out additional interrogations, if necessary’. With reference to its ‘especial importance’, the case was to be ‘taken care of in expedited fashion’.371 But results weren’t forthcoming. The investigations failed to turn up any further incriminating material. To avoid embarrassment, prosecutors had no choice but to re-evaluate the evidence. Suddenly the prosecutor’s office concluded that the proof it had just deemed insufficient was actually enough to constitute probable cause and justify immediate action.372 Shortly thereafter, a new arrest warrant was issued, and in October 1985, a complete request for extradition was presented to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry.373 Argentinian authorities were prepared for this. At the same time as it was trying to get German officials to file for extradition, the Anti-Defamation League sought to establish contact with Argentinian President Raúl Alfonsín. In April 1984, the league had received an audience with the Argentinian interior minister and had demanded that Kutschmann be arrested.374 Starting in mid-1985, the organization had increased the pressure and had got US Senator Alfonse D’Amato involved, who made inquiries about Kutschmann at Argentina’s American embassy.375 The embassy responded that the Argentinian judicial system’s hands were tied as long as West Germany had not applied for extradition. A short time after the West German request had arrived, the Anti-Defamation League warned against proceeding too slowly on the Kutschmann case, claiming that the TV network CBS was planning a programme about Kutschmann, in which Argentina had the chance to counteract the image of the country as a place of refuge for Nazi criminals.376 371 Vermerk Priestoph (StA LG Berlin), 13 May 1985 and Vermerk Priestoph, 17 May 1985 in ibidem. 372 Vermerk Priestoph (StA LG Berlin), 28 June 1985, in ibidem, Rep 058, Box 1039, vol. XIII. 373 Verbalnote der Deutschen Botschaft Buenos Aires an MREC, 2 October 1985, in PA AA, B 83, 1756. 374 FS Embajada en Washington to MREC, 20 December 1984, in AT, ADAAC 209. 375 FS Embajada en Washington to MREC, 11 June 1985, in ibidem, ADAAC 217; FS Embajada Washington to MREC, 12 August 1985, in ibidem, ADAAC 240. 376 FS García del Solar (Argentinian Ambassador in Washington) to Alconada Sempe (Subsecretario Jurídicos), 4 October 1985, printed in: Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 200 ff.

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The Argentinian public was also starting to get interested in the issue of Nazi criminals who had gone underground in the country. The campaigns of Nazi hunters resonated in Argentina’s neighbouring countries, and the idea that refusal to go after the criminals had something to do with a country’s political system also gained traction in Argentina. For example, a newspaper commentary about Chilean security forces’ actions against Klarsfeld read: ‘Instead of doing something about Nazi criminals, the military regime is expanding all its energy going after those who try to draw public attention to this ideological complicity’.377 The same sort of complicity also seemed to apply to Argentina. While the anti-Nazi campaigns were going on in neighbouring states, a commission hired by the government published its report on human rights violations during the military dictatorship. One whole chapter was devoted to the military junta’s anti-Semitism. The commission had collected a wealth of eyewitness testimony about swastikas and Nazi slogans in the junta interrogation centres.378 This discovery gave rise to the question of whether, as was the case for Rauff working for the DINA and Barbie in Bolivia, Nazi criminals had been involved in human rights violations in Argentina. Jacobo Timerman, one of the most well-known victims of the junta, had contended from his foreign exile that Mengele had worked as an advisor in Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina.379 Jewish circles, in particular, intensively discussed the connections between Nazi criminals and the military junta.380 But so, too, did the enemies of the Peronist party, which retained influence in Argentina. The party’s detractors saw the presence of Nazi fugitives as evidence that Perón had created the preconditions for military dictatorship. For example, the respected Argentinian journalist and writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, used a research grant in the US to investigate the flight of Nazi criminals to his home country. He had gone into exile before the putsch under Isabel Perón’s presidency and was working for the New York Times and several leading Argentinian newspapers. In 1984, he concluded that there was no evidence of war criminals working for Argentinian security forces. But Nazi fugitives had succeeded in establishing relationships with Argentinian intellectuals, clergy, and military officers, as well as the Peronists. Martínez wrote:

377 La Prensa, 5 February 1984. 378 CONADEP, Nunca Más, pp. 69-75. 379 Vega, Allende, p. 46. 380 See a.o. Kaufman and Cymberknopf, ‘Represión’, pp. 242 ff.; Kaufman, Victims; Martínez, ‘Perón’.

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Therefore, they infiltrated various sectors of the Argentine society and extended themselves much like an oil stain to the middle classes and trade unions, transforming the Argentine society into a repressive and authoritarian country. No country can open its doors to this class of criminal and still sleep soundly. No nation crosses these dark boundaries of history with impunity.381

It was thus hardly a marginal opinion in Argentina that a democracy couldn’t afford to allow Nazi criminals to go unpunished, and the reactions to the West German extradition request for Kutschmann show that this view was also maintained in governmental and state bureaucracy circles. In conversation with a member of the West German embassy, the undersecretary for human rights in the Argentinian Interior Ministry called the Kutschmann affair a ‘test case’ for the ‘new Argentinian democracy’ – an opinion that would often be seconded in upper-level government circles. The extradition request was processed with unusual speed, and on 14 November 1985, after an intensive manhunt, police arrested Kutschmann in the home of his sister. The Argentinian Foreign and Justice Ministries tasked Raúl Alconada Sempe, the nephew of the minister of justice who was an undersecretary in the foreign ministry’s legal department, with bringing extradition proceedings to ‘a successful conclusion’. Alconada immediately contacted Fernando Archimbal, the judge assigned to the case, to discuss the matter. He also contacted the West German embassy and offered his help.382 The Argentinian government interpreted its scope for action within the democratic separation of powers very liberally, but it could not afford to suspend the laws of the land. That made the matter very complicated. Kutschmann was still an Argentinian citizen. He could be denaturalized, but even if it could have been proven that he acquired citizenship under false pretenses, the deception would have fallen under the statute of limitations. If it were decided to go ahead with extradition proceedings, there was the danger that Kutschmann would demand a trial in an Argentinian court. In that case, he would likely have been acquitted since the murders he was accused of committing were already covered by the Argentinian statute of limitations. These problems could only be solved if two trials were conducted simultaneously. The process of denaturalizing Kutschmann had to be initiated at the same time as authorities pursued his extradition. It was 381 Martínez, ‚Perón’, pp. 15 ff. 382 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 25 November 1985. See also FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 24 November 1985 and 29 April 1986, in PA AA, B 83, 1756.

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crucial that his citizenship be revoked before his extradition was approved so that Kutschmann would have no recourse to Argentinian courts. Handing him over to the German judicial system would thus require the good will and cooperation of judges assigned to those cases. The judges and lawyers at the Argentinian Supreme Court would recognize how important good coordination of both cases was on 11 February 1986, when they conferred about which court had jurisdiction over denaturalization cases. It quickly became clear that almost nothing had been done since 1975 to determine Olmo’s true identity. The president of the court, José Severo Caballero, was outraged. He believed that this negligence had to relate to the political conditions at the time. It was telling, he argued, that between 1975 and 1980 nothing had been undertaken to determine this man’s identity.383 Caballero’s criticism was directed against not only the Argentinian judicial system during the junta years, but also the legal practice under the Peronist Party, which had governed until 1976 and which Caballero opposed. Caballero’s unambiguous statements weren’t the only motor driving denaturalization proceedings. His deputy Leopoldo Shiffrin had also taken part in the Supreme Court consultations. Immediately afterward he went to the West German embassy and requested a meeting with the head of the legal department. Shiffrin admitted that it actually wasn’t ‘the responsibility of his office to get involved in this form in Kutschmann’s extradition’, but it was important to him ‘as an Argentinian and a Jew’ to ensure that the extradition request would be granted. He reported in detail about the difficulties the denaturalization proceedings had encountered and passed on information intended to help the embassy find evidence of Olmo’s true identity.384 He apparently also contacted the press. At least in a comprehensive article about ‘the alleged fraud with Argentinian citizenship’, La Nación newspaper was very well informed about the details of the case.385 Thanks to the efforts of Caballero and Schiffrin, the denaturalization case, which was lagging behind extradition proceedings, gained momentum. While it would have been possible to postpone action of West Germany’s extradition request until questions of identity had been cleared up, Kutschmann would then have to be released. And it was crucial to avoid precisely that. Judge Archimbal displayed sympathy for the prosecutors’ problematic situation – he had been favourably inclined toward the West 383 FS Saumweber (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 13 February 1985, no. 131, in ibidem. 384 FS Saumweber (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 13 February 1985, no. 130, in ibidem. 385 Nación-Artikel, in AT, ADAAC 268.

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German extradition request right from the start. Without having taken a closer look at the details, he had given the lead West German lawyer to understand that the Argentinian government placed great importance on a positive ending to the proceedings and that this was why he had been appointed to oversee the case.386 Right from the onset, Archimbal believed that a state governed by law should be extraditing a Nazi criminal. Thus he was prepared to let the extradition proceedings, which had already made considerable progress, rest until Kutschmann’s denaturalization was complete.387 Kutschman had suffered several heart attacks since being arrested, and on 30 August 1986, before the identity investigations could be completed, he died in a Buenos Aires hospital. Again, attempts to prosecute a Nazi criminal in the 1980s had come too late. But one thing had become clear. Whether it was the Bolivian government, major figures in the Argentinian cabinet and judicial system, or regime critics in Chile and Paraguay, people had come to understand their efforts to extradite Nazi criminals to Europe as part of their cause of restoring the rule of law and democracy in South America. That was anything but self-evident, as the cases of Barbie and Kutschman show. Bringing extraditions and deportations in line with valid laws without damaging the independence of the judicial system was a difficult undertaking. Whereas the interpretation of extradition laws during the junta period had hindered the prosecution of those who had committed violent crimes in the name of the state, decision-makers now interpreted their legal restraints on their powers very liberally in order to rid their countries of Nazi criminals. The latter were increasingly becoming symbols of state oppression in South America. There was also another reason why South American democrats were willing to cooperate with the hunt for Nazi criminals. In view of the enormous interest the public in North America and Europe was taking in these cases, no one in South America could be under any illusions about the significance Holocaust remembrance had accrued. Helping to bring Nazi criminals to justice was an effective way for South American governments to distance themselves from the military regimes and win international approval. As the significance of Holocaust remembrance began to grow in the mid-1960s, state institutions in Europe and the US also changed the way they operated. Increasingly, the public subjected them to a litmus test. Did they take the concerns of former Nazi victims seriously and try to 386 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 19 November 1985, in PA AA, B 83, 1756. 387 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 10 March 1986, in ibidem.

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bring those responsible for the genocide of Jews to justice? This political transformation was driven by the increasing numbers or private citizens and NGOs who acted as memory activists. In their conviction the memory of the Holocaust contained important lessons for all of humanity, they formulated a number of demands concerning the politics of remembrance and the pursuit of justice. The hunt for Nazis was a major part of this process. The activists hoped that putting Nazi criminals on trial would publicize the details of their crimes and thus bolster memories of the Holocaust. More and more organizations founded departments to assist with the hunt for Nazis. Nazi hunter became something of a calling, a respectful name for people who attempted to apprehend and put Nazi criminals on trial. Thanks to the respect they enjoyed, these people were able to mobilize state and international institutions in unprecedented fashion. This caused problems for the West German government and judicial system. By the mid-1980s, the generation of people who had begun their careers in the Third Reich and who put up such resistance to prosecuting Nazi criminals had largely retired from public service. Yet while resistance may have lessened in following generations, by defining Nazi criminals as mere accessories to murder and via the ‘cold statute of limitations’, the West German judicial system and legislature had erected enormous barriers to prosecuting Nazi criminals. Pressing charges was a risky undertaking with an extremely uncertain outcome. For many authorities that was a reason not to file extradition requests. It was only once pressure began to build from the increasing numbers of activists of history that judicial officials, as the cases of Barbie and Kutschmann show, came to believe that the need to bring Nazi criminals belatedly to justice outweighed the difficulties that entailed.

IV Two Ways of Dealing with State Atrocities In July 1989, Carlos Menem became the first Peronist president of Argentina since the 1976 putsch. His election caused concern among those who wanted to see Nazi criminals prosecuted. For eighteen months, extradition proceedings had been going on against Josef Schwammberger, the former commandant of the ghetto of Przemyśl, but in his campaign Menem had repeatedly invoked Perón, whose role in the flights of Nazi criminals had been widely reported by the international press amidst the efforts to apprehend Rauff and Mengele. If he continued what seemed to be the policies of the man after whom his party was named, what would that mean for how Argentina dealt with Nazi criminals? It was also unclear whether Jewish organizations, which had stridently advocated the extradition of Nazi criminals, would be able to get themselves heard by Menem, who came from a Syrian, Muslim family. In addition, people were also worried about Menem’s stance toward the crimes committed by the Argentinian military junta between 1976 and 1983. Although as a member of the opposition he had criticized the amnesty laws of his predecessor Alfonsín, his first speech upon taking office made it clear that he wanted to draw a line under the recent past – a measure intended to win the loyalty of the military.1 But if crimes committed only ten to fifteen years ago were to be laid to rest, what would that mean for extradition proceedings concerning crimes that had been committed more than 40 years ago?2 The memory of how numerous Nazi criminals and collaborators had succeeded in entering Argentina under Perón’s presidency and the question of where the Peronist party stood vis-à-vis the past would dog Menem his entire time in office. Argentinian discussions about the Peronist past and global interest in the Holocaust, which reached its temporary zenith with the looted gold debate of the mid 1990s, would constantly influence one another. The coming to terms with Argentina’s role as a place of refuge for European fugitives was constantly fuelled by new impulses. The Menem government sought to meet the 1990s demands that past injustices be redressed by taking a number of measures that went far beyond just support for the extradition of Nazi criminals. The government tried to separate its stance toward the Peronist 1 2

Fuchs, Geschichte, pp. 178-184; McSherry, ‘Alliance’, pp. 69 ff. Freiwald and Mendelsohn, Nazi, pp. 258 ff.

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past from its attitudes toward the military dictatorship. But this was never completely successful. The legal prosecution of junta crimes was influenced by the government’s actions against Nazi criminals. And the Argentinian government wasn’t the only entity that faced challenges due to the Peronism debate. The consequences of that discussion crossed national boundaries and affected both West Germany and the other South American states.

1

Menem’s Amnesty Laws and the Nazi Past

In early 1983, with the news of Barbie’s deportation to France travelling around the world, the search for Josef Schwammberger also got a boost. At a press conference, Simon Wiesenthal let drop that he was probably in Argentina. The Baden-Württemberg Justice Ministry, which had jurisdiction over Schwammberger, checked registration documents and cards and discovered that his wife and son had given an address in Buenos Aires in 1980. The authorities doubted that Schwammberger himself would still be at the address, but also thought it might be a ‘useful starting point under certain circumstances’ and recommended that Stuttgart prosecutors file for extradition.3 The prosecutor’s office immediately followed that recommendation. Argentinian police who checked out the address in fact found Schwammberger’s son there. He, however, claimed that after a family dispute he was no longer on speaking terms with his father and hadn’t had any contact with him for a year. 4 With that, the authorities considered the matter settled, and a second opportunity also went unused. In late 1985, the Mengele campaign and the apprehension of Kutschmann gave an acquaintance of Schwammberger the idea to pass on the fugitive’s address to the West German embassy and pocket the reward money. But his hopes of earning a sum of dimensions promised in the Mengele manhunt were disappointed. His embassy contact was instructed to tell him that ‘by no means is this comparable with the Mengele case’. Conversely, he found the 10,000 Deutschmarks he was offered not enough.5 A police manhunt after an international arrest warrant also failed to yield results, and in April 1987, the reward for evidence concerning Schwammberger was raised to a 250,000 Deutschmarks. That, too, had 3 JM BW to StA Stuttgart, 14 March 1983, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18227. 4 Gimenez (Jefe Dep. Interpol Buenos Aires) to MREC, 18 April 1983, in AT, ADAAB 65. 5 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 7 February 1986, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18227; Schrimm, ‘Ermittler’, p. 144.

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no effect, and Stuttgart prosecutors were given the green light by the Baden-Württemberg Ministries of Finance of Justice to double that sum.6 After the increase was announced, police in Córdoba were tipped off that Schwammberger was being hidden by a fellow German on a small farm in the village of La Huerta. On 13 November 1987, when police and a judge knocked on the farm’s front door, all the aged former forced labour camp and ghetto commandant said was: ‘What took you so long?’7 Schwammberger’s arrest was interpreted abroad just as the Alfonsín government wanted it to be, as an indication of Argentina’s successful democratization. The Anti-Defamation League congratulated the Argentinian president, declaring: ‘The arrests of Walter Kutschmann and Josef Schwammberger during your presidency have evoked a very favourable reaction throughout the world. The denial of haven to the aforementioned war criminals will serve the cause of justice and the democratic principles upon which your government is based’. The trust that the League had gained in Argentina’s young democracy gave it the idea to demand the arrests of other people it suspected were in the country: Heinrich Eiche, who had taken part in the mass execution in the Riga area; Guido Zimmer, who had played a role in the deportation of Jews from Italy; and Karl Kirchmann, a former capo at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp.8 It’s unclear where the League’s information that these three men were in Argentina came from. In any case, it wasn’t up to date. Zimmer had died ten years previously in Buenos Aires. Argentinian police, who were powerless to act on their own, passed along the information to their West German colleagues in Wiesbaden. Research carried out by the Central Offices in Cologne and Ludwigsburg concluded that Kirchmann, who had been sent to Gross-Rosen for being a professional criminal, had fulfilled the position of block and camp elder. He was wanted by the Central Office in Cologne in conjunction with an investigation, but it had been discontinued, probably because he was no longer in West Germany. In 1970, prosecutors in Koblenz had suspended an investigation of Eiche, who had been an SS Unterscharführer at the commandant’s office of the Security Police in Minsk, because his whereabouts were unknown. Zimmer’s name, researchers found, turned up in an investigation by the Dortmund Central Office of crimes committed in

6 Schrimm, ‘Ermittler’, p. 144. 7 Freiwald and Mendelsohn, Nazi, p. 238. 8 Foxman (ADL) to Alfonsín (Presidente de la República de Argentina), 17 November 1987, in AT, ADAAB 178.

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Italy.9 The office had in fact discontinued the case against Zimmer, who was accused of involvement in the deportations of Jews from the Genoa area, all the way back in 1970. All the possibilities for a manhunt had been exhausted, the document justifying that decision read.10 Although the suspect was known to be in Argentina, during the 1960s and 1970s, extradition requests were as a rule not made if there was no exact address – the only exception was Mengele.11 The German authorities’ next steps can only be partially reconstructed from the files available to the public. The North Rhine-Westphalian Regional Criminal Office forwarded an arrest warrant for Kirchmann to the Argentinian Interpol division.12 The Central Office in Ludwigsburg informed the Baden Württemberg Justice Ministry about the results of the research and pointed out that there could be more suspects in Argentina whose whereabouts were unknown.13 But there were no further extradition proceedings. In the Netherlands, too, Argentina‘s helpful attitude led people to call for their government to demand the extradition of collaborators. Back in 1980, Moscovits had confirmed to Wiesenthal that Abraham Kipp was living as an Argentinian citizen in Buenos Aires.14 In 1949, a special court in Amsterdam had sentenced Kipp to death for being a member of the Waffen SS and for arresting Jews and resistance fighters, at least 25 of whom died. Wiesenthal immediately informed the Dutch government about Moscovits’ discovery but was told that Argentina didn’t extradite its own citizens. Wiesenthal had no success, either, with using the media to create public pressure directly after the Mengele campaign. But in 1988, when it was announced that Schwammberger was to be stripped of his Argentinian citizenship, the Dutch government under Ruud Lubbers found itself confronted with demands to press Argentina to denaturalize Kipp so that he, too, could be extradited.15 Another fugitive Dutch collaborator also came into the focus of the public and of prosecutors: Jan Olij Hottentot, who had been sentenced to twenty years in prison in 1949 for being a member of the Waffen-SS and taking part in mass executions in Eastern Europe and the arrests of people persecuted by the Nazi regime.16 9 Vermerk ZS Köln, 5 October 1988, in Barch, B 162, vol. 6070. 10 Einstellungsvermerk Hesse (ZS Dortmund), 18 February 1971, in ibidem, vol. 6069. 11 Vermerk Neumann (StA LG Berlin), 1 August 1961, in ibidem, vol. 1339. 12 LKA NRW to BKA, 7 October 1988, in ibidem, vol. 6070. 13 Streim (ZSL) to JM BW, 25 November 1987, in ibidem. 14 Handschriftliche Notiz, Wiesenthal to Moskovits, 7 August 1980, in SWA, Akt Kipp. 15 Remonda-Ruibal (Ambassador of the Netherlands in Buenos Aires) to Maciel (Dir. Gen. de Asuntos Jurídicos, MREC), 25 November 1987, in AT, ADAAF 001; Summary available Information Abraham Kipp, 17 May 1987, in ibidem, ADAAF 004. 16 Ponce (Interpol Buenos Aires) to De Paoli (Subdirector de Asuntos Jurídicos, MREC), 2 December 1988, in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 271 ff.

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In both cases, the Argentinian legal situation made extraditions extremely unlikely, and citizenship wasn’t the only obstacle. Olij and Kipp had been convicted of war crimes, but the Argentinian-Dutch extradition treaty from the nineteenth century didn’t recognize this as a legal category. The Dutch government knew about this problem, but at the same time, it wasn’t unaware of the intense interest of the Dutch media in both cases. In December 1988, it decided to file an extradition request.17 The Argentinian Foreign Ministry decided to pursue a similar strategy. Although the ministry’s legal department recognized that the problems would make it difficult to get a positive verdict, it acknowledged the request and was soon able to arrest Olij and Kipp.18 The main public focus, however, was on Schwammberger. Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the B’nai B’rith in the US and Argentina all took an intense interest in the former ghetto commandant and tried to influence proceedings. Beate Klarsfeld gave justice ministry officials documents to support the case against Schwammberger, while the Center suggested that victims of the suspect be called to testify against him.19 Stuttgart prosecutors followed the activities of these memory activists warily, fearing that Argentinian authorities could react with irritation.20 The Argentinian Foreign Ministry warned its embassy in Washington, which had connections to the American organizations, that the Argentinian judicial system might suspect international intrigue and political motives behind all the publicity and come to a negative judgement. The presence of witnesses, the ministry argued, was superfluous because they had nothing to contribute to the proceedings.21 Such worries proved unfounded. The judge appointed to hear the extradition case and the prosecutor charged with seeing that Schwammberger was denaturalized, were favourably disposed to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s case. The judge was convinced that the case was about improving Argentina’s image, and the prosecutors declared to a Center delegation that 17 Ayuda Memoria de la Embajada de los Países Bajos en Argentina, 27 Ocotber 1988, in ibidem, pp. 253-256. 18 De Paoli (Subdirector General de Asuntos Jurídicos) to Subsecretario Técnico Administrativo, 25 November 1988, in: ibidem, pp. 256-259. 19 FS Embajada en Washington to MREC, 21 November 1987, in AT, ADAAB 87; FS Embajada Washington to MREC, 3 December 1987, in ibidem, ADAAB 100. 20 Hölscher (StA Stuttgart) to AA, BMJ, JM BW, GStA Stuttgart, 2 December 1987, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18228. 21 Fretes (Dirección América del Norte) to Embajada en Washington, 3 December 1987, in AT, ADAAB 102.

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had travelled from the US: ‘In 1983 […] the society changed its way of thinking completely. And Schwammberger was a manifestation, the externalization of that change in attitude. This change in attitude toward the Nazis is part of a greater change in attitude, towards the concept of liberty, of justice, of rights’.22 Contact with the activists for history provided a good opportunity to spread the message that Argentina had changed to the world public. It’s no surprise then that prosecutors told the foreign ministry that it was important for the trial to have in attendance representatives of the Center and witnesses it had selected.23 Two questions were at the heart of the extradition proceedings. Did the German or the Argentinian statute of limitations apply? And did Schwammberger, as an Argentinian citizen, have the right to appeal to an Argentinian court? A positive answer to either question would have doomed the extradition request since in Argentinian law Schwammberger’s crimes would have fallen under the limitations statute, even though the actual letter of the law specified that only limitations rules of the country making the request needed to be taken into account. Gerhard Bohne’s extradition had set a precedent for interpreting the law, but Rentsch had his doubts about whether the courts would acknowledge it. The situation was ‘almost cursed’, the German embassy’s favourite lawyer declared. A widely circulated and often cited legal commentary, he wrote, found that the Argentinian statute of limitations also had to be taken into account.24 But in his verdict of November 1988 after an interruption of the trial due to illness, the judge stuck to the original letter of the law and followed the embassy’s arguments that Schwammberger could not appeal to Argentinian courts. The suspect had received Argentinian citizenship after his alleged crimes, the judge decided, and thus had no recourse to a trial in Argentina.25 The case then went to a court of appeals in La Plata, where none other than Leopoldo Shiffrin himself had become a judge. Together with his colleague Juan Manuel Garro, he now had the opportunity not just to encourage in the background the extradition of a Nazi criminal, but to render judgement upon one himself. But for the two judges the case was more than just a chance to see Nazi crimes legally punished. In the Peronist government that had been toppled in 1976, Shiffrin had coordinated the work of the federal 22 Freiwald and Mendelsohn, Nazi, pp. 141-256, quotation on pp. 249 ff. 23 Fretes (Dirección América del Norte) to Embajada en Washington, 19 May 1988, in AT, ADAAB 188 f. 24 Botschaft Buenos Aires to StA Stuttgart, 22 December 1987, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18229. About the juridical problems see Schrimm, ‘Ermittler’, pp. 146 ff. 25 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 30 November 1988, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18232.

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police from the Interior Ministry. When the military putsch happened, he was on a stipend in West Germany, where he was studying international law. It was only after the end of the military dictatorship that he returned to Argentina. He considered himself to have been damaged personally by having been forced into exile and applied for compensation.26 After being named an appeals court judge in La Plata, Shiffrin tried to exploit legal loopholes to prosecute crimes committed by the junta despite the laws passed under Alfonsín that exempted junta leaders from prosecution. In Garro, he found a kindred spirit, and when the two of them were assigned responsibility for the highly prominent Schwammberger case, they both saw the opportunity to establish a precedent. Argentina’s so-called ‘full stop law’, passed in 1986, set a sixty-day deadline for any further charges against the military junta’s represores. After that, there weren’t supposed to be any new cases. Garro and Shiffrin, however, saw the extradition of a Nazi criminal whose crimes were more than 40 years old as a useful contrary example within Argentinian jurisprudence. In a conversation with a member of the West German embassy, Garro pointed out ‘the political dimensions of the case with its national […] implications that might arise […] in relation to dealing with Argentina’s military past’.27 The two judges were not the first to reach such conclusions. Immediately after Schwammberger was arrested, Beate Klarsfeld travelled to Argentina to meet with the madres de la plaza de mayo, whose work she had supported since 1977, when the first charges of anti-Semitism were levelled at the regime. The madres de la plaza de mayo were a human rights organization comprised of mothers of people the military had kidnapped and made to disappear. Since the end of the military dictatorship, they had fought for the prosecution of junta crimes. In 1987, they organized a press conference for the Nazi hunter Klarsfeld in support of her demand that Schwammberger be extradited. The mothers declared: Our struggle has in any case one similarity to the efforts of those who refuse to rest in their search for Nazis: the unbending stamina in pursuing the goal that justice should be the path leading toward the dignity of peoples. For without justice we have only the abyss that freedom from punishment offers us and that will doubtlessly lead to new, even more heinous crimes.28 26 Roht-Arriaza, Pinochet Effect, p. 103; www.elargentino.com/nota-11917-La-verdadera-historiadel-Juez-Schiffrin.html, accessed 25 February 2011. 27 Adamek (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 7 December 1988, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18231. 28 Gacetilla de la Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 22 December 1987, in ibidem, vol. 18229.

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Shiffrin was determined to use the parallels between coming to terms with Nazi and junta crimes. Whereas Garro was content merely to uphold the lower court’s verdict, Shiffrin attempted to call into question Argentina’s rules concerning statutes of limitation.29 In a separate opinion, he argued that only the statute of limitations of the country requesting extradition had to be observed, but that the ex post facto extension of the statute in West Germany ran contrary to Argentinian law. Because public law set limits on foreign law, he continued, Argentinian laws had to be taken into consideration. His argumentation continued by focusing on the universality of human rights and the international recognition by the 1968 UN convention that statutes of limitations didn’t apply to crimes against humanity. Whereas the West German extension of the statute of limitations was an instance of ‘national implementation’ of the convention, Shiffrin proposed, Argentina had done nothing in this regard. Yet despite the ‘lamentable lack’ of ratification, the principle non-applicability of statutes of limitations applied nonetheless to Argentina since international law took precedence over national law. Shiffrin drew on this contorted argumentation in ultimately upholding the lower court’s verdict, which didn’t make his opinion any easier to read.30 Several efforts by interpreters with legal expertise failed miserably to translate Shiffrin’s elaborations into German.31 But if it was anything, Shiffrin’s opinion was of the moment. One week before he and Garro rendered their verdicts, Menem had taken the side of the supporters of amnesty in his inaugural address. Work on the Peronist Image The appeals court’s laboured attempts to argue, with help of the writings of Cicero, standard judicial literature and various Argentinian Supreme Court decisions, that human rights violation weren’t subject to the country’s statute of limitations had cost a lot of time. With Schwammberger intending to use all the legal means at his disposal and appeal to the Supreme Court, the newly installed Argentinian government was threatened with a foreign policy problem. It was clear that it would take months for the highest court in the land to render its verdict, whereas a precedent-setting judgement in Abraham Kipp’s case was imminent, and hardly anyone thought that it 29 Adamek (Embassy Buenos Aires) to AA, 31 August 1989, in ibidem, vol. 18232. 30 Sentencia de la Excma. Federal de Apelaciones del Departamento Judicial de La Plata, 30 August 1989, copy in: ibidem, vol. 18233. 31 Schrimm, ‘Ermittler’, p. 147.

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would turn out positively. In April 1989, a national court in Buenos Aires had already rejected the Dutch extradition request for Kipp with the expected argument that the statute of limitations in the extraditing country had to be taken into consideration.32 Shiffrin’s separate opinion can be understood as a rebuttal of this judgement, but his view that international law overrode national law didn’t enjoy much popularity among his peers. Even the Dutch government thought that an appeal would have zero chance of success and wasn’t planning to pursue the matter further. The rejection of the extradition request for Kipp thus threatened to become the first definitive judgement on a case concerning Nazi crimes under the newly elected Peronist government. Although Kipp didn’t attract anywhere near the amount of publicity Schwammberger did, the Argentinian Foreign Ministry was only too aware that in Wiesenthal, an influential public authority had got the ball rolling. For that reason, in late November 1989, when a federal court rejected, as expected, the Dutch extradition request with the same logic with which it had already rejected Olij’s extradition, the ministry’s legal department delayed announcing the results of the trial. Although the ministry had been informed in detail, they waited for three months before sharing the information with the Dutch embassy and Kipp’s lawyer. By that point, the Supreme Court was soon expected to render its verdict on Schwammberger.33 In the meantime, the Peronists were trying to use the Schwammberger case to demonstrate their reliability. In conversation, Prosecutor General Oscar Roger, who had been appointed by Menem and who was required to write an opinion in the case, assured the president of the Argentinian B’nai B’rith: ‘We’ll destroy this Schwammberger’. The B’nai B’rith president replied that he would prefer an extradition.34 In the years to come, Roger would make a name for himself as a prosecutor general who helped protect the government’s legal and political interests. In October 1989, when Menem pardoned several convicted military generals, Roger instructed his subordinate judicial offices not to challenge this measure, provoking the resignations of a number of prosecutors.35 Yet at the same time as he helped secure amnesty for junta criminals, in the Schwammberger case, he applied the law strictly to crimes committed in the name of a state. In 32 Sentencia de Larrambere (Juez Federal de Morón), 7 April 1989, printed in: Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 300-303. 33 MREC, February 21, 1990, in AT, ADAAF 216; MREC to Embajada de los Países Bajos, 27 February 1990, in ibidem, ADAAF 217. 34 Cited in Verbitsky, Corona, p. 45. 35 Clarín, 13 July 2007.

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conversation with the West Germany embassy, he expressed the opinion that genocide could not be left unpunished.36 In his summation, which he had already written in November 1989, he declared: I consider it unavoidable to determine once and for all that, in light of human rights and in view of the increase in forms of collective criminality that proceed from the state […] it is necessary to pursue and punish horrible crimes, of which genocide is one, without […] the perpetrators being able to claim the protection that the laws of a civilized society offers normal criminals.37

The prosecutor general wasn’t the only one working on implementing the legal and political interests of the government. Because only one of the five judges on the Supreme Court was close to the Peronists, Menem intended to increase their number to nine. But that reform would have led to a delay in the extradition proceedings, as the court president explained to the West German embassy.38 A positive judgement in the Schwammberger case seemed to be certain even without expanding the court so it was probably political calculation that made the government decide to wait with a parliamentary vote on the reform law until after the court’s verdict.39 On 20 March, the court definitively ruled in favour of the extradition, following the reasoning of the original lower court judgement. 40 While the Supreme Court had not taken up Shiffrin and made Schwammberger’s extradition a precedent for the legal prosecution of junta crimes, it had at least confirmed his verdict. Consequentially, Schiffrin’s judgement was to be cited often in the future – a fact that had major consequences. That same day Schwammberger’s Argentinian citizenship was revoked because he had made false declarations upon entering the country, and the West German assurance of reciprocity came into effect. On 3 May 1990, Schwammberger was finally turned over to officials from the West German Criminal Office. Two years later, a regional court in Stuttgart sentenced him to life in prison for murder and complicity in murder. With that he became the third fugitive who had to serve time after being extradited from South America. 36 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 15 November 1989, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18233. 37 Roger (Procurador General de la Nación) to Corte Suprema, 21 November 1989, in AT, ADAAB 270. 38 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 14 December 1989, in Barch, B 162, vol. 18234. 39 FS Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 11 April 1990, in ibidem, vol. 18235. 40 Sentencia de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación recaída en el pedido de extradición de Josef Schwamberger, 20 March 1990, printed in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 239-245.

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But the confrontations of the Menem government with fugitive Nazi criminals were only just starting to build momentum. In November 1991, just after Schwammberger’s trial in Stuttgart, Menem travelled to the US. The respected journalist Gerald Posner, who had written about fugitive Nazi criminals in South America, used the opportunity to call to the New York Times for Argentina to come to terms with its ‘pro-Nazi’ past. As a first step, he advised the Argentinian government to release a file about Martin Bormann which he claimed to have discovered while researching Mengele back in 1984 and which he said he had been prevented from inspecting.41 Only two days after the publication of this article, Argentinian Foreign Minister Guido di Tella announced that the Bormann file would be released. At a meeting with Jewish organizations in New York a few days later, Menem went a step further and declared that he would make all files on Nazi functionaries in the possession of Argentinian ministries accessible to the public. After his return home, he kept his promise, signing a decree to that effect in a public ceremony. The Jewish umbrella organization DAIA then commenced its ‘Witness Project’, which coordinated the search for sources concerning Nazi criminals. The quick and non-bureaucratic opening of its archives set a tone that the Peronist government, and especially di Tella, would follow in the years to come. The son of a wealthy entrepreneur, di Tella had studied economics in the US and had begun supporting the Peronist party in the 1960s. In 1976, after the military putsch against Isabel Perón, the second wife of the party founder, who had died in 1974, di Tella had gone into exile in Britain and taught at Oxford University. In 1986, he organized an international conference there whose goal was a re-evaluation of Argentina’s history. The introductory words of his own contribution spelled out the motives of his later policies toward history: In Argentina, the educated common wisdom, if there is such a thing, assumes that during the Second World War the country took an increasingly nationalistic attitude, was uncooperative with the Allied powers, showed strong sympathies with Germany, harboured German spies – and towards the end, Nazi refugees and Nazi monies – collided with the USA in a senseless fight, and finally ended up with a vernacular Fascist regime [the first Peronist government] that lasted for the first ten of the post-war years. This version would single out Argentina as one of the countries which, like Austria in Europe, toyed with Nazism, but has scarcely carried out a self-critical introspection of her sorry past. 41 New York Times, 13 November 1991.

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According to this view, Argentina’s relative international ostracism at least until the 1960s, coupled with a strong dislike of her by ‘lovers of freedom’, Allied sympathizers and Americans in particular, has been well deserved. […] These views have fed back and confirmed those of their counterparts in other parts of the world, particularly in the USA. 42

Di Tella had made it his long-term goal to counteract this view of Argentinian history and the Peronist party. After first being named Argentina’s ambassador to the United States and then Foreign Minister in 1991, this task accrued an even greater significance. The Menem government wanted to increase its status as a close ally of the US, but as di Tella pointed out, precisely in America the Peronists were saddled with the image of being a party with fascist roots. In order to protect Argentina’s attempts to cosy up to the US, the governing party had to rid itself of this image and win acknowledgement as a force for democracy. In November 1991, the first demands for the opening of the archives represented a golden opportunity to do this. While there was no denying that Nazi criminals had come to Argentina under Perón, the new Peronist government was able to show that it was not among those who resisted a ‘self-critical introspection of her sorry past’. At a DAIA organized conference in September 1993, which among other things aimed at presenting what had been learned from the Argentinian archives, di Tella declared: It was decided to open the archives because we have guilt owing to an embarrassment that happened in our past […] We do this primarily because we must ask Jewish communities in Argentina and the world and everyone who cherishes human rights for forgiveness for what happened in our fatherland, where we – sometimes out of apathy, sometimes out of complicity – worsened the situation that was brought about by the Nazis’ racist insanity […] Ultimately we are also opening our archives because we want to contribute to the cultural transformation in our country […] The opening of the archives and this conference benefit us Argentinians above all because they are a sign that we’ve begun to take responsibility for our past and for the democratization of our culture. Countries that don’t get to grips with their past tend to repeat the mistakes and horrors of the past. Breaking this vicious circle is one of our government’s priorities. 43 42 Di Tella, Argentina, S. 181. 43 Palabras del Sr. Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de la República Argentina, Ingeniero Guido di Tella, in Gurevich and Escudé, Genocidio, pp. 13 ff.

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Rapprochement with Jewish organizations, commitment to human rights and solidification of democracy – that was how di Tella wanted Argentina’s opening of its archives and its critical examination of its relationship with fugitive Nazi criminals to be interpreted. The case of Erich Priebke All the greater was the challenge with which the Menem government was confronted in the spring of 1994, when another Nazi criminal in Argentina began making global headlines. In late April, a team of journalists from the American TV network ABC discovered Erich Priebke living in the southern Argentinian vacation resort of San Carlos de Bariloche and convinced him to talk about his participation in the executions of 335 hostages in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome in March 1944. ‘It was our order’, Priebke said in front of the camera. ‘You know, in the war, that kind of thing happened’. 44 A series of right-wing extremist attacks in reunited Germany had got things rolling, leading the Simon Wiesenthal Center to take a look at German neo-Nazi circles. Center researchers stumbled across the name Juan Maler, who under his original name Reinhard Koops had been a secret police agent in Third Reich. He had helped Nazi fugitives escape to South America and was supplying the neo-Nazi scene in Germany with far-right pamphlets from Bariloche. The Center passed on this name to Sam Donaldson at ABC, who thought the matter was worth a story and met Maler in Bariloche. He denied everything and directed attention to Priebke, the president of the German-Argentinian Cultural Association. 45 Maler had been at odds with the association for decades after being forced out of its board of directors.46 It wasn’t the first time that Nazi hunters had been alerted to Priebke. The Federal Republic of Germany had regularly sent German teachers to schools financed by the association. That was how Fritz Küper, for instance, had come to Bariloche in early 1987. Küper’s parents had lived in Argentina between 1948 and 1955 and had come into contact with a lot of people who were living under assumed names. To better get to know this environment, which he considered a part of his family history, Küper applied to teach in Argentina. After two conflict-ridden years there, he returned to West Germany to write a letter to Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds. The directorship of the school, he wrote, consisted ‘almost exclusively of former members 44 Operation Rat Line, documentary directed by Donaldson. 45 Llorente and Rigacci, Priebke, p. 53; Schröm and Röpke, Kameraden, pp. 126 ff. 46 Botschaft Buenos Aires to AA, 9 June 1959, in PA AA, B 33, vol. 91.

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of the SS: Austrian Gauleiter Lantschner, Fuhrungsoffizier Max Christoph Naumann (today Schweiz), Schroppe, Hamann, Harry Pihl, a more reticient O. Berger (Gebirgsführer), and a certain Juan Maler whom I never saw’. It could be safely assumed, Küper added, that ‘some of the names were false’, which also applied to the directorship president Priebke. ‘According to my informant Dobrzanski in Bariloche’, Küper told the Nazi hunters, ‘there’s a book in which Priebke is made responsible for the execution of 50 hostages in Italy’. 47 Wiesenthal passed on the information to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg, which told him that Priebke and Naumann’s names were on the index but that neither was currently under investigation. 48 When an acquaintance of Wiesenthal failed to deliver any evidence that Priebke had been involved in any crimes, the matter seemed to be resolved. It wasn’t until four years later that Priebke’s ABC interview would occasion new investigations. Before the interview was aired, Marvin Hier from the Wiesenthal Center contacted the Central Office and described the research the team of journalists had done in Bariloche, in which Priebke had confirmed that he had been present at the executions in the Ardeatine Caves. Hier recommended that the German authorities commence an investigation and apply for Priebke’s extradition. 49 But it was only after the ABC report, which also featured Hier repeating his demands, was shown that investigators in Ludwigsburg realized how serious the matter was. Ambassador Wiegand Pabsch, who had known the president of the German-Argentinian Cultural Association personally,50 cabled back to Germany that all media outlets in Argentina were reporting on the show. He urged his government to act quickly: It can be safely assumed that the media interest in Mr Priebke’s Nazi past will continue to be intense, and that the Jewish organizations here in Argentina will turn to the embassy requesting a swift reaction from German judicial authorities and perhaps even an extradition. For this reason the relevant prosecutorial authorities should be informed immediately, and the embassy should be kept up to date about the measures that have been taken.51

47 Küper to Wiesenthal, 25 November 1989, in SWA, Akt Erich Priebke 1. See also Küper, Unsere Schulen, pp. 84-98. 48 Streim (ZSL) to Wiesenthal, 23 January 1990, in ibidem. 49 Hier (SWC) to Streim (ZSL), 29 April 1994, in Barch, B 162, vol. 43499. 50 Pabsch, Zeitgeschichten, pp. 473 and 491. 51 Pabsch (Ambassador Buenos Aires) to AA, 7 May 1994, in Barch, B 162, vol. 43499.

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Reports came from Washington, too, about the ABC programme,52 and officials in Ludwigsburg began to examine which court would have jurisdiction over Priebke. Two prosecutor’s offices had already investigated the fugitive: the Dortmund Central Office, which had discontinued proceedings concerning the deportation of Jews in Italy in 1971, and the prosecutor’s office at the Berlin regional court, which had scrutinized members of the Reich Main Security Office.53 Priebke’s wasn’t the only case the press was interested in. The ABC programme had revived the general interest in the subject of Nazi criminals in South America, and other names were soon appearing in the newspapers. Wilfried von Oven, Goebbels’ former press spokesman, had been the subject of a number of reports over the years, and it wasn’t long before the Argentinian media remembered him. A bit later, the list of names Küper had sent to Wiesenthal and the Klarsfelds a few years before was passed on to the Argentinian press. Kipp and Willem Sassen, who was known for his interviews with Adolf Eichmann, also became subjects for journalists. Ambassador Pabsch followed every report keenly and reported the names that were named back to Bonn headquarters.54 On the basis of his reports, an immediate check was ordered in Ludwigsburg. It didn’t turn up much, which was down to the unusually basic nature of Küper’s information. Proceedings against Max Naumann for the killing of POWs in Ukraine had been discontinued in 1974 by Prosecutor’s Office I in Munich because of lack of evidence. There were a number of ‘O. Bergers’, including someone who used to work at Auschwitz. The name of the former Tyrolean Gauleiter Fritz Lantschner also cropped up in the files, but he had never been under investigation in the Federal Republic of Germany, possibly out of deference to prosecutors in Innsbruck, where Lantschner had murdered a police sergeant in 1934. Kipp had been the subject of a preliminary investigation in Ludwigsburg of members of the Security Police Security Service’s foreign office in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He was thought to be the possible murderer of a Dutch resistance fighter, but he’d never been charged.55 There was no evidence of proceedings against Sassen and von Oven, while the names Hamann and Schroppe didn’t crop up in the Ludwigsburg files at all. The Central Office communicated the results of this check to the Federal Ministry of Justice, but because there 52 53 54 55

FS Botschaft Washington to AA, 10 May 1994, in ibidem. Vermerk Solf (ZSL), 10 May 1994; Streim (ZSL) to Generalbundesanwalt, 10 May 1994, in ibidem. FS Pabsch to AA, 17 May 1994 and 27 May 1994, in Barch, B 162, vol. 43499. Vermerk Sorg (ZSL), 28 October 1971, in ibidem, vol. 8031.

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were no arrest warrants, nothing happened. The possibility of reopening any of these cases was never considered.56 Meanwhile the Federal Court of Justice had declared the Central Office in Dortmund responsible for the Priebke case. It was initially uncertain about whether an extradition request was an option. In their 1971 decision to suspend investigations into the deportation of Jews in Italy, investigators argued that no base motives, extreme cruelty or perfidy could be ascribed to those who had participated in the executions in the Ardeatine Caves. For that reason, the case fell under the statute of limitations. The Central Office told North Rhine Westphalia prosecutors that they therefore saw no just cause for an extradition request.57 Nonetheless, Dortmund authorities continued their investigations and soon uncovered that an important piece of evidence had been neglected by all previous investigations. It concerned the published verdict of an Italian military court from 1948 against Priebke’s former superior Herbert Kappler, which could have been taken into consideration in 1971. Prosecutors believed that they could conclude from the verdict ‘that the shooting of the hostages had taken place under conditions that made the executions seem excessively cruel’.58 Inspection of the files from Kappler’s trial in West Germany confirmed this conviction. The former commandant of the Security Police of the Security Service had escaped from an Italian prison in Rome in 1977 and had fled to West Germany, where investigations against him were immediately begun in Lüneburg. The case hadn’t come to trial because Kappler had died a few months later.59 But because Lüneburg prosecutors had worked together with Italian authorities, they had succeeded in that short time in collecting more material about Nazi crimes in Italy than the Dortmund Central Office had in many years. The Lüneburg files contained statements directly after the war from those responsible about the executions in the Ardeatine Caves. Those files allowed investigators to conclude ‘that the shootings of the hostages had taken place under murder-like conditions, namely of cruelty’.60 It wasn’t just new evidence that allowed for a re-evaluation of Priebke’s deeds. The criteria used by judicial authorities had also changed markedly since the 1970s. In 1971, when investigations of the executions in Italy had 56 Streim (ZSL) to BMJ, 1 June 1994; Dreßen (ZSL) to BMJ, 18 May 1994, in ibidem, vol. 43499. 57 Schacht (ZS Dortmund) to JM NRW, 20 June 1994, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, 45 Js 16/94, Berichtsheft I: Priebke/Haas. 58 Schacht (ZS Dortmund) to JM NRW, 18 July 1994, in ibidem. 59 Bohr, ‘Flucht’. 60 Schacht (ZS Dortmund) to JM NRW, 24 March 1995, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, 45 Js 16/94, Berichtsheft I: Priebke/Haas.

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been suspended, the authorities tended only to classify acts as being murder or complicity in murder, if qualities like excessive cruelty or base motives could be proved individually. Where acts of repressing resistance among civilian populations were concerned, authorities usually assumed that these qualities weren’t present and classified as acts of manslaughter, to which the statute of limitations applied.61 But in the meantime, judges had come round to the view that participating in gruesome crimes deserved to be classed as murder or complicity in murder. At a discussion of the case in December 1994, between Dortmund investigators and a representative of the superior prosecutor general, a new problem arose. According to the files, before the executions, Kappler had threatened his underlings with an SS and police court, so that paragraph 47 of the military criminal code perhaps applied. It prohibited soldiers from being punished for carrying out orders. The issue could only be resolved by determining what capacity Priebke had occupied during the executions.62 Four months later, however, when no evidence for the suspect having a ‘superior position’ emerged,63 the prosecutor general changed his position. It was now argued that Priebke must have known the executions were illegal and thus couldn’t claim to have merely been following orders. The Central Office should therefore issue a warrant for his arrest.64 In July 1995, over a year after Priebke had been discovered, German authorities announced that they were ready to file an extradition request.65 But a further delay ensued because unlike Brazilian courts, Argentinian ones processed extradition cases one after another rather than simultaneously.66 Despite the tremendous media interest, the Central Office was able to carry out its investigations calmly and thoroughly, without undue public pressure.67 That was because everyone was paying attention to the Italian extradition request, which had been filed the previous year. Directly after the ABC programme was broadcast, the new government under Silvio Berlusconi announced that it would apply for Priebke’s extradition and had ordered its judicial authorities to commence investigations to that end.68 61 Freudiger, Aufarbeitung, pp. 325 ff. 62 Vermerk Heinrich (ZS Dortmund), 15 December 1994, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, 45 Js 16/94, Handakte. 63 Schacht (ZS Dortmund) to JM NRW, 24 March 1995, in ibidem, Berichtsheft I: Priebke/Haas. 64 Weissing (GStA Hamm) to Schacht (ZS Dortmund), 28 April 1995, in ibidem. 65 Schneider (BKA) to ZS Dortmund, 13 July 1995, in ibidem, Auslieferungsheft II. 66 FS Koepke (Botschaft Buenos Aires) to AA, 30 August 1995, in ibidem. 67 Interview Stahl with Ullrich Maaß (ZS Dortmund), 10 June 2010. 68 New York Times, 8 May 1994.

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This was a surprising step. Both Donaldson and the Simon Wiesenthal Center had talked only of the German government’s duty to prosecute Priebke. The Center hadn’t made any demands of the Italian government away from the public eye, either.69 Berlusconi’s governing coalition with the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano and the right-wing populist Lega Nord had unleashed a discussion in the country about Italy’s fascist past. Above all Gianfranco Fini of Movimento sought to counter criticism by invoking the need for ‘national reconciliation’ between fascists and the resistance and made a great show of honouring former resistance fighters in public.70 He no doubt thought that the trial of a German for shooting Italian resistance fighters would be just the thing to advance that reconciliation. In any case, the Italian government’s decision suited the Wiesenthal Center, which was running the anti-Priebke campaign, just fine. Hier and Zuroff saw the trials of Nazi criminals above all as a means to promote Holocaust remembrance, so it was in their interest to get authorities in as many countries as possible to prosecute such criminals. For that reason, they supported the Italian extradition request and hoped that a trial in Rome could set an example for others. The point was to remind people not just of the crimes that had been committed in Italy but the circumstances in the post-war country that had allowed Priebke to flee.71 But the Italian request had a flaw. Italy and Argentina had an extradition treaty that, just like the Dutch-Argentinian one, specified that the crimes in question were not to fall under the statute of limitations in either country. The cases of Kipp and Olij had delivered two precedents in which courts had rejected requests for precisely that reason. Even worse, the judge assigned to the Priebke request was the same one who had found that Kipp could not be extradited in 1989.72 Di Tella had apparently not thought of the obstacles existing treaties put in the way of extradition when he had told Donaldson in interview that every Nazi criminal would definitely be extradited. Nonetheless, the Menem government didn’t see the situation as hopeless. The President told his justice minister to examine which legal instruments existed that would help the extradition make progress. The minister concluded that ‘the government was in no danger of making a mistake’, if it supported the Italian request.73 69 Email Zuroff to Stahl, 15 March 2011. 70 Staron, Fosse, pp. 320-323; Mantelli, ‘Revisionismus’; Focardi, ‘Gedenktage’, pp. 218 ff. 71 Staron, Fosse, p. 335; FS Kastrup (Ambassador in Rom) to AA, 1 August 1996, in LA NRW, SA Münster, Q 234 StA Dortmund, ZS für NS-Verbrechen, 45 Js 16/94, Auslieferungsheft I. 72 Gurevich (CES) to Beraja (Presidente de la DAIA), 13 May 1994, in AT, Caja Erich Priebke. 73 Cited in Llorente and Rigacci, Priebke, p. 127.

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Menem and di Tella quickly adopted this position as their own,74 and as a sign of good will, the government decided to act. In 1992, the DAIA had suggested, as was the case in America in 1979, the creation of an authority for the express purpose of tracking down and deporting Nazi criminals.75 The suggestion was now revived and expanded. A national institute to fight discrimination, xenophobia, and racism was to be founded, and its duties would include uncovering war criminals in Argentina.76 In June 1994, a commission under Interior Minister Carlos Ruckauf went to Bariloche to begin drafting the legislation for this. The holiday resort in the south of the country was chosen for its symbolism. New reports about the cultural association that was contaminated with Nazi ideology, which were based on information from the former teacher Küper, had made Bariloche famous worldwide as a den of Nazism. The interior minister wanted to demonstrate that the days when Argentina served as a refuge for Nazi criminals were over once and for all.77 At first it seemed as though the Argentinian judicial system would go along with the government’s wish for an extradition. The judge abandoned his standpoint from the Kipp verdict and argued that Priebke’s deeds were crimes against humanity to which the statute of limitations didn’t apply. But that August, the verdict was overturned on appeal, with the court finding that the category ‘crimes against humanity’ could not be used retroactively to describe the executions in the Ardeatine Caves, and that the statute of limitations in force in Argentina in 1944 applied. The appeals court also objected that the Italian arrest warrant had been issued for war crimes and not the ordinary crimes which the Italian-Argentinian extradition treaty concerned. Nonetheless the appeals court judges didn’t want their ruling to be misinterpreted as indifference to what Priebke had done. Instead, it was a result of ‘mistakes and defects in the extradition system’, which it was not the court’s task to rectify.78 The case then went before the Supreme Court. Among the four judges who would render the final verdict were the court president Julio Mazareno and his vice-president Eduardo Moliné O’Connor. Both had been appointed as part of Menem’s expansion of Argentina’s highest court and were thought to 74 New York Times, 25 June 1994. 75 Conferencia de Prensa de DAIA, 8 August 1996, in AT, Caja Erich Priebke. 76 Insituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo (INADI). 77 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24 June 1994. 78 Sentencia de la Cámara Federal de Apelaciones de Gral. Roca, 23 August 1995, in Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 328-355; quotation: ‘fallas y defectos en el sistema extradicional’, p. 347.

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guarantee an ‘automatic majority of the Menemists’.79 That was a popular way of saying Argentinian jurisprudence followed the interests of the government on fundamental issues. Indeed, there were many indications that the two men were named because of their affinities with Peronism. Nazareno had enjoyed close contacts with the Menem family for decades, and Moliné, whose qualifications for the job left much to be desired, was also close to circles around the Argentinian President. Moliné’s most recent academic publication was from 1968, and his previous occupation was as the president of the Argentinian tennis association.80 The government’s instrumentalizing of the judicial system was so obvious Menem didn’t even bother to deny it. He openly declared: ‘There is no supreme court in this world whose members are not on good terms with political power. If you could name me a single example, maybe I’d be a somewhat convinced’.81 Significantly, in contrast to the other two judges, Nazareno and Moliné voted for Priebke’s extradition, developing an extremely innovative line argument with reference to Argentina’s previous practice. Despite the fact that the Italian warrant was issued for war crimes, the judges argued that Argentinian courts were by no means bound to follow that assessment. Priebke’s deeds could be interpreted as genocide since 75 out of the 335 people of the Ardeatine massacres had been Jews. This reinterpretation of the request was necessary, as the Argentinian-Italian treaty prohibited extradition ‘if the crime was covered by military law and not common law’.82 At the same time, the genocide proposition was necessary for the judges to argue that Priebke’s crimes didn’t fall under the Argentinian statute of limitations. According to a series of treaties and conventions that were part of the Mexico City Agreement, which Argentina had also signed, the case fell under international law. That took precedence over Argentinian law, including the Argentinian statute of limitations. Although Argentina hadn’t signed on to the convention suspending statutes of limitations for crimes against humanity, international law, which precluded such statutes, had to be considered when deciding on the extradition request.83 The court was split evenly, but the vote of Nazareno as president carried extra weight, so the final supreme court of 2 November 1995 verdict accepted 79 Mayoría automatica menemista. 80 See a.o. Chávez, ‘Judges’, pp. 37 ff. 81 Cited in: Nolte, ‘Perón’, p. 112. 82 Ley, 23.719, accessed 16 March 2011, www.cooperacion-penal.gov.ar/23719.htm. 83 Voto del Presidente y Vicepresidente de la Corte Suprema, printed in: Warszawski, Testimonio II, pp. 361-385.

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this argument and ordered Priebke’s extradition.84 The Menem government was only too eager to see that this ruling was carried out, and when Priebke was found innocent in an initial trial in Rome, di Tella hastened to inform the world that he would not be allowed to return to Argentina since his presence would ‘be and remain counterproductive’.85 While the Priebke case in Argentina reignited the debate about Perón’s relationship to the National Socialists, in Italy it made people think about why the Italian judicial system had done so little to punish Nazi crimes since the end of the war. Not long after Italian military prosecutors, following orders from their government, began to collect incriminating evidence against Priebke, investigators discovered a cabinet containing dusty files from proceedings against German war criminals from the 1940s and 1950s. They had all been suspended in the 1960s. The rediscovered documents from the ‘cabinet of shame’ enabled the Italian judicial system to restart legal proceedings in a number of cases – most in absentia since West Germany was not allowed to extradite its own citizens. At the same time, an inflammatory debate began in Italian society about why legal action had been cancelled starting in 1960. The Italian parliament formed an investigative committee to answer this question.86 The extradition verdicts and the fight against the Argentinian amnesty law The Priebke case didn’t just have consequences for the Italian judicial system. At the time of his extradition, a debate about Argentina’s junta past was in full swing in the country. For years the topic had existed only in the margins of Argentinian society, but in March 1995 an interview with the retired lieutenant commander Adolfo Francisco Scilingo caused a scandal. In it, he talked in detail about the so-called death flights. Under the military junta, security forces had killed prisoners by simply throwing them out of airplanes above the open ocean. Scilingo’s revelations led others to confess so that the general public learned more and more about the junta’s horrible crimes.87 In this context, it was easy to contrast the Menem government’s position on Nazi criminals with its amnesty policy. Whereas the state used all the means at its disposal to get rid of a Nazi criminal, it stuck to its policy of 84 Sentencia de la Corte Suprema, 2 November 1995, printed in: ibidem, pp. 359 ff. 85 La Nación, 2 August 1995. 86 Focardi, ‘Italien’, pp. 559-564; Steinacher, ‘Massaker’, pp. 306-311. 87 Fuchs, Geschichte, pp. 200-206.

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pardoning junta criminals and the so-called emergency order law.88 Indeed, the government steadfastly supported the Argentinian military, which was coming under increasing pressure. While challenged on this contradiction, the president of the DAIA answered evasively: ‘We have to accept that in the world and in political life there are often lots of contradictions’.89 If the issue of Nazi criminals had been instrumentalized for the prosecution of the junta, in which the DAIA in this point took little interest, it would have caused unnecessary problems for further extraditions. Other parties utilized the contradictions in the Peronist government’s policies concerning Argentina’s past. In January 1998, the left-wing opposition alliance of parties Frepaso90 put forward a draft law, much to the irritation of the government, which aimed to suspend the amnesty laws passed under Alfonsín. Schiffrin, who still presided over the court in La Plata and was one of a circle of judges supporting the legal prosecution of junta crimes, welcomed the initiative but felt it hadn’t been argued for well enough. Citing the Schwammberger and Priebke cases, he proposed, it could be shown that, despite its support for amnesty, the Supreme Court had already acknowledged that the statute of limitations didn’t apply to crimes against humanity.91 This argumentation was based on an essay Schiffrin had written about the ‘precedence of international before Argentinian law’ for a collection of judicial investigations published the preceding year by human rights organizations. In it, he had expounded upon the thesis that the international principle restricting statute of limitation also applied in Argentina.92 For tactical reasons in an election, Frepaso soon swiftly withdrew the draft law, but it was taken up again a few months later by one of the leading parliamentary deputies of the governing party. As a Peronist Jorge Yoma had suffered from junta persecution and considered it shameful that his party didn’t support holding the military dictatorship legally accountable for its crimes.93 In April 1998, he introduced legislation to translate the United Nations principle of restrictions on the statute of limitations into Argentinian law. The signs were auspicious. In 1995, after the difficulties it had encountered with Priebke’s extradition, the Argentinian Congress had endorsed the UN Convention. But in order for it to be enforced, a corresponding law had to be passed and presented to the United Nations as a so-called ratification 88 Ley de Obediencia Debida. 89 Conferencia de Prensa de DAIA, 8 August 1996, in AT, Caja Erich Priebke. 90 Frente País Solidario (Front for a Country in Solidarity). 91 Página 12, 30 July 1998. 92 Schiffrin, ‚Primacía‘. 93 La Nación, 4 April 1998.

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instrument. The Menem government had neglected to do this, and Yoma now demanded that the non-applicability of the statute of limitations to crimes against humanity had to be anchored in the Argentinian criminal code. With great skill, in newspaper interviews and parliamentary debates, he used the government’s efforts to change Argentina’s image as a Nazi-friendly country to point out the problem in the Priebke case: We’re one of the few countries on earth, in which this sort of crime falls under the statute of limitations. The result was that a judge in Bariloche rejected Priebke’s extradition with the argument that Argentina hadn’t ratified the Convention. If the Supreme Court hadn’t saved the day, we would have been humiliated internationally.94

In 1998, resistance also formed within the Argentinian judicial system to the policies of amnesty. A number of judges began to conduct trials aimed at uncovering the truth. While these could not yield legal convictions, they did reveal further details about junta oppression. Moreover human rights groups had discovered a loophole in Argentinian law that did allow for the prosecution of some junta leaders. Because the junta had allowed the children of victims to be adopted, many of its decision-makers were convicted of kidnapping in the 1990s. The federal judge Roberto Marquevich had taken a detailed look at these cases and had uncovered evidence that the adoptions were part of a strategy on the part of Argentina’s military government.95 In mid-July, Marquevich issued a warrant for the arrest of Jorge Videla, who had been president of the junta for five years. Videla had been convicted previously, but had benefited from Menem’s amnesty. Marquevich argued that the complicity in the kidnapping of children was a crime against humanity, and that the statute of limitations had not applied to this crime since Argentina’s constitutional reform of 1994. Back then, retroactive convictions had been explicitly prohibited, but Marquevich invoked Schiffrin’s thesis of the primacy of international law and argued that the principle had applied in the Schwammberger and Priebke verdicts. International law had forbidden the kidnapping of children at the time Videla had acted. Thus it could also be applied to junta crimes.96 94 DSCS, 28 October 1998, Article 13. See also: Página 12, 18 April 1998 and 20 October 1998. 95 Fuchs, Geschichte, pp. 214 ff. 96 Videla Jorge R. s/Prisión preventiva, 13 July 1998, accessed 17 March 2011, www.desaparecidos. org/nuncamas/web/investig/menores/fallos2_06.htm. See also Roht-Arriaza, Pinochet, pp. 99 ff. and 110 ff.

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Menem didn’t conceal his low opinion of Videla’s arrest, calling it a systematic campaign and ‘an act of revenge by the families of the victims’.97 But his protest was to no avail. Opponents of amnesty had succeeded in striking a decisive blow by pointing out the inconsistency of the Peronists’ treatment of state-sanctioned crimes and oppression. One year later, an appeals court upheld Videla’s arrest, citing Schiffrin’s Schwammberger verdict,98 while thanks to Marquevich taking the lead, more and more junta crimes were being investigated and prosecuted.99 Videla’s arrest marked a watershed in how Argentina’s prosecutors approached junta crimes, and the second decisive step toward a comprehensive revision of amnesty policies was also based on an extradition verdict. In March 2001, in response to a lawsuit by human rights organizations, Federal Judge Gabriel Cavallo declared the amnesty laws unconstitutional, citing the arguments of Nazareno and Moliné, to which he devoted several pages of his verdict.100 This was an adroit manoeuvre. Nazareno and Moliné still sat on the Supreme Court, which would ultimately decide on the amnesty laws. But in 2003, before that could happen, the newly elected Argentinian president, the Peronist Nestor Kirchner, reversed the government’s policies concerning the past. Under pressure from several European countries who were demanding the extradition of those responsible for junta crimes, and with the Supreme Court delaying its decision about Cavallo’s verdict, Kirchner decided to support a law annulling the amnesty legislation. After a highly publicized debate, the Argentinian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Congress, approved the draft law on 12 August 2003. A week later the Argentinian Senate followed suit.101 Once again, the Schwammberger and Priebke verdicts were cited as evidence for the laws’ unconstitutionality.102 Those two verdicts had become central elements in the change in policies concerning the past in Argentina. Against their own will, the Peronists’ attempt to free Argentina from the blemish of being a safe haven for war criminals had long-term consequences for the country’s treatment of its own dictatorial past. Ultimately it had

97 Cited in: Fuchs, Geschichte, pp. 215 ff. 98 Resolución de la Cámara Federal, 9 September 1999, accessed 17 March 2011, www.desaparecidos.org/nuncamas/web/juicios/argentin/videla_090999.htm. 99 Fuchs, Geschichte, p. 215. 100 Sentencia de Cavallo, 6 March 2001, 17 March 2011, www.cels.org.ar/documentos/index. 101 Fuchs, Geschichte, pp. 263-272. 102 DSCD, 12 August 2003, 18 March 2011, www1.hcdn.gov.ar/sesionesxml/frames.html and DSCS, August 20 and 21, 2003, www.senado.gov.ar/web/taqui/cuerpol.php.

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proven untenable to have two parallel strategies on how to deal with state-sanctioned crimes.

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Argentina and the Looted Gold Debate in the 1990s

When Marquevich cited the Schwammberger and Priebke extradition verdict in issuing the arrest warrant against Videla, he invoked an issue that was very pressing in mid-1998. Fugitive war criminals had repeatedly made the headlines in the preceding months. And Menem had made it clear with a series of measures that in its position concerning Nazi criminals the government felt duty-bound to continue the policies he had pursued ever since he was elected. Instrumentalizing the extradition verdicts was not only judicially clever. It also pointedly and publically underscored the contradictions in the Peronists’ policies toward the past. For example after Marquevich’s warrant had been carried out, the leftist-liberal newspaper Página/12 ran the headline ‘Videla’s Colleagues’, referring to the two Nazis whose extraditions had served as an important basis for the former’s arrest.103 But why did the Argentinian interest in fugitive Nazi criminals continue unabated in the late 1990s? Indeed, why had it in many respects grown so much that it came to affect the issue of how to deal with the country’s junta past? For the Menem government, the world should have been fine once Priebke was extradited. Again, it had shown it was willing to help bring a Nazi criminal to justice and had also opened its archives to the public. But then something happened that encouraged scepticism about the government’s actions. In the wake of the attempts of Swiss banks to gain a foothold in the US in the early 1990s, American media had begun taking a closer look at these financial institutions. It wasn’t long before the decades-old accusations were levelled with a renewed vehemence that the banks were denying surviving relatives access to the accounts of people killed by the National Socialists. The World Jewish Congress demanded that the banks unfreeze the accounts, and in late 1995, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, the chairman of the US Senate’s Banking Committee, got involved. During investigations into where Jewish assets had gone, members of D’Amato’s staff had consulted the American National Archive, and what they found attracted the interest of a whole phalanx of journalists.104 103 Página 12, 15 July 1998. 104 Eizenstat, Gerechtigkeit, pp. 69-101.

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center had also begun to take note of this issue, and it had a particular perspective on the matter. Had not Wiesenthal himself always insisted that the Nazis had spirited away looted Jewish assets to South America to help war criminals flee from Europe? This hypothesis seemed to be confirmed in late 1996, when documents from the archives concerning the American-Argentinian confrontation in the 1940s started coming to light. One of them spoke of 98 German companies in Argentina that served as recipients of transactions from the Third Reich. Wiesenthal had given this number of German companies in his books as well. In late November, the Center’s European representative, Shimon Samuels, travelled to Argentina and demanded that the Argentinian National Bank make its data from the 1940s available to the public. To add emphasis to his demand and feed suspicions that assets from the Third Reich had made their way to Argentina, Samuels cited Santander’s 1953 pamphlet ‘Technique of a Betrayal’.105 The Center was interested in more than just Argentina. Wiesenthal had always claimed that Nazi criminals had fled to countries where the Nazi government had transferred its assets. Conversely that meant that looted assets had to be located where Nazi criminals had been discovered. In a newspaper interview, Samuels declared: ‘There is the suspicion that an infrastructure existed in Argentina as well as Brazil and Paraguay, countries that harboured war criminals, to support those criminals. We maintain the deep suspicion that the missing gold might have been brought to this side of the Atlantic’.106 Under the leadership of Rabbi Henry Sobel, Brazil’s Jewish community insisted upon the release of f inancial data, and the country promptly complied. President Henrique Cardoso announced the formation of a commission that ‘would do everything possible and impossible’ to track down confiscated Jewish assets. However, the Wiesenthal Center’s claims never met with long-term interest in Brazil, Paraguay or other South American countries. The question of Jewish assets had little to do with the current political situation there. In Argentina, though, things were different. The country was governed by a party that took its name from a man suspected of having played an important role in the transfer of those assets. Moreover, in the American National Archive, which Senate workers and journalists had been going through with a f ine-tooth comb since the onset of the looted gold debate, there were documents from the 1940s that articulated precisely this suspicion. Whereas Samuels had mostly cited Wiesenthal 105 La Nación, 1 December 1996. 106 Interview with Shimon Samuels, in La Nación, 27 November 1996.

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and Santander to back up his demands, after his trip D’Amato’s researchers and journalists located these documents. Conjectures from the mid-1940s among the Argentinian opposition, Cordell Hull, Spruille Braden, Henry Morgenthau, and the intelligence services and informers with whom they worked was now passed on to the media as reliable historical evidence. It seemed certain that Perón had been a close ally of the Axis Powers who had received money from the Third Reich to enable war criminals to flee, thereby ensuring the survival of fascism. The threatening scenarios of the 1940s experienced a renaissance.107 The documents unearthed from the American archives and the assertions of the Wiesenthal Center seemed to confirm the suspicions, repeatedly voiced since Menem announced the release of the files on Nazi criminals, that the whole truth still had not seen the light of day. For the anti-Peronist press in Argentina, the reports coming in from abroad were a welcome excuse both to stigmatize the namesake of their rivals’ party as a Nazi ally and to criticize the policies of the latter-day Peronists toward the past as inadequate. Di Tella observed with great concern as the public once again began discussing interpretations of Argentinian history he had been trying to lay to rest since his days as a university lecturer. Once it became clear that, in the wake of the discoveries in the American archives, merely releasing financial data would not be enough to satisfy the public’s thirst for information, di Tella began to ponder further steps. In February 1997, he summoned DAIA president Beraja and declared: ‘For us this is a state problem that could cause a lot of unpleasantness internationally, if it isn’t solved’. Di Tella wanted to know what the Jewish community intended to do in this matter. Beraja responded that he had considered employing a team of researchers to investigate Nazi financial transfers to Argentina, much as the DAIA had already done in conjunction with the debate about Nazi criminals. If di Tella were to form an international commission, Beraja made it understood, he could count on DAIA support.108 Having been part of the historical debates in the 1940s before his political career under Menem, di Tella quickly recognized the opportunities inherent in forming such a commission. With its help, he could influence a debate which the government had previously been unable to steer. In March, di Tella contacted the historian Ignacio Klich, whom he knew from his days as an academic, and informed him about his plans. In his works, Klich had not only discredited many of the legends surrounding the flight of Nazi 107 Allison, ‘Evil’, pp. 36 ff.; Llorente and Rigacci: Priebke, p. 139. 108 La Nación, 9 May 1997.

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criminals and the transfer of wealth to Argentina.109 As the Latin America expert of the American Jewish Yearbook, Klich was also in a position to communicate such a message to the people di Tella wanted to reach. In the weeks that followed, Klich and di Tella together decided upon the mandate, structure, and composition of the Commission for the Investigation of National Socialist Activities in Argentina110 or CEANA.111 In defining the object of the commission’s research, Klick and di Tella went beyond the Wiesenthal Center’s demands, including not just the amount and whereabouts of looted Nazi assets in Argentina but also the issue of Nazi criminals who went underground in the country, which had been a renewed topic of discussion in the context of the looted gold debate. As time unfolded other questions connected with that debate were also addressed, for example the reasons behind Argentina’s neutrality in the Second World War. The expansion of the questions asked was not just an expression of Argentinians being especially assiduous about doing what di Tella called ‘self-critical introspection’. In the late 1990s, having a commission full of historians investigate the question of neutrality and the number of Nazi criminals in the country seemed to the Argentinian government to be an optimal solution. Among historians the interpretation, shared by di Tella, had established itself that Argentina’s neutrality was primarily a product of Argentinian and American competition for influence on the American continent and not an expression of sympathy for the Axis powers based on some sort of ideological affinity.112 The intelligence service reports about the supposed flight of Nazi fugitives to Argentina had started before the end of the war, but those reports, as well as the idea that they took large sums of money with them, had been revealed as erroneous and based on dubious sources.113 Investigations about putative Nazi criminals’ immigration to Argentina corrected their number markedly downward: from a couple of thousand to only fifty men from Germany or Austria who were wanted by the authorities. Furthermore, the notion of a wealthy organization of former SS members keeping an underground Nazi organization alive with rescued Nazis’ assets was rejected as a myth.114 The formation of a commission of historians was a media event that drew attention to results of recent research which had been completely ignored 109 Klich, ‘Nazis’. 110 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Acitividades del Nazismo en la Argentina. 111 Interview Stahl with Ignacio Klich, 18 November 2009. 112 See the contributions in the volume Di Tella, Argentina. 113 Newton, Menace. 114 Meding, Flucht.

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in the Nazi gold debate. At the same time, it was proof that the Argentinian government conformed to the standards of Western democracies by critically examining the country’s own past. This double function of the CEANA was reflected in its personnel. With Mario Rapoport, Holger Meding, Robert Newton, and Ignacio Klich, the commission included historians who had worked for years to revise the history of Peronism, of Argentina’s neutrality in the Second World War, and of Peronist immigration policies. At the same time, the commission also featured Charlotta Jackisch and Beatriz Gurevich, two scholars who were critical of Peronism and Argentinian neutrality. In March 1998, the commission presented its first preliminary report, and those who hoped the research carried out in various European and Argentinian archives would yield spectacular revelations were disappointed. The amount of money directly transferred between the Third Reich and Argentina was relatively small, transfers via third countries could neither be confirmed nor ruled out, and all of the war criminals found in Argentina were already known.115 It wasn’t long before the commission attracted public criticism. Jorge Camarasa, a journalist whose widely read books fed the wildest speculations, particularly criticized the commission’s findings about fugitive Nazi criminals in Argentina. The commission had written that it had begun research in Argentinian archives, using a list of nineteen names as a basis. Camarasa acted as if that were a definitive number and named several Nazi criminals who weren’t mentioned in the report, asserting that there were at least 200 Nazi fugitives in Argentina. His judgement about the commission’s work was damning in the extreme: This impoverished, imprecise and incomplete remake [sic] of what is already known gives reason to doubt about what sort of results there may be at the end. It recalls the saying attributed to Juan Domingo Perón: ‘If you want to ensure that something doesn’t become known, assign an investigative commission to it.’116

The Argentinian Ustaša exiles Camarasa would soon be given the opportunity to match his verbal criticism with deeds. With Croatia being ruled by the nationalist Franjo Tudjman in the mid-1990s, Jewish organizations were growing increasingly worried about 115 CEANA, ed., Primer Informe. 116 La Nación, 10 March 1998.

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developments in the Balkans. For Tudjman, Anti Pavelić, who had cooperated with the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews, was a positive figure and an ‘expression of the historical longing of the Croatian people for a sovereign state’. Tudjman, himself a former history professor, sought to downplay the crimes committed by the Pavelić regime. This stance toward Croatian history was popular. Numerous urban squares and streets were named after former Ustaša leaders.117 For that reason, in 1995, the Simon Wiesenthal Center decided that the trial of a ranking Ustaša official was necessary to remind the Croatian government about the crimes that had been committed in the Second World War. After researching the files of the Yugoslav State Commission for the Determination of the Crimes of the German Occupiers, which had carried out investigations in the post-war period, the director of the Belgrade Genocide Museum, Milan Bulajic, recommended going after Dinko Šakić. Šakić had run the Jasenovac concentration camp set up by Ustaša, where thousands of people, mostly Serbs and Jews had been murdered.118 It was no secret that Šakić lived in Argentina, and after the fall of communism, he had repeatedly got involved in debates in his home country. In a 1990 interview with a Croatian newspaper, he had glorified the Ustaša state, and during a trip by Tudjman to Argentina in 1994, he told Croatian journalists that he regretted not having killed more Serbs in Jasenovac.119 The way Tudjman presented himself on the trip didn’t encourage Šakić to be discrete. The Croatian president publically thanked Menem for the fact that Argentina had taken in so many Croatian ‘patriots’ after the war.120 But Šakić’s public brazenness would soon seal his fate. Efraim Zuroff was locating witnesses from Jasenovac and incriminating evidence was piling up against Šakić. Meanwhile Sergio Widder, the director of the Latin America division of the Wiesenthal Center in Buenos Aires, founded several years previously, and Camarasa were tracking down Šakić’s whereabouts. In the spring of 1998, they located his apartment, and Camarasa showed up with a camera team. The former concentration camp commandant didn’t try to deny what he had done in Jasenovac, merely pointing out that he had only occupied the post for 100 days. On 6 April, the interview was broadcast, and the next day Zuroff demanded of Croatia’s ambassador in Israel that his country apply for Šakić’s extradition.121 117 Hoppe, Elite, pp. 15 ff., quotation on p. 15. 118 Zuroff, Operation, pp. 131-136. 119 New York Times, 23 July 2008; Melčić, ‘Gerechtigkeit’, pp. 190 ff. 120 Hoppe, Elite, p. 15. 121 Zuroff, Operation, pp. 138 ff.

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At first nothing happened, which could hardly have surprised Zuroff. Tudjman’s priority where history was concerned was the reconciliation of all Croats, and his government had assigned the Jasenovac concentration camp a special role in this process. The plan was to bury the remains of everyone who died in the Second World War there, both those who had been murdered by Ustaša and those who had taken part in those murders and were executed by the communists after the war. There had been protests, supported by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, against this idea as far back as 1996. A trial of a member of Ustaša would have been enormously damaging to the government’s promotion of reconciliation, which could only function as long the crimes of the past were discussed solely in abstract terms. But then rumours circulated that the Serbian government was planning to request Šakić’s extradition. A globally publicized trial there would have given the Serbian government the chance to divert attention away from Serbia’s crimes against Croatian civilians in the Balkan Wars, which had just ended, and to demonstrate how much Serbian blood Croats had on their hands. Under no circumstances could the Croatian government allow that. Thus, on 10 April 1998, Tudjman’s justice minister announced that his country was applying for Šakić’s extradition.122 The text of the request that was delivered ten days later to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry made it clear what arguments Croatia would use to try to prevent Serbia from instrumentalizing the trial. There were suspicions, the request read, that during the Second World War Šakić had been involved in events in Jasenovac, where along with Jews and Sinti and Roma ‘politically inacceptable Croats and Serbs’ had been tortured and murdered.123 Zagreb didn’t admit that Serbs made up the disproportionately large number of the victims because, unlike the Croats, they were killed for racist reasons. Šakić was of course familiar with the constellation of political interests in the Balkans, and he seems to have hoped that the Croatian judicial system would treat him with understanding. When the police came to his door on 1 May, he had already come up with a plan. When asked whether he wanted to legally challenge his extradition, he said he would rather be handed over as quickly as possible to Croatian authorities. He rebuffed the attempt of a state-appointed attorney, who accompanied the police, to change his mind, saying: ‘We Croatians defended ourselves against bandits. For that 122 Die Zeit, 20/1998. 123 Fiscalía Regional de Estado – Zagreb – al Juez de Instrucción, 20 April 1998, in AT, Caja Croatas 2, Juzgado Federal de Primera Instancia de Dolores (Provincia de Buenos Aires): Dinko Šakić.

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reason, all those accusations you read out don’t worry me, I know from my own memory what really happened’. Addressing the attorney, he became even more dramatic, declaring that ‘he wanted to clear his name, not for his own sake but for his children and their descendents in Argentina, so that they could walk with their heads held high and say “Our father was no criminal”’.124 The Argentinian government welcomed Šakić’s faith in the Croatian judicial system, which meant there was no need to wait for the conclusion of trial which, as experience had shown, could take two years. Instead the government could celebrate a speedy success. Two weeks after Šakić’s arrest, Menem signed the extradition decree. The trial in Zagreb went differently than Šakić expected. In October 1999, a court there gave him the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison. He was the first criminal after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact to be convicted of complicity in Nazi crimes. The trial was accompanied by press reporting that forced the Croatian public to recognize how inhumanely the Pavelić regime had treated ethnic minorities and political dissidents. The trial presented an image of the Ustaša state opposite to the one Tudjman and other nationalists wanted to promote. It was the start of a heated debate about the Croatian past.125 With Šakić having been convicted in Croatia, the Wiesenthal Center felt emboldened to take further steps. Šakić was hardly the only Ustaša man who was known to be living in Argentina. Since the early 1990s, the Center had regularly examined the case of Ivo Rojnica, who had been the commandant of the city of Dubrovnik between 1941 and 1945. After the war, he had settled in Argentina and become a successful businessman with good contacts in government circles. He boasted about his close relationship to the Menem government and had a high opinion of di Tella.126 After Croatia became independent, it made sense for the Tudjman government to name this influential Croatian a representative of the newly founded nation in South America. But just as Rojnica was about to be appointed ambassador in Buenos Aires, the Simon Wiesenthal Center objected, whereupon the Argentinian government withheld its approval of the appointment.127 Because of Rojnica’s past, the Menem government found it extremely unpleasant that his case was again raised as it was trying to demonstrate its self-critical interest in its own history. But unlike Šakić, 124 Protocolo de la detención de Šakić, 1 May 1998, in ibidem. 125 Melčić, ‘Gerechtigkeit’, pp. 196 ff. 126 When the former Foreign Minister died in 2002, Rojnica wrote an obituary. 127 Interview with Rojnica, in La Nación, 14 May 1998; Página 12, 31 May 2003.

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there was never enough incriminating evidence to raise charges against Rojnica. The only piece of evidence against him was a decree he had signed in 1941 prohibiting Serbs and Jews from leaving their homes after seven pm. It could not be proven that Rojnica had been involved in any deportations.128 So no extradition request for him was filed. For critics of CEANA, the discovery and deportation of Šakić was a great triumph. They had succeeded in tracking down a man who had committed serious crimes but had not been mentioned in the commission’s preliminary report in Argentina. As a result, the commission felt compelled to widen its scope. Whereas the first preliminary report had been concerned only with German and Austrian criminals, additional research teams were founded to deal with Nazi collaborators who had fled to Argentina. The DAIA study centre, which was still combing through Argentinian archives in search of Nazi criminals, also began to take a closer look at Ustaša. The point was not just to learn more about how Ustaša members had been able to immigrate. The day before Šakić’s arrest Argentinian security authorities and the National Institution for Combatting Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism, INADI, had decided to form a joint Nazi hunting department. Although in the wake of Priebke being tracked down, INADI had been formed, in part, to track down Nazi criminals, it had never seriously engaged with that mandate. But against the backdrop of the Šakić case, the creation of a new department was a welcome opportunity for the Menem government to publicly demonstrate its good will. INADI president Victor Ramos announced that he would not just be searching for Nazis in Argentina, but developing an international strategy for hunting down war criminals with security forces in other South American nations. Within Argentina, he said, his office would be primarily cooperating with the DAIA.129 The DAIA was very satisfied with the newly founded department, which was called the Investigative Division for Discriminatory Behaviour.130 It was the practical realization of what the DAIA had been striving for since the start of the 1990s: the institutionalization of the Nazi hunt by the Argentinian government. Several months after the division took up its work, the two institutions got a chance to collaborate. The interest in Ustaša members since Šakić had been tracked down had sent the researchers at the DAIA study centre down a different path. In conjunction with its ‘Witness Project’, which the study centre had begun after Menem had opened the archives 128 El País, J6 anuary 1999. 129 Clarín, 2 May 1998. 130 División Unidad de Investigaciones de Conductas Discriminatorias.

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in 1992, they had discovered in the Foreign Ministry archives several of the extradition requests filed by the Yugoslav embassy in the 1940s. Some of these documents had been published as part of a source material edition issued by the project group in 1997.131 In December 1998, researchers discovered notes of conversations from the 1940s, in which the Yugoslav government had complained about the presence of 61 Croatian fugitives in Argentina.132 Among the people listed there were ranking Ustaša members. In February 1999, the DAIA contacted the newly founded Investigative Division with the request that it track down the former Ustaša members and bring them to justice.133 The DAIA reported what it had found to other authorities as well, and a federal court in Buenos Aires opened investigations. In late April, the Investigative Division had its first success, locating Mirko Eterovic in Córdoba.134 Documents in Argentinian archives indicated that Eterovic had been the commandant of a camp in Supetar. It was not the first time his name cropped up. The Witness Project source material edition also contained a Yugoslav extradition request for him. Citing that source, CEANA had also mentioned him in its third preliminary report from November 1998. But no one had tried to find out what crimes the Yugoslav courts had accused him of committing. The documents discovered by the study centre contained the first indications of this. The DAIA and INADI realized that this was a unique opportunity to stage a trial in Argentina that was modelled after the trials of Argentinian junta members in Spain on the basis of international law.135 However, that would have meant paving the way for junta crimes to be prosecuted in their own country. At a meeting Menem, his interior minister Carlos Corach, and INADI President Ramos agreed to denaturalize Eterovic for failing to disclose his past when he immigrated to Argentina and to deport him.136 But when the court tried to firm up the evidence against him, it came up empty-handed. Interpol Zagreb, which had received the list of the Ustaša members, reported drily that only one of the people on the list was wanted – for theft and black market activities. It knew nothing about 131 Clarín, 2 May 1998. 132 Memorandum, n.d., in AT, Caja Croatas 1. 133 Declaración de Chichowolski (Presidente de la DAIA) ante la Policía Federal Argentina, 11 February 1999, in ibidem, Caja Croatas 2, Querella Croata. 134 Santiso (Jefe Div. Unidad de Investigaciones de Conductas Discriminatorias) to Cristofani (Secretario Federal del Juzgado Nacional en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal Nr.10.), 27 April 1999, in ibidem. 135 Clarín, 20 September 1999. 136 Clarín, 3 July 1999.

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Eterovic.137 The Umbrella Association of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia was also unable to provide useful information, writing ‘Our Jewish Museum has no special evidence on Mirko Eterovic’.138 When legal proceedings started in September, the defence attorney declared that the documents from the Yugoslav embassy contained a mistaken translation. His client, the attorney, said was a logonik, a state employee, and not a logorsky zapovjednik, a camp commandant.139 Eterovic told newspapers: ‘I was a prosecutor. I was responsible for everyone who committed a crime regardless of whether he was a gypsy, a Jew, a Serb or a supporter of the Ustaša regime. And I punished them – the doors of the ministries were open to me’.140 There was good reason to believe that as a prosecutor Eterovic would have been involved in the persecution of minorities, but such a suspicion alone wasn’t sufficient reason to denaturalize him. In December 1999, proceedings were suspended. The Argentinian archives kept both the general public and the investigators busy, even though the government had hoped that the publication of CEANA’s final report in mid-1999 would answer all questions. No one was bothered that the list of Ustaša functionaries it included didn’t contain any concrete information of why they were wanted.141 The government and the commission were happy that the number of fugitives to Argentina had been corrected upward. That allowed them to counteract accusations that they had not been as self-critical as they might have been. But commission detractors had something else to criticize. In their eyes, not enough emphasis had been placed on Perón’s responsibility in making Argentina a place of refuge for National Socialists and their collaborators. Along with Camarasa, Uki Goñi was the sharpest critic. He belonged to a circle of journalists who had been interested for years in fugitives but who had not been appointed members of the commission. Goñi was deeply convinced that the ‘warm reception prepared for the Nazis’ was key to explaining the Argentinian military dictatorship and its crimes. Goñi succeeded in getting access to Argentinian immigration ministry files from the 1940s which commission members had not inspected. This was hardly a major discovery, but one thing leapt out at him. The immigration files on Eichmann, Mengele, Priebke, and Schwammberger had all been opened in 137 FS IP Zagreb to IP Buenos Aires, 16 April 1999, in AT, Caja Croatas 2, Querella Croata. 138 Singer (President of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia) to DAIA, 10 August 1999, in AT, Caja Croatas 1, Croatas. 139 Clarín, 20 September 1999. 140 Clarín, 3 July 1999. 141 CEANA, ed., Informe Final.

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1948 although some of them had first come to Argentina much later. Goñi saw this as evidence that their flight had been centrally organized. Nonetheless, that was all that could be gleaned from the files. Archive employees told Goñi in confidence that in 1996 – when the Peronists had been in power – files had been burned. He never gave up hope of finding further documents on how the flight of Nazi criminals had been arranged and who was responsible. Files from the president’s information office were still under lock and key. The director of the office had been Rudolf Freude, who was known to have played some kind of role in helping people to flee. But without public pressure, it was impossible to gain access to these files. In late 2002, Goñi published what he had found and his conclusions in his book The Real Odessa, which would be translated into many languages.142 Unlike the nearly one-thousand page final CEANA report, which was written in academic prose, Goñi’s slim book was easy to read and could hardly have attracted more attention both in Argentina and abroad. It was a major motivation for angry demands that Argentina open all its archives without any restrictions. Here, too, the Simon Wiesenthal Center took the lead143 and the House of Representatives in the US also adopted the cause. In May 2003, representatives passed a resolution calling upon Argentina to grant general access to all archives concerning Nazi criminals.144 The Wiesenthal Center demanded more than just access to the archives. Center members had stumbled across British documents there concerning Rojnica, which Goñi had published in his book. They revealed that Rojnica had been arrested in Trieste, Italy, in 1946, after a woman had identified him as the man who had arrested her husband and brother-in-law in Dubrovnik. Both were sent to a concentration camp and never heard from again. Rojnica, the British documents said, had always worn an SS uniform, and his job had been to remove ‘suspicious elements’ and Jews from the city. In 1947, Yugoslavia had applied for his extradition to the Western Allies, but by that point he had already fled to Argentina.145 This discovery led the Wiesenthal Center to once again demand Rojnica’s deportation. Kirchner, who had been elected president in April following the publication of Goñi’s book, reacted to international pressure after his inauguration by ordering the opening of the archives. He also declared that Argentina was, of course, willing to consider

142 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 125-129, quotation on p. 23; La Nación, 15 December 2002. 143 New York Times, 9 March 2003. 144 Congressional Record 108th Congress, 1st Session, H. RES. 235, 14 March 2003. 145 Goñi, Odessa, pp. 210-212.

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extradition applications for Rojnica.146 But despite numerous interventions by the Wiesenthal Center, neither the Croatian nor the Serbian judicial systems ever made such a request. Rojnica died in late 2007 in Buenos Aires. Rojnica’s case wasn’t the only one that was revived by Goñi’s book. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper thought the news that Kirchner was opening all the archives on Nazi criminals significant enough to merit a short report. That was how Kurt Schrimm learned of it. Schrimm, who had filed the extradition request on behalf of the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office for Schwammberger in the late 1980s, had taken over the Central Office in Ludwigsburg in 2000. Soon after assuming that post, he began to change the way the off ice worked. The major preliminary investigations were all complete and had been passed on to the prosecutors involved, but there were no more tips from survivors about thus far unknown Nazi crimes. So there were hardly any new investigations. To avoid having to close up shop, he decided to start research in previous inaccessible archives in the former Warsaw Pact in hopes of getting new evidence of Nazi crimes which he could begin investigating.147 The news from Argentina fit in well with this new method, since it was entirely possible that the archives there would yield information about suspects’ whereabouts in investigations that had been discontinued because no one could find out where those suspects lived. Schrimm contacted the Argentinian authorities and two years later, in May 2005, made his first trip to that country. But he was disappointed by the archive of the Argentinian immigration authority. The 800,000 files were organized not alphabetically or according to place, but purely chronologically. For two weeks, Schrimm examined random samples but then gave up. Still, that wasn’t the end of the matter. At the beginning of his stay, the German embassy had organized a reception that included representatives of the Foreign Ministry and other guests. In conversation, he was asked why research was being done into Argentinian archives, when it was well known that Nazi criminals were spread all over South America. That made sense to Schrimm, and once he returned to Germany, he sent inquiries to other South American countries. The answers he received were almost all positive, with only Paraguay saying that it no longer possessed any records from the period in question. Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador all granted access to their immigration and naturalization records, and it soon became apparent that the search 146 La Nación, 22 July 2002. 147 Here and in the following Stahl’s Interview with Schrimm (ZSL), 27 May 2010 and Stahl’s Interview with Steinz (ZSL), 27 May 2010.

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would not be as difficult everywhere as in Argentina. The Ludwigsburg investigators had also agreed on a methodology. Since in the cases that were known, the Nazi criminals had got to South America with the help of Red Cross passports, investigators went looking for male immigrants who had travelled on these documents and been born between 1910 and 1929. Brazilian and Chilean naturalization files contained the corresponding data. Since then, the Central Office has been combing through the archives in Santiago, Montevideo, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, but thus far they’ve failed to turn anything up. The contrast to the 1960s and 1970s, when even concrete evidence rarely prompted extradition requests, could hardly be starker. For the first time, a comprehensive, systematic manhunt is taking place that isn’t restricted to individual, known cases. Moreover, no one asks any longer whether extradition requests made to the countries in question have any chance of success. ‘That question is out of bounds’, said one of the investigators. ‘We simply have a duty to search for and apprehend murderers. If a country has laws that don’t correspond to our own, that’s certainly irritating and cumbersome, but that can’t be allowed to keep us from looking for murderers in these countries’.148 The way the Central Office works is part and parcel of the overall paradox presented by the hunt for Nazis as it has drawn to a conclusion in recent years. The less likely it became that fugitive Nazi criminals would be apprehended, the more effort was made to apprehend them. That was not just the result of a change of heart among the authorities and countries concerned. Decades of trying to find and prosecute Nazi criminals have mobilized or indeed called into life numerous state and private institutions. This development also reached South America as part of the Peronism debate of the 1990s, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center opened its Buenos Aires office, the DAIA got involved in the manhunts, and the Argentinian police founded a special division for Nazi hunting. Examining archives offered a number of institutions the chance to keep pursuing Nazi criminals even in the absence of concrete evidence.

148 Stahl’s Interview with Steinz (ZSL), 27 May 2010.

Conclusion Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, Klaus Barbie, Josef Schwammberger, Erich Priebke, and Dinko Šakić. Ultimately only six fugitives in South America were ever brought to justice, most of them decades after the end of the Second World War. That makes it apparent how much resistance there was in both Europe and South America to their prosecution. Nonetheless, the fact that after years in exile the fugitives increasingly felt less safe than before indicates a fundamental transformation. On both sides of the Atlantic, more and more people demanded that state-sanctioned crimes be subject to punishment. Conversely, arguments that perpetrators were only following orders and thus couldn’t be held culpable lost their social, political, and legal acceptance. The development by no means proceeded in a straight line, nor did it happen independently on the two continents. On the contrary, there was a great amount of mutual transcontinental influence in how to deal with state-sanctioned violent crimes. The hunt for Nazis is a perfect illustration of such connections, one that wouldn’t have come to light in a single-nation examination. The ways in which European and South American governments and authorities treated Nazi fugitives since the 1940s is not just a part of the history of the legal prosecution of Nazi crimes. The South American reactions to requests for legal assistance also reveal the extent to which individual authorities thought it legitimate for the state to oppress people in their countries. Rightly, activists back then drew parallels between the use – and later investigation – of state oppression by South American governments and the way they dealt with Nazi fugitives. The Nazi hunt became a part of confronting post-war authoritarian regimes, and there were instances in which efforts to bring Nazi criminals to justice also provided impulses for prosecuting state-sanctioned violence in South America. And conversely the position taken by South Americans toward state oppression had consequences for how Nazi crimes were dealt with in Europe. The American efforts to use the Mexico City Agreement to keep war criminals from fleeing to South America weren’t only aimed at hindering an evasion of post-war justice. They were also about preventing the European fascist elite from infiltrating Latin American countries and turning South America into a cradle of new aggression. Above all, the Farrell and Perón governments in Argentina were suspected of being Axis allies, not just because they had resisted declaring war against the Axis countries but also because there were points of comparison between their own domestic oppression and the European dictatorships.

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Thus it is no great surprise that the horror scenario of fascist infiltration of the continent was widespread until the late 1950s among leftist-liberal Argentinian opposition politicians. They accused Perón and the military leadership of receiving money from National Socialists and helping ranking Nazi functionaries flee shortly before the end of the Second World War so that they could keep fascism alive in Argentina. These accusations were largely untrue. As historians have abundantly demonstrated, they were based on erroneous information. But what effect did they have on internal Argentinian conflicts? Santander, Damonte, and their allies warned against fugitive Nazis and collaborators from Europe because they were convinced the latter would help Perón transform Argentina into an oppressive state modelled after the defeated German regime. For them, dealing with the fugitives was part of dealing with the repressive side of the Peronist government, which in 1951 had declared a state of ‘internal war’, excluded opposition parliamentarians from the Argentinian Congress for criticizing the president, removed opponents of the regime from public offices, and massively curtailed press freedom. In this context, the connections between Perón and war criminals became a hot-button political issue. It served to delegitimize abroad a president who was enormously popular at home. Opponents of Peronism interpreted the connections as evidence that Perón was involved in a Nazi conspiracy to commit crimes against peace – a crime that had been invoked at the Nuremberg Trials. When Perón was toppled in the mid-1950s, the Nazis in exile attracted the attention of the new holders of power. An investigative commission and a number of government authorities examined the question of the fugitives’ relation to the old regime and how they had supported it. But those who considered going after the fugitives to be a major part Argentina’s transformation were quickly marginalized. Nothing further was done. Even if there was no truth to the accusation that the Argentinian government had conspired with Nazis to spread fascism in the American hemisphere, the Argentinian opposition wasn’t completely off the mark with its contention that Perón had ideological commonalities with the fugitives arriving from Europe. While scholars have rightly and repeatedly insisted that there were serious differences between Peronism and European forms of fascism, there’s no overlooking the fact that Perón himself saw two central affinities: the dual opposition to both communism and capitalism. That mutual hostility underpinned the trust in the Nazi immigrants that helped to shape his immigration policy, which made it possible for Nazis and collaborators to flee to Argentina in the first place. Allowing Nazi fugitives to enter the country was not just a by-product of the attempt to

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recruit European specialists and scientists. It also had ideological roots. Thus it is hardly astonishing that Perón didn’t support the trials of former Nazis and collaborators in Europe. He refused to even entertain the idea of extraditing Nazi criminals back to that continent. This also had to do with his concept of the law. He saw the post-war trials of Nazis as unjustified interventions in the sovereignty of the defeated nations. The responses the Argentinian Foreign Ministry made to European extradition requests reflected this attitude. Argentina isn’t the only example, however, which shows that the influence of those who had served the defeated regimes of Europe could not immediately be eradicated. Over the years, these people had built up networks which persisted into the post-war era and allowed them to establish new careers. They also had experience that made them valuable commodities in the eyes of many governments. This was true not just of Nazi criminals who fled to Argentina, but also of those who stayed in West Germany. Old connections, combined with amnesty laws, smoothed the way for them back into the apparatus of state – a development, supported by a consensus throughout the political parties, which caused the prosecution of Nazi injustice to grind to halt in the 1950s. Fewer and fewer politicians were of the opinion that anyone outside the upper leadership echelons of the Nazi Party could be considered responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich. Thus as a rule, extradition requests were rarely filed, even when a wanted suspect’s whereabouts abroad were known. In those cases such as Klingenfuss’ where the Social Democrats’ interest in a trial and the watchful eyes of people abroad did lead to an extradition request being filed, the social and political barriers in Argentina invariably got in the way. The fugitives could count on the support of the nationalist part of the expatriate community. It had good connections to the Perón government and was courted by the German embassy. Not only did Bonn’s diplomats in Argentina have no interest in the request being granted. They actively tried to have it rejected. Interpol’s refusal to get involved in resolving crimes that ‘had any connection with the particular organizations and institutions of the German Reich of 1933-1945’, can also be partially attributed to personnel continuities. In particular, the French members, who had great influence within Interpol, resisted the idea of getting involved. This was in their own vested interest, given that the police in Vichy France had shown a lot of initiative in implementing Nazi crimes, and numerous French police officers had succeeded in continuing their careers in the French force after 1944. But the West German Interpol section in the Federal Criminal Office made no serious

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attempts either to get the French-dominated Secretary General’s Office to revise its policy of non-involvement. On the contrary, West German criminal investigators saw their Paris headquarters’ position as a confirmation of their own resistance to prosecuting Nazi criminals. Both of these authorities were not primarily concerned with maintaining Interpol’s statutes. Interpol was indeed allowed to pursue people accused of murder. The police authorities involved approved of the defamatory view that prosecuting Nazi criminals was an instance of ‘winner’s justice’. This attitude caused problems that lasted until the 1980s. Criminal investigators were forced to act without the most effective instrument for international manhunts, which repeatedly led to delays and snags in extradition proceedings. It wasn’t until the end of the 1950s that the ball got rolling again in the pursuit of Nazi criminals. At the same time, a public debate about their crimes commenced in West Germany. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem was one of the key events in this process, raising people’s consciousness about the scope of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina was not, as it may seem today, solely the result of the desire to stage a symbolic trial of the main people responsible for the Holocaust. Israeli authorities were also interested in the former member of the Reich Main Security Office because rumours were swirling among intelligence services and Holocaust survivors that Eichmann still played a major role in the supposed Nazi underground. The fact that Eichmann was in Argentina gave credence to these rumours. The anti-Peronists’ contention that fascist elites who had fled Europe had been able to reorganize under Perón’s protection in Argentina had spread across the globe. After the abduction, Mossad had to revise its view that Eichmann held a leading position among exiled Nazis, but Perón’s relationship to fugitive war criminals continued to influence attempts to deal with the Nazi past. Had Nazi fugitives, protected by the Argentinian president, maintained an organization that continued to exist after Perón‘s fall and that was still working to restore National Socialism to power? Simon Wiesenthal, one of the most important advocates in the 1960s of bringing Nazi criminals to justice, whose lobbying hastened the change of social attitudes and journalistic approaches to this topic, was convinced of the existence of such an organization. To find out more about it, Wiesenthal began investigating Argentina’s Perónist past and established contact with anti-Perónists like Santander. His diligence in searching for Nazi criminals was born of a fear of a Nazi reawakening, which he wanted to combat. It was the sort of resistance which Holocaust survivors were perennially accused of having lacked during the Third Reich. In trials, survivors had to be content with

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the role of witnesses, but the hunt for Nazis offered them room to fight back against Nazism ex post facto. Anyone could provide tips about the whereabouts of a fugitive. Indeed, given the limited scope for international manhunts and Interpol’s reluctance to get involved, investigators depended on the help of non-state actors. The threatening scenario of a Nazi underground operating out of South America played an important role in Wiesenthal’s effort to see fugitives prosecuted for their crimes. It allowed him to link prosecution of those crimes with warnings about resurgent right-wing extremism. While there was cross-party consensus in West Germany that the latter was undesirable, there was nonetheless great resistance to the former. Wiesenthal wanted to make it clear that prosecuting Nazi crimes was part of combating right-wing radicalism. Nazi criminals had to be pursued, he argued, to put a stop to Nazi organizations that were still active. Above all, though, he wanted to prove that unlike conventional criminals, Nazi perpetrators had had the chance before the end of the Third Reich to found an organization that, together with the Argentinian government, had prepared the flight of fascists from Europe. Because they had had the backing of such an organization, Wiesenthal argued, they should not enjoy the benefits of the statute of limitations. This argument would become an integral part of Wiesenthal’s campaigns during the 1960s and 1970s. The discovery of Klaus Barbie in 1972 meant the adaption of the threatening scenario of an active Nazi underground, which Wiesenthal had popularized, to new conditions in South America. Barbie’s business connections throughout South America became known, and they seemed to be evidence that a Nazi network was working together with various South American regimes. The employment of the former head of the Security Police and Security Service in Lyon by the Bolivian military dictatorship encouraged the view that this collaboration was anything but harmless – that in fact techniques of oppression from the Nazi era were being passed on. This hypothesis was widespread in the 1970s and served to further connect the hunt for Nazis and conflicts surrounding South American military dictatorships. Political dissidents and human rights organizations that focused on the crimes of the military juntas also reported about the activity of Nazi criminals, protested against their presence and tried to track them down. Conversely, activists supporting a historical coming to terms with the Holocaust also criticized the human rights violations of the military juntas. Although connections between Nazi criminals and South American dictators could only be proven in a minority of cases, it still made sense for regime opponents to take up the topic. By the mid-1970s, the mass murder

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of European Jews was gaining importance in Europe and North America. While it wouldn’t reach its zenith until the 1980s and 1990s, figures like Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds, and Elie Wiesel commanded respect in the West – people listened to them. Reports about South American dictators using the services of fugitive war criminals made it possible for regime opponents to interest history advocates in violations of human rights in South America and expand the audience for their criticism of the military juntas. But regime opponents were interested in more than just publicity. They wanted to show that the legal tropes of the Nuremberg Trials could be transferred to the situation in South America, something the anti-Peronists had already tried to do. What held true for the Third Reich, so the logic went, should also apply to the juntas. Governments that committed crimes should be equally ostracized. For that reason, the politically oppressed and human rights organizations sought to highlight similarities between the crimes of the Nazis and the juntas. The idea that Hitler’s former henchmen were again being used to oppress people in South America served as evidence for this hypothesis. For the memory activists, warnings about an active Nazi underground in exile with connections to South American regimes presented the opportunity to underscore the importance of Holocaust remembrance for the here and now. Thus, Wiesel used rumours about fugitives’ activities on behalf of South American dictators as an occasion to draw lessons for the present from the past and to demand that the world not shut its eyes to inhumanity this time around. When Beate Klarsfeld spoke about Barbie’s connections to the Bolivian military government, her audience was people in South America. Her point was to show that prosecuting the Nazi criminal was related to the political situation in South America and to drum up support within the populace there for her cause. Nonetheless, Klarsfeld’s public demonstrations in countries suffering under political oppression could be interpreted with reference to contemporary Europe. Her excoriations of South American military dictatorships, expertly staged for the media, suggested that civil oppression was directly connected to the refusal to pursue Nazi criminals. That was a message addressed primarily to the West German and French judicial systems. This was more than just a question of how the junta profited from the know-how of Nazi criminals. Since the mid-1970s, the United States and the American intelligence services were accused of cooperating with their South American regimes in a joint fight against communism and of thus supporting human rights abuses on the continent. In connection with this criticism, a number of questions concerning Nazi criminals were raised:

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Had the intelligence services brought other fugitives to South America in addition to Barbie? Had they thereby been complicit to the continent’s lurch to the right? And above all had the US in its fight against communism worked together with former Hitler henchmen? American involvement in the hunt for Nazis in the mid-1980s was a direct consequence of this debate. It was also a reaction to the fact more and more people were developing a heightening sensibility for the Holocaust and the human rights abuses of the military juntas. Amidst the public interest in Nazi fugitives since the early 1970s, the West German judicial system was coming under increased pressure to act. Although investigations into Nazi crimes had gained some momentum in the late 1950s, there was still a lot of resistance within society at large and the judicial system. Courts still clung to a jurisprudence that identified only the Nazi leadership as ‘perpetrators’ and classified everyone else as mere ‘accessories’. This made it extremely difficult to get convictions. In 1960, the Bundestag hardly took notice of the fact that the statute of limitations had kicked in for instances of Nazi manslaughter. The German parliament even passed a law that helped the country’s highest court declare that the statute applied to many cases of complicity in murder as well. It was the courts which interpreted the Franco-German Transitional Treaty to mean that those convicted of crimes in France could no longer be prosecuted under German law. As a result, the investigations of many fugitives were discontinued even though authorities knew where they were living in South America. Even when arrest warrants were issued, authorities were slow to file extradition requests or failed to do so at all. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, the Foreign Ministry was full of diplomats who had as little interest in the prosecution of Nazi crimes as many German judges and politicians did. Extradition requests were matters in which they could reveal their true feelings. Secondly, the decisions of judicial authorities were influenced by the economy of the judicial system. Extradition proceedings were extraordinarily complicated and the chances of success were relatively slim, so in most cases such requests simply weren’t made. As a result, many of the fugitives could simply live their lives untroubled, even though their whereabouts were known. The Argentinian government may have let it be known in the mid-1960s that it had an interest in extradited Nazi criminals – this was the result of the growing influence of people during presidency of Arturo Illia, who had warned about the spread of fascism in South America during Perón’s reign. But Argentina’s readiness to cooperate did nothing to change the fundamental hesitance of West German judicial authorities.

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But when a case succeeded in capturing international attention, authorities in the Federal Republic were capable of reacting very differently. When Josef Mengele started making headlines around the world against the backdrop of the Eichmann abduction, the Auschwitz trial and the debate about whether the statute of limitations should apply to Nazi crimes, the Foreign Ministry didn’t shy back from any conflicts in its efforts to support Frankfurt prosecutor Fritz Bauer. Nonetheless, ministry officials were less concerned with clearing up Nazi crimes than legitimizing the approaching statutes of limitation with a display of short-term activism. The name recognition of Nazi criminals changed over time. In 1972, when Barbie and the Nazi network to which he allegedly belonged attracted massive media attention, the public suddenly heard the names of people who were previously not very well known. Prosecutors reacted by once again examining cases that had been laid to rest. This wasn’t always unproblematic. Lawmakers and judges had erected a number of obstacles to prosecuting Nazi criminals: definitions of them as accessories, the application of the statute of limitations to manslaughter, cold amnesty, and the restrictive interpretation of the Transitional Treaty. These couldn’t simply be undone. As a result, in the cases of Barbie and Kutschmann, prosecutors and judicial authorities considered extradition requests impossible no matter how much public attention the cases were attracting. This wasn’t a huge problem before the 1980s because the brunt of the public criticism was directed at the behaviour of the South American military dictators, under whose protection Nazi criminals could live quite comfortably. In Chile, President Pinochet considered Walther Rauff a loyal soldier, and loyalty was what he demanded from his own armed forces. In Bolivia, the Supreme Court reacted to a French extradition request with a ruling that protected Barbie, an advisor to high-ranking military officers, not just from the French but also the West German judicial system. In Argentina, Schwammberger and Roschmann could count of the sympathies of the police, with whom they had a number of ideological affinities, while the judges assigned to the cases of Gustav Wagner and Kutschmann were convinced that taking part in state-ordered crimes didn’t violate the law. Only Stroessner’s personal affection for former members of the Wehrmacht and the SS failed to benefit a prominent wanted Nazi criminal, although Paraguay’s dictator was apparently willing to harbour Mengele. When the age of the South American dictators came to an end, however, the West German judicial system became increasingly unable to hide behind the decisions rendered on that continent. The close connection of the hunt for Nazis with protests against the crimes of the military dictators was beginning

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to have an effect. The fugitives in South America had become symbols of oppression. As one junta after another gave way to democracy in the 1980s, several countries began to look around for ways of getting rid of these negative symbols. Bolivia and Argentina’s governments and judicial systems considered it part of the democratization process to go after Nazi criminals living in their countries and hand them over to European courts. In Bolivia, this was primarily a matter of ridding the country of a Bolivian citizen, accused of being part of the crimes of the dictatorship, who was still viewed as a threat to democracy. By contrast in Argentina, the government and the judicial system saw action against Nazi criminals as a chance to demonstrate the country’s transformation on the human rights issue. Considering that the military junta’s represores were simultaneously enjoying amnesty, the Argentinian stance toward extradition can be described as an instance of compensatory cleansing. This double policy toward the past was capable of generating good publicity by demonstrating, particularly toward countries abroad, that Argentina was living up to its responsibility to come to terms with past human rights abuses without angering the military, which was still a serious, threatening source of power. The contradictions inherent in this stance became especially evident under President Carlos Menem. His Peronist government not only sought to win over the military with wide-ranging amnesty policies. During its tenure, Perón’s sympathies for the Axis and the flight of Nazi criminals and collaborators were discussed more intensively than ever before. In an attempt to rid the party of the stigma of having fascist roots, the Menem government supported the historical investigation of these topics and took an intense interest in seeing Nazi criminals extradited. The government could rely on the support of the Supreme Court, which had been stocked with judges loyal to Menem, in order, among other things, to provide his amnesty policies with a secure legal foundation. But arguments used by the judges to approve of extraditions could also be applied to the prosecution of junta crimes. Argentinian opponents of amnesty exploited the contradictions within Menem’s dual policy toward the past and used the verdicts in extradition cases against Nazi criminals to justify reopening legal proceedings against prominent representatives of the former military government. It’s no accident that specifically in Argentina the attempt to bring Nazi criminals to justice contributed to the progress in prosecuting junta crimes. From the very beginning, Argentina had played a special role where fugitives were concerned. Long before the Second World War had ended, it was considered the most likely destination for people fleeing Europe, and Perón’s connection to these European exiles had been polarized in the 1940s and

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1950s. Wiesenthal had adopted the Argentinian debate about this and continued to stress its importance beyond the 1950s. Peronism continued to be a major factor of power. All of this made the presence of Nazi criminals a much more important political issue in Argentina than in other South American countries. The topic became so weighty that contradictions in how the fugitives and the junta criminals were treated didn’t remain a footnote of the country’s legal history. On the contrary it could be effectively instrumentalized to influence public opinion. Confronted by the changes the democratization process had wrought upon South American governments and judicial system, West German authorities revised their legal opinions in several cases. While the Munich prosecutor’s office insisted that Barbie could only be tried for a single case of murder, Berlin investigators reinterpreted the documents involved in the Kutschmann case, and in Dortmund new evidence was collected to enable a warrant to be issued for Priebke’s arrest. The fact that the deeds of several Nazi criminals were reassessed was not just a reflection of West German authorities’ change of heart. It also had an entirely practical cause. The number of Nazi criminals who could be prosecuted was dwindling, so that the investigative authorities specifically devoted to Nazi crimes had less work to do. At the same time, increasing numbers of NGOs were demanding that such criminals be brought to justice. Major attention was being directed at even those criminals who, because of their subordinate role, had rarely been the focus of either investigators or the public at large. The criteria for what crimes would be prosecuted were gradually shifting. This development was also the reason why the Peronism debate and the opening of state archives in Argentina caused German authorities to track down fugitives in South America systematically and comprehensively for the first time. The political developments in South America also had an effect in France, Italy, and Croatia. The facts that the Siles government deported Barbie because he had become a symbol of military government oppression and that the Peronists were trying to use extradition to distance themselves from their own authoritarian past and portray themselves as a force for democracy made it possible in all three European countries to bring crimes committed in the Second World War to trial. The trials of Barbie, Priebke, and Šakić were very significant. In France, the legal proceedings unleashed a heated debate about the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Third Reich. The guilty verdict against Barbie, which confirmed that the 1964 principle suspending statutes of limitations for crimes against humanity could be applied retroactively, created the basis for further trials of French

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collaborators. By contrast, in Italy, the discovery of Priebke caused an intensive conversation about the crimes committed by German occupiers. Charges were brought against a number of other Nazi criminals, and the Italian parliament and people began to ask why it had taken so long to legally address the crimes of the past. In Croatia, the Šakić trial brought to light a wealth of information about the crimes of the Ustaša regime and gave rise to an impassioned conversation about the violence of the first sovereign Croatian state, which the nationalist Tudjman government had always held up as a positive reference point in Croatian history. Trials of people brought back from South America played a role in a number of cases during the second wave of investigations of Nazi criminals and collaborators that started in the 1980s in several European countries. That was because the fugitives had neither been punished in the immediate post-war period nor had they enjoyed later amnesty measures. Barbie and Priebke had exposed themselves to prosecution in various states when they fled. Because they lived abroad, they were unable to profit from the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany didn’t extradite its own citizens. Viewed only in terms of numbers, the hunt for Nazis and legal prosecution of Nazi crimes largely appears as a failure. Nonetheless, they have become a symbol of the tireless persistence with which private individuals, NGOs, and isolated judicial authorities tried to overcome massive social and political obstacles to bring Nazi criminals to justice. Today these efforts are considered a paradigm, worthy of imitation, of how to work for the cause of justice. In 2012, when Germany’s Left Party put forward Beate Klarsfeld as a candidate for the office of president, the other parties, which had agreed to support the candidacy of Joachim Gauck, spoke with the utmost respect about the Nazi hunter and her attempts to ensure that Nazi criminals would be called to answer for themselves. No one doubted that a Nazi hunter was morally qualified for the highly symbolic German presidency. The pursuit of perpetrators of state violence across national lines and the metaphor of the Nazi hunt have also become paradigms in South America, as was powerfully apparent to anyone present in the Argentinian Congress on 21 August 2003, the day the country’s senate annulled its amnesty laws. When it was announced that a broad majority had voted in favour of annulment, onlookers in the gallery began singing a song of triumph that has become something of a hymn for all those who still work today to see that junta crimes are punished. ‘Olé, olé, olé, olá! Como a los Nazis, les va a pasar, adonde vayan los iremos a buscar!’ – They’ll be treated like the Nazis. Wherever they may go, we will search for them.

Acknowledgements I would never have written this book, had Norbert Frei not encouraged me to take on a doctoral dissertation, and if he hadn’t created the financial conditions necessary to develop a research concept worthy of being funded. I’m very grateful to him for advising and supporting all my work over the years, which led to a grant from the Jena Centre for Twentieth-Century History, thanks to which I was able to complete my dissertation, and to the acceptance of this book in this series. I would also like to thank Carlos Collado-Seidel, my second supervisor, for his helpful comments. Research like this is difficult if travel money is tight. For that reason, I am grateful that the Gerda Henkel Foundation not only supported my project with a two-and-a-half year grant but also a generous budget for travels and a contribution to the printing costs of the German edition of this book. I should also not fail to mention the contribution toward the printing costs made by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation for the Humanities. After I defended my dissertation in January 2012, I still had time to revise the manuscript for publication – this was made possible by the Graduate Students Academy of Jena University. I would like to especially thank everyone who helped my research with advice and suggestions: Jacob Eder, Anne Giebel, Hendrik Niether, Louisa Reichstetter, Dominik Rigoll, Tim Schanetzky, Dietmar Süß, and Annette Weinke. My work also benefited from the comments of everyone who took part in the biennial academic discussions at the Jena Chair for Contemporary and Recent History, the meeting of doctoral students of contemporary history Jena-Halle-Frankfurt/Oder, the 16th Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar at the German Historical Institute in Washington and the workshop meeting on Zwätzengasse 3. I’m very grateful to the members of the Political Archive at the German Foreign Ministry, the Federal Archives of the Hesse and Hamburg Judicial Authorities, and the many state and regional archives I visited for speeding up my research. I was particularly glad that in several South American countries documents that enabled a critical historical examination were made available to me. Both the members of the Centro de Documentación y Archivo of the Paraguayan Justice Ministry and the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry were very helpful. Special thanks are due to the Vice-Minister Lilianne Lebrón de Wenger and Alicides Albariño, the ministry archivist. Last but not least I should mention all the non-governmental document centres. Without the meticulous preparation of Michaela Vocelka at the

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Simon Wiesenthal Archive in Vienna and friendly help of Marisa Braylan at the Centro de Estudios Sociales (DAIA) in Buenos Aires, the research for this book would have been a lot more difficult. I was lucky to be able to draw on the knowledge of numerous people when the information in the archives wasn’t getting me anywhere. Jorge Burkman, Ruth Fuchs, Gerd Heidemann, Samuel Kaplan, Beate Klarsfeld, Ignacio Klich, Ullrich Maas, Paul-Gunter Potz, Heinz Schneppen, Kurt Schrimm, Uwe Steinz, Sergio Widder, and Efraim Zuroff shared and gave me access to information and helped me make contacts. For that I thank them. To form all the information you collect over the course of your research into hypotheses, it’s useful to occasionally get some distance from sources, secondary literature, and your own desk. For regular distance of this sort, I thank my wife Clara and our children. In conclusion, I would propose that my work would have been a lot less measured and reflective, if they had not regularly forced me in the evening to swap my keyboard for a sandbox shovel.



The Most Important Manhunts and Extradition Proceedings

Karl Klingenfuss (1901-1990) 1 September 1948

December 1949 19 January 1950 6 November 1950 23 September 1952 15 October 1952 11 February 1953

24 March 1953 August 1958 June 1960 December 1960

The Nuremberg District Court issues an urgent arrest warrant for Klingenfuss for complicity on numerous counts of murder. The court doesn’t enforce the warrant because the suspect is deemed unfit for imprisonment. Flight to Argentina. The Nuremberg-Fürth superior prosecutor files charges. Proceedings suspended because the suspect is absent. Investigators learn that he is in Argentina. Press reports that the fugitive is living in Buenos Aires. The West German Foreign Ministry instructs the embassy in Buenos Aires to ask Argentina for extradition. The embassy is instructed to withdraw the request because Klingenfuss declared that he would voluntarily appear in West Germany for the start of his trial. The trial is temporarily postponed because Klingenfuss’ former superior Franz Rademacher cannot be located. The Argentinian Foreign Ministry rejects the West German extradition request. West German ambassador Werner Junker encourages West German government offices to end the proceedings against Klingenfuss. In the wake of the Eichmann abduction, press reports about Klingenfuss. The case is discussed in the Bundestag. Following intervention by the West German ambassador and the German-Argentinian Chamber of Commerce, Klingenfuss is made immune from prosecution.

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Josef Mengele (1911-1979) August/December 1958

25 February 1959 7 July 1959

30 November 1959

May 1960 2 June 1960

September 1960 Early 1961 March 1961 11 August 1962

1964 7 February 1979

Ernst Schnabel (author of a book about Anne Frank) and Hermann Langbein (General Secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee) independently accuse Mengele of murder. Mengele moves main residence to Paraguay. In November acquires Paraguayan citizenship. The West German Foreign Ministry instructs its Buenos Aires embassy to apply to the Argentinian Foreign Ministry for Mengele’s extradition. The request is returned in August and November for being incomplete. The Israeli government inquires Argentina about Mengele’s whereabouts. Investigations by the Argentinian intelligence agency turn up nothing. Mossad’s attempt to bring Mengele to Israel as part of the Eichmann abduction fails. The West German embassy provides the Argentinian Foreign Ministry with the missing documentation for the extradition request. On 24 June, General Prosecutor Ramón Lascano accepts the extradition request. Mengele leaves Paraguay and goes underground in Brazil. Mossad commences a year-long search in South America. Frankfurt General Prosecutor Fritz Bauer learns of Mengele’s Paraguayan naturalization. After the West German embassy in Asunción assesses Mengele’s naturalization and clears up several legal issues, German authorities request extradition from Paraguay. West Germany’s demand that Paraguay rescind Mengele’s citizenship leads to tension between the two countries. Mengele dies in Brazil.

The Most Important Manhunts and Ex tr adition Proceedings

8 August 1979 February 1984 22-24 November 1984

4-6 February 1985 February-May 1985 17-31 May 1985 31 May 1985

5-21 June 1985

Mengele is denaturalized in Paraguay. Beate Klarsfeld leads a number of protests in Paraguay. Klarsfeld, Menachem Rosensaft, Elizabeth Holtzman, and René Valero travel to Paraguay and meet with high-ranking government representatives who promise to establish a commission to find Mengele. Mengele Tribunal takes place in Jerusalem. West German, Israeli and US investigators launch joint manhunt. Klarsfeld makes third trip to Paraguay to demand Mengele’s extradition. House of Hans Sedlmeier, manager of the Mengele company in Günzburg, searched. Family correspondence indicates that Mengele has been dead for six years. International investigative team finds Mengele’s grave in São Paulo and identifies his remains.

Walther Rauff (1906-1984) 1950s

1959 13 April 1960 30 June 1960 August 1960 13 March 1961 12 June 1961

331

Hanover prosecutors launch various investigations int the gas truck murders in which Rauff was involved, but all are suspended. The Central Office in Ludwigsburg opens preliminary investigations about use of gas trucks. Hanover prosecutors take over Ludwigsburg investigation. Hanover Regional Court issues warrant for complicity in murder. Hanover prosecutors discover Rauff’s address in Chile. Arrest warrant for murder. West German Foreign Ministry orders embassy in Santiago de Chile to request extradition from Chilean Foreign Ministry.

332 

Hunt for Nazis

3 December 1962

Chilean police arrest Rauff on the basis of West German extradition request after ambassador delays delivering it for more than a year. 26 April 1963 Extradition request denied on final appeal. August 1972-March 1973 After letter from Wiesenthal to Chilean President Allende, West German and Chilean authorities examine possibility of reviving proceedings. Media rumours that Rauff is working for May 1974 Chilean intelligence service DINA. Israeli prosecutor general demands Rauff’s 28 November 1983 extradition from Chile. Beate Klarsfeld travels to Chile to demand Late January 1984 Rauff’s extradition. The US, the European Parliament, Britain, February-May 1984 France, and West Germany pressure Pinochet to extradite Rauff. Rauff dies of lung cancer. 14 May 1984

Josef Schwammberger (1912-2004) 14 January 1960

Kaiserslautern District Court issues arrest warrant based on accusation by a survivor of the Przemyśl concentration camp. August 1960 Kaiserslautern police determine Schwammberger’s wife’s address in Argentina. May 1962-February 1963 Stuttgart prosecutors, who have assumed responsibility for the case, contact the West German embassy in Buenos Aires with the request to check whether Schwammberger is in Argentina. Ambassador Junker argues against extradition request. Schwammberger’s whereabouts unknown. January 1965 Investigations in Eberbach suggest Schwammberger could be in San Isidro, Argentina. Stuttgart prosecutors decide against extradition request. November-December 1971 Members of Argentinian She’rith ha-Pletah succeed in finding Schwammberger’s address

The Most Important Manhunts and Ex tr adition Proceedings

9 January 1972

April 1972 December 1985

13 November 1987

20 March 1990

18 May 1992

after tip from Wiesenthal and notify Austrian embassy. After Austrian embassy passes on information from Argentinian Sh’erith ha-Pletah, West Germany requests Schwammberger’s extradition. Request approved in late March. Attempt to apprehend Schwammberger fails because the fugitive is warned by Argentinian police. Housepainter Adolfo Guth tells embassy members he will reveal Schwammberger’s whereabouts in return for a reward. German officials consider the sum demanded too high. Shortly after Stuttgart prosecutors increase reward for information about Schwammberger’s whereabouts to 500,000 Deutschmarks, embassy receives tip, and the fugitive is arrested. Argentinian Supreme Court orders Schwammberger’s extradition upholding two earlier rulings (28 November 1988 and 30 August 1989). Stuttgart District Court sentences Schwammberger to life imprisonment for murder and complicity in murder.

Walter Kutschmann (1914-1986) 1961

May 1962 June-July 1965

333

The Central Office in Ludwigsburg opens preliminary investigations about Nazi crimes in Galicia. Witness testifies to Berlin investigators about meeting a man named Ricardo Olmo in Argentina who is really Walter Kutschmann. Waldshut prosecutors, who took over responsibility for Galicia crimes in 1964, and the Central Office in Ludwigsburg decide that it is impossible to apprehend a Nazi criminal who has fled to South America. Proceedings against Kutschmann closed.

334 

24 January 1967

17 August 1967 5 June 1968

12 February 1975 August 1975

3 July 1985

2 October 1985

30 August 1986

Klaus Barbie (1913-1991) 1959

12 April 1961

Hunt for Nazis

West German federal prosecutor decides that Berlin prosecutor general should lead investigations of Kutschmann. Witness information confirmed. Tiergarten District Court issues warrant for Kutschmann’s arrest. After legal review, Berlin prosecutor general concludes extradition request for Kutschmann would have no chance of success because he holds Argentinian citizenship. Case suspended. After tip about Kutschmann’s employer, Wiesenthal contacts Berlin prosecutors and requests joint action to extradite Kutschmann. Berlin prosecutors decide that so-called ‘cold statute of limitations’ applies to Kutschmann. Case must be closed unless Kutschmann can be interrogated in Argentina and he incriminates himself. Argentinian judicial authorities delay action of West German request for legal assistance to enable interrogation. Tiergarten District Court reissues arrest warrant. Previously, Anti-Defamation League increases pressure on Berlin prosecutors and demands further investigation to expand charges against Kutschmann. On the basis of new arrest warrant, extradition request for Kutschmann made to Argentina. Argentinian police apprehend Kutschmann at his sister’s house on 14 November. Kutschmann dies in investigative custody before an Argentinian court can decide on West German extradition request.

The Central office in Ludwigsburg begins preliminary investigations into Klaus Barbie. Interrogation of Barbie’s cousin provides first concrete indications that suspect is in Bolivia.

The Most Important Manhunts and Ex tr adition Proceedings

September 1965 1965-1966

March 1967

February 1970

22 June 1971

August-September 1971

19 January 1972

January-February 1972

335

Augsburg prosecutors given responsibility for case. At their request, Augsburg District Court issues warrant for Barbie’s arrest. West German embassy begins investigations into past of Klaus Altmann, who has openly espoused Nazi ideology at the German Club in La Paz. They come to nought after change in ambassador in late 1966. At the same time, German foreign intelligence service contacts Altmann. Augsburg prosecutors end proceedings against Barbie. As per German highest court decision of 14 February 1966, West German courts no longer responsible for criminals convicted in absentia by French courts. Based on information from journalist Herbert John and German embassy in La Paz, investigators at the Central Office in Ludwigsburg conclude Altmann is in fact Barbie. No extradition request filed because of high court ruling. Munich prosecutors, who also investigated the case, end proceedings. Unlike Central Office, they conclude it cannot be proven that Barbie knew of the fate of the Jews, for whose deportation he was responsible. Beate Klarsfeld starts campaign in France to force Munich prosecutors to change their assessment of the case. After public pressure, Superior Prosecutor Manfred Ludolph gives activists material with indications of Barbie’s whereabouts. Daily newspaper L’Aurore publishes article reporting that Barbie has relocated from Bolivia to Peru. France applies for extradition from Peru. Klarsfeld makes two trips to Peru and Bolivia to demand Barbie’s extradition, after newspaper reports that Barbie has been deported from Peru to Bolivia.

336 

March 1973 6 December 1974 1975-1978

February 1982

October 1982 25 January 1983

4 February 1983

Hunt for Nazis

Barbie arrested on the basis of French extradition request. Bolivian Supreme Court rejects French extradition request. French embassy in Bonn repeatedly demands that West Germany also apply to Bolivia for Barbie’s extradition, Munich prosecutors refuse, citing lack of evidence. After pressure by West German Foreign Ministry, Munich prosecutors initiate extradition proceedings. Arrest warrant for murder issued. Democratically elected government of Hernán Siles takes power from military regime. At the behest of Bolivian information minister, Barbie arrested for unpaid debts. The Bolivian interior minister offers the West German embassy in La Paz to hand over Barbie to German authorities. To avoid having to put Barbie on trial in West Germany for a single case of murder, embassy declines the offer and tries to get Barbie deported to France. Bolivian security forces hand over Barbie to French authorities.

Abbreviations AA AADB

Auswärtiges Amt Auswärtige Ausschuss des Deutschen Bundestages (Foreign Committee of the Bundestag) Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik AAPD Deutschland Anti Defamation League ADL Archiv der Republik (Austria) AdR Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina) AGN Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung AHIS Alliierte Hohe Kommission (High Commission of the Allies) AHK Agencia Judia de Noticias AJN AMREC Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (Argentina) Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata ANSA Archivo Testimonio AT Auslandsvertretung (Diplomatic Representation) AV Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (German Office for BfV the Protection of the Constitution) Bundesgerichtshof (Superior Court of Justice) BGH Entscheidungen des Bundesgerichtshofes in Strafsachen BGHSt Bundeskriminalamt (German Criminal Office) BKA BMfaA Bundesministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (Austria) Bundesministerium für Justiz (Austria) BMfJ Bundesministerium für Inneres (Austria) BMfI Bundesministerium des Innern (Germany) BMI Bundesministerium der Justiz (Germany) BMJ Bundesnachrichtendienst (German Intelligence Service) BND BT Bundestag BW Baden-Württemberg Candles Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors Capri Compañía Argentina para Proyectos y Realisaciones Industriales Fuldner y Cía CEANA Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Acitividades del Nazismo en la Argentina CES Centro de Estudios Sociales (Buenos Aires)

338 

Hunt for Nazis

CDU Christlich Demokratische Union CDyA Centro de Documentación y Archivo (Paraguay) Central Intelligence Agency CIA CIC Counter Intelligence Corps CNI Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones (Argentina) CONADEP Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas DAIA Dienststelle für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten DfAA Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional DINA Departamento de Ordem Política e Social DOPS Displaced Person DP Diario de Sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados DSCD Diario de Sesiones de la Cámara de Senadores (Argentina) DSCS Estados Unidos de América EEUU Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung FAZ Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Freie Demokratische Partei FDP Frepaso Frente País Solidario Federal Republic of Germany FRG Fernschreiben (Telex) FS GA Generalakten GG Grundgesetz Geschichte und Gesellschaft GG Generalstaatsanwalt (General Prosecutor) GStA Hessisches Landeskriminalamt HLKA Hessisches Ministerium der Justiz HMJ HStA Hauptstaatsarchiv Institut für Zeitgeschichte IfZ Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la XenofoINADI bia y el Racismo IP Interpol IRO International Refugee Organization Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas JbLA Justizministerium (Ministery of Justice) JM KG Kammergericht (Court) LA Landesarchiv LG Landgericht LKA Landeskriminalamt Mitglied des Bundestages MdB MOPOCO Movimiento Popular Colorado

Abbreviations

MREC Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (Argentina) MRREE Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Paraguay) National Archives and Records Administration (USA) NARA NGO Non-Governmental Organization NRW Nordrhein-Westfalen NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei Odessa Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen (Organization of Former SS-Members) Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Austria) ÖStA Office for Special Investigations OSI Office of Strategic Services OSS Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts PA AA Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico PLRA Rote Armee Fraktion RAF RREEyC Relaciones Exteriores y Culto SA Staatsarchiv Sociedad Argentina de Recepción de Europeos SARE Sipo-SD Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands SPD SS Schutzstaffel Staatsanwaltschaft (Prosecutor) StA StAHH Staatsarchiv der Hansestadt Hamburg Staatssekretär (Undersecretary of State) StS Simon Wiesenthal Archive SWA Simon Wiesenthal Center SWC Union Internationale de la Résistance et de la Déportation UIRD United Nations Organization UNO Verein Deutscher Sozialdemokraten Brasilien VDSB Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte VfZ VVN Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime) WJC World Jewish Congress Wahlperiode (Legislative Period) WP Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen ZDF ZfG Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle ZRS ZS Zentralstelle Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg ZSL

339



Sources and Literature

Archives

1 Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (AdsD), Bonn 2 Archiv des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung (AHIS) 3 Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (AMREC), Buenos Aires 4 Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores del Paraguay, Asunción 5 Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Buenos Aires 6 Archivo Testimonio (AT) del CES/DAIA, Buenos Aires 7 Bundesarchiv (Barch), Koblenz and Ludwigsburg 8 Centro de Documentación y Archivo (CDyA), Asunción 9 Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf 10 Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover 11 Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden 12 Hessisches Justizministerium, Wiesbaden 13 Justizbehörde Hamburg 14 Landesarchiv Berlin 15 Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA), Vienna 16 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PAAA), Berlin 17 Privatarchiv Gerd Heidemann, Hamburg 18 Simon Wiesenthal Archiv (SWA), Vienna 19 Staatsarchiv München 20 Staatsarchiv Münster (Landesarchiv NRW) 21 Staatsarchiv der Hansestadt Hamburg (StAHH) 22 Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg (ZSL)

Information received from:

Samuel Kaplan and Jorge Burkman (B’nai B’rith, Buenos Aires), 24 November 2009 Beate Klarsfeld, 25 May 2010 Ignacio Klich, 18, 24 and 27 November 18 2009 Ulrich Maaß (Leitender Oberstaatsanwalt ZS Dortmund), 10 June 2010 Paul-Günter Pötz (MinDir a.d., BMJ), 29 November 2010, and 9 December 2010 Kurt Schrimm (Leitender Oberstaatsanwalt ZSL), 27 May 2010 Uwe Steinz (Kriminaloberkommissar, ZSL), 27 May 2010 Sergio Widder (Simon Wiesenthal Center, Buenos Aires), 18 November 2009 Efraim Zuroff (Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem), 4 November 2009

Online resources

Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Record Group 263: Files released in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (USA), URL: www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-report. html Juicios contra los culpables de las desapariciones, asesinatos y torturas durante la guerra sucia en Argentina, URL: http://www.desaparecidos.org/arg/juicios/

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Extradiciones: Consideraciones jurídicas y decisiones políticas. Selección de documentos (Argentina), URL: www.argentina-rree.com/portal/archivos/indice.htm House of Commons Official Report (Great Britain), URL: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ Congressional Record (USA), URL: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/LegislativeData.php?&n​ =Record&c=101

Newspapers

Argentinisches Tageblatt (Argentina) Bild (Federal Republic of Germany) Clarín (Argentina) Correo Semanal (Paraguay) Crítica (Argentina) Daily Express (Great Britain) Daily Mail (Great Britain) Der Spiegel (Federal Republic of Germany) Die Tat (Federal Republic of Germany) Die Zeit (Federal Republic of Germany) El Atlántico (Argentina) El Diario (Paraguay) El País (Argentinien) Expreso (Peru) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Federal Republic of Germany) Frankfurter Rundschau (Federal Republic of Germany) Freie Presse (Argentina) Journal do Brasil (Brazil) La Nación (Argentina) La Prensa (Argentina) La Razón (Argentina) Los Angeles Times (USA) Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland) New York Times (USA) Opinión (Argentina) Página 12 (Argentina) Quick (Federal Republic of Germany) Sunday Herald (Argentina) Time Magazine (USA) Washington Post (USA)

Movies

Hetzjagd – No Nazi Can Hide Forever, directed by Laurent Jaoui, BRD 2007. Hotel Terminus: Leben und Zeit des Klaus Barbie, directed by Marcel Ophüls, USA 1988. My Enemy’s Enemy – Klaus Barbie and the Neo-Fascist Connection, directed by Kevin MacDonnald, USA 2007. Operation Rat Line, directed by Sam Donaldson, USA 1994.

Sources and Liter ature

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Index Acevedo, Euclides 255 Achenbach, Ernst 189 Adenauer, Konrad 13, 89, 99, 102, 145, 190 ADL (Anti-Defamation League) of the B‘nai B‘rith 269f., 279, 281, 285 Aharoni, Zvi 104, 107, 139, 149 Alconada Sempe, Raúl 272 Alfonsín, Raúl 257, 270, 277, 279, 283, 298 Allende, Salvador 183, 202-206, 208f., 246, 252-254 Altmann, Klaus see Barbie, Klaus Alvensleben, Ludolph von 46, 155-159, 164-170, 180f., 216 Amadeo, Mario 40, 107 Amit, Meir 150 Amoroso, Delgado 152 Aramburu, Pedro 68 Arce Gómez, Luis 244f. Archimbal, Fernando 272-274 Arens, Richard 210f. Argaña, Luis María 259 Argentina 10, 16-91, 94-108, 112-121, 125, 128, 134f., 139, 146, 153-171, 174, 180f., 193, 196, 212, 215-226, 235, 241, 251, 257, 268-272, 277-318, 321-324 Auschwitz 81, 91, 94, 102-104, 109, 122, 139-141, 190, 211, 247, 258, 261, 266, 291 Auschwitz trial 94, 119, 140, 152-153, 322 Australia 206, 233, 268 Austria 43, 50, 59, 90-92, 96f., 101, 108f., 147, 172180, 208, 221, 229-232, 259, 287, 304 Banchero, Luis 194 Banzer, Hugo 183, 195-197, 200, 239 Barbie, Klaus 9-12, 15, 48, 183-201, 210, 212f., 235-248, 250, 255, 257f., 261, 268f., 271, 274f., 278, 315, 319-322, 324f. Barrientos, René 186 Bauer, Fritz 99-105, 119f., 134-136, 139-141, 153, 160, 171, 182, 322 Begin, Menahem 230f. Belgium 35f., 39, 43, 50, 81, 233 Benzon, Branko 35, 44 Beraja, Ruben 303 BKA (Bundeskriminalamt) 86f., 110f. Blankenhorn, Herbert 127 BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) 98, 126, 138, 186f. Bohne, Gerhard 46, 90, 160-168, 181, 282 Bolivia 9 Bormann, Martin 53f., 58, 65, 135, 137-139, 148-150, 157, 171, 182, 188, 194, 213f., 287 Bousquet, René 245 Braden, Spruille 29-34, 43, 53, 62, 303 Brauner, Artur 119

Braunsteiner, Hermine 174, 246 Brazil 17, 23f., 43, 48-51, 74-77, 91, 119, 138, 150-153, 172-180, 183, 196, 212, 215, 228-235, 241, 259, 267, 293, 302, 313f. Brentano, Heinrich von 113, 115, 118, 121, 138 Briest, Eckart 135-144 Britain 13, 19, 21, 23, 25, 58, 68, 233, 252f., 268, 287 Bulajic, Milan 306 Bülow-Schwante, Vicco von 75 Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz 98f., 113 Bundestag (Germany) 59, 66, 89, 115, 122, 141, 143, 189, 321 Byrnes, James 28, 30f. Camarasa, Jorge 305f., 311 Camps, Ramón 220 Canada 268 Candles 258 Capri 46 Cardoso, Henrique 302 Carstens, Karl 129f., 144 Cavallo, Gabriel 300 CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union, Germany) 77, 191 CEANA 304f., 309-312 Central Office Ludwigsburg 94, 101, 104, 110, 126, 145, 150, 154, 158f., 171, 186-192, 201, 203, 215, 279f., 290f., 313f. Chairoff, Patrice 212 Chile 17, 23, 29, 46, 74, 87, 119, 126-134, 183, 196f., 202-212, 241, 250-254, 257f., 271, 274, 313f., 322 Chomsky, Noam 212 Christmann, Kurt 90 CIA 97f., 186, 205f., 210, 246-248, 264 CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) 95 Clement, Ricardo see Eichmann, Adolf CNI Comisión Nacional de Investigaciones (Argentina) 65 Cohn, Haim 102, 104f. Cole, John 207, 209 Contreras, Manuel 205, 210 Corach, Carlos 310 Croatia 10, 35, 69-72, 305-308, 313, 324f. Cukurs, Herbert 49-51, 150f. Czechoslovakia 11, 20, 39, 116-118 D’Amato, Alfonse 270, 301, 303 DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones ­Israelitas Argentinas) 181, 287f., 295, 298, 303, 309f., 314 Damonte Taborda, Raúl 21, 24, 56, 64f., 68, 316 Daye, Pierre 10, 35-37, 39-42, 44, 107 Debray, Régis 197, 240f.

372  Delmer, Sefton 58 Diana, Pablo 35, 44 Dickopf, Paul 110f., 119, 224 DINA 204-210, 271 Donaldson, Sam 289, 294 DOPS (Office of Political and Social Order, Brazil) 51, 174 Duarte de Perón, Eva 62 Dullien, Reinhard 110, 153 Ďurčanský, Ján 39, 116-118, 161, 212 Eban, Abba 250 Ecuador 48, 126, 313 Egypt 105f., 115, 213f. Ehlert, Fritz 113 Ehrard, Ludwig 145, 148 Eiche, Heinrich 279 Eichmann, Adolf 10, 15, 46, 56, 81, 89, 91, 94-124, 134f., 138, 146, 148-150, 152, 154f., 163, 174, 181, 184, 188, 248f., 291, 311, 315, 318, 322 Eichmann, Klaus 100 Eisele, Hans 115 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 64, 97 Eloy Martínez, Tomás 271 Engelhardt, Hans 269 Eterovic, Mirko 310f. Farago, Ladislas 214 Farías, Victor 203 Farrell, Edelmiro 26f., 30f., 315 Faupel, Wilhelm 72, 93 FBI 25, 53f. FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei, Germany) 59f., 66, 189 Federal Court of Justice, West Germany 122, 127, 189, 292 Feigl, Fritz 50 Fini, Gianfranco 294 Fischböck, Hans 91, 171 Fontecilla, Rafael 132f. Forsyth, Frederick 213-217 France 9-11, 13f., 34, 43, 68, 72, 81, 106, 123, 154, 183f., 186, 188-194, 198f., 201, 235-246, 248, 250, 257, 278, 317, 321, 324 Frepaso (Frente País Solidario, Argentina) 298 Freude, Ludwig 43f., 65f. Freude, Rudolf 43f., 312 Fricke, Bruno 135, 138f. Fried, John H.E. 206, 208 Friedman, Tuviah 101, 258, 264 Fritsch, Eberhard 58, 79 Frondizi, Arturo 68, 107, 159 Fuldner, Carlos 44-47 Galland, Adolf 46, 55, 58 Ganzenmüller, Albert 90 Garro, Juan Manuel 282-284 Gawlik, Hans 145, 164 Geisel, Ernesto 228f., 233

Hunt for Nazis

Genscher, Hans-Dietrich 243, 269 Gerhard, Wolfgang 150 German Democratic Republic 14, 16, 223 German Federal Republic 9, 11, 13, 16, 19, 43, 58-64, 66-68, 74, 76-81, 85-96, 100-102, 105, 109, 112-133, 136f., 140, 142-154, 157, 160-164, 166, 169, 172, 176-178, 182, 187-191, 196, 216f., 226, 229-231, 234-243, 246-248, 252, 257, 259-263, 266, 270, 273, 278f., 283f., 286-292, 297, 304, 313, 317-319, 325 German Reich 10f., 19-21, 23, 25, 27, 32, 34, 43, 50 German-Argentinian legal assistance treaty 88f., 165-170 Gestapo 55, 57f., 90, 149, 196f., 208f., Ghenea, Radu 41, 44 Globke, Hans 99, 120 Globocnik, Odilo 146f. Goldman, Nahum 97f. Gómez, Leon 209 Goñi, Uki 311-313 Griffith, John 53f. Gruenewald, Malchiel 248 Grützner, Heinrich 88, 114, 164f., 167, 169f. Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 185, 197, 200 Gurevich, Beatriz 305 Gurion, Ben 105-107 Hagen, Herbert 191 Halaunbrenner, Itta 193 Hallstein, Walter 77f., 80, 127 Hampe, Karl 188 Harel, Isser 100f., 104-107, 150, 231 Hausner, Gideon 249, 258 Heidemann, Gerd 259f. Herrmann, Lothar 100-102, 107 Hier, Marvin 232, 234, 268, 290, 294 Hoff, Hellmut 239f., 242-244 Holl, Reinhart 136f. Holm, Wilhelm 186f. Holtzman, Elizabeth 246f., 258, 260f. Holzheimer, Hermann 253f. Hora, Vojtech 116f., 161 Hudal, Alois 45, 48, 261 Hull, Cordell 24, 27, 29, 303 Hungary 43, 48, Hungria, Nélson 179 Illia, Arturo 158-161, 163, 165, 170, 221, 321 INADI (Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo) 295, 309f. Insfrán, Edgar 136-140, 142 International Auschwitz Committee 102 Interpol 86f., 110-112, 119, 152f., 219-224, 263f., 278, 280, 310, 317-319 Israel 11, 17, 56, 59, 94, 96f., 100-112, 116, 139, 150, 152f., 174, 177, 179, 202, 213f., 230, 232, 248-251, 255, 258, 260, 262-264, 306, 318 Italy 11, 20, 23-25, 34f., 43, 46, 49, 54, 87, 279f., 290-292, 294, 297, 312, 324f.

373

Index

Jackisch, Charlotta 305 Jackson, Robert 53 Jacquet, Eugenio 259 Jahn, Gerhard 141 Janko, Sepp 212 Jewish Documentation Center, Paris 190 John, Herbert 188, 192, 194-196 Jovovic, Blagoje 72 Jugoslavia 10f., 37f., 57, 69-72, 311f. Jung, Werner 136f. Junker, Werner 99, 104, 120, 124f., 134, 155, 169 Jürges, Heinrich 61-65, 68, 72, 76f., 93 Kalmanowitz, Abraham 97-99 Kanter, Ernst 88f. Kappler, Herbert 292f. Kastl, Jörg 218f., 231, 233 Kasztner, Rudolf 248 Katz, Hermann 174 Keller, Robert 158f. Kempner, Robert 84 Kendall, Raymond 263 Kennedy, Robert 178 Kiesinger, Kurt-Georg 190f. Kinkel, Klaus 243 Kipp, Abraham 280f., 284f., 291, 294f. Kirchmann, Karl 279 Kirchner, Nestor 300, 312f. Kissinger, Henry 205, 207, 248 Klarsfeld, Beate 87, 182f., 190-197, 200, 235, 238, 240f., 244, 246, 250-252, 255-261, 265f., 271, 281, 283, 289, 291, 320, 325 Klarsfeld, Serge 183, 190-193, 195-197, 235, 238, 240, 244, 246, 250, 256f., 281, 289, 291, 320 Klich, Ignacio 303-305 Klingenfuss, Karl 80-88, 115, 120-125, 134, 165, 212, 317 Knochen, Helmut 192 Krug, Alban 134f., 139, 151, 260 Künzle, Anton 151f. Küper, Fritz 289-291, 295 Kutschmann, Walter 154, 157f., 166, 168-170, 212, 216f., 222-228, 235, 237, 257, 268-275, 278f., 322, 324 La Rosa, Pascal 36-41, 70 Laíno, Domingo 255, 265, 267 Langbein, Hermann 102, 104 Lantschner, Fritz 290f. Lanusse, Alejandro Augustín 221 Lara Castro, Carmen de 256, 266 Lascano, Ramón 103, 116f. Leers, Johann von 59, 106 Leguay, Jean 245 Lernoux, Penny 221 Lescat, Charles 34-36, 39 Lischka, Kurt 191 López Moreira, Jorge 143f. Lübke, Heinrich 143

Ludolph, Manfred 191f. Lütkens, Gerhard 76f. Maler, Juan 289f. Maltzan, Vollrath von 127 Marquevich, Roberto 299-301 Meding, Holger 305 Mende, Erich 59f., 66 Menem, Carlos Saúl 17f., 277f., 284-289, 294-301, 303, 306, 308-310, 323 Mengele, Josef 10, 46, 90, 102-104, 107, 115-120, 123f., 134-146, 148-150, 152-154, 156, 164, 170f., 174, 182, 188, 194, 209-212, 230f., 247, 255-268, 271, 277f., 280, 287, 311, 322 Menghin, Oswald 91 Merck, Carlos von 59, 75, 78f. Merex 187, 195 Merkatz, Joachim von 93, Messersmith, George 32, 34 Meuer, Ernesto 75 Mexico City Conference / Act of Chapultepec 27-30, 32f., 36-40, 47, 49, 51, 66, 73, 174, 199, 206, 296, 315 Mexico 23, 158f. Meza, Luis García 9f., 239, 244 Michaelis, Georg 153f., 166 Mitterrand, François 10, 238, 240f. Mohr, Ernst-Günther 155, 160, 164, 167-169 Moliné, O’Connor, Eduardo 295f., 300 Montanaro, Augusto 258f. MOPOCO (Movimiento Popular Colorado, Paraguay) 266 Moraes, Evaristo 175-177, 179 Morgenthau jun., Henry 27f., 303 Moskovits, José 181, 222f., 225 Mossad 99-101, 105, 107f., 113, 116, 139, 149-152, 181, 231, 318 Motz, Günter 185-187 Moulin, Jean 10, 191, 241 Müller, Erich 45f., 157 Müller, Heinrich 149f. Münch, Hans 266f. Naumann, Max 290f. Naumann, Werner 60 Nazareno, Julio 296, 300 Neder, Antonio 233 Népote, Jean 110, 224 Netherlands 81, 91, 171, 248, 280, 291 Neurath, Konstantin von 125 New Zealand 268 Newton, Robert 305 Nissim, Moshe 249, 262 Nixon, Richard 205 Novoa, Eduardo 129-133, 203 Oberg, Carl 192 Oberländer, Theodor 223

374  Odessa (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) 148f., 188, 195, 212, 213, 232 Olij, Jan 220, 280f., 285, 294 Olivan, Alfredo 227f. Olmo, Pedro see Kutschmann, Walter Onganía, Juan Carlos 162f. Ortiz, Roberto 21 Ortiz, Zavala 159 Ovando, Alfredo 186 Oven, Wilfred von 59, 78f., 291 Oxfort, Hermann 269f. Pabsch, Wiegand 290f. Papon, Maurice 245 Paraguay 17, 47f., 66, 119, 134-146, 149, 152, 174, 183, 196, 200f., 210-212, 219, 241, 255-267, 271, 274, 302, 313, 322 Pavelić, Ante 10, 55, 57f., 68-74, 116f., 306, 308 Paz Zamora, Jaime 244 Pekar, Jan 116f., 161 Peralta, Santiago 35 Perón, Isabel 271, 287 Perón, Juan Domingo 16-18, 31-35, 40-47, 49, 52-72, 74, 79, 92, 94, 105, 112, 146, 148, 159, 271, 277, 288, 297, 303, 305, 311, 315-318, 321, 323 Peru 48, 188, 192-196, 198, 214 Pinochet, Augusto 132, 197, 205, 208-210, 241, 247f., 250-254, 322 PLRA (Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico) 256, 266 Poland 11, 95, 124, 146, 155, 160, 176f., 179, 230 Pompidou, Georges 192f. Posner, Gerald 137, 287 Priebke, Erich 46, 171, 289-301, 309, 311, 315, 324f. Prokopchuk, Pedro 138 Rademacher, Franz 81-84, 86-88, 103, 111, 120, 122f., 165, 212, 224 Ramírez, Pedro 24, 26 Ramón, Castillo 21-24, 57 Ramos, Victor 309f. Rapoport, Mario 305 Rastalsky, Heriberto 84, 86, 124 Rauff, Walther 48, 125-134, 195, 201-210, 212, 212, 214, 247-255, 261, 268, 271, 277, 322 Reagan, Ronald 248, 253, 261 Rentsch, Ulrich 169, 216f., 225f., 282 Riess, Curt 58 Roca, Orlando 198 Rockefeller, Nelson 27, 29-31 Roger, Oscar 285 Rojnica, Ivo 308f., 312f. Roncal, Mario 9, 239f., 242 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 22, 24-26, 28f. Roschmann, Eduard 47, 213-221, 225, 235, 322 Ruckauf, Carlos 295 Rudel, Hans-Ulrich 55, 58-61, 63f., 66, 69, 73, 79, 106, 125, 137f., 195, 200f., 260 Rueda, Mario 241f.

Hunt for Nazis

Šakić, Dinko 306-309, 315 Samuels, Shimon 302 Sánchez Viamonte, Carlos 159 Sánchez, Gustavo 200, 241, 256 Santander, Silvano 54-57, 62f., 64-69, 72, 74, 93, 146, 158f., 161, 180f., 302f., 316, 318 Sapena Pastor, Raúl 137, 142 SARE (Sociedad Argentina de Recepción de Europeos) 42-44, 47 Sassen, William 78, 149, 155, 291 Schabrod, Karl 208 Schäfer, Paul 209 Schäffer, Fritz 114f. Scherpenberg, Hilger van 121 Schiffrin, Leopoldo 273, 286, 298-300 Schreiber, Walter 48 Schrimm, Kurt 313 Schüle, Erwin 154f. Schwammberger, Josef 46, 124f., 155, 157, 159, 170, 212, 214, 220-222, 226, 277-287, 298-301, 311, 313, 315, 322 Schweitzer, Miguel 127-129, 250 Schwend, Friedrich 187f., 193-195, 198, 201, 214 Scilingo, Adolfo Francisco 297 Sedlmeier, Hans 262, 266f. Seelig, Max 135f. Seidl, Alfred 236 Serbia 307, 313 Serna, Victor de la 41, 44 Severo Caballero, José 273 Shultz, George 253 Sicot, Marcel 86, 111, 224 Siemsen, August 76 Siles Suazo, Hernán 10, 238f., 241-244, 324 Simon Wiesenthal Center 234, 249, 251, 259, 261, 268, 281, 289f., 294, 302-304, 306-308, 312-314 Skappel, Frederik 212 Skorzeny, Otto 54f., 57-59, 74, 96, 195 Sobel, Henry 302 Socialist Party, Argentina 20f., 63 Solari, Juan 63 Soviet Union 14, 20, 38, 51, 53, 100 Spain 19, 25-27, 30, 33-35, 41, 44, 74, 95, 188, 310 SPD 76f., 81, 83, 88, 115, 122, 141 Spiecker, Carl 75, 77f. Staden, Berndt von 243 Stalin, Josef 53 Stangl, Franz 10, 49, 155, 171-181, 194, 228f., 232, 315 Steinbruch, Aaron 172-174, 178 Sterzinger, Franz 91 Stettinius, Edward 27-30 Strack, Hans 127-134, 250 Strasser, Otto 61, 135 Stroessner, Alfredo 66, 139-143, 152, 200, 210, 212, 256, 259f., 265, 267, 322 Supreme Court, Argentina 162, 216, 273, 284-286, 295f., 298-300, 323

375

Index

Supreme Court, Bolivia 198, 200, 204, 239, 241f., 245, 322 Supreme Court, Brazil 177, 179, 228, 231-235 Supreme Court, Chile 132f., 209 Supreme Court, Paraguay 136, 141f., 256, 259 Swarsensky, Hardy 157, 222 Syria 49, 87, 115, 120, 126, 175, 277 Tamir, Shmuel 248f. Tank, Kurt 46, 58, 63 Taylor, Telford 258 Tella, Guido di 287-289, 294f., 297, 303f., 308 Terdenge, Hermann 78-80, 83-87, 120f., 169 Thatcher, Margret 252 Thermann, Edmund von 62f. Timerman, Jacobo 220, 271 Torres, Juan José 183, 195f. Touvier, Paul 245 Trifa, Valerian 249f. Tudjman, Franjo 305-308, 325 Ukraine 48, 291 Unión Cívica Radical, Argentina 20, 24, 54, 56, 67, 159, United States of America 19, 23f., 26-29, 33f., 39f., 43, 47, 49, 53-57, 59, 64, 89, 97, 105, 119, 174, 205, 232, 246, 248, 258, 265, 268, 288, 291, 320 Uruguay 53, 64f., 151f., 172, 183, 313 Valdés, Gabriel 250 Valle, Jaime del 254 Vargas, Getulio 51

Videla, Jorge 299-301 Vildoso, Guido 238f. Vogel, Hans-Jochen 234 Vötterl, Josef 46f., 90, 220 Wagner, Gustav 49, 228-235, 248, 322 Wagner, Horst 82, 86f. Waldheim, Kurt 259 Wallace, Henry 25 Wehner, Herbert 115 Weiser, Benno 260 Welles, Elliot 269f. Werner, Gerardo 204 Widder, Sergio 306 Wiesel, Elie 211f., 256, 320 Wiesenthal, Simon 50, 94-99, 104f., 108-110, 112, 146-150, 153, 157f., 161, 172-175, 178-183, 194, 196, 201-204, 206f., 209, 212-214, 221-226, 229, 231f., 234, 246-255, 258-261, 268-270, 278-281, 285, 289-291, 294, 302, 306, 318-320, 324 Winterstein, Vojtech 172, 174-177 WJC (World Jewish Congress) 59, 97, 110f., 144, 172, 177, 301 Wolff, Karl 259f. Yad Vashehm 104, 108, 249, 258 Yoma, Jorge 298f. Zaldívar, Andrés 250 Zimmer, Guido 279f. Zinn, Georg-August 100 Zuroff, Efraim 249, 268, 294, 306f.

NIOD Studies on War, Holocaust, and Genocide Bas von Benda-Beckmann: German Historians and the Bombing of German Cities. The Contested Air War 2015, ISBN 9789089647818 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Sandrine Kott, Peter Romijn and Olivier Wieviorka (eds): Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe, 1943-1947 2015, ISBN 9789089643780 Uğur Ümit Üngör (ed.): Genocide. New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses, and Consequences 2016, ISBN 9789089645241 Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans (eds): The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’. Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society 2017, ISBN 9789089648488 (hardback) and 9789462986084 (paperback) Daniel Knegt: Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce 2017, ISBN 9789462983335