Argentina's Declassified Files May Shed Light On 'Rat-lines' Safeguarding Nazis

Argentina’s Minister of Defense, Luis Petri, announced on April 1 in Buenos Aires that the government’s files on the Nazis who escaped to the South American republic after the Second World War have been declassified and sent to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California. This came following a request from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, for local authorities to collaborate in their investigation.

“Argentina, at the time, became a den of Nazis. Nazi hierarchs like Mengele, Priebke and Eichmann lived here. It is estimated that around 5,000 Nazis may have passed through Argentina between 1945 and 55″, Petri told local media. He warned that due to the so-called “rat-line” of safe houses and routes taken by Nazis fleeing justice, money linked to Nazis also circulated in Argentina. President Javier Milei began the process of declassification after receiving a letter from Grassley delivered by authorities of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which asked for Argentina’s assistance in investigations. 

Petri said: “There was interest in knowing some of the minutes of the board of directors that reported on military manufacturing operations between 1945 and 1950. These minutes, remarkably, were secret and entrusted the contracting - for example - to people from European countries”, adding that this documentation could help to clarify the movement of Nazi funds and funds confiscated by the hierarchs. As he explained, the minutes will also make it possible to clarify how certain European banks operated “to facilitate and cover up the handling of these spurious funds”.

“It is a novel track that has emerged. Let's remember that, in the first place, the focus was put on those Nazis who had arrived in the Argentine Republic and today what is being reconstructed is how they were financed, how they were economically sustained and who facilitated the economic support of these Nazi hierarchs”, he said. 

According to Petri, the secret archives are already being analyzed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “We decided to provide all the information that was requested because it seems to us that it is monumental evidence of the Shoah, of the Holocaust, to remain in the collective memory of humanity”.

The measure is in line with the declassification of all documentation related to the actions of the Armed Forces during the dictatorship of the 1970s and previous periods. Thousands of Argentines were tortured and murdered by their country’s military and intelligence agencies during that period. The remains of approximately 30,000 of the so-called “disappeared” have not yet been located. “The documentation was in the possession of the Justice system. What is going to happen now is that, not only the judges and the judicial files are going to become aware of this information, but it is going to be made public and this is, it is paramount”, he explained.

“I think it is very important for society as a whole to have access to this documentation that reconstructs and recreates part of the history of our country, where we say that we must have a complete memory, right? And we have been saying this since December 10”, he added in an interview with DNews. 

Last March 24, Argentina’s National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice, the Argentine government announced the transfer of the archives that had been under the control of the infamous State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE) to the General Archive of the Nation, the agency in charge of the preservation of historical documents. There are more than 3,000 boxes of files. It was then that President Milei’s spokesman Manuel Adorni announced that Argentina will acknowledge before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the attack by the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) on the family of Captain Humberto Viola was a crime against humanity. Viola and his three-year-old daughter Maria Cristina were murdered by security forces on December 1, 1974, in downtown San Miguel, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Because the incident had not been defined as a crime against humanity, the Ministry of Justice could not move forward with the family's request to reopen the investigation.

Nazis found sympathetic ears among some post-war Argentines. President Juan Peron, who was in office 1946-1955 and 1973-1974, was openly hostile to the United States and had an open door policy for Nazis fleeing justice. For example, Col. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a fanatical Nazi and decorated ace pilot, surrendered to U.S. forces in 1945. In 1948, he emigrated to Argentina, via the “rat-line” after having a Red Cross passport issued to him under a pseudonym with help from Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal of Austria. Rudel lived in a German settlement in Argentina’s interior where he operated a brick works and engaged in neo-Nazi propaganda and agitation. He wrote books about the war and in support of the Nazi regime, blaming Oberkommando der Wehrmacht for "failing Hitler".

Among Rudel’s associates were Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chamber, extermination camp doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele, SS officer and Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann, who had taken refuge in Argentina and worked for Mercedes Benz. The latter was eventually seized by Israeli operators and taken to Israel were he was tried and convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. 

In 1953, Rudel stood as top candidate in the West German federal election for the neo-Nazi German Reich Party. He was defeated. Following the fall of Peron in 1955 in a military coup, Rudel moved to Paraguay where he was greeted by his long-time friend dictator Alfredo Stroessner. In Paraguay, he was a foreign representative for several German companies, including Salzgitter AG, Dornier Flugzeugwerke, Focke-Wulf, Messerschmitt, Siemens, and Lahmeyer International. Rudel had a lucrative business selling discarded German armaments to various South American countries, including Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. In the early 1960s, Rudel joined with Friedrich Schwend, a former member of the Reich Security Main Office, and Klaus Barbie “The Butcher of Lyon” to form a company employing former SS officers. Rudel died in 1982.

As for Barbie, he was extradited from Bolivia by France in 1983. An investigation revealed that he had collaborated with U.S. intelligence services in 1947 despite his reputation for torture and murder of Jews and French patriots during the war. An investigation by Allan Ryan, Director of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department, concluded that "officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law."

Other war criminals who fled to Argentina were Erich Priebke, Eduard Roschmann, Josef Schwammberger, and Walter Kutschmann.