Ratlines and Unholy Trinities: A Review-essay on (Recent) Literature Concerning Nazi and Collaborators Smuggling Operations out of Italy

© 2003, The Vatican Files.net

 

This essay began as a review of a few books on the Priebke affair while I was acting as a researcher for CEANA [1] . In particular, I was interested in understanding why they described so vaguely and fabulously the flight through Italy of former SS and other war criminals in the second half of the 1940s. After a while, I realized it was useless to review these books without taking into account their historiographical background. In fact, many of them do not deal with new pieces of evidence (we will see that the Priebke trials did not bring any element of novelty about the Nazi flight) and they are also heavily based on prior accounts. These accounts are very interesting because historical reconstructions of Nazi escape routes from Italy are very often based on reportages (later instant books) written by journalists and reports written by diplomats, rather than scholarly research. Moreover, these reconstructions are too often like the ones proposed by novels and movies. As a rule, popularized history is conceived in the same vein as mass literature or popular entertainment, but here we find something more because the authors did not want to be considered to be mere popularizers. They thought they were doing what academic historians did not do, because of the latters' fear of being involved in political issues.

At this point, I had to deal with a double and, at least according to me, dangerous issue: popularized history versus academic history, political passion versus scholarly research. I decided the only sensible thing to do was to draw a sketch of debates since 1945 on the Nazi flight through Italy, combining works by trained historians, journalists, novelists and movie-makers. Therefore, I tried to map chronologically the entire literature on the topic and to stress all links to analogous questions, like the one concerning relationships between Catholic Church and Nazism or the Cold War and the recycling of former Nazi spies and soldiers. I hope that I have not given an oversimplified outline, but I think that it was necessary in order to discover how "historical (un)truths" were built up over the decades. Often this was done out of genuine sincerity, because researchers were not trained or did not think carefully about what they were writing. I do not wish to suggest here that historians can reach the TRUTH, but that writers can and should check what they are doing and also state the rules of the game. If they are writing a novel or a screenplay they can state that Hitler is still alive. But they cannot do the same, if they are writing academic or popularized history because they must take documentary evidence into account.

The literature on the the underground routes going from Central and Eastern Europe to Latin America through Italy owes a lot to late 1940s press or diplomatic reports. The first SS and other war criminals arrived in Argentina from Italy in 1947 [2] , but since 1946 German-speaking and Italian diplomats were complaining about the rebirth of Fascism and Nazism on the American side of the Atlantic [3] . In 1947, Vincent La Vista reported to the U.S. State Department that the Red Cross was granting passports without screening - thus helping the illegal emigration from and through Italy of former Nazis - and that a group of priests were instrumental into it [4] . The State Department decided to not release the report, but in 1949 the U.S. and West German governments thought that too many Nazis had gone over to the USSR and that was time to stop that flow, at least the part of it that was benefiting the Soviet Union. Representatives of both governments leaked this news and the New York Herald Tribune printed an article on the danger of a new Nazi-Soviet alliance that was reprinted by Die Standpunkt (16 December 1949). In that occasion the same newspaper added that the idea of the new Nazi-Soviet alliance was nurtured by a group of German "nationalists" who had immigrated in Buenos Aires, where they were publishing Der Weg [5] .

Meanwhile, on 6 December 1949, the German Agency Nord Press announced that Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the German College of S. Maria dell'Anima, was a well known pro-Nazis prelate in Rome and that he received from 60 to 100 Germans daily who were looking for tickets and visas to Latin America. Exactly one week later, the Sunday edition of the Passauer Neue Press reported on two networks of spies smuggling Nazi criminals to Argentina and to the Middle East: the first had been centered in Rome, at the College of S. Maria dell'Anima, but its headquarters were shut down because of Vatican pressure. At the beginning of 1950, the German press charged Hudal with having hidden Otto Skorzeny and others in Rome [6] . Hudal denied the allegations against him, but on 30 April 1950, the weekly Die Strasse printed a report on "Görings Männer in Argentinien" with pictures of German pilots in Argentina. This text mentioned that Hudal wrote articles for Der Weg and that an unnamed German pilot had declared having been helped by the prelate.

In 1951-1952, Simon Wiesenthal followed Adolf Eichmann's tracks to Rome. Here, he discovered that Hudal was the "head of the organization that prepared the illegal emigration of the nazists", as he told an Italian magazine a few years later [7] . Actually his (and others') suspicions regarding the help that Eichmann received to escape focused on Anton Weber, a Pallottini Father, and Benedikt de Bourg d'Iré, a Capuchin. However, Wiesenthal was never able to tell the difference between Catholic secular priests and members of various religious orders: for him cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and friars were all the same. He was not very informed about the features of the Catholic Church, nor did he care to be, because he was targeting the Holy See as a whole [8] . He was trying to demonstrate that there have been and perhaps still was a strong alliance between the Catholic Church and a powerful Nazi organization called Odessa (= Organisation der Ehemaligen SS Angehorigen), founded just before the end of the war to help former SS.

Eichmann's trial did not confirm Wiesenthal's view, or at least it did not assess the existence of a well organized underground network supported by former Nazis and by the Catholic Church [9] . In any event, the proceedings were covered by every newspaper in the Western world and aroused the curiosity about Nazis in Latin America. If Hannah Arendt wrote a seminal essay on Eichmann [10] , Michael Frank authoredd a book about Nazis in Buenos Aires [11] . Moreover, this trial and subsequent proceedings in West Germany convinced many Germans, in particular the younger ones, that they had to deal with their country's awful past [12] . At the same time, the trials started a historical reappraisal (or, in many cases, the appraisal) of the Holocaust, even in the Jewish communities around the World [13] .

A few years later, Wiesenthal reinforced his own view in The Murderers Among Us [14] and his thesis was backed up by Werner Brockdorff, formerly Alfred Jarschel [15] . Jarschel, a leader in the Hitler Youth, described how Catholic priests had helped former SS members, taking them to Rome, often disguising them as members of the Catholic clergy, and finally giving them passports and money to reach Latin America. Altough his book is more a novel than a well documented essay, many readers took Jarschel's tale at face value.

In the following decade, Gitta Sereny tried to verify the issue writing her astounding book about Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Treblinka lager [16] . Sereny did not share Wiesenthal's obsession about a nazi-catholic conspiracy. Overall, she thought that if there were networks helping the Nazis' flight, they were simply informal. Finally, she believed that Stangl just walked away from prison and, using a forged ID, went to Florence, where he caught the train to Rome. Stangl told Sereny he went looking for Hudal, because he had heard that the bishop was helping the Germans. Eventually, Hudal gave him a Red Cross passport and Stangl left for Syria, where, according to him, the bishop had found him a job in a textile factory. After a while Stangl's family was reunited in Damascus and in 1951 they left for Brazil, but they were never helped by underground German associations and they had to live the hard life of emigrants.

Reading Sereny, we detect that Stangl's recollection of Rome is fuzzy. Stangl is unable to spell Hudal's family name, calling him "Hulda"; he never remembers too well places and personalities in Rome. Only the fear of  being caught by the Italian police is what the former Treblinka commandant recalls of Rome. Interestingly enough, he often talks about his dread of being sent to Camp "Frascati": i.e. Camp Fraschette (close to Alatri in the province of Frosinone, in the southern part of Latium, not close to Rome, as Sereny erroneously assumed in calling it "Frascati"), where illegal immigrants were sent. Maybe, he was trying to cover up his helpers' tracks. Nevertheless, his tale is very reminescent of the stories told by other  refugees, who were not Nazis, looking for job opportunities or for visas and tickets to the Americas. Thousands of documents at the "Archivio Centrale di Stato" (Italian Central National Archives) in Rome confirm Stangl's (and Sereny's) description of the life and fears of illegal German immigrants in Italy. I will deal with this documentary evidence in another paper, but let me just say that at the end of 1947, there was quite a tight screening of German immigrants (not because of their past, but because the Italian government was fed up with any kind of immigrant). In november 1947, there were 698 German illegal immigrants at Camp Fraschette and during the month of December those and others were sent back to Germany [17] .

In any event, Sereny guessed that Wiesenthal simplified the issue. In her view, he had fictionalized the flight from Germany of many Nazis. this was understandable, she thought, because Wiesenthal was a Nazi hunter and not an historian. But it was a mistake. History, according to Sereny, does not need thrilling explications and historical data simply did not back up any conspiracy theory. She also felt that Brockdorff had given a much too romanticized account of his own experience, if for different reasons: in fact, Sereny was one of the first to point out that historians should not accept Flucht vor Nürnberg as a testimony. Finally, she stressed that the position of the Catholic Church needed to be fairly and soundly assessed. It seemed to her that Pius XII's position after the war should be related to his position during the war, which showed how the pope was paralized by a double set of fears: the dread of communism and his certainty that Hitler would have crushed the Catholic Church, if itr had vehemently protested against him. Moreover, she added, two other elements should be factored in: the antisemitism shared by Pius XII and his clergy even when they tried to help some Jews, and the pope's deep love for Germany. Therefore, according to Sereny, the Church of Rome was unable to stand against nazism during the war, and was ready to forgive and forget the sins of many nazis after the war. But this did not mean that the clergy and the pope had some kind of alliance to neonazis organizations.

While working on her book, Sereny interviewed a lot of priests active in the post-war period, and among them the already mentioned Anton Weber, who confirmed his meeting with Eichmann, but declared that he did not know who the latter was. Sereny did not believe Weber and many of her interviewees, but she did not think that they had conspirated with former SS membrs. Moreover, she was not sure that the Vatican was behind those flights. She seemed more convinced that a number of German members of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy, who were in Italy during those years, helped Germans to migrate: they knew that some of the latter were former SS members, but they were not specifically helping the latter because they were Nazis. She also reported that many members of the Roman clergy told her that Hudal was a small fish, who tried to look bigger, smarter and more powerful than he really was. That was also the opinion of Jesuit historian Robert A. Graham, who later co-authored with David Alvarez Nothing Sacred. Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican 1939-1945 [18] . That book revealed that during the war Hudal was an informant for German intelligence, but nobody listened to him in the Vatican and, least of all, in Berlin [19] .

Today Sereny's reflections and interviews are underestimated, but she did a great job: in fact, she tried to understand what actually happened after the war without looking for sensational pieces of information. Perhaps, this is just why she was not taken seriously, while other, more sensationalistic books got a lot of attention. We should remember that when her book was published and then was translated into other languages [20] , readers were captured by a novel telling a more appealing story: The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth [21] .

Forsyth's thriller is still well received by specialists, because it is very entertaining, a nice blend of fiction and reality [22] . The protagonist, reporter Peter Miller, is a fictional character, but he is hunting down SS captain Eduard Roschmann, who really did sneak past tribunals and other judicial bodies that sprung up after the war. Moreover, Miller interviews Simon Wiesenthal, who told him (and Forsyth's audience) that the SS went under cover at the end of the war and were helped by Odessa. The SS runaways embarked at Italian ports and their destination was the Middle East or Argentina. According to Forsyth (and Wiesenthal), the gold looted during the war by the SS was deposited in the secret vaults of Swiss banks and was later used to buy 7,000 passports from Perón. Moreover, the Catholic Church helped the fugitives while they were in Italy. Many cardinals, according to Wiesenthal, were pro-Nazi and among them Alois Hudal, the "German apostolic nuncio". Thus, the SS found shelter in the big Franciscan convent of Rome and received Red Cross IDs, just what they needed to embark in Genoa.

Forsyth is often inaccurate, or better his sources (i.e. Wiesenthal) were not accurate in retelling their experience. For example, Hudal was not a cardinal, nor a German apostolic nuncio. Moreover, it is impossible to locate the "big" Franciscan convent in Rome mentioned in the novel. Finally, Odessa seems a good inspiration for a thriller, but many historians doubt that it ever existed. In fact, a couple of not very important German underground networks called themselves "Odessa" in 1946, but later the only proof of their existence is … Wiesenthal. Reading Forsyth, another question arises: why the former SS going to Argentina need Red Cross IDs, if they had bought passports from Perón?

We cannot blame Forsyth for being inaccurate. He was writing a thriller, not an historical essay. The role of Wiesenthal in the genesis of the novel is more interesting. later, the Nazi hunter confessed that he wanted to influence the writer [23] . In fact, Wiesenthal was using the thriller to force Roschmann out into the open, which is what actually happened. En passant, Wiesenthal's confession is very useful, because it shows that historians should not accept at face value Wiesenthal's writings and interviews, but should interpret them as baits and devices to deceive Nazis still on the run.

Forsyth had a huge success, his thriller was adapted to the screen [24] , and Roschmann died of a heart attack. In 1974, William Goldman published another successful novel, Marathon Man, on the same issue [25] , and that too became a universally acclaimed movie [26] . Goldman's novel and screenplay, still popular today [27] , are about a former Nazi war criminal who is smuggling diamonds in the United States and who is ready to kill to protect himself. Together with the Forsyth thriller and Neame's movie, Goldman's writing convinced other authors that undercover Nazis were good entertainment. Thus, Ira Levin wrote The Boys from Brazil about doctor Mengele coming to the U.S. [28] . Levin's novel too was adapted to the screen [29] and the three novels plus the three movies told their audiences that Nazis were still ready to rob and to kill [30] .

These works had a wide impact and started a sub-genre in the mass culture that did not stop. Moreover, a few books by reporters or by former intelligence men added chapters to the ongoing saga of Nazi hunting [31] . At that point, attention focused on Martin Bormann, who was the leader of Odessa according to Wiesenthal [32] . The books on Bormann's flight to Argentina through Italy were even more unrealistic than the ones by Forsyth or Goldman. Moreover, it is now known that Argentinian spies and policemen cheated one author, Hungarian journalist Farago, and sold him forged documents and fake information [33] .

Still, those books were taken seriously in the second half of the 1970s. People and governments started to pay attention to the presence of former SS members in the Americas and other countries (Australia, South Africa, etc.), and to the fate of East-European collaborators and war criminals. Sereny remembered in her book that not only former SS members went through Italy, but also  members of the Russian Army of general Vlasov, who fought along the Germans and disbanded thousands of Ukrainian collaborators in Italy, and the soldiers of Polish general Anders, who fought against the Nazis and enroled war prisoners in his army. Moreover, according to Sereny, thousands of Nazis and collaborators fled from Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and Austria after the war and went to Italy, moving later to the Americas and Australia. At the end of the 1970s, this issue acquired new relevance because many former nazists and collaborators, who were living in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries, were reported. In 1979, the U.S. created a special bureau of investigation for this kind of criminals and in the following years the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. tried a number of post-war immigrants.

Anthony Lerman states that those initiatives were unsuccessful [34] . Even when the committees of inquiry discovered former Nazis, they were unable to prosecute them or the latter were acquitted, when tried. Nevertheless, the committees published reports [35] and other materials [36] . Thus, a large quantity of documents came to light, but it was not enough for the reading public and for publishers, who wanted something like the novels that had captured them in the 1970s. In any case, the decision to set up committees of inquiry taken by the U.S., Australian, British and Canadian governments drove reporters and free-lance writers to start their own parallel investigations. These free-lance inquiries were supplemented by two scandals. In 1983, Bolivia expulled war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was tried in France. The proceedings showed the protection that U.S. intelligence had given him [37] . This produced an enormous uproar and a number of books on Barbie's career went published [38] . The second scandal was in Austria, where in 1987 a campaign began against its president, Kurt Waldheim, because of his past in the German army. In this case too, books were written and their authors debunked the myth of "good" German or Austrian soldiers, who were only obeying orders [39] .

During that decade, essays replaced the novels of the 1970s, but they were mostly made of the same stuff: few documents, a lot of interviews and a lot of imagination sold as detective skill. A few authors tried to understand why the Nazis were not prosecuted after the war [40] and they pointed to the recruitment of former SS members by U.S. intelligence [41] . But many others just looked for sensational stories [42] . Some preferred to describe the activities of Wiesenthal and other Nazi hunters [43] or to write about Nazi hunting by governments. For the latter argument, a case in point is Allan A. Ryan, Jr., who authored Klaus Barbie and the United States government : exhibits to the report to the Attorney General of the United States [44] and Quiet Neighbours. Prosecuting Nazi war criminals in America [45] . These writings show clearly how many attorneys transformed themselves into reporters and writers, partly because they thought that people had to know, partly because of the high sales of those kinds of books.

At this point, many reporters started paying attention to the role of Swiss banks and also to the smuggling of Nazi gold to Latin America. In fact, they were looking for gold and goods stolen by Nazis and asking where they were hidden [46] . Unfortunately for them, they had not read the debunking article by Ronald C. Newton "The United States, the German-Argentines, and the myth of the Fourth Reich, 1943-1947" [47] . Newton demonstrates that tales about Nazi gold were the result of an operation of disinformation by the British intelligence at the end of World War II. The British were trying to convince the Germans to disert and thus they let leak mesmerizing news about Nazi leaders running away with enormous amount of gold.

Later Newton also demonstrates that the (dis)information about Hitler leaving Germany and reaching Argentina, or sending his gold there had the same origin [48] . Finally, Mario Rapoport and Andreés Musacchio did not find any trace of that gold in Buenos Aires [49] , but in the meantime a lot of authors took its existence for granted. Thus, for example, Jean Ziegler proposes a mix of facts and hypothesis about the nazi loot, Swiss banks an gold sent from Germany to Argentina via Switzerland and the Vatican [50] , that often does not work at all [51] .

Mark Aarons and John F. Loftus are two of the most important investigators who deal with the responsability of Swiss banks and the Vatican. Actually, Aarons started studying Nazi havens in Australia [52] , while Loftus tracked down Byelorussian collaborators [53] . Later, they worked together, co-authoring Ratlines (London, William Heineman, 1991) [54] and The Secret War against the Jews [55] . The former was printed in the U.S. as Unholy Trinity [56] and had a new and revised edition [57] . Loftus resumed part of their research in "La immigración de criminales de guerra nazis a Norteamérica" [58] . At the beginning of this short, but clever essay, Loftus states that he does not believe in the existence of a Nazi underground network, in particular Odessa, and Nazi U-boots transporting Hitler's gold to Argentina. On the contrary, he is sure that France, Great Britain and the United States helped the flight of former Nazis because of the Cold War [59] .

Aarons and Loftus do not at all like conspiracy theories, but in their way they contribute to enflate the sensationalistic side of Nazi hunting stories. For example, they state that at the end of the war there were 150,000 war criminals, and that only 50,000 were apprehended. Thus, according to them, 100,000 criminals just ran off away in the post-war period: still according to them, the Vatican sent 30,000 Germans and 30,000 ustashi criminals to Argentina (even if they concede that those criminals did not stay there, but used this nation only as a stopover); others went to Australia, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa, U.K. and the U.S.. Moreover, Loftus and Aarons involve British and U.S. intelligence as well as the Vatican and the Swiss banks in the smuggling of Nazis. Some of them (the banks) were just trying to gain as much as possible, others (the Vatican and the intelligence) were preparing, if not already fighting the cold war. They were trying to use former German spies against the USSR, but they were unable to understand that a lot of them were already controlled by Soviet intelligence. In any case, the Vatican, the intelligence services and the banks formed the "unholy trinity" that spirited away collaborators and former SS members.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Aarons and Loftus thesis has caused a sensation. It is well conceived, and the authors were apt to link together a large set of documentation from European and U.S. archives. Nevertheless, their data are exaggerated. Concerning numbers, we know that no more than 40,000 German-speaking emigrants went to Argentina from 1945 to 1955 [60] . Therefore, the estimate of 30,000 German war criminals coming to Argentina in that period seems to be quite ludicrous. Argentinian historian Ignacio Klich gives more reasonable numbers: "hasta 800 de ellos [the German-speaking immigrants] … estaban seriament comprometidos por su actuación en favor del nazismo, y 50 de éstos eran candidatos seguros a la clasificación como criminales de guerra" [61] . German historian Holger M. Meding adds that his team found documents in German archives about only 5 war criminals, 7 whose arrest had been ordered for alleged crimes but without legal proceedings being initiated, 6 whose proceedings for alleged crimes resulted in dismissal or acquittal, 10 high level persons with a nazi past not subject to accusation, arrest warrants or sentences, 8 Nazi propagandists, 5 who helped illegal migrants, and 4 scientists/businessmen. On the other hand, if, at the end of the war as many as 300,000 German soldiers went under arrest, after the war only 5,000 former Nazis were tried in what would become West Germany [62] .

Checking Aarons's and Loftus's numbers, I can add that we have a fair idea of how many refugees legally went through Italy between 1947 and 1951: there were no more than 210,000. 66,640 were resettled refugees from all over Europe and only 9,648 of them went to Argentina [63] . Those figures are too far from the ones given by Aarons and Loftus and it therefore seems very difficult to believe their statistics about war criminals.

I have the same problem with regard to other ideas of these two authors. They heavily stress the responsability of the Vatican as an institution and opposed to Vatican officials as individuals; moreover, they back their thesis by recalling Vatican politics before and during the war. Actually, the literature about the Vatican and Nazism is quite huge, and we have a lot of good books on this topic. When Sereny wrote her plea for a fair assessment, it was already at her disposal The Silence of Pius XII by Carlo Falconi [64] . Later, Ennio Di Nolfo and Owen Chadwick dealt with the contacts between the Allies and the Holy See [65] , while many books focused on the relationship between Pius XII and Hitler. From the Vatican side, the edition of the Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale, recently summarized by Pierre Blet, was meant to show that the pope acted beyond suspicion [66] . Recently John Cornwell gave exactly the opposite interpretation, but his work is flawed [67] . Giovanni Miccoli capped  35 years of  research by explaining that the Holy See  still believed that it would a kind of go-between au-dessus de la mêlée: this was a fault partly due to Vatican self-representation as a superior, spiritual force, answering more to God's demands than to human beings, partly to an out-of-date evaluation of European politics [68] .

Incidentally, Miccoli, who wrote the best book on the issue to date, also shows that historians do not need to check Vatican files anymore, because we have enough testimonies from other archives and from the memoirs of the principal political and religious actors of World War II. Unfortunately, the discussion about the need for opening the Vatican archives is still raging as demonstrates the preliminary report submitted to the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and to the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations by the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission [69] .

In the last years, new essays have condemned what the pope did [70] . Moreover, Wistrich has enphasized Pius XII's fear of communism in an interview with an Italian left-wing newspaper [71] . This idea is not unknown to Catholic historians, even if they exploited it by pulling the stress elsewhere. The already mentioned Robert A. Graham says that it is correct to see "the Holy See's attitude as conditioned by the presence of forces of evil in the vesture of belligerent states. In World War II there were two such forces, the Soviet Union and the National Socialist Reich" [72] .

To coming back to Aarons and Loftus, they transform Pius XII's dread of communism into the central pillar of their interpretation, but what Miccoli writes about the pope confirms what Sereny stated in 1974. The same doubt about Aarons' and Loftus' analysis could be raised when analyzing the issue of Swiss and Vatican banks. In the last 5 years, the CEANA and the U.S. government tried to follow the movement of those amounts of gold and goods [73] . The effort made by the Argentinian and U.S. commissions was huge, but they were unable to say the last word on the issue. In 2000, George Zivcovich et alii's legal suit again raised the question [74] ; nevertheless, it is too early to obtain an answer and it is possibile that in this case too, we are dealing with the consequences of the disinformation started by British intelligence at the end of the war.

Moreover, the Ustashis's passage through Rome and the Vatican involvement with them is well known according to Aarons and Loftus and to Marco Aurelio Rivelli [75] , but in their and other reconstructions of the subject there are lots of gaps to be filled [76] . For example, we know that Croatians built the socalled Ratline (see my comments on Meding's writings below) and that they helped U.S. intelligence smuggle a few Germans. But we also know that U.S. and British military police did not always protect Croatians: in April 1947, the Italian police and the British military police tried to get hold of many Croatians in Rome, looking for smugglers and war criminals [77] . We know that Hudal and Krunoslav Draganovic, the Croatian priest who seems to have been in charge of the ratline, cooperated for a while, but we also know that they were in competition with each other and that they did not trust the Vatican, because they thought that the pope and the cardinals were listening too closely to the syrens of U.S. protestant capitalism and of Soviet communism [78] !

The documents relating to Hudal and Draganovic show that many of their "friends" went to Argentina. Therefore, the study of smuggling operations in Italy is linked to the analysis of Nazi and Croatian immigration into Argentina. The essays and novels we have already quoted dedicate quite a few pages to the latter country, but we should take into account the research done by Argentinians. Already in the 1950s, Perón's opponents denounced the presence of former Nazis [79] . Thus the issue was linked to Perón's faults and their evaluation was influenced by judgements on the general and his regime. Consequently, it was very difficult to raise this issue. Only after 1983, did international debate involve Argentinian witnesses, historians, and novelists [80] . At the same time, a few Nazis felt free to publish their memoirs, in which they thanked the Catholic Church for its help [81] .

The strengthening of democracy in Argentina, tighter links with the U.S., and international pressure gave way to the necessity for a deeper analysis. Argentinian historians rethought the relationship between Argentina and Perón, on the one hand, and Hitler's Germany, on the other, as well as the relationship between Argentina and the United States [82] . Argentinian historians studied the arrival of immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1940s [83] .

In the 1990s, the question of  the immigration of Nazis and war criminals was covered in Argentina not only the people who already studied it [84] , but also by a number of reporters. Jorge Camarasa wrote a first, scandalmongering book in 1992 [85] , then rewrote and softened it as Odessa al Sur [86] . Camarasa accepts as true every myth (or almost) about Odessa, the nazi gold and Bormann's fligth to Argentina: the chapters on these arguments are so sensationalistic, even in the softened version, that the Italian translator added a disclaimer stressing that Bormann died in 1945 [87] . Regarding to Italy, Camarasa writes that the Catholic Church helped 5,000 war criminals from 1945 to 1949 and that Walter Rauff, former chief of the German Nazi intelligence in Northern Italy and Bormann's right-hand man, had an illegal bureau in Genoa helping German illegal emigration. Camarasa depicts a nightmarish Italian landscape, were Nazi priests deal with easily corrupted civil servants. Nevertheless, his description of Latin America is even more dreadful. In fact, his book deals mostly with what happened after the flight from Germany and the Italian stopover. The real problem for him are Nazis' activities in Argentina and other Latin American countries, and his book deals a lot more with this issue than with the escape from Europe.

In Argentina and Italy, Camarasa's seemed a good, even if sensational, introduction to understanding the Priebke affair. The literature about the latter is quite considerable. Wladimiro Settimelli, a reporter for Unità, then owned by the former communist party, wrote Herbert Kappler and edited Priebke e il massacro delle Ardeatine, in which he gathered testimonies on the massacre as well as a few papers by historians [88] . Cinzia Del Mazo and Simona Micheli authored  a book on the trial and published other documents [89] . Walter Leszl, professor of Ancient history at the University of Florence, tried to show that not only was Priebke guilty, but that he should have been tried by a civil court, because his act of murder was a political and not a war action [90] .

In hindsight, Leszl seems to be absolutely right about the trial, but it was a very polemical stance to take at that time. In Italy a fierce debate raged about the massacre of the "Fosse Ardeatine" and the previous attack to the German army. Many wrote that without that attack, the Germans would have not killed their prisoners. A group of old-time right-wingers falsely stated that if the partisans had surrendered, the Germans would have freed their hostages [91] . In Italy and in Europe there was a violent neofascist and neonazis protest in favor of Priebke: many openly showed their solidarity with Priebke [92] , while others declared that the trials were a Jewish trick to blackmail Swiss banks and European governments [93] . At the same time, neonazis were active in the streets and on the web, where they posted comments on Priebke's "heroism" [94] .

Neofascists and neonazis did not study Priebke's flight from Italy, but even books by left-wing authors did not expand on this issue. It is possible to find something on this only browsing the net [95] or reading the books by Robert Katz, and Elena Llorente and Martino Rigacci.

Many years ago, Robert Katz wrote  a famous book about the "Fosse Ardeatine", which was even adapted to the screen [96] . In 1994, Harry Phillips, free-lance writer-producer for the ABC's Prime Time Live, discovered that Priebke was living at San Carlos de Bariloche and asked Katz for advice. Altough Katz did not do anything relevant, the broadcast (which was aired on 5 May 1994) brought about Priebke's extradition. Therefore, it was natural that Katz covered the Italian proceedings and then wrote Dossier Priebke. Anatomia di un processo directly for Italian readers [97] .

In his new book, Katz reconstructed the history of the massacre, Priebke's flight, his discovery in Argentina and the first trial. Katz stressed that many knew Priebke's whereabouts. Already in 1989 Serge and Arno Klarsfeld told the Italian Foreign Affairs about Priebke. The Italian honorary vice-consul in Bariloche knew Priebke's past, but decided that the latter had repented and thus that it was useless to denounce him. According to Katz, something similar happened at the end of the war. At that time, Priebke went from Brescia to Vipiteno (Bolzano). Later, the British captured him and he was interned at the miltary camp of Rimini (13 March 1945) and then at the Camp Afragola, were he was questioned. On August 1946, he was back to Rimini, where he escaped. He went to Vipiteno, where the Americans looked for him at least twice (17.5.1947 and 21.10.1947), without finding him. Meanwhile, always according to Katz, he was caught by the British and even brought to Rome, but later he was able to flee again or someone let him free. Finally, Priebke escaped to Argentina.

Katz reportes that in 1994 Priebke told an Argentinian reporter that he was helped by the Catholic Church and thanked Hudal, who had told him how to reach Buenos Aires. But in a 1996 memoir, Priebke stated that an Italian friend, a fascist from Brescia, helped him to get a visa for Argentina. After a while, according to Katz, the friend from Brescia also fled too to Buenos Aires (this is interesting because nobody is studying the links among Italian fascists and German Nazis during their escape). In any case, Priebke had a Red Cross passport and tickets. So maybe he was also helped by Hudal or by some other priest. Katz declares however that there is no proof of Odessa's involvement in the escape, nor in Priebke's later life or in the trial. According to Katz, someone paid something for the lawyers, but Priebke was clearly broke during the trial and no one was giving him financial aid [98] . At the beginning of the book, Katz mentioned other German fugitives, for example Juan Maler (alias Reinhard Kopps), in relation to the Ratline and the help by the Vatican and the British and U.S. intelligence. But this part is not original, and it is very short.