Argentina Evades Its Nazi Past
Opinion
By Ann Louise Bardach
Congratulations are due to those who finally cajoled the Swiss into admitting their role as bankers to the Third Reich. Indeed, other so-called neutrals of World War II -- Spain, Sweden and Portugal -- who did brisk fencing for the Nazis would do well to follow suit before they face a similar international browbeating.
The complicity of the European neutrals, however, paled in comparison with the treachery of a country that deserves greater scrutiny: Argentina. Whereas the Swiss-Nazi relationship was entirely mercenary, that between Juan Peron's Argentina and Hitler's Germany was seamless and symbiotic, an ideological marriage of caudillismo and Fascism.
This month President Carlos Saul Menem of the Peronist Party acceded to a request from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hand over bank records for the accounts of some 334 Nazis and their wives and mistresses who fled to Argentina. But this would not be the first time that Mr. Menem has signaled token cooperation and then proved to be less than sincere.
In 1992 he announced with great fanfare that he was releasing all of Argentina's wartime archives. But Sergio Widder, the Latin American representative at the Wiesenthal Center, insists that the records were ludicrously incomplete. ''Adolf Eichmann was not in the file,'' he said. Nor was there anything on Joseph Schwammberger, the commander of the Mielec concentration camp who was captured in Argentina in 1987, or on Erich Priebke, the SS officer captured in 1994 and now on trial in Italy for the massacre of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine cave outside Rome in 1944.
Nor did the files include anything on Ivo Rojnica, a pro-Nazi Ustashe commander from Croatia who became a Menem supporter and was even nominated as Croatia's Ambassador to Argentina in 1993. (After protests from Argentina's Jewish community, Croatia withdrew his nomination.)
Notwithstanding Madonna's revisionist rendering of Eva Peron, Argentina's Nazi past is hardly a secret. But recently declassified files from Argentine and American Government archives reveal that the ties ran far deeper than most realized.
According to the Blue Book of Argentina, an exhaustive document compiled by the O.S.S. in 1945 (the World Jewish Congress obtained a copy last year), the Peron Government continued to aid the Fascist cause long after the war ended, issuing an estimated 60,000 to 90,000 visas to desperate Nazis, including Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele. So complicit was Argentina that the United States seriously considered barring its entry to the United Nations.
A recently declassified 1945 State Department report concluded that ''the personal fortunes of Nazi officials'' were transported by diplomatic pouch to Buenos Aires, and that Hermann Goring had ''more than $20 million,'' as well as a submarine loaded with 40 boxes of treasure.
Last month, the Buenos Aires paper La Nacion reported that Peron's private secretary, Rudolf Freude, oversaw the immigration of Nazi war criminals from his office. Mr. Freude's father was Ludwig Freude, a Peron confidant and the most important Nazi agent in Argentina; while the son shepherded Nazis into the country, the father smuggled in their money.
Regrettably, the Menem Government seems to be following the circuitous path of the Swiss -- parceling out just enough information to stave off international condemnation. In February, Mr. Menem responded to a Wiesenthal Center request for his country's wartime central bank records. But what he made available -- five accounting books of Argentina's gold registry -- offers no clues as to the names of the depositors.
Likewise, when Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Wiesenthal Center recently requested files on Nazis now living in the country, he was only given dossiers on Eichmann, Mengele and Martin Bormann, all long dead. No one doubts that many Nazis are alive and thriving in Argentina, including Reinhard Kops, who worked in the ''rat line'' ferrying Nazis out of Europe.
''We're asking for both moral and material restitution,'' says Elan Steinberg, the executive director of the World Jewish Congress. He has asked for American support in his calls for Argentina to establish a truth commission with an international pedigree, as the Swiss have done. There is every reason to believe that the Argentines, motivated by international pressure, could lead investigators to the billions of dollars in Nazi plunder and the surviving fugitives.
As Eichmann stood on the gallows with the hangman's noose around his neck, his last words were: ''Long live Germany! Long live Argentina! Long live Austria! I will not forget.'' Nor should we.
