Chile - Top Secret: The clandestine underworld of the CIA, the KGB, DINA and the Nazis by Carlos Basso

Author:Carlos Basso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Published: 2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

the last of theirs

Latin America was one of the main destinations for the Nazis fleeing among the remains of Europe which they devastated until 1945, but we are not very mistaken if we say that hundreds, perhaps thousands of criminals who took refuge in our countries, there were four Gestapo and SS officers who stood out, both for the cruelty with which they acted against the defenseless, and for the fame they achieved acquired.

Perhaps the most famous of all was Doctor Josef Mengele, known as the "angel of death", who lived between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, also spending brief periods in Chile. Denounced for the experiments carried out on prisoners (mostly Jews), he was protected by the government of Juan Domingo Perón and Alfredo Stroessner, and ended up drowning on the beach of Embu, in Brazil, in 1979.

Several years earlier, in 1961, a command of the Mossad had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, lieutenant colonel of the SS and one of the principal persons in charge of the application of "the final solution" in Buenos Aires, as the chapter on Henry Hecksher. .

Taken secretly to Jerusalem, he was subjected to a controversial trial, at the end of which he was sentenced to death. However, this process -apart from its intrinsic importance- left an enormous legacy to the world of thought, since it was here that the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who covered the case for the New Yorker magazine, created the concept of " the banality of evil". .

Unlike many who wanted to see Eichmann as a monster, she observed an ordinary man, a bureaucrat without much intelligence, who strictly enforced the extermination laws, even knowing that what he was doing was criminal, but without even questioning it. question. .

Then would come the turn of Klaus Barbie, the assassin of the leader of the French resistance Jean Moulin and author of several crimes at the head of the Gestapo in Lyon (France), including the export of more than 300 Jewish children to Auschwitz, where they were executed. . . First detected in 1972 in Lima, at the home of another former SS officer (Friedrich Schwend), Barbie also enjoyed the protection of several Latin American governments, including Chile (which admitted her son to the School naval) and especially the Bolivian, until he was finally deported to France in 1983, where he died in prison four years later.

With Barbie already detained, in late 1983 Israel launched a diplomatic offensive toward Chile, seeking the country to deliver Walther Rauff. In fact, during a visit to Tel Aviv by the dictatorship's foreign minister, Miguel Álex Schweitzer, Israel's then attorney general, Yitzhak Zamir, "caught him in a public trap", asking him that Chile extradite Rauff.

The ambush was not gratuitous and the victim had not been chosen at random. Schweitzer, one of the most prestigious lawyers in Chile, a very important man on the right and in the inner circle of dictator Pinochet, was also Jewish. Using all the diplomacy at his disposal, he explained to Zamir that it was a "res judicata" and that it was therefore impossible to extradite him.

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