After the Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany and military operations in Europe ended in 1945, it became difficult and dangerous for the Nazis to be in Europe. Thousands of SS civil servants, influential members of the Gestapo and their associates (including a large number of war criminals) have crossed the Atlantic, finding shelter in South America, especially in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.
Why South America?
Argentina, for its part, was a popular refuge for German expatriates and therefore maintained a close relationship with Germany even during the war. After 1945, the Argentinean head Juan Perón, himself not indifferent to fascist ideology, called on his own officers and diplomats to identify and develop "Rat Trails", that is, escape lines for Reich agents through third countries and forged documents. In addition, the Nazis were supported by priests of the Vatican in Rome and Austria. Many of them supported and harbored the Nazis, not knowing about their bloody past, and some were fully aware.
Here is a list of the most famous SS war criminals who fled to South America in hopes of evading punishment.
Adolf Eichmann
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"The most hunted fascist on the planet," Eichmann was the main architect of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, or, in other words, Hitler's decree to exterminate absolutely all Jews in Europe. The infamous SS Lieutenant Colonel secretly ran the SS network of concentration camps, which became the site of the murder of an estimated 6 million people. Eichmann was the initiator of a complex system for identifying, collecting and transporting European Jews to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps in German-occupied Poland.
After World War II ended, Eichmann hid in Austria. With the support of a Franciscan monk from Genoa, he received an Argentine visa and applied for a falsified identity document from the Red Cross. In 1950 he went to Buenos Aires. Eichmann lived with his wife and children in the suburbs of Buenos Aires and worked at the Mercedes car plant.
Israeli Mossad intelligence officers captured Eichmann during a special operation on May 11, 1960 and secretly took him to Israel. There Eichmann appeared before the court as a war criminal. He was found guilty during a four-month trial in Jerusalem and received the only death verdict ever issued by an Israeli court. He was hanged on May 31, 1962.
Josef Mengele
Mengele lost the highest line in the list of the most wanted Nazis only to Eichmann. Named the Angel of Death, the doctor performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz. SS officer Mengele was sent to the Eastern Front at the beginning of the war, where he received the Iron Cross for his courage.
Wounded and found unfit for intensive military service, he left for Auschwitz. There, he used prisoners, especially twins, pregnant women and the disabled as laboratory rats for his own sinister experiments. He constantly tortured and killed children with his medical experiments.
After World War II, Mengele hid in Germany. In 1949, with the support of the church clergy, the Angel of Death fled to Argentina, then to Uruguay, where he even got married under his own name.
West Germany sent a request for extradition to Argentina, whose government deliberately pulled rubber. Ultimately, Mengele drowned on the Brazilian coast in 1979 due to a heart attack.
Walter Rauff
Colonel SS, Rauff was responsible for the development and implementation of mobile gas chambers, which killed approximately hundreds of thousands of people during the war. According to British intelligence, Rauff personally monitored the work of trucks, whose exhaust gases entered sealed chambers placed behind the heavy vehicles. One mobile cell could hold sixty people. Rauff became famous for his excessive ruthlessness and without analysis or repentance executed both Jews and captured partisans.
The allied forces detained the colonel, but he escaped from the camp and hid in monasteries. In 1949, Rauff sailed to Ecuador before settling in Chile, where he resided under his own name.
They never managed to catch and condemn him. In fact, Rauff was a spy for West Germany from 1958 to 1962. His whereabouts became known after he sent an official request to Germany to send his German naval pension to Chile. The Chilean tyrant Pinochet actively neglected to respond to German requests to extradite the war criminal. Rauff died in Chile in 1984.
Franz Stangl
Named the White Death for his passion for snow-white uniforms and a whip, Austrian Stangl worked on the Aktion T-4 euthanasia plan, in accordance with which the Nazis killed people with mental and physiological disorders. He later worked as commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps. Over 100,000 Jews were killed during his service at Sobibor before he was transferred to Treblinka, where he was directly responsible for the deaths of nearly a million people.
At the end of the war, Stangl was captured by the Americans, but fled to Italy in 1947. The Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, who favored the Nazis, assisted Stangl in obtaining a Red Cross passport, with which he sailed to Brazil in 1951.
He was recruited by Volkswagen in Sao Paulo under his own name. In 1967, Stangl was found by the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor. He extradited the criminal to West Germany, where he was found guilty of the mass murder of 900,000 people. He died in prison from heart failure in 1971.
Joseph Schwammberger
An Austrian fascist, Schwammberger was an SS commander who led three labor camps in Poland during the war. He loved to swing his whip and walk around camp with a German shepherd, trained to pounce on people. In 1943 he organized the massacre of five hundred Jews. He personally executed 35 people by shooting them in the back of the head, in addition, he sent a huge number of Jews to death in Auschwitz.
Schwammberger was detained in Austria in 1945, but fled to Italy in 1948, and a few months later ended up in Argentina, where he lived freely under his own name and even took citizenship.
Schwammberger was eventually arrested by Argentine civil servants in 1987 after a whistle-blower took the German government's $ 300,000 reward.
He returned to West Germany in 1990 to face trial. In 1992, Schwammberger was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Schwammberger died in prison in 2004 at the age of 92.
Erich Priebke
A mid-level SS commander and Gestapo member, Priebke was complicit in the massacre of Italians in the Ardeatine Caves, where the Nazis shot 335 people in retaliation for the murder of 33 German officers by Italian partisans.
Priebke escaped from an English prisoner camp on Christmas night in 1946. With the support of Bishop Alois Hudal, Priebke fled to Argentina.
From there he was extradited to Italy, where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison. Priebke passed away in 2013 at the age of one hundred.
Gerhard Bone
A lawyer and SS officer, Bone headed the web of Reich Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes and is responsible for the management logistics of Hitler's Aktion T-4 euthanasia project. Bonet called himself the Angel of Mercy, and he himself actively participated in the systemic extermination of the disabled and people with mental disabilities in order to cleanse the Aryan race and evade government spending on helping the disabled.
Bonet fled to Argentina in 1949. He later confessed that Peron's assistants had provided him with funds and fake papers.
After a coup d'état overthrew Perón, Bonet returned to Germany and was indicted by a tribunal in Frankfurt in 1963. He was released on a deposit, and Bonet once again fled to Argentina, but was eventually extradited to Germany three years later. Bonet was the first SS criminal to be formally extradited by the Argentine government. Bonet died in 1981 without receiving a court verdict.
Hope Chikanchi