Gerarchi in fuga - Versione inglese

The end of Nazism didn’t coincide with the end of its hierarchs. Some were captured and put on trial in Nuremberg. In the chaos which followed the collapse of Nazi Germany, though, many of those responsible of the extermination of Jews and of war crimes simply went back home, where they lived undisturbed for a long time. Others, after finding a temporary refuge in Europe, managed to flee. They were often helped by support networks which got them fake documents to emigrate. Among the many destinations chosen by members of various rank in the Nazi nomenclature, among which prominent figures such as Adolf Eichmann and his vice, Alois Brunner, along with soldiers, bureaucrats, scientists, and tormentors of every rank and background, Latin America and the Middle East stand out. Here, regimes partially inspired by Nazi-fascism welcomed them in, granted them asylum, and recruited them in the ranks of their bureaucracy, propaganda, and armed forces. Many passed through Italy. Here, some high-ranking clergymen of the Catholic Church, such as bishop Alois Hudal, having chaos as their accomplice, helped them flee towards Latin America, where clerical-reactionary regimes such as that of Juan Perón in Argentina, didn’t hesitate to welcome them, give them new identities, or, like in the case of Johann von Leers, a scholar, member of the SS later an employee of Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda, allow them to continue their career of ruthless antisemitic propaganda. In the meanwhile, in the Middle East, where the conflict between Jews and Arabs on the future of the British Mandate in Palestine already raged, Arab governments and Palestinian militias welcomed the fleeting hierarchs, enrolling them both to strengthen the war effort and, later, to help the new nationalist regimes to consolidate their power and launch a ruthless campaign of antisemitic propaganda against first the Jewish settlement and later the newborn Jewish state. In this exhibition, we will tell you their stories, their routes, and the complicity which made their escape easier.

Escape routes

Many Nazis, both hierarchs and officials, avoided arrest warrants and trials brought against them in Europe by heading for the Middle East (Egypt, Syria, and, secondarily, in Libya, Algeria, and Morocco) and for South America (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay). Naturally, the main reason of these escapes was the desire to evade justice but, at the same time, many had the hope of a second chance after the fall of the Third Reich. They didn’t perceive the military defeat of Nazism in the same way of an ideological defeat: for them, its moral values and principles kept all the original validity and force, so much that some even dreamed of forming a Fourth Reich.
The (also physical) exclusion of the Jew from the human society, the building of a social structure based on Totalitarianism, in which the will of a few prevailed in defiance of any democratic aspirations, the need to still feel alive, operational, and able to affect the surrounding reality: these are the reasons that, to varying degrees, contributed to guiding the life choices of the ex Nazi hierarchs. Julian Perón’s Argentina, the Egypt first of King Farouk and then Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat after the 1952 coup d’état, and the Syria of various dictators, were military and totalitarian regimes where a strong man in power, supported by a small circle of oligarchs, imposed severe restrictions to freedom of expression, of association, and of the press in exchange for continued support to the most vulnerable groups of the population through infrastructure development, health care, education, and redistribution of wealth and the nationalisation of industries.
Arab nationalism in Egypt and Syria had sympathised with Nazism and, together with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was organisationally and ideologically modelled after European fascisms. The Arab regimes that emerged after after the war in 1948 were characterised by a strongly antisemitic stance, which showed itself also in the production and circulation of publications in Arabic of Hitler’s 'Mein Kampf' (by, among others, the ex-Nazi Ludwig Heiden, alias Louis al-Hajj) and of an unknown author’s 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. South America also vereed towards European fascisms. In Argentina, that was then the home of the biggest Jewish community in South America, during the time of Perón the state authorities and the Catholic ones reached agreements for a huge opening of credit to ex-Nazis that wanted to reach the Rio de la Plata. Perón’s Argentina a wide range of “solutions” to the ex Nazi-hierarchs (and not only the German ones): some lived a modest life, with a job as labourer or merchant; others were treated with much higher regards from the Casa Rosada and they were directly involved in the publishing and journalism field to support far right and anti-Jewish positions; the technical and engineering skills of others were exploited for military purposes among which the construction of new weapons and vehicles. In Egypt and Syria, the existential prospectives offered were much like those just described, with the difference that in the Argentinian case these coincided especially with the first Perón presidency (1946-1955), while in Egypt and Syria the changeover of power between different figures didn’t actually alter the highly favourable environmental conditions: scientists were asked to invent new weapons and the improvement of those already in existence; the intellectuals were asked a relentless propaganda against the common enemies, meaning colonialist Westerns (first and foremost, French and British) and Jews; fianally, experts in fighting strategies and techniques were asked to train the national troops to make them comparable, in terms of efficiency, to the Waffen-SS.
Finally, let's not forget that in the "run" to hoard the best German scientific minds,a non-secondary role during post-WWII was played by the USA and the URSS respectively, with the operations 'Overcast' (after, 'Paperclips') and 'Osoaviakhim': American and Sovietic autorities and secret services put aside any ethical scruples on these minds' past, trying not to fall behind in the arms race while the new era of the Cold War was dawning.

Organisations, proceedures, reasons

The escape routes of the ex-Nazi hierarchs and officials were multiple: from Germany towards Denmark, or towards Spain and Portugal through France; for those coming from the East, the transit for Italy was from Central-Eastern Europe (Austria, Slovenia) or from the Balcans. They moved towards South America, or towards North Africa or the Middle East, both from the Iberian peninsula and the Italian one. The fugitives could take advantage of the fundamental help of some Organisations that were kept secret for years , such as ODESSA 'Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen' ('Organisation of ex-SS members'), which was created in mid-1947, and 'Stille Hilfe' ('Silent Help') which was founded in Munich by elene Helizabeth von Isenburg in 1951. How did they work? They were almost like travel agencies in which the last step was the purchase of plane or maritime tickets, while the most difficult work was the underground one, which was precedent. They had to find a temporary accomodation and food for people that mostly travelled without their families, which would have joined them later on, and who had to stay in Spain or Italy for days, weeks, sometimes months until all bureaucratic transfer proceedures had been completed. Then, they needed to get landing permits from the destination countries, where units of such organisations that provided the issue of vivas and the necessary documents, often also in the presence of fake IDs or anyway not corresponding to their presumed owners. However, escape routes often benefited from the connivance of the authorities. The Argentinian Immigration Office, for example, granted collective landing permits to a few tens of people. ODESSA also followed and took care of the phase between the arrival of the subject to their destination and the first weeks in the new country, by first of all offering a bed and food at the Hotel de Inmigrantes at the Beunos Aires harbour. These philo-Nazi support and protection nets included: ex-Nazi individuals that had preceeded other fugitives in the new country; philo-Nazi individuals such as Argentinian-German Rodolfo Freude and Carlos Fuldner, who, by keeping direct contact with Perón, respectively in Buenos Aires and Bern, selected and recruited, and organized the journeys of who was thought to be useful for Argentina's future; autorities such as German bishop Alois Hudal (ex-dean of the German College of Santa Maria Dell'Anima in Rome), Argentinan cardinal Antonio Caggiano and French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, and Catholic clergymen such as Croatian Krunoslav Draganović; the international Red Cross; the Arab Red Crescent. For the Catholic Church of post-WWII, fear of Tito's or Stalin's Communism outweighed aversion to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis who, as enemies of their enemies (the “reds”), paradoxically became their friends. This was particularly true for the Usthasha, Croatian Catholic fascists, authors of brutal crimes in the Balcans, who obtained enormous help in their escape from Yugoslavia from the Vatican itself, through the mediation of the aforementioned Franciscan priest Draganović. Thanks to a similar help net, the poglavnik ('duce') of Croatia Ante Pavelić and several of his ministers in the puppet state of Croatia wanted by Hitler could flee. An important role in dealing with certain prominent individuals (von Leers, Eichmann, Brunner, Abdel Qader al Husseini) was played by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who after coming back to Cairo in 1946 served as an important beacon for many Nazis who found refuge in the Middle East.

Destination: Middle East

"Hitler hasn't lost his war against the Jews. It continues. Escaping from the 1945 defear, some fugitives of the Third Reich have found refuge in the Arab lands and have put their experience to the service of Arab leaders, convinced that in this way they would have continued, at least as far as Jews were concerned, to serve the cause for which they had been mobilised in the past by their Fuhrer." (Julius Bogatsvo, I nazisti dopo il nazismo. Dov’erano e cosa hanno fatto gli ex gerarchi del III Reich, Res Gestae, Roma, 2022) (Italian text transl.). This is what Julius Bogatsvo wrote at the beginning of the 1970s, alluding to the hospitality extended by Arab regimes to fleeing Nazi leaders. First king Farouk, then Nasser, followed by Sadat, revealed a clear inclination in favour of Nazism, as testified by the many publications in Arabic of the Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which have circulated for decades and continue to circulate in Middle Eastern bookshops, libraries and universities.
Johann von Leers was, in a way, the founder of a large colony of ex-Nazis in Egypt which could be founded in Cairo, with the protection of the Egyptian regime, which kindly protected who had been an enemy (the Nazi) of its own enemy (the Jew and the British). Von Leers guided the Middle Eastern section of ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) ('Organisation of ex-SS members') and greatly facilitated the expatriation of many of his former comrades-in-arms to Nasser's authoritarian Egypt, who very often chose to change their names, assuming an Arab identity firstly to divert suspicion from themselves, but often for a sincere act of conversion to Islam. According to the 1967 statement of Simon Wiesenthal - the famous "hunter of Nazis" - after the end of the world war, six thousand to seven thousand Nazis had taken refuge in the Muslim countries. The aim was to fully revive Hitler's anti-Semitic policies and give an authoritarian face to the hosting Islamic country.
Other Nazis hosted by the Nile committed themselves, just like von Leers, to Antisemitic propaganda:
- Ludwig Heiden (Lous al Hajj), a German journalist who translated 'Min Kampf' in Arabic,an editorial operation which brought to the sale of tens of thousands copies in just a few days;

- Helmut Cramer, owner of the publishing house 'Ring', which distrubuted new publications in Egypt, other than those produced before his arrival in Egypt and which he had sent from Germany.
Furthermore, in the Nazi settlement in Cairo entered, in various waves, figures (Afrikakorps, Gestapo, SS) who were able to continue their scientific research in the military field, at the service of the Egyptian cause. Those who worked to missile projects were Wilhelm Fahrmbacher, an ex-artillery expert of the Wehrmacht, who brought about forty or so officials with him; Wilhelm Voss, an ex-SS general, senior arms official in the Göring factories and director of the Škoda factories in occupied Czechoslovakia; the trio of scientists (who arrived in 1960 after Nasser's invite) Wolfgang Pilz, Hans Kleinwachter, and Paul Görcke (an electronics and remote control specialist from Peenemünde, who in Egypt dealt mostly with radars) who had developed the Veronica missile project. Eugen Sänger was chosen to supervise and direct the German scientific-military community; he was an expert of reaction propulsion and author of a project that aimed to pass from the vertical flight of rockets to horizontal flight. Three workshops located at distinct points on the outskirts of Cairo ground up projects and experiments with the aim to manifacture the following weapons: a He 200 training fighter; a supersonic fighter; a small tactical missile; the V2 ballistic missile. In 1964, scientist Willy Messerschmitt launched the first Egyptian fighter.
Furthermore, the following figures proved themselves to be important consultants and supervisors for the Egyptian secret police: Leopold Gleim (ex chiefof the Varsavian Gestapo, who converted to Islam and changed his name into Ali al Nahar); Heinrich Willermann (Naim Yachim), ex-SS official and Poland and Ukraine; Joachim Dömling (Ibrahim Mustafa), who died in 1967; Heinrich Sellermann (Hamid Sulaiman).
In the land of pyramids, the following also found a welcoming accomodation:
- Klaus Barbie, an SS captain, inquisitor of the French partisans, who resided in Cairo from 1966;
- Hans Eisele, who died two months after von Leers, and who had been an SS captain: a doctor infamous for his scientific experiments on human test subjects in Buchenwald and Dachau;
- Hans Affler, a psychological warfare expert.
Some extremely prominent figures chose the Syrian destination (Damascus) instead, carrying out activities similar to those carried out by their compatriots and comrades in Egypt. Usually, the stay in the land of the ancient Aramaeans only lasted a few years (Franz Stangl, Walter Rauff); an exceptional case was that of Alois Brunner, who stayed there for a few decades, and which will be taken into account in his biographical profile.

Destination: South America

In his private memories recorded in the last years of his life, Argentinian dictator Juan Domingo Perón justified the rescue operation of the Nazi war criminals by his Government as an answer to the treatment that the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets reserved to the defeated German soldiers. According to Perón, the Nuremberg trials against the main Nazi officials were an offence against his military honour and pushed him to try to remove as many individuals as possible from Allied justice.
Argentina was not the only South American country that welcomed ex Nazis, but the Perón regime certainly was the one that invested the most in this direction, not limiting itself to welcome the fugitives due to inertia or local corruption, but also by organizing an actual rescue net which in Europ had men - often SS officials that had immigrated right at the end of the war and which were now now the immigration advisors of his Government - and special offices in strategic cities such as Bern and Genoa with the task of screening and facilitating the escape of Nazis, Usthasha, and collaborators.
Of course, the offence caused by the Allies' behaviour to Perón was not his only reason for his commitment to saving ex Nazis.
If for the latter South American in general - and Argentina in particular - presented itself as geographically distant from devastated Europe and out of the Allies' immediate jurisdiction, and with already flourishing German communities in which they could integrate and disappear, Perón’s Beunos Aires searched in them for that knowledge and technical competence which would have allowed the country to have a rapid industrialisation and success. So, they let in aeronautical engineers like Kurt Tank, designer of the Flocke-Wulf (one of the best jet figher in WWII), who actually equipped Argentina with Pulquis, jet fighters that were extremely advanced for the time, as well as nuclear physicists, like Ronald Richter, to whom Perón gave illimited funds to achieve controlled nuclear fusion, without however obtaining anything, and doctors, like the Danish-born endocrinologist Carl Værnet, who used Buchenwald's prisoners as human subjects, or the geneticist Joseph Mengele, who studied twins in Auschwitz. The idea was that these "scientists", although criminals, could modernize the military and industry by making the country grow in such a way as to make it independent from the influence of the USA in South America.
Another fundamental factor,also in the geopolitical framework of the Cold War, in addition to Perón’s never hidden sympathies for the fascist regimes, was anti-Communism. Varga's Brazil had been close to the Axis, but in 1942, under pressure from the USA, it had sided with the Allies, and in 1945-46,it was politically ambiguous and potentially dangerous for ex-Nazis. Argentina instead presented itself right away as a bulwark against Communism. From this point of view, Nazis and their collaborators, first of all the Croatian Usthasha, were perceived as a 'strategic asset' from whom to learn proven techniques for the systematic distruction of political opposition and managment of internal security.
If Argentina was a safe refuge between 1946 and 1955, after Perón’s fall ex-Nazis started to feel in danger. It was then that, for example, the Paraguay of Stroessner, a dictator of Bavarian origins, or Brazil, immense and chaotic, became a valid alternative. Mengele fled from Argentina to Paraguay right when he felt something was changing in Buenos Aires, and then in Brazil. Eduard Roschmann, deputy commander of the Riga ghetto, moved from Argentina to Paraguay; while in Brazil those finding refuge were Franz Strangl, commander in Sobibor and Treblinka, Gustav Wagner, Stangl's vice in Sobibor, and Herberts Cukurs, a Latvian collaborator.

Alois Brunner [Georg Fischer] (1912-2001 or 2010)

Austrian, he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party when he was 19 and at 27 he joined the SS, in which he reached the rank of captain. He has gone down in history as 'The butcher of Vienna' per his exceptional ferocity and mean determination showed in the pursuit of the primary goal for him and his superior, Adolf Eichmann, represented in the so-called 'final solution of the Jewish problem', meaning the physical elimination of the Jewish people. He was the right-hand man of Eichmann, who considered him his best man, and during WWII he received various assignments which had one common denominator: rally the people of Jewish faith in an always different geographical area and organise their deportation towards ghettos and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. According to rough estimates, he deported more than 100,000 Jews. The places where he was active were Austria, Germany, Greece, France, Slovakia, and Hungary. Simon Wiesenthal, in his book Justice, not vengeance (Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1989) titled ,in his "honor", chaper XXX The Right Hand of the Devil and on page 233 he says "One might say that Eichmann was the head and Brunner the hand, but that would belittle Brunner's part: he was a hand with a head." Brunner, also to compensate for the inadequacy of the men available to carry out the mass deportations of Jews, thought of paradoxically availing himself of the collaboration of Jews, convinced now with the promise of better life conditions, now with the promise of saving their skin or forced with threats to indulge his orders. He also showed himself to be a shrewd trafficker of valuable goods taken from rich Jewish families overtaken by the Shoah, to gift or sell to compliant philo-Nazi upper middle class and nobility.
At the end of the war, he managed to escape capture, perhaps because of homonymy with another Nazi, Anton Brunner. It doesn't seem like the two knew each other. He remained hidden until 1954. In that year, a French court sentenced him, in absentia, to death for crimes against humanity, then in 2001 the death penality was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1954, he ran to Rome. then in Egypt and, in the end, in Syria, where he spent the remainder of his existence.
The Syrian president Hafez al Assad, father of Bashar al Assad, welcomed him kindly because they shared the same antisemitic feelings, and al Assad wanted to make use of his "competences" in the exortion of information and confessions from victims also through torture, an ability that Brunner had achieved and perfected during the war. Moreover, Hafez al Assad employed him in the establishment of the Ba'athist secret police and in the Syrian intelligence services. Brunner was also allegedly involved in the illegal arms trade under the guise of a quiet German businessman. Here he took on the new name of Georg Fischer.
He was the target of Nazi hunters, from the agents of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the Klarsfeld Foundation and the Mossad. His body forever carried the traces of two firecracker bomb attacks he suffered in Syria, the first by French secret agents due to his support to the Algerian National Liberation Front and the second by the Israeli secret services: the first was in 1961, when he lost an eye, the second in 1980, when he lost all the fingers of his left hand except for his thumb. For the reasons indicated aove, Syria never had any interest in welcoming the extradition requests received over the decades from France, Austria and Germany. However, towards the end of the 1980s, negotiations began between the German Democratic Republic and Syria for Brunner's extradition: only the fall of the Berlin Wall saved him from the handover, but he was however confined by the Syrian authorities to the basement of an apartment building, where he lived out the rest of his days in extreme poverty and discomfort.
The place and date of death are not known with certainty: according to some sources in 2001, according to others in 2010, almost surely in Syria, where he's allegedly buried in an unmarked grave.

Aribert Ferdinand Heim [Tarek Hussen Fariq] (1914-1992)

He came from a modest Austrian family, his father was a police inspector and his mother a housewife. He studied medicine at the University of Granz. He rushed ahead in his eagerness to join the Nazi Party: in 1935 he joined the Nazi Party; in 1938, the occasion of Austria's annexation to Hitler's Germany, he joined the SS, and two years later he joined the Waffen-SS.
During World War II, he was a doctor in the concentration camps of Mauthausen. Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. His brutal acts have handed him to History as 'Dr. Death' and the 'Butcher of Mauthausen'. He made scientific and pseudo-scientific experiments on helpless prisoners, mostly Jewish: from the statements of survivors of those scamps, we know that he would narcotise people, who were perfectly healthy, he would incise and open their chest to examine the functioning of the internal organs, and then would extract them together with the viscera. Then, he would decapitate the victims and would boil their heads, odering the conservation of the skulls having perfect dentition, skulls that would then make a good show of themselves on Heim's desk and on those of his acquaintances and colleagues. To such atrocities letal injections in the heart of the unfortunate victims of substances like water, poison, or even gasoline must be added. Finally, it seems he loved to clock the time it would take for a victim to die.
In 1945, he was arrested by the Americans and detained for his past as an SS; but, without poor available at that moment on his murders, he was then released in 1947. already in 1948 we find him again in Germany, first in Mannheim and then in Baden-Baden, as a gynecologist. He married a colleague of his and he would spend the following years in Baden-Baden, until 1962, when police came to his door to arrest him following multiple testimonies of his crimes. However, surely thanks to a tip from an unknown person, he had already run away to an unknown destination. In the following years, it turned out that he had obtained a passport and had found refuge in Egypt, in Cairo, where he certainly found a community of ex-Nazis founded by Johann von Leers, which made acclimatisation easier for him. It also turned out that he lived with a minimum of ease of income, thanks to income derived from rental of 34 (!) apartments in a apartment building in Berlin (income that his sister sent him), which he and his wife would have bought during the happy period in Baden-Baden. The 'Nazi Hunter' Simon Wiesenthal intervened with German judicial authorities in a successful attempt to interrupt this flow of capital to Egypt.
In 2008, Rüdiger, Heim's then-52 son, gave an interview on his father. His words, meticulous research (carried out first of all by the policeman Alfred Aedtneer) and especially the discovery of a briefcase belonging to Heim, full of documents, letters and health certificates, allowed us to reconstruct the last years of his life. He had lived in a hotel room in Cairo, making himself well wanted by the family that owned the building, so much that one of the children of the family called him 'Uncle Tarek'. Heim died from colon cancer on August 10, 1992, and was buried with an Islamic funeral in a cemetery in the capital. In the past, he had changed his name to Tarek Hussein Fariq and had converted to Islam.
From a document published during an investigation carried out by the Uruguayan newspaper 'El Pais', it seems he had spent a certain period between the end of War World II and his escape in Egypt in Uruguay, in the city of Paysandú.

Johann von Leers [Omar Amin] (1902-1965)

In his youth, he studied Law and he obtained a teaching chair at the university of Jena (Thuringia). He was an extremely cultured essayist (among other things, he also dealt with philosophy, religions and mysticism) and polyglot (he learned Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese and also Yiddish; furthermore, he wrote correctly in Latin), he joined the leadership of the National Socialist Party in 1929. Attracted by religions and movements that harked back to the most remote origins of humanity and showed a great internal propulsive force (Islam, Aryan neopaganisms, ancient solar cults), he immediately showed a propensity for political pragmatism (Realpolitik) and a lasting aversion to Judaism. He served as an official in Paul Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda and worked under Heinrich Himmler when he was in the SS: right-hand man of the first and also esteemed by Alfred Rosenberg, he showed, during and after WWII, to have learned the lesson of propaganda well. When the Third Reich was now irreparably collapsing in the spring of 1945, he fled to Italy. Arrested, he was brought into an American internment camp, where he stayed for a year and a half. He evaded, and in 1950 he found refuge in the arms of the Argentinian President Perón; then, when the latter was overthrown with a coup in 1955, the following year Von Leers decided to accept the invitation of his devoted reader since the 1930s, Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and move to Egypt. He crossed the Atlantic again and landed in Cairo, where the Egypt of President Gamal Abdel Nasser waited for him. The president admired Nazism. Right from the beginning of his Egyptian stay, he had occasion of meeting Husseni, who introduced him to Sunni Islam, to which von Leers converted adopting the double Arab name "Omar Amin" (the second name in honor of his great Palestinian friend). Both in Buenos Aires and Cairo he resumed his pro-Nazi and Antisemitic journalistic activity: he founded and directed the magazine "Der Weg" (The Way) in Beunos Aires and then published articles in line with his reationary and racist extremism on the German magazine "Der Spiegel". In Cairo, he made Antisemitic and anti-Zionist speeches at a local radio station. He got the journalist's license, founded the publishing house "The sword of Omar" and started a collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Information. Furthermore, he made contacts and supported the independence cause of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan nationalist forces . He died in Egypt in 1965 and was buried, with a Islamic funeral, in the cemetery of Schtterwald (Germany).

Franz Stangl (1908-1971)

In 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, Franz Stangl started his career in the Nazi Party. In 1940 he was appointed security supervisor in the annihilation centers of the T4, responsible for the Euthanasia Project. Here, Stalin's worked at the Hartheim tollbooth and got to know many of the men that would later be involved in the Aktion Reinhard (the secret Nazi plan to eliminate Polish Jews.) He was then sent to the Bernburg Institute, close to Hannover, to deal with its closure as a replacement for Irmfried Eberl. Stangl had the opportunity to demonstrate his organizational and command skills.
In April of 1942, Stangl was sent, on recommendation of Christian Wirth, to the Sobibor extrermination camp to accelerate the contruction work. Odilo Globocnik then entrusted him with the command of the camp. In September 1942, Stangl was moved to manage the Treblinka extermination camp. After the riot in the camp, in August 1943, Globocnik called Stangl to Trieste to cohordinate the action against partisans, Yugoslavs and Italian.
At the end of the war he went back to Austria, he was reported to the Americans in the village on the Attersee in which he had found refuge and was moved to the Glasenbach camp, where he stayed for more or less two years. The Americans incarcerated him as an SS without asking him any question on his duties during the war. Towards the end of 1947, they handed him over to the Austrians for his involvement in the Aktion T4 (the Nazi campaign of Euthanasia against people with disabilities). After being moved to the Linz Prison, he ran away on May 30, 1948.
As he himself told Gitta Sereny, from Austria he went to Rome, searching for Bishop Hudal, because he had found out that the bishop could've helped him to leave the country. The bishop actually found him an accomodation in Rome where he could stay while he waited for the preparation of his new documents, some money and, a few weeks later, a passport of the International Red Cross to the name of Paul Franz Stangl, so with first and second name inverted, but not fake. Hudal also got him an entry visa for Syria and a job in a textile factory in Damascus, as well as a ticket to reach the country by ship. From his new arrangement, he regularly wrote to his family in Austria.
In May 1949, his wife and their three daughters joined him. On the form that Mrs Stangl fillen in to get out of Austria, she declared she was going to Damascus to join her "runaway husband" [Mann geflüchtet].
In 1951, the Stangl family chose to leave Syria to move, through Italy, in Brazil, the South American state that first responded to the request for an entry visa.
In Brazil, Franz Stangl worked first as in a textile factory, then on his own in a small company that producted medical supplies, and finally at Volkswagen. He never went into hiding. In 1954 his family registered at the Austrain consulate in Brazil. In 1964, an article appeared on Austrian newspapers in which Simon Wiesenthal, a Jew who survived the Shoah and and who was involved in the search for unpunished Nazi criminals, reported Stangl's story and announced his search for him. Stangl's son-in-law, Herbert Havel, showed him the newspaper, but Stangl never changed his habits, nor tried to cover his tracks.
He was arrested on February 28, 1967 by the Brazilian police. On June 22 he was extradited in West Germany. Frank Stangl was found guilty of the death of 900,000 Jewish women, children, men, and elders in Treblinka and convicted to life inprisonment. He died of a stroke on June 28, 1971 in the Düsseldorf Prison.

Walter Rauff (1906-1984)

If Auschwitz today is the symbol of the Shoah, it was just one of its last pieces. Before the efficiency of the death factory of Birkenau, Nazis and their collaborators murdered Jewish men, women, and children through shooting and gaswagen. Between 1941 and 1942, among those working to the development of these mobile gas chambers, with which thousands of people were murdered on the Western front, there was Walter Rauff.
After resigning from the Navy due to the divorce from his wife, Walter Rauff joined the SS and had made a rapid career in the Ranks of the SD (security service) thanks to his friendship with Reinhard Heydrich.
In 1942 he was sent to Tunisia to oversee the persecution of the local Jewish community and then in Italy, where, as a senior Officer of the Secret Police, he dealt with the repression of the Resistance.
On April 30, 1945, he was arrested by the Anglo-Americans at the Hotel Regina in Milan, the ex headquarters of the SS, and he was brought to the internment camp in Rimini, from which he escaped at the end of 1946.
His involvement, albeit with a secondary role, in the surrender of the German forces in Italy, allowed Rauff to get some kind of protection, to stay in Rome, where Archbishop Alois Hudal got him a job as a teacher in a Catholic school and allowed him to bring his family in Italy.
In the Italian capital, Rauff actively worked both to the South American ratline and the Middle Eastern one. In particular, through the latter, Rauff rectruited d former Nazi officers as military-technical advisors to help the Syrian regime to strengthen its armed forces, including in the war against Israel, The ex-Nazis reached Syria by plane through Cairo. Thanks to the Egyptian embassy in Rome, to the German College and to the Caritas of the apostolic administration of Innsbruck, they got the visas and passports necessary for expatriation.
Between the end of 1948 and the first months of 1949, Rauff himself moved to Damascus with his family. Here, as can be seen from his dossier collected by the CIA, heto the March ‘49 coup and reorganized the Syrian political police along the lines of the Nazi Gestapo. He was arrested after the umpteenth coup, was released after just a few days and expelled from the country.
He took refuge in Beirut from where, on September 20 1949, he returned to Rome. In Italy, the Mossad, the Israeli secret services, approached him, because it hoped to recruit him as a undercover agent in Egypt. Despite the failure of this collaboration, Israel got him a visa for Ecuador. On December 17, 1949, Rauff embarked, under the fake name of Hermann Bauermeister, from Genoa to Quinto with his family. At the Chilean embassy in Ecuador he met the then Major Augusto Pinochet, with whom he would then collaborate, after the coup of 1973, for the repression of internal dissent.
In October 1958, he moved to Chile. In that same year and until 1962, Rauff worked as an informer for the Intelligence Service of the Federal Republic of Germany (BND), going back to Germany more than once with a passort bearing his name.
On December 19, 1962, he was arrested in Chile because West Germany had requested his extradition. The Chilean Supreme Court rejected the request and let Rauff go. Allende's election to president didn't change the situation: none of the extradition or expulsion requests for Rauff were successful.
Walter Rauff died of sickness in Santiago del Cile in 1984, he was 78.

Erich Priebke [Otto Pape] (1913-2013)

On March 7, 1998, the Military Court of Appeal of Rome, presided over by Dr. Giuseppe Monica, sentenced Erich Priebke to life imprisonment, finding him criminally responsible of "complicity in violence with aggravated and continued homicide against Italian citizens" for the Ardeatine massacre in Rome, which happened in the afternoon of March 24, 1944, and during which German soldiers and officials shot 335 people between civilians and soldiers. Priebke was responsible for managing the list of victims, he deleted the names after the execution, and he himself killed at least two people.
After the liberation of Rome, Priebke had moved to Verona, Brescia,and then Bolzano. Here, on May 13, 1945, he was arrested by the Allies and first moved to the camp for prisoners of war in Afragola, Naples, where he was interrogated about the Ardeatine massacre, and, in the end, at the Rimini Enklave, a system of camps for prisoners of the German army managed by the British.
In the night of New Year's Eve 1946, Priebke managed to escape. After heading to the bishop's palace and being diverted to a convent, he took a train that allowedh him to joinhis wifeand children in Vipiterno.
Priebke lived undisturbed for almost two years with his family in South Tyrol, despite the fact that in November 25, 1946, the military prosecutor's office in Rome had issued an arrest warrant in his name.Here, the former colonel became Catholic through the administration of a second baptism by the parish priest Johann Corradini, on the formal order of the bishop of Bressanone Giovanni Battista Geisler and under the coordination of Vicar General Alois Pompanin.
When, on July 20, 20, 1948, the military court of Rome sentenced Herbert Kappler, its direct commander, to life imprisonment, Priebke started to organize the last stop of his escape. A Franciscan priest, whose name he claimed not to remember, unable to help him return to Germany, offered to help him emigrate to Argentina. And he accepted.
Under the fake name of Otto Pape, an application for landing was submitted for him at the Genoa office of the Delegation for Argentine Immigration to Europe ( Daie), established by the Perón Government and directed by the former SS captain, born in Argentina but with German citizenship, Carlos Fuldner. The request in his name an that of Josef Mengele have two consecutive numbers, to demonstrate the fact that there was an actual organization dealing with this kind of thing. On July 26, 1948, the Pontifical Commission for Assistance in Rome got him a Vatican ID, again with the name of Pape. Thanks to this document, the bishop of the Holy See Alois Hudal could get him apassport of the Red Cross. Mr and Mrs "Pape" and their children could then leave Genoa on October 23,1948, on board the steamship "San Giorgio", towards Beunos Aires, where htye arrived three weeks later. A year later, thanks to the general amnesty Perón granted to foreigners that had entered the country illegally, Otto Pape could finally go back to officially being Erich Priebke.
In 1954, the family moved from Beunos Aires to San Carlos de Bariloche, where Priebke directed the German school and lived in tranquillity until 1994, when the Wiesenthal Center reported to the American broadcaster ABC the presence of Reinhard Kops, Hudal's assistant, in Bariloche. Korps, caught off guard by journalist Sam Donaldson, revealed Priebke's presence to divert attention from himself. Interrogated in front of a camera on his role on the Ardeatine massacre, the former SS admitted to his involvement, provoking an international scandal. Priebke was arrestedin 1995, extradited in Italy and, after many trials, he was convicted of crimes committed more than fifty years earlier.

Adolf Eichmann [Ricardo Klement] (1906-1962)

On May 23, 1960, David Ben Gurion, First Minister of the State of Israel,
made a dramatic announcement to the Knesset: Adolf Eichmann, ex-SS lieutenant colonel, one of the main architects of the “final solution to the Jewish problem”, had been captured by the Mossad and was in Israel in a maximum-security prison.
Eichmann could now be put on trial before an Israeli court.
Eichmann, who had joined the SS thanks to Ernst Kaltenbrunner (successor of Reinhard Heydrich as supreme commander of the Nazi security in 1943), began his ascent in the Nazisystem in 1938 when, after the annexation of Austra, he worked for the expulsion of Jews from the country. After Vienna, Eichmann worked in Prague and then in Berlin at the the Jewish Affairs Section of the Reich Central Security Office. Following the Wannsee Conference, he became the coordinator of the deportations of Jews from all over Europe to the extermination camps.
The Allied forces arrested him in Austria at the end of the war. He identified himself as Private Otto Eckmann. Interned in several prison camps, including Oberdachstetten, at the beginning of 1946, fearing his identity might be discovered - also because in Nuremberg, venue for the largest trial of former Nazis, his name was starting to emerge -, he fled. He changed identity again and, as Otto Henninger, he led an extremely modest life in Lower Saxony waiting for the waters to calm down.
In 1950 he moved to Italy, where where he was a guest of a monastery first in Bressanone and then in Merano. Here, thanks to the complicity of some local clerics and officials, he got afake ID of the municipality of Termeno in the name of Ricardo Klement.
With his new documents, with the intercession of Bishop Alois Hudal, he got a passport of the Red Cross and on June 1, 1950, on board of the steamship "Giovanna C", he left Genoa for Beunos Aires.
At the beginning he moved in the province of Tucumán and found a job at the C.a.p.r.i. (Compañía Argentina para Proyectos y Realizaciones Industriales – Fuldner y Cía), a construction company owned by Carlos Fuldner that employed several ex-Nazis. Among his colleagues at the C.a.p.r.i., there was the German geologist Gerhard Klammer who, years later, will have Eichmann's precise address in Buenos Aires sent to the prosecutor Fritz Bauer, a fundamental element for his capture.
In 1952, now feeling safe, Eichmann brought his wife Vera and their three children (to whom he introduced himself as "uncle") to Argentina. After the failure of the C.a.p.r.i., Eichmann changed several jobs. Finally, he found work as a mechanic, and then team leader, in the Mercedes-Benz factory in González Catán, in the outskirts of the capital. He led a methodic life: every day he would take the bus to go to the factory andhe would come back in the evening. This extreme conformism was his best protection, but was also the reason of his capture.
It was his eldest son Klaus who had Eichmann betrayed, unwittingly. The young Eichmann started to date a German girl, Sylvia Hermann, without knowing she was of Jewish origin: her father, Lothar Hermann, had survived the German persecution. Klaus, who used his real surname, often talked about the merits of Nazi Germany. Suspicious, Hermann, despite the fact he was almost blind, managed to connect who Klaus called his uncle to Adolf Eichmann, and he wrote more than once to the Israeli Embassy and, in 1957, to Bauer.
The German prosecutor, not trusting his own Government, turned to Israel. He struggled to convince the Jewish state to intervene, but in the end, by providing the various evidence that had arrived from Argentina, he succeeded.
On May 11, 1960, the Mossad, after following him for weeks and having confirmed his identity, captured Eichmann at the bus stop in Calle Garibaldi while he was coming back from work. Nine days later, Eichmann was moved by plane to Israel, disguised as an EL AL flight attendant.
Eichmann was put on trial and found guilty, among others, of crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, crimes against Humanity. He got the death penality and was hanged on May 31, 1962. It was the first and last death penalty carried out by the State of Israel.

The women

In 1939, the year World War II started, the German population consisted of nearly 40 million women. A thid of them was actively taking part in some National Socialist organization, and the number of female party members increased regularly until the end of the conflict.
German women will participate in various ways to the construction of the millennial Reich. They were administrators; teachers; secretaries; nurses; they were in charge of radio operations, wiretapping, recording; Race inspectors; settlement consultants; social operators; wives, girlfriends or lovers of SS on various war fronts.
Around 30,000 women appear in police certificates as auxiliaries in gendarmeries, Gestapo headquarters or prisons; around 3,500 worked as overseers, Aufseherinnen, in concentration camps.
Many of them decided to take up service in Eastern Europe and contribute to the German "civilisation" process. Some went out of ideological conviction, but most fo them did it out of ambition, for the chance of making a career, for the priviledges that the role gave them in times of War, for a higher paycheck; to leave behind repressive laws, bourgeois customs and social traditions that made life in Germany regimented and oppressive.
They didn't limit themselves to just machine-tap execution orders and deportations, but took part of the massacres and plundering of the Jewish population, first in the cities and then in the Ghettos; as wives and partners, not only would they console their men after they had done the dirty work,but would contribute to it by shooting themselves or by "simply" preparing banquets and alcohol near the execution sites.
Some women distinguished themselves for their cruelty, lack of empathy and sadism. Few, very few paid for their crimes after the war.
For a Ilse Koch, first secretary and overseer at Sachsenhausen, and then wife of the commander of Buchenwald Karl Otto Koch, condemned to life imprisonment for having personally attacked and tortured some prisoners to the point of causing their death; or a Irma Grese, one of the worst overseers in the Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, found guilty during the trial in Belsen in 1947 and hanged up when she was only 22 years old, most of the women were never was not prosecuted for their own crimes. During the post-war period, the German woman was painted as a heroine that had to clean the shameful past of Germany, victim of the rapes by the Red Army, and completely apolitical.
For the women, then, who are much more difficult to identiy with a precise name and surname, also because they had much more nuanced roles even if just as fundamental as men, was not necessary to create a ratline. Easily, and often by taking a new surname thanks to marriage, they mimetized themselves inside society and the new German reality and disappeared. Among the exceptions there is Hermine Braunsteiner (1919-1999).
Braunsteiner worked in the female concentration camp of Ravensbrück and then in the concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek, in the in the Lublin district. During her service, she committed crimes, abuses, and acts of sadism; she whipped to death several prisoners and was known to have killed various women, including children and elders, trampling them with particular violence, so much she earned the name Kabyla, "kicking mare2. Reassigned to Ravensbrück, she fled to Vienna before the Soviet soldiers liberated the camp. In 1946, she was arrested in Austria and handed over to the Allied authorities. Freed, she was once again arrested by the Austrian authorities and put on trial. convicted of murder, infanticide and manslaughter in reference to the facts of Ravensbrück, but was once again released on November 22, 1949. None of the crimes for which she was detained referred to Majdanek.
Overall, she was convicted to three years of prison, which she didn't serve if not minimally. In the end, the Austrian government promised not to charge her with further crimes and granted her amnesty.
A few years later she met Russel Ryan, American, married him and moved with him in Queens, getting the American citizenship in 1963.
The following year, Wiesenthal, at the urging of survivors of the Majdanek camp, decided to hunt her down. He tracked her down in Queens and reported The New York Times.
On July 14, 1964, the young reporter Joseph Lelyveld, after knocking on her door and identifying her, wrote that Mrs Ryan had swiflty admitted to being Hermine Braunsteiner and to have worked at Majdanek.
In 1971, the United States revoked her citizenship for hiding her conviction from the immigration office, and two years later she was expelled. Germany on Poland then asked for her extradition, she chose West Germany. Her trial began in Düsseldorf in November 1975. Due to numerous witnesses and procedural delays, it did not end until mid-1981. She was convicted to life in prison.

Nazi Hunters

After the Nuremberg Trials, many former Nazis managed to escape the courts and conquer a peaceful life in Europe or by emigrating, thanks to the reticence of national justices and reason of state. The task to investigating and trying Nazi criminals was remitted to the national prosecutors' offices, which, for politcal reasons, ncluding complicity of officials inherited from the Nazi-Fascist nomenclature of the war period, they often preferred to overlook it. Additionally, with the advent of the Cold War, the ex allies, now rivals, competed to recruit those within the ranks of Nazism who had scientific knowledge and knowledge useful for the new ideological clash between Western and Communist blocs.
Who, on the other hand, was not willing to let pass unnoticed the crimes of single Germans or collaborators who had committed war crimes, was a small group of citizens, often former victims of the Nazi dictatorship, who decided to hunt the perpetretors wherever they had hidden worldwide.
Simon Wiesenthal
The most famous "Nazi hunter" is perhaps Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal was born in Galicia, today Ukraine, in 1908 to a Jewish family. Engineer, when Lviv was invaded by Nazis, he was deported to various concentration camps. He was freed in Mauthausen in May 1945.
As soon as he he gained enough strength back, he started to work for the American army, collecting information for the trials against the Nazi war criminals. In 1947, with other volunteers, he founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz, with the goal of collecting information for the future trials. When the United States and the URSS lost interest in prosecuting further war crimes, he continued on hisown.
Hiswork contributed to the capture, or at least the unmasking, of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, Franz Stangl in Brazil, Karl Silberbauer - the Gestapo official who arrested the Frank family and who, in 1963, still worked in the Veiennese police - in Austria, Hermine Braunsteiner in New York.
Serge Klarsfeld and Beate Künzel
To spousesSerge Klarsfeld and Beate Künzel, respectively son of a Jew murdered in Auschwitz and of a soldier of the Wehrmacht, we owe instead the capture of Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, Kurt Lischka, head of the Paris Gestapo, the denunciation of Herbert Hagen, co-responsible for the deportation of the French Jews, and of Walter Rauff.
For the Klarsfeld couple, the idea that the former Nazis were leading a respectable life inside German society as judges, politicians, and businessmen was intollerable. When, in 1966, the former Nazi propagandist Kurt Kiesinger was electied cancellor of West Germany, Beate collected a dossier on Kiesinger's war activities and presented it to the French and German press. Two years later, during a congress of the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union Party), she publicly slapped him. She was arrested andbrought to trial, but she and Serge managed to transform the trial in a trial against Kiesinger.
Over the years, both were arrested and intimidated, but no one has done more than them to force France to face its collaborationist past and bring the war criminals to justice.
Mossad
The Israeli Secret Services, the Mossad, physically captured Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960 e, unable to extradite him or abduct him in Bra, they killed Herberts Cukurs in Montevideo in 1965.
Fritz Bauer
In the immediate post-war period and for the whole 50s, the German public opinion in West Germany welcomed the trials conducted by the Allies with a mixture of rejection and indifference, many Germans considered the trials not as acts of justice, but as revenge. The desire for normality, to draw a line on the past and turn the page to focus on economic reconstruction was prevalent.
It was Fritz Bauer, not a proper Nazi Hunter, but the General Prosecutor of Frankfurt, who contributed to change the relationship Germans had with their past. Bauer, a Social Democrat and Jew, was the one who provided the Mossad with the elements to capture Eichmann. He had long lost his trust in the West German judiciary, he often repeated that he entered in enemy territory each time he got out of his office, and had therefore consciously chosen to circumvent the law and take his information abroad. Not having enough power to proceed alone, he convinced, not without having to raise his voice, the Mossad to operate almost as if it were the “executive arm” of the Frankfurt Prosecutor's Office.
In 1963, he managed to create the so-called Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, in which 22 former SS members and official of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex were put on trial. For the first time, unlike Nuremberg, it was German judges who tried German criminals according to German laws. The details of daily life in Auschwitz were published on newspapers and disclosed on television. Common people were forced to see. The trials also sparked the student uprising of '68, during which children began holding fathers to account for their past.
Also following Bauer's actions, on July 3, 1979, the Bundestag, West Germany's parliament, abolished the statute of limitations for murder crimes. It was a painful decision, taken with a non-overwhelming majority (255 votes for, 222 against), but which allowed the Nazis to continue to be investigated without any time limit.

The Nazi on the run in post-war Cinema

The figure of the Nazi criminal on the run has fueled a prolific film genre, oscillating between rigorous historical reconstruction and the vivid colors of conspiracy thrillers. Movies like Marathon Man (1976)and The Boys from Brazil (1978) transformed the historical truth of the ratline into metaphysical nightmares, where the threat of the Third Reich survived in secret lab or among the metropolitan shadows, embodied by sinister figures modeled on Josef Mengele.
At the heart of this narrative stands the theme of hidden identity. In The Strangerr (1946) by Orson Welles, the hierarch mimetizes himself in the calm of New England, revealing how evil can nestle in bourgeois normality. By contrast, works like The Odessa File (1974) explore the complex web of protection of the former SS, introducing the public to the dynamics of private justice and investigative journalism. More recently, perspective has shifted towards memory and civil responsibility. Labyrinth of Lies (2014) documents the difficult process of awareness in Germany in the 60s, while This Must Be The Place (2011) translate the Hunt for the Nazi in an existential and melancholic journey. These movies are overall not entertainment, but rather mnemonic devices which question the border between revenge, justice and oblivion.

Abdel Qader al Husseini (1908-1948)

Born in one of the most powerful and wealthy families of the Arab-Palestinian group living in Jerusalem, Abdel Qader was the son of Musa al Husseini, brother of Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalemwho, during World War II, organized the Nazi propaganda in Arabic from Berlin and contributed to the creation of the Handschar division of the Waffen-SS, made up of Balkan Muslim recruits. Abdel Qader studied at the American University in Cairo, graduating in Chemistry in 1932. During the graduating ceremony,he stood up and harshly criticized the institution, calling it an instrument of imperialism, thus the expulsion from Egypt. After moving to Jerusalem, he started to work at the Territorial Affairs Department of Mandatary Palestine and as a editor of two Palestinian party-led newspapers, "Al-Liwa" (The Banner) and " 'al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya " (Islamic Association). In 1933, he joined the Arab-Palestinian Party, founded the clandestine paramilitary group "Munazzamat al-Jihad al-Muqaddas" ("Organization for the Sacred Jihad"), whose troop, called "Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas" (Army of the Sacred Jihad"), he himself and Hassan Salama led during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
Abdel Qader participated in the great Arab revolt of 1936-1939 as a combatant: wounded, he managed to temporarely take refuge in Damascus. In 1938, he was exiled from the Mandatary territories, and the following year he moved to Baghdad, always under control of the British, where he found a job as Math teacher at the Military Academy and in a high school of the city but, at the same time, he was preparing the Anti-British and anti-Jewish revolt (which took the form of a pogrom in the Farhud massacre, on June 1, 1941) with the support of his uncle Hajj Amin, and the cohordination of the Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al Gaylani. The coup failed and he, like his uncle, even though with different times and journeys, went in the run, including a brief period in Germany, where he was trained in the use of weapons and explosives. In the post-war period, he managed, like the Mufti, to escape to Egypt in 1946 and took back the command of his troop, together with Hassan Salama, who in the meanwhile had followed the Mufti to Berlin. King Farouk was not happy with his arrival, but tollerated it to avoid undesired reactions from a part of the population, since Abdel Qader was considered by many Arabs, not only Palestinian ones, to be a hero fighting in the name of freedom and independence from those who were considered intruders and oppressors: the British and Jews.
He fought in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and died fighting on April 8while he was trying, with a reckless action, to get back a village that had been recently occupied by the troops of the nascent State of Israel.
The mausoleum where his father Musa and his son Faisal are also buried is situated on the Temple Mount, near the Dome of the Rock. Next to it there is the grave of king Abdallah, assassinated in 1951 on that very hill by a Palestinian nationalist.