Usually South America is presented as a promised land for fugitive Nazis, including the Fuhrer himself and Bormann. Recently found archival documents reveal a completely different picture of the work of the agents of the Third Reich in this hemisphere. Was there a springboard prepared for the escape of the Nazi bosses?
From the published 1,500-page study, it follows that German spies not only planned sabotage actions in Chilean seaports and mines, but were even ready to destroy the Panama Canal. The agents of influence sought to put pressure on the Cuban government so that they would not accept Jewish refugees from Europe.
Agents were recruited from young German immigrants. Many of them spoke Spanish fluently, but they saw their ideological preferences in a new political formation - the Third Empire. Sometimes their so-called love and devotion was based on a completely material basis: the Third Reich supported its promises by paying officers' pensions to widows or family members of arrested German spies.
German settlers have mastered the prairies and territories of South America since the 19th century. Decades later, their descendants easily (as well as in the homeland of their ancestors) adopted the Nazi ideology and pledged to faithfully serve the thousand-year-old Reich of the German nation. The most important outpost of the intelligence agencies of Hitlerite Germany was at that time the South American state of Chile. Three decades later, fighters raised on Nazi yeast will carry out a putsch in this country, destroying the legitimate government of President Salvador Allende.
Ironically, the socialist Allende, who was killed in a military coup in September 1973, was a native of Valparaiso, a city full of pro-Nazi minded undead agents of the Third Reich. A 1,500-page document from Chile's National Archives details the activities of Nazi spies during World War II. Members of paramilitarist and paramilitary groups were recruited from among young immigrants from Germany. This is evidenced by declassified papers, interrogation records, witness statements and lists of evidence, and evidence from Department 50 (D50).
D50 employees worked closely with the counterintelligence agencies of the foreign division of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to the Chilean police, investigators managed to intercept encrypted messages and cover two spy networks that have been active since 1937 in southern Chile and in Valparaiso itself.
Ludwig von Bohlen, the military attaché of Nazi Germany in Chile, led a large-scale spy network. The headquarters was located in the capital of Santiago, and the special operation led from Berlin, which covered Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba, bore the name of the South American freedom fighter Simon Bolivar.
At the end of March 1942, a certain Chilean Air Force lieutenant responsible for aircraft maintenance, working under the pseudonyms Roberto, Alberto and Pedro, with a salary of four thousand Chilean pesos (130 US dollars at the time), passed on classified information to the Germans.
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The declassified history of the former cooperation of the Chilean government with the Nazis, of course, did not please the authorities in the current seemingly democratic state of South America. Some MPs sincerely believe that such information is still a state secret.
The trouble lies not so much in the very fact of cooperation between the Chilean government and the fascist regime, which is already known in itself and is subject to condemnation. At the Nuremberg trials, not only the crimes of the Nazis were condemned, but the Nazi criminals themselves did not escape punishment. Except those that were especially interested in need. Most of the criminals against humanity found protection in the United States and Canada, the other half settled in South America.
And who knows if, over time, all this Nazi infection will not wake up in the same way as the same infection, the center of which smoldered all the post-war period in Western Ukraine, flared up at an opportunity and spread throughout the country, sowing death and destruction.