Uki Goņi

The mass post-war escape of wanted criminals and Nazi collaborators, codenamed Odessa (Organisation der SS Angehoerigen, or Organisation of SS members), has inspired fiction such as Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File and the sadomasochistic The Night Porter, but only now does the true story emerge in all its sordid detail.

It has taken five years' dogged research by an Argentine journalist, Uki Goņi, to expose the cover-up, which existed on an international scale and involved the Vatican and the Red Cross, as well as the diplomatic corps and police and legal chiefs of several countries.

But the real architect of the secret-escape network was Juan Perķn, twice dictator of Argentina - from 1943 until 1955, and then briefly in the early 1970s. Uki Goņi's book forges the last links in a chain of evidence that leads ultimately to the chancellery of the Holy See, if not to the Holy Father, Pius XII, himself.

Goņi had to surmount two daunting hurdles: the Vatican's archives were subject to 80-year closure, and all the files on Perķn's dealings with the Nazis were burnt, bar one, in 1996. His persistence paid off, however. He discovered that the private papers of one of the principal middle men in the Argentine dictator's transactions had been moved back to Belgium, where he had been the arch collaborator with the Nazi regime. Further details of this sombre picture were filled in from the normally impenetrable Swiss archives and, crucially, American Secret Service papers - proving once again what can be achieved through a Freedom of Information Act that means what it says.

The author, one feels, has written this book partly as expiation for being a passive observer of another Holocaust - the Argentine militarists' reign of terror in the late 1970s. The fate of the "Disappeared Ones" (tortured, shot and buried in unmarked graves, or thrown out of aircraft over the South Atlantic) forms a leitmotif throughout the book.

Apart from interviewing 190 players of varying importance in the Odessa drama, Goņi obtained a tape Perķn made secretly in exile in Madrid, in which he confessed to his role in smuggling convicted war criminals out of Europe and offering them sanctuary in South America. They included notorious figures such as Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Final Solution, and Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz "Angel of Death", and hundreds of the fascist lackeys from all over Europe who had done Hitler's bidding. Perķn confided that the Nuremberg trials had "outraged his sense of military honour" and that he had determined to save as many as possible from Allied justice. He said bluntly, "In Nuremberg at that time something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity."

Goņi identifies the nerve centre of the operation as Perķn's Information Bureau, his secret service unit, housed next to his office in the presidential mansion. Its then chief, Rodolfo Freude, refused an interview with Goņi, but the author discovered that a simple letter of reference originating in the bureau, and the use of an alias, could be enough to obtain entry for a Nazi.

The actual processing of escapees' "credentials" and details of their flight were in the hands of Carlos-Horst Fuldner, a disgraced, German-Argentine, former SS intelligence officer, who was dispatched to Buenos Aires by Himmler in March 1945 to establish the "rat-line" - and given a plane-full of plundered art treasures to help finance it.

Fuldner reappeared in Genoa with an Argentine passport in December 1947. Posing as an emigration official, and "a special envoy of the president" (Perķn), Fuldner worked closely with Herbert Helfrich, an architect of the V2 rocket sites and the "Atlantic Wall", to bribe Swiss officials to turn a blind eye while Nazi weapons experts, particularly in jet aircraft, were allowed to use Switzerland as their launch pad to the new world - often via KLM airline, which badly needed cash. As a frustrated American intelligence agent wrote, "the Swiss government is not only anxious to get rid of German nationals, legally or illegally, but they make a considerable profit in getting rid of them".

Other Nazis escaped from Scandinavia by ship. Goņi says that "particular pains were taken to get out SS Captain Kurt Gross, who knew more than anyone about the links between Perķn and Himmler's Intelligence Service" (Perķn had provided cover for a German spy ring in Argentina during the war). By 1948, 500 files a day were being processed to hasten the exodus, and SARE (the Society in Argentina for the Reception of Europeans - "to procure for our friends on the old Continent visas and resources for immigration to Argentina") was thriving. The traffic flourished as late as 1951.

It had allowed them, in the words of this eulogy, "to save thousands of good and honest young men" who, with all their ruthlessness, had failed to build the Thousand-Year Reich and now thought they could enjoy a Latin-American variant, secure from prosecution and in the wealth their co-nationals had built there. False beards went with false names ... and Mengele had his Red Cross passport made out in the name of Dr Helmut Gregor. Eichmann was one of the last important criminals to be processed by Odessa, reaching Argentina, like Mengele, on a luxury liner.

As for the role of the church, Goņi says that, "although it may be impossible to pin the rescue of any individual war criminal on the Pope", the complicity of the Vatican in clearing the way for fugitive Nazis' flight can no longer be doubted. The creation of a pan-Hispanic Catholic revival was a dream given fresh impetus after Franco's victory and the persecution of the Church in Mexico. Perķn, who operated a heartless exclusion policy towards Jewish refugees, was sympathetic to the extent of aiding pro-Nazi prelates such as Bishop Alois Hudal to shelter criminals, sometimes at convents in the shadow of the Vatican, before passing them on to Fuldner's dispatchers in Genoa. Goņi is uncompromising in his indictment: "Cardinals such as Montini (the later Paul VI), Tisserant and Caggiano masterminded their escape. In the face of such incontrovertible evidence the question of whether Pope Pius XII was fully informed is not only immaterial, it is alarmingly naive."

Fifty years on, Argentina now finds itself bankrupt not only financially but also of any sense of responsibility for its wartime actions. Goņi has powerfully exposed the deceits and conniving, and pierced what he calls the "wall of silence".

Copyright 2002 The Sunday Times