The Ratlines

On the evening of 14 July 1950, a passenger named Ricardo Klement walked down the gangplank of the steamship Giovanna C in the port of Buenos Aires. He had sailed from Genoa as a refugee. His papers were in order. He carried a Red Cross travel document, an Argentine landing permit and a baptism certificate from a parish priest in Genoa. He had a job waiting for him at the Capri construction company in Tucumán. Within a year he would send for his wife and three sons. Within a decade his wife and one of those sons would meet a young man named Nicolas Eichmann, who would mention to his Jewish girlfriend that his father had been an officer in the SS.

Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann. The papers he carried had been arranged for him in Rome by an Austrian bishop named Alois Hudal, working out of a small German seminary on the Tiber called Santa Maria dell’Anima. Hudal had taken Eichmann’s confession, given him a new name, written him a character reference, and put him on a train to Genoa with a list of contacts to find at the dockside. The fee, paid by Eichmann’s family in Linz to a Vatican charity, was modest. The receiving country, Argentina, knew exactly what kind of man it was admitting; the immigration officer in Genoa had been briefed by an Argentine diplomatic officer who specialised in SS arrivals. The man who had organised the deportation of two-thirds of European Jewry had, in a four-month operation that anyone could have stopped at any of half a dozen points, walked free.

The escape route Eichmann travelled was used, by the most credible estimates, by between five hundred and a thousand SS men, Wehrmacht officers, Gestapo officials, doctors from the camps, Croatian Ustaše, French collaborators, Belgian Rexists and Hungarian Arrow Cross. The number is small against the total of perpetrators. The men who used it were not. They included the architect of the Final Solution, the doctor of Auschwitz, the commandant of Treblinka, the inventor of the gas vans, the Gestapo chief of Lyon and the deporter of the Jews of Vienna, Salonika and Drancy. The system that moved them is now called the ratlines. It is the most disgraceful chapter of the postwar period. It is also one of the least examined.

How a man becomes a refugee

The first problem the SS officer faced in 1945 was not transport. It was identity. The new occupying powers had captured the personnel files of the SS at Berlin-Lichterfelde. They had captured the identity card files of the Reich Main Security Office. They had photographs, fingerprints, signatures. To leave Germany under his own name was to be arrested at the first border crossing.

The escape system solved this through a bureaucratic device that the postwar world had set up for innocent reasons. Across Europe in 1945 there were millions of displaced persons: forced labourers from the East, concentration camp survivors, prisoners of war, civilians whose homes lay across borders that had moved. None of them had usable papers. The International Committee of the Red Cross began issuing temporary travel documents, the so-called Red Cross passports, on the basis of declarations and supporting paperwork. The Red Cross was not a police force. It accepted what it was told.

The supporting paperwork could be a baptism certificate from an Italian parish, a letter of identification from a Catholic welfare bureau, a sworn statement from a witness. None of these documents was hard to obtain if you had a sympathetic priest. By the autumn of 1945 a small number of priests in Rome, in northern Italy, in Innsbruck, in southern Germany had decided that the SS men were souls in need. They wrote the certificates. The Red Cross issued the passports. The names on the passports were new. The men holding them were the same.

The route from a German monastery to a Genoese dock typically took six months. The fugitive lived in a religious house, sometimes for weeks, while the paperwork was assembled. He learned a new biography. He was given a contact name in Rome. He travelled south on local trains, often dressed as a priest. In Rome he stayed in a Catholic hostel until his ship was ready. The names of the houses recur in survivor accounts: Santa Maria dell’Anima for Germans and Austrians, San Girolamo degli Illirici for Croats and Slovenes, the Capuchin houses of the Veneto, the Franciscan friars of Bolzano. The shipping line was usually Genoa to Buenos Aires, sometimes Naples to Damascus, occasionally Hamburg to Asunción.

Bishop Hudal

The man at the centre of the German operation was Alois Hudal, an Austrian theologian who ran the Pontificio Istituto Teutonico di Santa Maria dell’Anima, the German national seminary in Rome, from 1923 to 1952. Hudal was sixty when the war ended. He had spent the 1930s arguing, in print and to anyone who would listen in the Vatican, that National Socialism could be reconciled with the Catholic Church. His 1937 book Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, published in Vienna, sought a middle position between Hitler and the Pope. Pius XI rejected the book; Hudal was sidelined. By 1945 he was a marginal figure in the Curia.

The marginality liberated him. From 1944 onwards Hudal organised, on his own authority, the rescue of as many SS men as he could reach. He raised money from German and Austrian Catholic sources. He arranged baptism certificates with sympathetic Italian priests. He wrote personal letters of recommendation, on the seminary’s headed paper, to Argentine officials in Rome. He paid passage. He met arrivals at Roman railway stations. He kept a list, which has not survived, of the men he had helped.

What survives is his own memoir, Römische Tagebücher, published in 1976 after his death. Hudal there describes his work as a Christian mission. He writes that after 1945 his task as a priest had been to help, with all the means at my disposal, the chief culprits of the so-called war crimes. He names some of the men. He expresses no regret. The book is one of the strangest postwar documents in print: a Catholic bishop’s matter-of-fact account of how he saved Eichmann, Stangl and Rauff, written in the same calm voice in which he describes his liturgical reforms.

The men Hudal moved are by themselves a charge sheet. Franz Stangl had commanded Treblinka, where 800,000 Jews were murdered in fourteen months. Hudal arranged Stangl’s papers, his train fare and his ticket on the Italian liner Antoniotto Usodimare in 1948. Stangl ended up in Brazil, working at a Volkswagen plant in São Paulo, where he lived openly under his own name for sixteen years. Walter Rauff had supervised the gas vans that killed perhaps 100,000 people in occupied Russia and Belarus. Hudal sent him to Damascus and then to Chile. Erich Priebke had personally shot prisoners at the Ardeatine caves outside Rome on 24 March 1944. Hudal moved him to Bariloche in Argentina, where he ran a delicatessen for fifty years. Gustav Wagner of Sobibór, Eduard Roschmann of Riga, dozens of others, passed through the same hands. The cost to the Vatican of stopping any of this would have been a single phone call to the Roman police.

The Croatian channel

A parallel operation ran out of the Croatian college of San Girolamo degli Illirici, near Piazza Cavour in Rome, under the direction of a Franciscan priest named Krunoslav Draganović. Draganović had served as a chaplain to the Ustaše regime, the Croatian fascist movement responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma at the Jasenovac complex of camps. He arrived in Rome at the end of the war as part of a small group of Ustaše clergy and laymen who had brought their archives, their gold reserves and their political ambitions with them. He set up his ratline operation within months.

Draganović’s clients were Croats first. He moved Ante Pavelić, the Ustaše head of state, to Argentina in 1948 under the false name Pablo Aranyos. He moved most of the Ustaše leadership the same way. The operation gradually expanded to take in non-Croat clients including Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon known as the Butcher of Lyon, who had personally tortured prisoners and had deported the children of Izieu, forty-four Jewish children and their carers, to Auschwitz. Draganović moved Barbie to Bolivia in 1951.

The Barbie case is the documented one. A 1983 United States Department of Justice report, the Ryan Report, established that the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria had been employing Barbie since 1947 as an informant on Communist activity. When the French began asking for him in 1950 the CIC could neither hand him over nor risk a public scandal. They paid Draganović 1,400 dollars in cash to move Barbie, his wife and two children to South America under a Croatian identity. Draganović delivered. Barbie lived in La Paz for thirty-two years, advised the regime of Hugo Banzer Suárez on counter-insurgency methods that drew on his Lyon experience, and ran a security company that sold arms in the region. France finally got him back in 1983 after Bolivia’s return to civilian government. He was tried in Lyon in 1987, convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to life and died in prison in 1991.

The Ryan Report concluded that the United States government owed France an apology. The apology was duly given. It did not, of course, undo the thirty-two years.

What did the Vatican know

The question is unavoidable. Hudal was not a freelance priest operating in private. He held a Vatican title. He used Vatican stationery. He drew on Vatican networks. The Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, the Pope’s main relief office, processed thousands of refugee cases including those for which Hudal supplied paperwork. The Holy See’s anti-Communist diplomacy in the early Cold War made escape routes for men fleeing east-bloc persecution a sympathetic cause; the line between an anti-Communist refugee and a wanted war criminal was deliberately left blurred.

The pontificate of Pius XII closed its archives in 1958. They reopened to researchers in March 2020. Five years of work since then, principally by historians at the German Historical Institute in Rome and the Vatican Apostolic Archive itself, has given the fullest picture available. The picture is not of a coordinated central conspiracy. The picture is of an institution that had survived the previous twelve years alongside the Reich, that now faced men in cassocks who said these were souls in need, and that did not look closely. Pius XII himself appears to have been informed in general terms of Hudal’s activities. He did not approve them in writing. He did not stop them. The Curia tolerated the operation. Some senior figures, the Substitute at the Secretariat of State Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Paul VI, knew enough to be uncomfortable. The discomfort did not produce action.

That is the fairest summary of an unfair record. Reasonable people will continue to argue about how much Pius XII knew and when. Reasonable people cannot argue about the outcome. The outcome was that the highest religious authority in Western Christendom failed to use any of its considerable powers to stop a small group of priests on its own staff from moving the architects of the Holocaust to safe havens. That failure is part of the moral record of the postwar Church. It is unfinished business.

Argentina

The receiving end of the principal ratline was the government of Juan Domingo Perón, who took office as President of Argentina in June 1946 and held it until his overthrow in 1955. Perón’s government openly recruited German engineers, scientists, technicians and pilots in the months after the war; the recruitment was justified as economic development and was not in itself controversial. What ran alongside it, and was not justified at all, was a separate immigration channel for Nazi war criminals.

The channel was administered by an Argentine immigration office in Rome under a senior figure, Carlos Fuldner. Fuldner was an Argentine of German descent who had served in the SS during the war. After 1945 he returned to Buenos Aires, was given a presidential commission and set up his Roman operation. Fuldner’s office processed perhaps three hundred SS arrivals a year between 1947 and 1951. The names on the manifests are unmistakable: Eichmann under his alias, Mengele under his alias, Priebke, Roschmann, Schwammberger, Pribke, Klingenfuss. Perón knew. The Argentine intelligence services knew. The Argentine immigration ministry knew. The Argentine archives, opened in part since the 1990s and further since the Kirchner government’s openness initiatives of the 2000s, document the operation in detail.

What did Argentina want from the trade? Perón’s calculations were several. He wanted technical skills for an industrialising economy. He wanted an ideological tilt against the Anglo-American powers that had humiliated his country during the war. He wanted to mobilise the substantial German-Argentine community as a domestic political bloc. He wanted, in some accounts, ransom payments and donations from the funds the SS men brought with them. The mix of motives is not fully clear. The result is.

The American hand

The United States was implicated in three distinct ways. The first was the operational use of Draganović for the Barbie evacuation, documented by the Ryan Report. The second was Operation Paperclip, the recruitment of German rocket and weapons scientists, including Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and Hubertus Strughold. Their war records, including in the case of Rudolph the use of slave labour at the Mittelbau-Dora missile factory where prisoners died at a rate of one in three, were systematically scrubbed from their immigration files. The third was the absorption of Reinhard Gehlen, head of Wehrmacht intelligence on the Eastern Front, and his network of former officers as the basis for postwar West German intelligence.

None of these decisions was made by a single rogue officer. They were policy. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency in Washington signed off on Paperclip; the Office of Strategic Services and its successor the Central Intelligence Agency ran the Gehlen relationship; the CIC paid Draganović. The decisions were defended at the time on the grounds of Cold War necessity. They are not defensible now. They have produced fifty years of slow embarrassment as one file after another has been declassified.

The Soviet Union ran a parallel operation in its own zone, recruiting German specialists for its weapons programmes; the British took officers into the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and the Joint Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee. The pattern was not American alone. It was the pattern of every postwar intelligence service that decided that wartime crimes were less important than the next conflict. The men who built the camps had skills the new conflict needed. They were therefore not punished. Most of them were paid.

Where they went

Eichmann lived as Ricardo Klement in San Fernando outside Buenos Aires for a decade, working as a foreman at the Mercedes-Benz plant. Israeli agents seized him on the evening of 11 May 1960 on the road outside his house. He was hooded, drugged, hidden for nine days in a safe house and flown out of Argentina on an El Al charter as a sedated airline crew member. He was tried in Jerusalem in 1961, convicted, hanged in May 1962 and his ashes were scattered at sea outside Israeli waters.

Mengele lived in Argentina, then Paraguay, then Brazil. He was hunted but never caught. He drowned while swimming off Bertioga in February 1979, was buried under a false name at Embu, was exhumed in 1985 and identified through dental records and skull morphology. Forensic confirmation came from DNA analysis in 1992.

Stangl lived in Brazil under his own name, working at a Volkswagen plant in São Paulo, until Simon Wiesenthal located him in 1967 and Brazilian authorities extradited him to West Germany. He was sentenced to life and gave Gitta Sereny a hundred hours of interviews from his cell before dying of heart failure in 1971. Sereny’s resulting book, Into That Darkness, is the most extraordinary postwar interrogation of a perpetrator on record.

Rauff lived in Punta Arenas at the southern tip of Chile, ran a fish-canning factory, declined repeated extradition requests under the Pinochet government and died in 1984. The German consul attended his funeral.

Brunner, Eichmann’s deputy in the deportation office, lived in Damascus under Syrian state protection, advising the Assad regimes on intelligence techniques. The Mossad sent him letter bombs in 1961 and 1980 that took an eye and several fingers but did not kill him. Syria refused every extradition request. He died, probably in 2010 although Syria has never confirmed the date, at over ninety.

Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga whom Frederick Forsyth made notorious in his 1972 novel The Odessa File, lived in Argentina until the novel made him too well known, fled to Paraguay and died there in 1977.

Priebke lived openly in Bariloche for fifty years, met visiting German tourists at his delicatessen, was confronted on camera by the American journalist Sam Donaldson in 1994, was extradited to Italy, tried and convicted at the age of 82, served his sentence under house arrest at the Roman home of his lawyer and died there in 2013 at the age of 100. He had outlived almost everyone who had known what he had done.

The ODESSA myth

Forsyth’s The Odessa File is good fiction. It is not history. ODESSA, supposedly Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, was a vague postwar SS welfare network that did exist in modest form, principally to assist with pensions, employment and legal defence funds for former SS men who remained in Germany. It did not run the escape system. The escape system was a patchwork of priests, dock agents, immigration officers and intelligence officers. There was no central headquarters. There was no Odessa membership card. The myth of a single sinister organisation has had a curious effect: it lets the actual responsible institutions, the Vatican welfare offices, the Argentine immigration ministry, the United States Counter Intelligence Corps, off the hook by pretending the work was done by a phantom that no real institution can be held responsible for. The phantom was a novelist’s invention. The institutions were real. They are still in business.

What the routes show

The ratlines are the measure of how seriously the postwar order took the murder of six million Jews. The trial at Nuremberg said the murder was the supreme international crime. The escape networks said something different. They said that the murder, in the calculation of the men who actually held power in Rome, in Buenos Aires, in Washington, in Berne, was a matter that could be subordinated to other priorities: anti-Communism, technical recruitment, religious solidarity, plain self-interest. The men who pulled the levers of the new order looked at the men who had run the camps and decided that some of them could be useful, some could be tolerated, and most could be left in peace.

The hunters who later spent their lives reversing this calculation, Wiesenthal in Vienna, the Klarsfelds in Paris, Friedman in Haifa, Rosenbaum at the Office of Special Investigations, the Mossad in its operational decades, were not making up the work. They were doing the work that the governments and churches of 1945 to 1950 had refused to do. They were small. They were underfunded. They were sometimes attacked by their own communities for the obsessiveness of what they were doing. Most of them died still working. Their work is the answer to the ratlines. It is also the proof that the ratlines were avoidable. What was missing in 1947 was not the means to stop them. It was the will.

See also

Sources

  • Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice, Oxford University Press, 2011
  • Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Granta, revised edition 2022
  • Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks, St Martin’s Press, 1991
  • Allan A. Ryan, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, U.S. Department of Justice, 1983
  • Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988
  • Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, Andre Deutsch, 1974
  • Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009
  • Daniel Stahl, Nazi-Jagd: Südamerikas Diktaturen und die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen, Wallstein, 2013
  • Hubert Wolf, Der Papst und der Holocaust: Pius XII. und die geheimen Akten im Vatikan, C.H. Beck, 2025