Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (37 page)

A
RGENTINA
—L
AND OF
S
ILVER

IN 1536, SPANISH CONQUISTADORES established a settlement on the Río de la Plata (River Plate) that was to become the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires. It lay on the edge of the vast pampas or plains that stretched hundreds of miles to the Andes Mountains on the western edge of South America. The conquistadores came in search of gold and silver. Such was their lust for precious metals that they called the newfound territory Argentina, or Land of Silver, after the Latin
argentum
. There was little gold or silver to be had from the nomadic Native American hunter-gatherers living on the pampas, but the Spaniards brought with them something far more valuable: the horse and the steer. The pampas were ideal for the raising of cattle. The legendary gauchos (cowboys) tended immense herds, spending months at a time in the boundless countryside. The end product was leather, which was exported in huge quantities to Europe. It was a wasteful process, as the only monetary value lay in the hides and the meat was mostly discarded. And then in 1879, with the advent of refrigerated shipping, whole carcasses of beef, lamb, and mutton were dispatched by the millions across the seas from specially constructed ports—Buenos Aires in Argentina, Fray Bentos in Uruguay, São Paulo in Brazil—to feed the workers of the industrial revolution and generate great wealth in South America.

With burgeoning populations in the Old World, many Europeans sought a new life in the Americas. Between 1850 and 1930, over six million immigrants flocked to Argentina: mostly Italians, but many Spaniards, British, and French as well. This medley of races gave rise to the quixotic nature of the Argentines, who have been described as “Italians who speak Spanish and think they are British living in Paris.” The southern Europeans provided the labor while the Anglo-Saxons supplied the capital for the country’s growing infrastructure of railroads and ports. The English also purchased vast tracts of the pampas for their cattle farms, or estancias, and encouraged the widespread cultivation of wheat for export. After the unification of Germany in 1871, German immigrants began to arrive in Argentina in significant numbers, but the best lands of the pampas were in the hands of the English or the old, established Spanish families. The Germans were obliged to look elsewhere. Their eyes fell on the desolate hinterland of Patagonia that straddled the borders of Argentina and Chile to the south.

It is difficult to comprehend the scale of Patagonia: one and a half times the size of Texas or nearly four times that of Great Britain. Most tellingly, its population in 1945 was minimal. By comparison, if New York City had the same population density there would be just thirty-five people living in Manhattan. On one side, Patagonia is bordered by the magnificent Andes Mountains and on the other by the cold and forbidding waters of the South Atlantic. Although Imperial Germany had been stripped of all its colonial possessions by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Patagonia, which remained in Argentine and Chilean sovereign territory, was a de facto German colony.
When war broke out in 1939
, there were 60,000 members of the overseas
Nazi Party
living in Argentina, the largest group of National Socialists outside of Germany. The total German population of approximately 237,000—not including German Jews—represented a small, but economically and politically important section of Argentine society. Its influence at the government level far exceeded its numerical size.

IN GERMANY, STRATEGIC DREAMS
for the Americas had predated Hitler’s rise to power by at least three decades. As early as 1904, Ernst
Hasse
, president of the Pan-German League in Berlin, had even been moved to predict that “the Argentine and Brazilian republics and all the other seedy South American states will accept our advice and listen to reason, voluntarily or under coercion. In a hundred years, both South and North America will be conquered by the German Geist [philosophical mind-set], and the German Emperor will perhaps transfer his residence to New York.”

During the Nazi era, the two key figures in German penetration of Latin America were Adm.
Wilhelm Canaris
, from 1935 the head of the Abwehr, and Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel, head of the Ibero-American Institute, the headquarters for German espionage and conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

Canaris knew Argentina and Chile well. He had joined the German Imperial Navy in 1905, and by the outbreak of World War I he was serving as an intelligence officer on board the SMS
Dresden
. The
Dresden
was the only German cruiser to escape destruction by the British at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914. The Royal Navy finally caught up with the
Dresden
in March 1915, at Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. After a short battle against overwhelming odds, the German crew scuttled their ship and spent the rest of the war interned in Chile. Canaris escaped in August 1915; he was already fluent in Spanish, and during an early stage of his long journey back to Germany he was helped by German settlers in Patagonia, in particular at the
Estancia San Ramón
outside San Carlos de Bariloche, in the foothills of the Andes. Canaris even evaded capture in England during his sea voyages home (he also spoke good English). He then served as an undercover agent in Italy and Spain before ending World War I as a U-boat commander in the Mediterranean. His brilliant talents and unusual firsthand knowledge of the Patagonian region would be invaluable during the development of the Nazi intelligence network in southern Argentina.

The preexisting basis and principal cover for this activity was the Lahusen company, a major enterprise with offices and shops throughout Patagonia since before World War I (now defunct). Central to its early profitability was the wool trade, supplied by the German sheep ranches of Patagonia; before refrigeration made meat shipments to Europe possible, wool was Argentina’s largest export and its trade fueled the country’s vibrant economy. The Lahusen organization facilitated the German espionage system throughout Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in both world wars. It employed over a thousand people and owned nearly a quarter of a million acres of land in the territory; its headquarters in the Montserrat district of Buenos Aires took up seven floors of a modern office building. Every town and village in Patagonia had its Lahusen store and agent, and it was a
standing joke
in Buenos Aires’s diplomatic circles that Hitler knew more about Patagonia than the Argentine government did.

Wilhelm von Faupel, the German General Staff’s primary expert on Argentina, also had experience in Argentine affairs that predated World War I. From 1911 to 1913 he was a professor at the military academy in Buenos Aires. At the outbreak of war, he was relocated to Spain, where he ran German espionage and sabotage activities in the Mediterranean. Following Germany’s defeat, he returned to Argentina as chief adviser to the Argentine General Staff. From 1927, Faupel supported the rise of the Nazis in Germany; he recruited important German émigrés—such as Walter and Ida Eichhorn—to help fund the National Socialist Party; the Eichhorns in particular would, for decades to come, play a central part in Nazi plans for Argentina. From 1938, from a
mansion on Fuerenstrasse
in Berlin, Faupel organized the training of German and South American agents and saboteurs. He had contacts with the
Falange
Española—the Spanish fascist political party that underpinned the Nationalist uprising by rebel army officers in July 1936—and was instrumental in the creation of the Condor Legion soon afterward. This force combined cadres of German military instructors and squadrons of combat airmen that assisted the Nationalist forces—and acquired useful experience themselves—during the Spanish Civil War. Wilhelm von Faupel’s activities over three decades would bring him huge influence in Spain after the Nationalist leader, Gen. Francisco Franco, established his military dictatorship in 1939. In time, this influence would enable Martin Bormann’s plans for a “Fourth Reich in the South” to move toward reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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