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Uki Goñi The Real Odessa Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina Granta Books | London - New York
 Uki Goñi was born in Washington DC in 1953, being raised in the United States, Argentina, México and Ireland. He interrupted his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, to settle in Buenos Aires, the native city of his parents, in 1975. He has written for various US publications, including The New York Times, Time magazine and The Miami Herald. In Great Britain, his work has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer and The Scotsman. The Real Odessa and its author have been the object of innumerable reviews and interviews in international media, and of telvision documentaries by Discovery Channel, the BBC and television stations in Switzerland and Italy. |
Towards the end of World War II, a group of bizarre and crooked SS men arrived in Argentina and set up a Nazi rescue organization with tentacles in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the Vatican. The Real Odessa shows exactly how it was done - and reveals for the first time how the Swiss authorities turned a blind eye to the smuggling of the Nazis through their territory, how the gold of the Croatian state treasury (pillaged from the 600,000 Jewish and Serb victims of that country's Nazi puppet regime) ended up in Argentina, and the role played by Pope Pius XII.
The Nazi rescue organization operated out of the Presidential Palace of Juan and Eva Perón in Buenos Aires, and helped Adolf Eichmann (the organizer of the Final Solution), Josef Mengele (the SS doctor at Auschwitz), Erich Priebke (the SS officer who helped massacre Italians in the closing stages of the war) and many other war criminals find refuge in Argentina. Published to wide acclaim in 2002, the book takes its title from Frederick Forsyth's 1972 best-seller The Odessa File, which fictionalized an SS network named Odessa (the Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) that smuggled war criminals to Latin America. Drawing on declassified US intelligence records, original Argentine documentation, previously unseen documents from European archives and interviews with those involved, Goñi's book proves that Himmler agents did indeed arrive in Madrid in 1944 to prepare an Odessa-like escape route. In 1946 the operation moved to Buenos Aires. The book shows that the escape mechanisms were organized with Perón’s enthusiastic support. It also describes the pre-war anti-Semitism of the Argentine elite, the moral blindness of Argentina’s leaders, and explores how the Argentine security services absorbed the lessons of their new friends. During the 1970s and 80s, the methods of the Nazi police were applied by Argentina’s military rulers in their own genocidal ‘Dirty War’ against those they deemed outside their ‘Western and Christian’ world view. |
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