The Odessa File, the acclaimed bestseller published by the British author Frederick Forsyth in 1972, installed in the collective imagination the idea of the existence of a sinister international organization dedicated to facilitating the escape of Nazi criminals from Europe after World War II through of the so-called ratlines, or “rat routes”, escape routes that generally ended in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Brazil or Paraguay.
The dark plot Odessa (Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, Organization of Former SS Members) would not only seek, according to the novel, to prevent the murderers from passing through the courts of justice, but also to revive and expand Nazi ideology in South America.
Forsyth's fiction had as its seed a revelation from the Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In August 1944, according to Wiesenthal, a secret meeting between senior Nazi leaders and prominent German industrialists such as Emil Kirdorf, Fritz Thyssen and Gustav Krupp had been held in a Strasbourg hotel. The aim of the shadowy meeting was to ensure the continuation of Nazism after almost certain defeat and to finance what Wiesenthal called "the largest fugitive organization in world history."
The perverse structure, with hidden ramifications in different countries, would be nothing more than a myth amplified by cinema and literature, in the opinion of prestigious historians such as Richard J. Evans.
“The Odessa network made up of ex-SS officers is a myth, propagated by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), especially in his book The Murderers among us [...], it was a convenient way for Wiesenthal to keep the debate about the Nazi fugitives and a useful explanation of how the ex-Nazis managed to escape from Europe”, explains this expert in the history of the Third Reich to Historia y Vida. Evans adds that American counterintelligence investigated the alleged network between 1946 and 1947 without finding any evidence.
“No, there was no Odessa network as described in books and films,” adds Daniel Stahl, from the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. However, there were many Nazi networks after 1945 in Germany, as well as in other countries."
According to the Argentine journalist Uki Goñi in his book The Authentic Odessa, “the Nazi escape was not the work of a single organization, nor of a single State, but of various people, institutions and governments that sometimes operated independently, sometimes interconnected. often vast distances apart.
The recent declassification of documents has shown, Evans says, the utter lack of evidence for the existence of the Odessa network. The British historian also rules out a "mass escape" of Nazi criminals. “Each of those who managed to escape found their own way to evade justice. Most of them simply went underground in Germany itself, often assuming false identities,” he says.
The ratlines was the nickname given to the clandestine routes used by war criminals to escape from Europe after the end of World War II. They were not only German fugitives, but also Croatians, Slovaks, Belgians, French and Austrians.
Although there was no general framework or superstructure to coordinate these “rat tracks” (unstable and generally short-lived), in Daniel Stahl's opinion, they cannot be considered small-time operations or desperate escapes either. On many occasions, they were routes designed and organized by people with power and influence. They would never have succeeded without the collaboration of two institutions of such prestige as the Red Cross or the Catholic Church, especially its center of authority, the Vatican.
As Richard J. Evans argues, after the Allied victory, Western Europe was left in chaos. Millions of people were moving across the continent: German and foreign refugees, former Nazi slaves, German and Austrian prisoners of war, and people fleeing the advance of communism in Eastern Europe. Most did not have any kind of documentation. That situation of uncertainty and confusion was the perfect breeding ground for the former members of the SS to look for the opportunity to camouflage their identity with forged papers.
Some used the so-called Nordic route, helped, according to Goñi, by agents of the Argentine government whose objective "was to illegally remove Nazi aircraft designers from Germany to Sweden and Denmark, and from there to Argentina, to work on the ambitious aeronautical program of the president".
However, the best route for these fugitives from justice was through the Alps, crossing the border with Italy. In their journey through the South Tyrol region, a territory under Italian rule but German-speaking, they found the sustenance and support of some inhabitants who considered them compatriots. Also from experienced border smugglers.
Once in Italy, the fugitives took advantage of the direct or indirect collaboration of different institutions, including the Red Cross. Focused on relief work in such dire circumstances, the organization helped Jews trying to immigrate to Palestine illegally, while providing ex-Nazis with the identity documents they needed to cover their tracks from Europe. "The priority of the Red Cross was not to look for criminals, but to solve this immense humanitarian crisis," historian Daniel Stahl argues to Historia y Vida.
For years, historians have debated the alleged complicity of the Catholic Church in the flight of prominent Nazis to South American countries, with the Vatican as their center of operations. “The Church was strongly anti-communist and viewed many of the criminals as individuals who had helped fight communism. And there was the hope of proselytizing the old elite,” explains Stahl.
The so-called “Vatican route”, via Rome and Genoa, was the most used by Nazi fugitives. Among the main architects of these shadow operations stands out the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal. As the spiritual director of the German community in Italy, Hudal had been a fervent supporter of Hitler, trying to reconcile Nazism and Christianity. In his 1936 book The Foundations of National Socialism (markedly anti-Semitic in character) he defended the role of the Nazi leader in the consolidation of a Christian Europe.
After the liberation of Rome, the bishop would become one of the fundamental pieces in the escape machine of important Nazi criminals. "Starting in 1945 I felt compelled to dedicate all my charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially the so-called 'war criminals,'" he would confess years later in his memoir Roman Diary.
Almost eighty years later, the debate on the role played in those turbulent years by Pius XII, who assumed power on the eve of the start of the Second World War, remains open to historians. Despite the recent opening of part of the Vatican's secret archives relating to that time, ordered by Pope Francis, many episodes still remain in the dark. The negotiations with the Third Reich and its scandalous silence during the Holocaust place the mandate of Pius XII at the center of the controversy.
Madrid was the epicenter of the so-called “Iberian route”, which was coordinated by Nazi agents in Spain and which used Galician ports as the first link in a long journey that would take war criminals to safe destinations in South America.
In "The Neofascist network and Madrid 1945-1953", a profuse article published in the Contemporary European History magazine of the University of Cambridge, the historian Pablo del Hierro reconstructs the sophisticated framework that made the capital of Spain a fundamental node in the network transnational fascist.
After the Normandy landings, this Maastricht University professor told Historia y Vida, many French collaborators and other nationalities decided, for pragmatic reasons, to seek refuge in Spain. Some as famous as Pierre Laval, a prominent figure in the Vichy regime, or the leader of the Belgian Rexist Party, Léon Degrelle.
“In many cases they knew people from the Franco regime, they knew that they were going to be treated more kindly than in other countries, and the so-called 'snowball' effect worked: in these years there is a diaspora, and when they find a safe route, such as Spain, more and more people decide to use it”, he says.
In the capital up to four ratlines came to function, according to this scholar, systems that functioned as informal networks of people who moved from one country to another and provided help. Money, accommodation, clothing, means of transportation and false documentation. Everything you need to bury an old life of crimes and start a new stage.
“They were semi-informal structures and it is very difficult to delineate them. They shared spaces and in a certain way overlapped and overlapped ”, he adds. How did the Francoist authorities respond to this landing of fugitives from justice and the establishment of these networks? "The active tolerance of the Francoist authorities and the possibilities of using them as contacts to carry out lucrative business were factors that facilitated their settlement in the capital," this expert's investigation detailed.
Different “rat routes” operated in a capital of great “geopolitical” importance and with a fundamental role as the headquarters of the State ministries. "If you want documentation, if you want to negotiate stay permits or new passports, if you want to have your papers in order, Madrid is the best place to be," concludes Pablo del Hierro, who will see his book Madrid published this coming week. Metropolis (neo) fascist (Critical).
The capital of Spain will become even more important as a refuge from 1946, when the first air route to South America opens, the Madrid-Buenos Aires line, chartered by the Iberia company. One of its first users would be the Belgian collaborationist politician and military man Pierre Daye.
Documents brought to light in 2012 estimate the number of Nazi soldiers and collaborators who fled Europe after the end of World War II at 9,000. Of these, some 5,000 landed in Argentina, a golden haven or, in the words of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, "the Cape of Last Hope" for former criminals.
Although this predilection for Argentine asylum has often been explained by the agreement of approaches between the German Nazis and the government presided over by the military and politician Juan Domingo Perón, who came to power in 1946, the truth is that the contacts between both nations , affirms Uki Goñi, had begun some time before, in the midst of the world conflagration.
"The envoy who traveled to Germany to hold private meetings with Ribbentrop, with Heinrich Himmler and, apparently, with Adolf Hitler himself, was Juan Carlos Goyeneche, a well-connected Catholic nationalist," Goñi asserts.
Since at least 1943, the journalist maintains, there was a secret agreement between the two regimes: Argentina offered legal documents so that SS agents could move freely throughout South America and strengthen their extensive espionage network, while the Nazi government would supply confidential information about the neighbors of the southern country.
“The Argentine dictator seized the opportunity to acquire skilled and skilled Germans to help build and modernize his country's economy, and he welcomed fugitive Nazis. His motive was not really ideological. Adolf Eichmann and other former SS officers did form a network in Argentina, but it was just a discussion group: it did nothing practical,” says Richard J. Evans.
“On July 14, 1950, the Giovanna C arrived at the port of Buenos Aires with its load of toxic waste from the German Reich and Adolf Eichmann set foot on Argentine soil for the first time. Many years later, he still accurately remembered his feelings: 'My heart was full of happiness. The fear of being denounced disappeared. He was there and he was safe ’(Meine Fluch [My escape], p. 22)”, writes Bettina Stangneth in her essay Adolf Eichmann (2014).
This is how the most famous Nazi who obtained refuge in the Perón regime arrived in the “promised land”. The main organizer of the deportation of millions of Jews to Hitler's concentration camps survived the end of the Third Reich for fifteen years before being captured by Mossad agents in 1960 and transferred to a Jerusalem prison.
The man who lived hidden in the shadow of the alias Ricardo Klement was sentenced to death by hanging for crimes against humanity on June 1, 1962 in Ramla prison. When asked what had caused him the most suffering after 1945, his answer had been unequivocal: It was "the psychic burden that caused anonymity."
Other Nazi criminals, such as Erich Priebke (the main architect of the massacre of the Ardeatine Pits in Rome, where 335 Italian citizens were massacred), Josef Mengele (the Angel of Death of Auschwitz) or Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyon), They also had an anonymous existence in the American continent, adding to the black list of infamy and impunity.
More than seven decades later, the ratlines remain shrouded in mystery as historians delve into archives from half the world trying to untangle the skein: who helped the Nazis escape and why? "It is necessary to know more about the role played by the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], especially in providing false information and documents, and about the actions of Bishop Alois Hudal, who supported the fugitives from the Vatican," he concludes. Richard J. Evans.
