2.05.2015

Uki Goni - 'The Real Odessa'

Reading this book, and certainly writing about it, takes me a little bit out of my comfort zone. I'm used to reading and writing about fiction, yet this is non-fiction. The subtitle for the book is "How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina." Which tells you exactly what the book is about. And while it may not be fiction, I still have many thoughts about the book, not to mention having learned some of the more atrocious secrets of Juan Peron's regime and Argentina's shameful complicity with saving Nazi war criminal and the real Odessa*.

First off, this story is thoroughly well researched. It's an amazing story, hard to believe at points how various governments of the world (including the USA) were complacent in the transfer of Nazis from post-WWII Europe to South America. That said, I thought the writing was a bit stiff and hard to follow at points. To that point, the book may have been too well-researched for only being 326 pages (not including the Afterward added to the second edition).

Another issue I had was how little mention there was of Eva 'Evita' Peron. She is mentioned numerous times throughout the book, sure, but is barely mentioned in the index when trying to find references to her. But, to be fair, this book is meant to focus on the war criminals. The book leaves her sympathies ambiguous: she did stand up to a Nazi war criminal when she refused to fire a Jewish employee. Yet, she was very welcoming and apparently charmed by multiple Nazis that visited la Casa Rosada.

But enough about the issues. The story is fascinating and I recommend it to any history buffs out there. Here are some of my major takeaways from the book:

  • Here's the part that disturbed me the most. Pierre Daye. Daye was a Belgian war criminal who fled to Buenos Aires and helped set up an organization that aided in the rescue of Nazis (under the misleadingly named SARE - Society in Argentina for the Reception of Europeans). It's not just that he did this that disturbed me. The fucked up part is how brilliant his writing is. Which is not to say I agree with what he wrote. Not at all. But as far as putting pen to paper and creating golden sentence after golden sentence, this man was brilliant. From his journal, describing a bombing in Buenos Aires: the sound was "a kind of muffled whistle, the heavy rumble of a train advancing at top speed, a thunderous din..." I'm sure I'd be hard pressed to find any of his work still being published in English (obviously), but I still have a strong curiosity to read more.
  • There were secret orders restricting the number of Jews able to enter Buenos Aires. In 1941, 2,006 legal Jewish immigrants arrives in BA. That number fell to 60 in 1942, 26 in 1943, and guess what in 1944? One.
  • Peron's reaction to the Nuremberg trials: "Now we realize that they [the Allies] deserved to lose the war. During my government I often delivered speeches against Nuremberg, which is an outrage history will not forgive!"
  • Argentine Cardinal Antonio Caggiano in 1960 speaking out against the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann: "Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he's done."
  • While researching this book in the 90s, hundreds of immigration files were destoyed by the Argentine government
  • Carl Vaernet, 'the Danish Mengele,' experimented with the 'reversal of hormonal polarity,' in attempts to find the 'Final Answer to the Homosexual Question.' He even tried to sell his hormone delivery system to the US and England. 
  • Despite all of this, Peron actually allowed some Jews into Argentina. The reason for this, according to Hector Emilio Magistrali, Secretary General of the Directorate General of Immigration, was 'firstly, to soften the widely held perception of racial persecution, and secondly and fundamentally, because being elderly persons they leave no descendants and the [Jewish] community does not increase.'
  • The Vatican neither outright condemned nor endorsed what the Nazis stood for, but the Roman Catholic Church in Croatia was "an ardent supporter" of Ante Pavelic, dictator in Croatia. 
  • French fashion designer Coco Chanel had a romantic relationship with an SS officer, and supported other Nazis financially after the war. 
  • The Red Cross issued Dr. Joseph Mengele a passport under a false name he continued to use in Argentina until his death. This man was evil personified, and granted a second lease on life thanks to the Red Cross. 
  • Croatian Roman Catholic priest Father Krunoslav Draganovic was instrumental in helping wartime criminals escape to Argentina. Later, he was aided in US taxpayer money by the CIA for information retrieved from his spies to help topple Tito's Communist regime in Yugoslavia.
There is obviously much more about the book, but these are some of the parts I found most interesting. For Goni, this seems to be a topic that he can only exhaust when the Argentine government has burned every last document about this era.

* = ODESSA, not the city in Ukraine, but standing for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen

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