Why did South American countries welcome and help harbor Nazi officials?

Question

thank you for your explanations.

Answer 1

This is an interesting question because I was in Bariloche, Argentina very recently and my brother purchased a book that argues Hitler didn't die in that bunker, but fleed to Argentina after the war.

In fact, many Nazi officials did end up in countries like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Today, you can still see small German and Swiss colonies in the southern tip of Argentina.

An interesting story is the one of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed the most horrible experiments on humans. Here is some background info on him, Josef Mengele was the infamous Angel o£ Death at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland. As a doctor with Hitler's dreaded SS seeking to unlock a genetic basis for a superior race, he conducted macabre experiments, primarily on twin inmates, using them like laboratory animals. He also became known as the Great Selector for his role of deciding which of the prisoners were to be summarily killed as they were brought in by the carloads. For more than 34 years after World War II, he eluded his pursuers, and although he died in 1979, the world did not learn of his death until 1985, when the discovery of documents in Bavaria led to his grave in Brazil.

(http://www.posner.com/articles/mengele.htm)

What's the true story on
South American Nazis?


After the war Argentina and Paraguay were run for years by nationalist strongmen, Juan Peron and Alfredo Stroessner respectively, who liked to strut around in military regalia and brutalize dissidents. Argentina had remained officially neutral until early 1945, when economic pressure forced it to throw in with the Allies, but until that point was in intimate contact with Hitler's regime and the fascist Franco government in Spain. Postwar Brazil was still fascist-friendly, a legacy of deposed dictator Getulio Vargas. Surely it's no surprise that the leaders of these countries nurtured fraternal feelings for fleeing Nazis.

Not all fugitives from the Third Reich ended up in South America--quite a few are said to have headed for Spain or the Middle East, and the U.S. imported a crowd of Nazi rocket scientists during Operation Paperclip. That said, the true story of how war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele wound up in the land of the gauchos has never been fully told, and even now it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.





Leading candidates for chief enabler of the great escape include:

Odessa. Part of the popular consciousness ever since Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 novel The Odessa File, this secret group (the name is an acronym for Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, "Organization of Former SS Members") supposedly used stashed war booty and connections in high places to spirit Nazi big shots out of reach of the Allies. Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal says he first heard about Odessa during the Nuremberg trials, and in his 1989 book Justice, Not Vengeance he seems convinced it exists, or rather existed. He offers little evidence, though, and others have their doubts. Even some believers say the organization was amateurish and short-lived.

The Catholic church. The claim that members of the Catholic hierarchy were instrumental in obtaining documents, cash, and safe passage for many escaping Nazis is only barely scandalous these days. The benign view is that individual clerics acted out of humanitarian concern, believing they were aiding refugees from postwar communist persecution, and were unaware of their charges' sordid pasts. Others say the Vatican knew quite well what was going on but wanted former Nazis as allies in its struggle against the reds. A figure commonly named in this context is Alois Hudal, an openly pro-Nazi German bishop in Rome who is said to have helped engineer the escapes of dozens if not hundreds of Nazis--including Eichmann, who was living in Argentina when the Mossad caught him in 1960, and Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who ultimately made his way to Brazil and was captured there in 1967.

Evita, Swiss
&
the Nazis




The above plus Peron. Argentine journalist Uki Goñi, in The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron's Argentina (2002), offers what amounts to a synthesis of earlier theories. The "real Odessa," he says, consisted of about a dozen energetic ex-Nazis and Nazi collaborators from several nations, including a few wanted war criminals, working in concert with the Peron regime and sympathetic Catholic officials in both Europe and Argentina. Goñi makes a plausible case that the cabal, which was organized in Buenos Aires following Peron's election as Argentina's president in 1946, orchestrated the emigration of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Nazis and other unsavory types to the country in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (He also claims that the cabal was based at the presidential palace, and that many of its members were given important jobs in Peron's government.) The old Nazis made frequent trips to Europe to troll for more fugitives; some war criminals had to be smuggled out, but in other cases countries were glad to unload their troublesome Nazi refugees. Visas and landing permits were handed out freely, the chief concern being that no communists or Jews be allowed in by mistake. How many ex-Nazis made it to Argentina is not known. Goñi says he identified 300 during six years of research, and it's easy to believe there were many more.



It is absurd to believe that 300,000 fugitive Nazis escaped to South America on the few U-Boats remaining at the end of the war, or that they all made their own travel arrangements...



The truth is much more ordinary, almost mundane. It is all the more shocking as a result. For whatever success ODESSA achieved, they were mere amateurs at Nazi-smuggling when compared with the Vatican.



~Mark Aarons and John Loftus "Unholy Trinity"




It's a lot to swallow, no question, and notwithstanding his 591 footnotes Goñi concedes that many key Argentine records that would've corroborated his story have been destroyed. Still, he avoids the overheated claims of other writers, and the plain fact is that all those Nazis didn't wind up in South America by coincidence--they were going where they were welcome. As for the details? Given the current worldwide consensus that Nazis represent the ultimate human evil (and the resulting disinclination of officials in Argentina and elsewhere to come clean), Goñi's book may be as close as we'll get to the truth.

Argentina's government had, in 1938 (on the verge of World War II, and with Hitler's politics regarding Jews already on the move), sanctioned an immigration law restricting access to any individual scorned or forsaken by his country's government. This was implicitly targeted for Jews and other minorities fleeing Germany at the time. This law was discovered and denounced by writer Uki Goñi. This legislation, though already in disuse for many years, was finally vetoed on 8 June 2005.

(http://greyfalcon.us/restored/South.htm)
this link will be very helpful!

Answer 2

Nazi In South America

Answer 3

It's simply money. They got out with wealth, in forms of property stolen from throughout Europe, and from those they held in the camps. The corruption of the South American countries in question at the time allowed this to easily be done. From most accounts, their last days were pathetic, and left them destitute, but not before they caused some mischief in those countries as well. That's my two cents worth.

Answer 4

Because South America was poor and needed skilled leaders and workmen to build up their societies. They also jumped at bribes. The Germanies played a very important role in South America making new forms of industry and manufacturing. Also, Germanies were very successful in farming husbandry.
The Germans were able to hide among the South Americans who assisted their plan to change identities blend into the society.

Answer 5

Their governments did not. They didn't have the guts to do so, but there were and still are a large german population in S American countries such as Argentina. The Nazis simply had no other places to go. They had to take the risk to flee to S. America. Many of them were caught immediately after they arrived, but many settled down and hid themselves there.

Answer 6

two main reasons:
1. money, plain and simple.
2. Racism - The South American countries wanted to encourage more white europeans into their blood lines

It is interesting to note that Argentina also welcomed many Jewish refugees as well as Nazis.

Answer 7

I always spend my half an hour to read this blog's posts daily along with a mug of coffee.

Answer 8

German colonized them countries way back in 1800s and they was already a good German Population there but what it really boils down to is money.....Argentina,Brazil ,were dirt poor back then and germans brought boat loads of cash

Answer 9

$$$$$$$$$$$$$