Argentina’s and Peron’s apparent preference for the Axis, and particularly for Nazi Germany, has muddied the country’s relations with the Anglo-Saxon powers and poisoned its domestic politics. Anti-Peronists have often used the term Nazi (or Pero-Nazi) a bit too freely in attempting to discredit their opponents–not just Peron but also the administration of President Ramon S. Castillo (1940-43), who preceded him. Indeed, Argentina’s 1946 elections, the first of three in which Peron was elected to the presidency, were, as much as anything else, a plebiscite on the credibility of such accusations. In recent years, the Canadian scholar Ronald Newton, in his masterly The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931-47 (Stanford), has suggested that much of the Nazi-fascist menace in Argentina was an invention of British intelligence, fearful of the loss of historic markets in that country to the U.S. after the war, and therefore desirous of straining relations between Buenos Aires and Washington.
Far in advance of the final report of President Menem’s commission (of which Newton is a member), that theory has now been refuted in an extraordinary piece of investigative reporting–also a major breakthrough in historical scholarship–by Uki Goni, whose Peron and the Germans has just been published in Buenos Aires. In this book the author, who also works as a local correspondent for TIME, establishes that, for all the hyperbole, Washington’s darkest suspicions were if anything greatly understated. For one thing, Goni demonstrates that the Castillo administration, and particularly the Argentine Foreign Ministry, was honeycombed with Nazi sympathizers as early as 1942–so much so that it is difficult to see why any of the most anxious partisans of neutrality, such as found in the secret lodges of the Argentine army, felt the need to overthrow the government at all!
For another, Goni establishes without doubt that there was an Argentine-German conspiracy to detach neighboring countries from their sympathetic posture toward the Allied cause. This conspiracy reached its maximum point of success in Bolivia, where a regime friendly to the U.S. was ousted by a military coup in 1943. Argentina was also active (if less successfully) in Brazil, Paraguay and Chile. Goni demonstrates that operatives of Heinrich Himmler’s Sicherheitdienst, or SD, the political-espionage service of the Nazi Party, moved without difficulty throughout Argentina for the entire war. In spite of an Argentine parliamentary commission on un-Argentine activities and a special office of the Federal Police deputed to prosecute such agents of espionage, Himmler’s operatives were rarely disturbed, and after they were finally jailed at the end of the war, they were released as soon as possible.
As late as 1944, the Argentine military thought the Nazis were going to win the war, and during the first months of 1945 tried to act as if they had. Having bet on the wrong horse, Peron and his associates–far from reproaching themselves for their bad judgment, or at least striving to correct it–closed ranks and came to the rescue of some of the most unsavory figures to escape Allied justice in liberated Europe.
