It was the 31st of January 1943, and after a gruelling 6 month battle over the politically
vital city of Stalingrad, GeneralFeldMarschall Friedrich Paulus announces his and the German
6th army’s surrender, and thus Stalingrad is completely recaptured by the Red Army within
the next couple days. It was this pivotal point in history that many believe was the
turning point for the Germans in World War 2. They lost all their momentum in Russia,
and from that day forward, the slow push all the way back to Berlin began for the allies.
Nazi Germany was beginning to crumble, and despite Hitler’s propagandised reassurances,
doubts were beginning to form in many people’s minds, and the self-preservation instinct kicked
in for a lot of high-ranking Nazi’s and facists who knew they would be prosecuted at the wars end.
This started a chain reaction that led to what came to be known as the Ratlines after the war,
a series of routes that helped hundreds of fascist war criminals escape the swift
and brutal hand of Justice present in a post world war 2 society. In today’s Front Episode,
we’ll be taking at the reality of the escape networks that helped these war criminals and
we’ll be answering a lot of those why questions people often have with a topic like this,
such as why certain countries took them in, why there wasn’t more done to track them
down and much more. Anyway, without further adieu, let’s get into the juice of the video.
The first hints of a ratline beginning to form actually came in as early as 1942,
where shady Vatican and Argentine relations subtly spelt a get out of jail free card for Fascist war
criminals if they ever needed it. This hint came in the form of a probe from an Italian Cardinal
to an Argentine Ambassador which inquired as to the the "willingness of the government of the
Argentine Republic to apply its immigration law generously, in order to encourage at the opportune
moment European Catholic immigrants to seek the necessary land and capital in our country”.
Despite early rumblings that came from the Vatican in Rome, it was unsurprisingly Spain
that became the first actual center of ratline activity that helped facilitate the escape of
war criminals after World War 2. By 1946, Spain sheltered hundreds of War criminals and thousands
more fleeing Nazi’s and facists, and pretty much had the full support of the Vatican world wide,
with various historians claiming that they "preferred to see fascist war criminals on board
ships sailing to the New World rather than seeing them rotting in POW camps in zonal Germany".
One of the most notable efforts to help the war criminals escape came in the form of Bishop Alois
Hudal. Hudal, a Nazi sympathiser from early on, held a position from December 1944 that
allowed him to directly communicate with Germans in internment camps. He used this role and,
the chaos and confusion directly after World War 2 to aid all sorts of Nazi’s that were
destined for the hangman. Some of the men he was instrumental in helping included Franz Stangl,
the commanding officer of Treblinka, Gustav Wagner, the commanding officer of Sobibor,
Alois Brunner, the man responsible for the Drancy internment camp near
Paris and in charge of deportations in Slovakia to German concentration camps,
and the notorious Adolf Eichmann, more commonly known as the architect of Auschwitz.
Hudal is pretty unapologetic in his memoirs and we’ll get to that soon, but first I just
want to provide some context into how the whole process of aiding rogue Nazi’s actually went.
Through the Vatican Refugee Organisation, Hudal and numerous other Nazi sympathisers in the
Catholic system were able to quite easily provide false papers in the form of identity documents.
Although the documents weren’t full passports, they had enough weight that they were able to
obtain a displaced persons passport from the red cross, from which could be used to successfully
apply for Visas. In practise, the Red Cross was supposed to perform background checks on the
applicants for their displaced persons passport program, but the reality of the situation was
that due to the sheer backlog of applicants and confusion that followed World War 2,
the word of a priest or bishop would almost always be good enough, and luckily for these Nazi’s,
a lot of their help did come from the Vatican, meaning this was a very popular method of escape.
Going back to Hudal and offering some insight into why some people
did help these war criminals escape, he justified his actions by stating:
“The Allies' War against Germany was not a crusade, but the rivalry of economic complexes
for whose victory they had been fighting. This so-called business ... used catchwords
like democracy, race, religious liberty and Christianity as a bait for the masses. All these
experiences were the reason why I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my whole charitable work
mainly to former National Socialists and Fascists, especially to so-called 'war criminals'.”
But, alas, although Hudal’s operation in itself was influential, it paled in comparison to some
of the other Ratlines that were developed post World War 2. One of these was to be dubbed the
San Girolamo Ratline which was operated by a small yet powerful group of Croatian priests,
led by Father Krunoslav Draganović. This highly complex chain had ties to Austria
through to Croatia and all the way to an escape route in Italy that led to Spain
and Portugal. Although initially used to smuggle out Ustasha war criminals,
the network quickly began to aids Germans, Hungarians and Romanians, and although they were
picked up by US intelligence in around 1947, they had a foolproof plan that worked in almost any
situation. After using their ties around Europe to get in contact with the intended escapee,
they would quickly shuffle them to a Croatian monastery, get the false documents ready, and
then completely negate the danger of what would usually be the most dangerous part of the trip.
Due to the status these Croatian Catholics had with the Vatican in Italy, they were
granted a car with a chauffeur several times a week that held a diplomatic license plate,
meaning that on their way to Italy, you weren’t legally allowed to stop them. And to
make things even more secure, the escapees were dropped off at the Monastery of San Geronimo,
hence the name, which also had a large degree of immunity from authorities.
Ultimately, Draganović’s network helped dozens of Nazi’s and facist war criminals
escape to places such as Argentina, including the infamous Croatian fascist Ante Pavelić, who
he sheltered directly after the war for a while until providing him an escape route to Spain.
And finally, we’re going to talk about the countries that ultimately sheltered some of these
monsters, the context of why they did it, and the satisfying end to some of these war criminals
despite their escape. First, there was Spain and Portugal. Spain in World War 2 had fascist
leanings and although Portugal’s Government was more so pro-ally, they too had a heavy contingent
of fascists that were willing to help the Nazi’s out. With that said, this made that Western point
of Europe an attractive spot to either settle down or travel through in Ratlines for many of these
Nazi’s in exile. Spain was an essential route for many fascist criminals escaping to South America,
which leads me to the next big country that helped out a Nazi in need, Argentina.
Due to a large German immigrant community, a desire to gain Nazi expertise, as well
as a Government with fascist leanings, the Argentines were more than happy to help a
brother out and actually created their own small scale ratlines through Scandinavia,
Switzerland and Belgium. Although technically declaring war on the Axis a month prior to their
downfall, many historians speculate that this was just a ploy to begin preparing an
institutionalised network of Ratlines, aided by various sources such as Draganović’s and
Hudal’s that operated from January 1946 to at least the mid 1950’s. As previously stated,
having ties with sympathetic members of the Vatican, Argentina was a popular destination
for many war criminals after receiving their passports from the Red Cross, and they were
welcomed and quickly integrated with society under their new false names and identities.
The biggest organisation however, naturally came from the Germans themselves, and keep in
mind I have been overemphasizing Argentine and Vatican Ratlines because they were the
more recently discovered. But before this however, the common view was that the Nazi’s
ran their Ratlines pretty much by themselves with the support of a few sympathisers on
the outside. Well in conjunction with the other organisations and systems mentioned
in the video that researchers have only just discovered, that base fact still does remain,
and various cells of SS members that managed to escape earlier were the
primary ones that built up a network to help out other Nazi’s that were trying to flee.
Through these different cells, help from select priests and bishops as well as aid
from countries such as Argentina, Spain, Italy, Syria and Egypt,
over 10,000 former German military, primarily SS and Gestapo, were able to escape to all corners
of the globe and live under an assumed identity for the rest of their lives.
With that said, not all that escaped lived happily ever after. Some high-ranking Nazi’s
were perpetrators of crimes so severe that intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad
was not willing to just let it slide. They would mercilessly track down Nazi’s
and if they didn’t manage to capture them, they would at the very least keep them on
their toes and cause severe stress from all the hiding they were forced to do.
I’m going to show a quick 30 second slideshow of some high profile Nazi’s and their fates
in just a second but just before I do, I want to state that the in depth information about
Ratlines is highly conjectural and highly controversial. Although the general picture
is correct and the roles of individuals such as Hudal and Draganović is undisputed, the larger
role of the Vatican and various institutions is still subject to heated debate. With that said
more and more and more is being uncovered by historians and hopefully we’ll have a clearer
and more definitive answer to this chaotic time in the near future. Anyways enjoy the Slideshow