Fact: 9,000 Nazis Escaped to South America

Readers will know that many Nazis escaped the aftermath of WWII in Europe, some with the aid of the infamous ODESSA organization and the Vatican, and some with the aid of victorious allied governments eager to use Nazi technology secrets. Now there is documentary proof of the ratlines out of defeated Germany. Secret documentary files in Brazil and Chile accessed by German prosecutors searching for Nazis returned to the Fatherland have leaked to the press. An estimated 9,000 war criminals including Croatians, Ukrainians, and Russians who aided the Nazi extermination machine, escaped to South America. About 5,000 went to Argentina whose dictator, Juan Peron, sold 10,000 blank passports to ODESSA, the organization set up before the final defeat of Germany to aid SS officers to escape allied armies. Between 1,500 and 2,000 went to Brazil; between 500 and 1,000 to Chile; the remainder to Paraguay and Uruguay. A few hundred more are thought to have fled to right-wing regimes in the Middle East.

In a related development, the former Nazi Sobibor camp guard John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, who lost his US citizenship and was extradited to stand trial for his participation in the death of 28,000 Jews, died in Bavaria, Germany last Saturday. He denied his involvement to the end, claiming he was a helpless Ukrainian POW victimized by the SS. Hundred of thousands of Jews lost their lives at Sobibor although it was only staffed by about 20 SS officers [above, insignia of the 13th Standarten, SS-Totenkopfverbande]. He was at the top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of wanted Nazi war criminals, and was convicted of war crimes in abstentia by an Israeli court in 1991. That conviction was overturned on appeal after new evidence indicated a case of mistaken identity. The 2009 conviction in Munich was based almost entirely on documentary evidence since there were no surviving witnesses to his crimes. Demjanjuk was 91. Reportedly, his last request was to have his body returned to the United States for burial.