A Quiet Flame

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am indebted to Uki Goñi’s excellent book The Real ODESSA for much of my information about Nazis in Argentina. For anybody writing about this subject, it is the one indispensable source.

Directive 11, signed into existence by the Argentine foreign minister José María Cantilo, on July 12, 1938, condemned as many as two hundred thousand European Jews to death. Its existence is denied by some to this day.

Throughout World War II, rumors persisted of a concentration camp for Jews in Argentina’s remote forests. According to Uki Goñi, Argentine government ministers demanded a “solution to the Jewish problem” in the country. The existence of such a camp has never been confirmed.

According to Gerald Posner and John Ware’s authoritative biography Mengele, huge quantities of Nazi loot almost certainly fell under the control of the Peróns. Four of the Argentine-German trustees of the Nazi money were murdered between 1949 and 1952.

Eva Perón developed uterine cancer in 1950. Despite a hysterectomy performed by the eminent American surgeon George T. Pack, her cancer returned rapidly. She developed lung metastasis and was the first Argentinean to undergo chemotherapy (a novel procedure at the time). All available treatment notwithstanding, she died at the age of thirty-three, on July 26, 1952.

Eva’s brother, Juan Duarte, was dispatched by Juan Perón to Zurich in early 1953, ostensibly to persuade Swiss authorities to sign Eva’s personal fortune over to Perón’s name. After his return to Buenos Aires in April 1953, Duarte committed suicide. But most people believed he was murdered.

The fifty-eight-year-old Perón took a fourteen-year-old mistress, Nelly Rivas, in October 1953. She was one of many girls the president dallied with openly. Perón was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church by the Vatican on June 16, 1955. He was deposed not long afterward.

After eighteen years in exile, Perón returned to power in June 1973. His wife, Isabel, succeeded her husband to the presidency and was herself deposed by a military coup in March 1976. The junta that took control combined a widespread persecution of political dissidents with state terrorism. As many as thirty thousand Argentines “disappeared” under the junta.

Josef Mengele was one of several thousand Nazi war criminals who came to live in Argentina after World War II. In 1958 he was arrested by Buenos Aires police on charges of performing illegal abortions. After bribing a detective to release him, Mengele fled to Paraguay. He probably drowned in São Paulo.

Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina in May 1960, and hanged in Jerusalem on May 31, 1962.

General Dr. Hans Kammler, an engineer who oversaw numerous SS construction projects, designed and built the extermination camps and supervised the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. From January 1945, he was number three in the SS and in charge of all Nazi missile projects. He disappeared in May 1945 and, it is strongly suspected, was taken to the United States as part of the Paperclip program. There is no information on Kammler after that. He is perhaps the highest-ranking Nazi war criminal whom, even today, people have never heard of.

Uki Goñi reports that most documentation on Argentina’s Nazi past, including the still-denied Directive 11, was destroyed by Perón in 1955; and the rest in 1996, when confidential immigration dossiers containing the landing papers of Nazi war criminals were ordered burned.