Uki Goņi

Argentina is in crisis, and you don't kick a man who's down. When Uki Goņi finished his book last summer, he wasn't to know that his country would default on a massive foreign debt, experience three presidents within a month and that Buenos Aires would suffer the worst violence since the 1970s. Yet Goņi, a journalist who remembers and wrote about Argentina's Dirty War of that decade, will have a sense of deja vu; his book is about Argentina's unfinished business, its unacknowledged past, its fault-lines.

Its most lurid fault-line is Peronism. Hard though it would be to prove that Peronist agitators were behind the recent riots, any solution to Argentina's current turmoil will probably see that creed and naive political salve, whose most recent and rampant reincarnation was Carlos Menem, play a part. Goņi will despair but will not be surprised.

The business he looks at took place over 50 years ago. The man in charge was General Juan Perķn; the business was the postwar protection, facilitated and supported by the dictator, of Nazis. Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele found safe haven in Peron's Argentina. Those names are just two - two of the worst, certainly - among a sweaty crowd of really abominable men who fled Europe after participating in the Holocaust. How they got to Argentina and what they did once there is Goņi's tale.

His title deliberately echoes that of Frederick Forsyth's 1972 novel, The Odessa File, with its always plausible notion of a clandestine group whose mission was to save Nazis. In fact a scene that kept occurring to me as I read was not from Forsyth, but from the film Marathon Man, where Laurence Olivier - once a murderous Nazi - walks down a street in New York and is recognised by a former camp inmate, who screams for him to be detained: a chilling image of what might have happened to the monsters in Goņi's book; except that they were in South, not North, America.

As early as 1942, an unsavoury Argentine, Juan Carlos Goyeneche, was in Madrid as cultural attaché at the Argentine embassy, but actually spending a great deal of time in occupied Paris, at the Vatican and in Berlin. He got Ribbentrop to agree that Spain constituted the "natural bridge" between Argentina and Europe - Franco's Spain was an obvious port-of-call for Argentines of fascist persuasion. One lynchpin there, the most prominent character in Goņi's account, was a chancer called Carlos Fuldner.

Born an Argentine of German stock, he moved with his family to Germany in 1922. Ten years later he was in the SS and 10 years after that - though his wartime movements, as Goņi says, are obscure - he'd become a close aide of Himmler's. It was Fuldner who, capitalising on the bridge-building of Goyeneche, enabled people like Mengele and Eichmann, as well as less notorious but equally brutal SS officers - Gerhard Bohne (central to Hitler's euthanasia programme) and Erich Priebke (responsible for the killing of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in March 1944) - to get the right documents, and a warm welcome in Argentina.

Goņi's point is that Perķn was not only happy to have these people, but considered them good material for the consolidation of an Argentina wrought out of his crude blend of populism, nationalism and old Catholic values. Racism wasn't part of it, though Goņi shows clearly enough how, long before Perķn came to power in 1946, Argentina had closed its doors to Jews or sanctioned a racket that extorted huge amounts to let them in. These issues are brought home hard and are beyond dispute.

Goņi's research is admirable. Where he risks losing his reader is in the sheer relentlessness of his detail, an almost exhausting proliferation of agents, go-betweens and criminals: from Argentina, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Croatia, Italy, the Catholic church most heinously. In her 1974 book, Into That Darkness, about the Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl (who makes a fleeting appearance here on his way to Brazil), Gitta Sereny carried out pioneering work on the Vatican's protection of Nazis, so Goņi can't claim first-time exclusivity for his. I was relieved to get to chapters that provided individual profiles of Bohne, Eichmann et al; here, after so much amassing and marshalling of evidence, Goņi relaxes into narrative.

A clue to his motives for the book can be found in his conclusion. Between 1997 and 1999 a commission was set up in Argentina to examine earlier governments' links with fugitive Nazis. Goņi joined the probe for three days in 1998, but found that it "failed abysmally to deal with the core issues". He resigned, and this book is his answer to that failure: an Argentine's J'accuse against a country which has too often chosen amnesia, over abominations in the 1970s as well as over those which are Goņi's subject.

He can be forgiven for writing a book that's sometimes more akin to an investigative report than a readable story (though not for occasional blandness: "They managed to rid Poland of its Jews, but the Germans were less successful at winning the war"). You put down The Real Odessa thinking that Argentina has much to cry about.

Copyright 2002 The Financial Times