Nazi Criminals Escaped to South America, Ratlines, Argentina Post WW2 Refuge, President Milei Releases Files
Last edited Fri May 29, 2026, 08:00 PM - Edit history (4)
- 'The 7 Most Notorious Nazis Who Escaped to South America.' In some cases, it took 4 or 5 decades to bring them to justice. History, May 28, 2025.
After Allied forces defeated Germany in World War II, Europe became a difficult place to be associated with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. Thousands of Nazi officers, high-ranking party members and collaborators—including many notorious war criminals—escaped across the Atlantic, finding refuge in South America, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.
Argentina, for one, was already home to hundreds of thousands of German immigrants and had maintained close ties to Germany during the war. After 1945, Argentine President Juan Perón, himself drawn to fascist ideologies, enlisted intelligence officers and diplomats to help establish “rat lines,” or escape routes via Spanish and Italian ports, for many in the Third Reich.
Also giving aid: the Vatican in Rome, which in seeking to help Catholic war refugees also facilitated fleeing Nazis—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not...*The 7: Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, Walter Rauff, Franz Stangl, Josef Schwammberger, Erich Priebke, Gerhard Bohne
https://www.history.com/articles/the-7-most-notorious-nazis-who-escaped-to-south-america
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- Wiki, RATLINES (WW II). The ratlines were systems of escape routes used by Nazis and their collaborators to flee Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II.
These routes mainly led toward havens in South America – particularly Argentina – in addition to Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. Some escapees also settled at the various transfer points or used them to flee elsewhere.
Two primary routes from Germany to South America developed independently with their operators eventually collaborating; the 1st transferred through Spain and the 2nd through Rome and Genoa. The ratlines were supported by some clergy of the Catholic Church, such as Austrian bishop Alois Hudal and Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganović, as well as some outlets of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The Nazis paid Argentine officials (starting c. 1943) to shield their agents, bolstering the rise of Juan Perón, whose regime set up additional ratlines through Scandinavia and Switzerland. Significant Nazis and their collaborators escaped, including Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić, as well as SS officers Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, both perpetrators of the Holocaust...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II)
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- 'Argentina Lifts Veil on Its Past As a Refuge for Nazis,' The Week, May 18, 2025. President Javier Milei publishes documents detailing country's role as post-WW2 'haven' for Nazis, incl. Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. -Ed.
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.. The flight of thousands of Nazi party members to Argentina after the Second World War remains "an extremely uncomfortable period" in the country's history. Argentina has not been good at "reckoning with its past as a haven for war criminals". President Javier Milei, however, "appears to have changed tack". On 29 April, he released 1,850 documents from the national archives containing details, said the Buenos Aires Herald, of "prominent Nazi criminals who escaped to Argentina" – including Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz doctor known as the "Angel of Death".
Most of the documents, a mix of police and intelligence agency files, were declassified in 1992 but "remained almost impossible to access", said The Times. They were only viewable "by appointment, in a single designated room"...
https://theweek.com/history/argentina-nazi-files-javier-milei
- 'The Ratlines: How Nazis Escaped Europe After WWII' (15:12 mins). State Archives, 2026.
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- Wiki. ODESSA is an American codename (from the German: Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning: Organization of Former SS Members) coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as ratlines.
Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
Although an unknown number of wanted Nazis and war criminals escaped Germany and often Europe, most experts deny that an organisation called ODESSA ever existed. The term itself is only recorded certainly as an American construction, coined to cover a range of planning, arrangements, including those enacted and those simply envisaged, and both known and hypothesised groups. There has been and remains some confusion over the years of the use of the term ODESSA. About 300 Nazis found their way to Argentina with support from Juan Perón after he was democratically elected president of Argentina in 1946...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODESSA
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- 'Why Did the Nazis Flee to Argentina?' (29 min). YouTube Description: As the Allied armies advanced through France, Italy and Eastern Europe, high ranking officials and officers in the German National Socialist Party (Nazi), the SS and the Wehrmacht seem to have finally realized that taking on most of the largest, most industrialized countries in the world at the same time had not been the wisest idea...
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