Why did so many Nazis choose to escape to Argentina, and how did they manage to escape over the Atlantic undetected?
In: 3074
Argentina had close cultural ties with Germany and Italy and a lot of Argentinians have Italian and/or German ancestry from a large number of immigrants that arrived in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a German or Italian war criminal, it was easy to blend into the Italian or German immigrant communities in Argentina.
The Argentinian government also maintained close political ties with Germany and Italy for most of the war. The Vice President (and later president) of Argentina, Juan Peron, was a fascist sympathizer who had served as a military attaché in Italy during the early years of the war. He, with the help of the Vatican and other sympathizers, set up routes through ports in Italy as well as neutral Spain and to smuggle war criminals out of Europe and to South America using forged identity documents. There was a lot of chaos in Europe after the war and it was pretty easy to disappear without anyone noticing.
Edit: Just to add, it should be noted that Argentina was not the only country that helped Nazis and Axis war criminals escape. The U.S. and Britain has a massive program to secretly ferry thousands of prominent Nazi scientists to the U.S. and the U.K. to come work for them (Operation Paperclip and Operation Surgeon). Many of these were also war criminals. The only difference between these Nazis and the ones that ended up in South America are that these Nazis had skills that the U.S. and U.K. wanted to put to use.
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