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from The Real
Odessa
Uki Goñi on the hidden Nazi past of Argentina, 'a country that time and time again has failed miserably the test of looking at itself in the mirror.'
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Peron's Nazi Ties
By MARK FALCOFF
How the European fascist sensibility found new roots and new life in the South Atlantic region
Since the 1930s, the political culture of Argentina has been afflicted by periodic spasms of covert violence, secrecy and denial. As in the case of Vichy France, memory can be an inconvenience or an embarrassment; faced with incidents that require explanation, too many Argentines instinctively reach for the words borron y cuenta nueva (Let's forget it all and start over with a clean slate). As a result, even today nobody knows exactly how many people disappeared during the "dirty war" against subversion (1976-83), nor the number of victims in the left-wing guerrilla violence that preceded it. The 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the city's Jewish center, causing the loss of 115 lives, remain unsolved. Even events far more remote have had to wait decades for elucidation.
One of the most important of those events is Argentina's vaunted neutrality in World War II, a posture it maintained long after other American republics broke off relations with the Axis. Only since the country's return to democracy in 1983 has the real story of Argentina's covert alignment with the Axis finally begun to emerge. A commission to investigate the activities of Nazism in Argentina, appointed by President Carlos Menem and assisted by an international team of scholars, started work last July. A preliminary report is expected in mid-November, when the scholars meet in Buenos Aires, and a final report a year later.
At issue here is not merely a matter of diplomatic taste. Throughout the war, Argentina was regarded by U.S. diplomats and the U.S. media as the regional headquarters for Nazi espionage. After 1945, reports kept cropping up in the U.S. press that Argentina was the final redoubt of important Nazis and their European collaborators, a point dramatically brought home as late as 1960 by the capture and forcible removal to Israeli justice of Adolf Eichmann, principal director of the "final solution."
Over the years, these allegations seemed at least superficially credible in light of the emergence in 1946 of Colonel Juan Peron as the leader of a defiant, nationalist Argentina. Though in practice the Peron regime resembled hardly at all the defeated European fascist dictatorships, Peron made no secret of his sympathy for the defeated Axis powers.
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.
After 1945, the Argentine consulate in Barcelona became a distribution point for false passports, which enabled literally hundreds if not thousands of Nazi functionaries to escape to Argentina, including the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. Eventually Argentina provided safe haven for such sinister personalities as Belgian Nazi collaborator Pierre Daye; Reinhard Spitzy, the Austrian representative of Skoda in Spain; Charles Lescat, former Vichy functionary and onetime editor of the scurrilous magazine Je Suis Partout; SS functionary Ludwig Lienhardt; German industrialist Ludwig Freude; SS functionary (for a time) Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyons"; Eichmann; and Eichmann's adjutant Franz Stangl. Argentina also became home to dozens of Croats, veterans of the bloodthirsty Ustashe, as well as the wartime Prime Minister of occupied Yugoslavia, Milan Stojadinovich.
Some of these people had an important afterlife in Peron's Argentina. Vichyite Frenchman Jacques de Mahieu drafted the doctrinal texts of Peron's movement and became an important ideological mentor to Roman Catholic nationalist youth groups in the 1960s. Daye became the editor of one of the official Peronist magazines; Freude's business ventures prospered, and his son Rodolfo was the chief of presidential intelligence during Peron's first presidency. In 1951 Stojadinovich founded one of Argentina's main business dailies, El Economista, which still carries his name on its masthead.
Many of these people also benefited from the clandestine assistance of the Vatican in making their escape from Europe to Argentina. The one question Goni's book cannot answer is why either the Catholic Church or the Peron regime felt so strongly about the need to provide succor and assistance to partisans of a lost (and, one would have thought, thoroughly discredited) cause. Money did have something to do with it. Argentine officials in Europe were known to sell passports for large sums. But there appears to have been a vague, confusing and still unexplained overlap between defeated Central European fascism, preconciliar Catholicism and nascent Peronism. A case in point is the career of a Croatian priest based in Rome, the Rev. Krunoslav Draganovic, who was deputed by Peron to facilitate the escape of hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators to South America, including the infamous Barbie. When the Butcher of Lyons asked the clergyman why he was going out of his way to help him, Draganovic merely replied, "We have to maintain a sort of moral reserve on which we can draw in the future." Thus the European fascist sensibility, if not precisely the fascist system, found new roots and new life in the South Atlantic region.
Mark Falcoff is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. His books include Prologue to Peron: Argentina in Depression and War, 1930-43. | |
Ever since the end of World War Two, the existence of a shadowy organization dedicated to the rescue of Nazi war criminals has been the subject of countless media articles, documentaries, novels and movies. Some of these claim that leading members of the Third Reich escaped justice by crossing the Atlantic in submarines. Indeed in Argentina, where I live, there are many eyewitness accounts of nervous men in Nazi uniforms disembarking from rubber dinghies on the coast of Patagonia at the end of the war. Large crates packed with Nazi gold and secret archives of Hitler's Reich were reportedly collected at night from windy beaches and driven across the continent to secluded havens in the Andes mountains. According to these mostly fantastical accounts, Hitler lived out his final days in southern Argentina, where he still lies buried; his deputy Martin Bormann settled nearby as a rich landowner, first in Chile, then in Bolivia and lastly in Argentina.
Yet none of these far-fetched accounts has gripped the collective imagination as strongly as one novel, The Odessa File, by the best-selling British author Frederick Forsyth. The book portrays a group of former SS men linked in a secret organization named Odessa (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen), whose aim is not only to rescue their comrades from postwar justice but also to establish a Fourth Reich capable of fulfilling Hitler's unrealized dreams. Thanks to extensive research and his own experience as a Reuters correspondent in the early 1960s, Forsyth wrote a novel that was not only believable but also contained many elements of truth. Ever since its publication 30 years ago, the existence of a 'real Odessa’ has been hotly contended by journalists, though frequently denied by serious scholars.
In the last ten years, however, the steady declassification of secret documents in the United States and Europe has made it possible to test those fictionalized tales of Hitler's survival, and Forsyth's more plausible novel, against the hard stone of historical fact. The picture that emerges is not necessarily one of an ageing Führer doddering peacefully in the Andean foothills attended by faithful Nazi servants. It does not even include an organization actually named Odessa, but it is sinister nonetheless, and weighted in favour of an actual organized escape network. The documents reveal that the 'real' Odessa was much more than a tight organization with only nostalgic Nazis for members. It consisted instead of layered rings of non-Nazi factions: Vatican institutions, Allied intelligence agencies and secret Argentine organizations. It also overlapped at strategic points with French-speaking war criminals, with Croatian Fascists and even with the SS men of the fictional Odessa, all in order to smuggle Hitler's evil minions to safety.
But in Argentina the Odessa trail was growing faint, and was in danger of being erased altogether. This trail led back to the presidential office of General Juan Perón; it could therefore conceivably tar the figure of his beloved wife Evita, who remains an icon of almost saintly devotion to her compatriots even today. In the wake of the tardy revelations regarding Switzerland's role as a haven for Nazi gold, it came as no surprise when Argentina attempted to blur the facts. In a blaze of publicity in 1992, the Perónist government of then-president Carlos Menem announced the opening of Argentina's Nazi files' to researchers. The international press descended upon Buenos Aires, anxious to discover the truth behind the old rumours of Perón's secret dalliance with Hitler. But no such revelation was at hand.
Instead, reporters and researchers found a batch of dog-eared 'intelligence' dossiers containing mostly faded press clippings but precious little new information. The file on Bormann, who never really survived the fall of Berlin, included a press article claiming that he had been transported to Argentina via submarine. Conspicuously absent was the file on Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's 'Final Solution' and the most notorious Nazi criminal to have actually arrived in Argentina (under the auspices of both the Catholic Church and Perón's Nazi-smuggling team). The dossiers proved hugely disappointing to journalists, while the scholars inwardly cheered: the lack of evidence seemed to corroborate the growing consensus in academia that no Odessa had ever existed, and that the Nazis had arranged their escapes individually, finding their separate ways to Argentina without any organized assistance.
It was against this backdrop, unconvinced by the all-too-convenient lack of evidence, that in 1996 I began to dig for clues to Argentina's Nazi past. I guessed, correctly as it later turned out, that there was a wealth of material out there just waiting to be uncovered. If a 'real Odessa' had ever existed, I was determined to find traces of it.
In Buenos Aires, much of the vital documentation had reportedly been destroyed back in 1955, during the last days of Perón's government, and again in 1996, when the burning of confidential immigration dossiers containing the landing papers of Nazi criminals seems to have been ordered. But tantalizing leads in other Argentine files that had miraculously survived these purges led me first to Belgium, where vital information on what I discovered to be Perón's long-denied Odessa-like organization had happily remained out of the reach of Argentina's document cleansers. Hundreds of pages of government documents were sent to me from Switzerland, detailing the co-operation of anti-Semitic Swiss officials in Perón's Nazi escape operation. In London, patient digging in British postwar papers finally paid off when these documents revealed direct Papal complicity in the protection of war criminals. Documents I requested from the United States under the Freedom of Information Act proved how Perón's top Nazi smuggler had actually been a secret agent of the SS, sent out of Berlin in l945 on a mission slated to start after the end of the war. Declassified CIA documents also explained how gold looted from the Serb and Jewish victims of Croatia’s Nazi puppet regime had found its way to Argentina in the early 1950s.
Incredibly, it sometimes proved easier to gain access to faraway archives in the US and Europe than to those at home. The progress I made in Argentina was maddeningly slow, hampered by the unresponsiveness of government officials and by the refusal of surviving participants in the Nazi rescue operation to be interviewed. One thing was clear, however: the cover-up had been so complete that only separate parts of the jigsaw puzzle survived in each country. I was forced to assemble and compare the varying information available in Brussels, Berne, London, Maryland and Buenos Aires. This was a gargantuan task that involved obtaining copies of thousands of pages of documents and indexing them all, while working simultaneously in four languages (French, German, English and Spanish) before the whole could be understood. And even that proved insufficient, for the assembled documentation left glaring gaps in the investigation which had to be filled in with some 200 personal interviews. It took six years of dedicated work. But finally, for the first time, the disparate pieces of the Nazi rescue puzzle slid into place, revealing the whole gruesome tableau.
I didn't know it when I started, but parts of that puzzle had been almost literally on my front doorstep all along. Looking out of my apartment window, for years I had unknowingly been seeing the grandson of Fritz Thyssen, the German industrial magnate who bankrolled Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s, take a stroll along the sidewalk. Four doors down, by the Swiss ambassador's residence, is the chalet once inhabited by SS Captain Carlos Fuldner, the Himmler agent who coordinated the main Nazi escape route and shielded Eichmann, among others. It sounds like Berlin, Munich or Vienna, but no, it is the sleepy Embassy Row of Buenos Aires. The street remains oblivious to its sinister past. I myself had been unaware of its notorious inhabitant when I cycled past Fuldner's house as a kid in the 1960s. What a missed chance for an interview!
The luxurious town houses and elegant curved streets of the Palermo Chico neighbourhood disprove the assumption that Hitler's helpers were somehow condemned to a life of squalor during their long postwar Argentine 'exile'. Most of them boasted select addresses in a city that rightly prided itself on being the Paris of South America'. Some, like Fritz Thyssen, who died in Buenos Aires in 1951, regretted aiding Nazism. The magnate had a falling out with the Führer and spent much of the latter part of the war in German concentration camps. Others, such as Fuldner, remained loyal to the cause long after Hitler's demise.
From my window, across the avenue, I can almost see the attractive red-brick townhouse where Thilo Martens lived not so long ago. He was a German millionaire who smuggled into Argentina the state-ofthe-art radio sets used by Hitler's agents to communicate with Berlin. After the war Martens reportedly arranged money transfers for some of the more notorious Nazis who escaped to Buenos Aires with Fuldner's help. But his Nazi past did not spare the ageing collaborator from abduction by the generals of Argentina's genocidal 1976/83 dictatorship, who pocketed a substantial part of his fortune.
A few blocks further along, in a comfortable modern apartment building, lived another SS captain circa 1943, Siegfried Becker. He was arguably Himmler's most cunning and successful agent in the western hemisphere. During the war he plotted the overthrow of the Allied-leaning government of neighbouring Bolivia with Perón. Afterwards he apparently helped channel Nazi funds to Argentina.
Finally, slightly up the hill from Becker lived the man who breathed life into the Nazi escape route, Colonel Perón himself. The Argentine strongman shared his bed there with a 14-year-old girl now remembered only by the pet name Perón gave her, 'Piranha'. In 1944, Evita arrived on the scene and threw the teenager out.
None of this was on my mind in mid-1996 when the Sunday Times of London called for a story. It had been a slow week in the rest of the world and the paper's editors needed some colourful copy for their international section. I offered up the usual Argentine fare political scandals, new twists in the Falklands dispute, ageing generals from the 1970s and 1980s trudging through the courts on renewed charges of old human rights violations. The British voice coming down the line was not impressed. 'Well, and then there's the Bormann passport in Patagonia,' I offered, hoping the editor would decide there was nothing worth taking from my neck of the woods.
How wrong I was. That weekend the Sunday Times ran a big piece entitled 'Bormann File Reopened by Passport Find'. In it I reported that a Uruguayan passport had turned up in southern Chile made out in the name of Ricardo Bauer, one of the aliases allegedly used by Hitler's deputy during his flight to South America. It proved a shaky start for the investigation that resulted in this book, for two years later a DNA test conducted on a skull found in Berlin established that Bormann had died fleeing Hitler's bunker during the last days of the war. Nonetheless, tackling the Bormann mystery made one thing obvious to me no well-documented research was available on the Argentine side of the postwar Nazi escape route.
I had reasons of my own to start digging. For too long I had been aware of silence as a noisy presence in Argentina, a country that time and again has failed miserably the test of looking at itself in the mirror. Each Argentine carries around a fabricated version of the country's history, tailored to their own personal comfort. There is one version for the die-hard Perónist, another for the Catholic nationalist; one for the victim of the 1976/83 massacres, another for those who walked blindly through the horror. As I write this, in mid-2002, the country is going through another of its perennial crises, this time an economic collapse of unprecedented proportions. The current storm has plunged over half the population of an until recently fairly affluent middle-class country below the poverty line. Silence played its hand here as well, the collapse driven by tens of billions of dollars in ill-gotten assets funneled out of the country by a hopelessly corrupt political class and its attendant financiers, with barely a single person ever convicted for corruption by Argentina's easily bought judges. But of all these silences, there is none so deafening as that surrounding Perón, the Catholic Church and the Nazis they helped to escape from justice. If this particular section of the wall could be cracked, I thought, then Argentines might feel encouraged to chip away at other parts of the edifice
When I was born in 1953 in Washington, DC, where my father served at the Argentine embassy, the wife of Perón's vice-president suggested that since I had come into the world on 17 October the anniversary of the popular uprising in 1945 that catapulted Perón to the presidency I should be named Juan Domingo, in homage to El Líder. I was spared that particular ignominy, even though suggestions from Perón's presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, carried not a little weight back then. The awareness of that small jolt at the start switched me on to permanent alert mode during the strange years that followed.
In 1955, Perón was ousted by a group of fanatically Catholic rightwing generals who gave cabinet posts to former collaborators of Himmler's espionage service. These generals were succeeded in turn by a series of oppressive military regimes that, apart from brief interludes, kept a firm boot against the Argentine throat until Perón’s triumphal return to power in 1973. No better than Perón himself, these regimes forbade even the mention of Perón's or Evita's name in the press. Shockingly, Argentina's journalists obeyed the ban.
I grew up in the US, far from the centre of events that make up this tale, spending part of my childhood years in an old mansion called Downcrest that my parents had rented at the end of wooded Crest Lane in McLean, Virginia. The house, built in castle style with mock battlements, still overlooks the Potomac river today. Back in the late 1950s, one of its frequent visitors was Senator Eugene McCarthy, who, together with his wife and children, had become close friends of our family. The McCarthys and my parents, hailing from extreme ends of the same continent, had some life points in common: both couples had married in 1945 and both had four children. Although I was small, I can remember eavesdropping intently on the long conversations that my father the South American diplomat and McCarthy the Democrat Congressman had on the open veranda of Downcrest above the Potomac. I like to think that some wisdom filtered through despite my scant years. Afterwards, the lives of our two families took different directions, as my father proceeded to new diplomatic postings and McCarthy embarked on his failed but heroic bid for the US presidency in 1968, running a campaign against the Vietnam War that raised fundamental military, political and moral questions concerning America’s role in the world.
That same eventful l968, after spending brief years in Argentina and Mexico, I was transplanted to Dublin, where my father headed the Argentine embassy. That was the year Ché Guevara was murdered in Bolivia. Each morning as I left the embassy residence in chauffeur-driven comfort for classes at St Conleth's College, I would see the scrawl of graffiti on our sidewalk: 'Guevara Lives', in white letters, painted during the night by Irish revolutionary sympathizers. Just as inexorably, each day the embassy staff would scrub the offending letters away. Driving over the reiterated scrawl, I shrank ever); time a little deeper into the red leather upholstery of our old Jaguar.
Erasing the evidence was a method that I grievously mistrusted even then. During the research for this book, some Argentine diplomats argued off the record that the country could best shake off its Nazi stigma by 'proving' once and for all that there had been no wartime collaboration by Perón and no organized assistance for fleeing Nazis; I disagreed. There was no shame in admitting old Nazi connections. It would be shameful only to be caught tampering with the evidence. Let the scrawl remain.
Between 1972 and 1975, I moved back and forth between Ireland and Argentina, unable to decide where I wanted to stay. While making the slow transition to Argentina, where: I finally settled, I spent a lot of time walking around Buenos Aires, trying to adapt to a society that I barely knew. My arrival coincided with Perón's return after l8 years of exile in Spain. The country was spiralling into mindless violence, driven by armed confrontation between youthful Perónist terrorists who wanted to ride piggyback on Perón's return to power and the right-wing death squads that he used to shake the pesky youths off his ancient back.
During these long walks I came across a disturbing sign of the times that I should perhaps have heeded better. On the broad Nueve de Julia Avenue that divides Buenos Aires in half—'the widest avenue in the world',—according to some Argentines stands a giant white obelisk that is the city’s most conspicuous landmark. In 1974, the landmark lost its virginity in the strangest of ways. A revolving billboard was suspended around the Obelisco, snugly encircling the huge white phallus. Round and round the ring turned, inscribed with an Orwellian message in bold blue letters on a plain white background" 'Silence Is Health'.
I was stunned. With every turn, the ring reaffirmed its doctrine, schooling Argentines in the total silence they would practise in the years to follow. Anywhere else, people would have mocked loudly, but in Argentina nobody laughed at all. My attempts to discuss the ring with friends invariably foundered met with blank stares. The ring's message, I soon learned, was self-fulfilling. A line had been drawn. Today, over a quarter of a century later, I still receive blank stares when I bring it up in conversation.
After Perón's death and following the overthrow of his vice-president wife 'Isabelita' in 1976, a new military dictatorship set up Nazi-style death camps across Argentina. The generals were intent on defending what they considered to be the country's 'Western and electric torture prods and Christian' lifestyle. Their instruments were mass killings. Instead of gassing their victims, the generals slit their stomachs open and threw them alive from planes into the freezing South Atlantic. That way they sank faster.
Under the military the silence became asphyxiating and present everywhere, all the time. Only the Buenos Aires Herald, a small English-language newspaper read by Argentina's mostly conservative British community, dared report on the bloodbath. I gravitated to its offices in the port of Buenos Aires, first as a cub reporter, then as editor of national news.
Daily the mothers of the victims would come in to report their tragedies. Men in green uniforms had broken into their homes in the middle of the night and taken their children from their beds to an unknown destination. They were never to be seen again. The abductors returned to steal their TV sets and refrigerators; sometimes they even unbolted the doors and loaded those on their trucks too.
I asked the mothers why they didn't report their stories to the big Spanish-language dailies. Why bother coming to a tiny newspaper published in a foreign language? 'Don't be naive,' the mothers almost laughed. 'We went and they wouldn't even let us in the door.' Just as Argentina's journalists had erased Perón's name from their vocabulary, now they erased part of a generation.
Attempts to repeat outside the Herald what I had heard from these mothers came up against a brick wall, much in the way my previous attempts to discuss the ring around the obelisk had. Even friends, members of my generation who picked up guitars and sang Blowin' in the Wind' at the parties I went to, gave me the empty stare.
If I forgot the 'disappearances', life could hardly have been more glorious. The military obtained huge international loans and opened up imports, and for the upper layer of the population the economy boomed. Colour television finally arrived; the streets were suddenly full of new BMWs; flights to Europe and Miami were packed with Argentines, their pockets bulging with dollars. Rod Stewart came to Buenos Aires for the 1978 World Cup. After the matches he is said to have joined the dancers in the basement of Experiment, a trendy disco where I began spending much of my time outside the Herald in a haze of gin and tonics while the killing was at its bloodiest.
Hell managed to intrude even through the deafening disco beat pounding out of Experiment's loudspeakers. My then-girlfriend confided in a whisper that her aunt had been kidnapped by the dictatorship. She was placing great trust in me for she had been warned by her family not to tell anyone. I begged her to impress upon them that the only hope of saving her aunt's life lay in going to the international press immediately, before the military concluded their dirty work. The family stuck to their policy of silence until it was too late. Multiply that by thousands.
My scariest memories of those years are not of the middle-aged generals who ordered the killings but of the deep abyss that separated even the more enlightened members of my own generation from the rest of humanity. Some generals became obsessed with the Jewish question' during 1976/83, particularly the powerful chief of the Buenos Aires police, General Ramón Camps, who hoped to stage a trial against the country's most prominent Jews in order to prove the existence of what he imagined was a Zionist plot against 'Western and Christian' Argentina. To this end, he abducted Jacobo Timerman, editor and owner of the influential daily La Opinión. After confiscating his newspaper and torturing him for months, the 'doves' among the. military finally caved in to international pressure, stripped Timerman of his Argentine citizenship and threw him out of the country.
Enraged at being deprived of his prey, Camps called a press conference at the exclusive Alvear Hotel during which he played the tapes of Timerman's interrogation.
The purpose of the exercise was to prove that Timerman was 'a Zionist' who sought Argentina's destruction.
'Do you admit you are a Jew?' Camps could be heard snarling on the first tape.
'Well . . . yes,' came back Timerman's frightened whisper.
Then you are a Zionist' hollered Camps.
'Well ... I don't know, maybe,' said Timerman.
Camps ordered the tape stopped and beamed triumphantly at the gathered reporters: "See, he admits he is a Zionist'.
The general's raving in the luxurious hotel in front of a gathering of foreign correspondents wasn't half as frightening as the composure of his civilian assistant, a finely educated young man who was the 'best friend' in Argentina of British writer Bruce Chatwin, someone Chatwin considered possessed of 'a culture and sensibility that has died out in Europe'. The assistant also happened to be a close friend of mine. He gave me Chatwin's address when I travelled to London in 1980.
This young writer had a hard time making ends meet and had been set up with Camps by his father. The scene was unreal: here was an otherwise enlightened intellectual (together we used to pore over scholarly editions of T. S. Eliot's poetry) pressing the play button for the forced interrogation of Argentina's main Jewish journalist by a wildly anti-Semitic general.
I hung around after the press conference and nodded to my friend, inviting him for a cup of coffee at the hotel. He was smiling, thrilled that so many correspondents had turned up, completely oblivious to the dark significance of the role he had just played.
'You have to give up this job,' I said bluntly.
'What? Why?
Look, one day there's going to be a Nuremberg here and your name is going to be associated with this crazy general.'
‘No! He's a friend of my father's. Do you think so I really don't,' he said, stirring his coffee with a silver spoon. It proved impossible to press the point any further. Our friendship faded years later when I tried to bring up the memory of that bizarre press conference, the wall of silence intact even after all those years.
Argentines still lack a definitive understanding of the general moral blindness that allowed the l976/83 dictatorship to carry out its gruesome exterminations. Almost equally, the country remains at a loss to comprehend how, even in 2002, the most egalitarian society in Latin America has lurched suddenly into a chaos of apocalyptic proportions, undone by widespread corruption and with the spectre of mass hunger haunting a land historically known as the 'breadbasket' and Beef capital' of the world. It could take many more years before such an understanding is possible. Meanwhile, clues as to how chat past horror of mass extermination and this present one of rampant corruption were generated may be found in Argentina's (still-denied) closure of its borders to the Jews at the beginning of the Holocaust and the warm welcome it extended to the Nazis afterwards.
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