Secret Base in Chile

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Sid Guttridge
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#16

Post by Sid Guttridge » 24 Mar 2017, 14:21

P.S. It reminds me of an old Roman Catholic bon mot about the Church of England: The Church of England always seeks to find a balanced position - half way between Good and Evil.

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red devil
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#17

Post by red devil » 24 Mar 2017, 14:32

that could be very easily be put as The church in Rome today.


michael mills
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#18

Post by michael mills » 27 Mar 2017, 09:20

Despite the sensationalising headline of the Daily Mail article, it does provide some factual material, for example that most German and other Axis officials who fled to South America did so on special Red Cross passports (designed to help Displaced Persons return home or find refuge), and that in many cases they were assisted to obtain such passports by Bishop Alois Hudal, head of the German College in Rome.

The Vatican itself was not involved in the issuing of Red Cross passports to anybody. Not every Catholic institution in Rome is part of the Vatican, and the German College was not, being an independent body.

The story about Peron selling 10,000 Argentinian passports to the German Government during the war is a furphy. In the first place, fugitives such as Eichmann travelled to Argentina on Red Cross passports, not Argentinian ones. In the second place, as Sid Guttridge pointed out, Peron was not president of Argentina during the war, beginning his first term as president in June 1946. From 1943 he had been Minister for Labour, in which post he forged the ties to the trade unions which became the basis of his political support as president.

While the Peron administration did allow substantial numbers of Axis fugitives to enter Argentina in the years after 1945, it also allowed large numbers of Jewish survivors and other Jewish immigrants to enter. That is why many of the first memoirs by Jewish survivors in the immediate post-war years were published in Buenos Aires.

It is supposed that one reason why Peron allowed German fugitives to enter Argentina during his presidency was that he hoped that they would bring advanced German technology, in much the same way as German scientists and technologists such as Von Braun were bringing it to the United States.

Sid Guttridge
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#19

Post by Sid Guttridge » 27 Mar 2017, 19:05

Hi Michael,

I think the Jewish information may be wrong. If I remember correctly, Argentina took more Jewish refugees before the war than any other country in the Americas, including the many times more populous USA. This generosity was not repeated under Peron after the war.

Peron's common interest with the Vatican was in aiding Catholic Axis collaborators. It was for them that the escape route to Argentina was set up. They included Pavelic of Croatia, a Slovak foreign minister, assorted Belgian Rexists, the pro-Vichy French aircraft designer Dewoitine, a cross section of Italian Fascists, etc., etc.

His interest in Germans came afterwards, particularly when the Allies began to release senior armaments engineers in the late 1940s who could help his own armaments programmes. I doubt he had any particular interest in providing refuge for purely political Nazis as they were of no value to him or Argentina. He was probably indifferent to their presence.

Cheers,

Sid.

michael mills
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#20

Post by michael mills » 28 Mar 2017, 00:45

There certainly was a substantial number of Jewish survivors who settled in Argentina immediately after the end of the war. So far as I know, Peron did not introduce any policy of preventing the entry of Jews who wanted to immigrate.

However, it is likely that Argentina was not a preferred destination for Jewish survivors, in comparison with the United States or Palestine, or other Anglophone countries.

Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Argentina was placed under an embargo by the United States because of its alleged pro-Axis sympathies. That may have led to a loss of its attractiveness as an immigration destination, coupled with endemic political instability. Nevertheless, Jewish survivors did settle there during Peron's administration, and, as I wrote, they did produce a considerable number of the first survivor narratives in Yiddish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Per%C3%B3n
Fraser and Navarro write that Juan Perón was a complicated man who over the years stood for many different, often contradictory, things.[61] In the book Inside Argentina from Perón to Menem author Laurence Levine, former president of the US-Argentine Chamber of Commerce, writes, "although anti-Semitism existed in Argentina, Perón's own views and his political associations were not anti-Semitic...." Laurence also writes that one of Perón's advisors was a Jewish man from Poland named José Ber Gelbard.[62] U.S. Ambassador George S. Messersmith visited Argentina in 1947 during the first term of Juan Perón. Messersmith noted, "There is not as much social discrimination against Jews here as there is right in New York or in most places at home..."[13]

Perón sought out other Jewish Argentines as government advisers, besides Ber Gelbard. The powerful Secretary of Media, Raúl Apold, also Jewish, was called "Perón's Goebbels." He favoured the creation of institutions such as New Zion (Nueva Sión), the Argentine-Jewish Institute of Culture and Information, led by Simón Mirelman, and the Argentine-Israeli Chamber of Commerce. Also, he named Rabbi Amran Blum as the first Jewish professor of philosophy in the National University of Buenos Aires. After Argentina became the first Latin American government to acknowledge the State of Israel, Perón appointed Pablo Mangel, a Jewish man, as ambassador to that country. Education and Diplomacy were the two strongholds of Catholic nationalism, and both appointments were highly symbolic. The same goes for the 1946 decision of allowing Jewish army privates to celebrate their holidays, which was intended to foster Jewish integration in another traditionally Catholic institution, the army.
Argentina signed a generous commercial agreement with Israel that granted favourable terms for Israeli acquisitions of Argentine commodities, and the Eva Perón Foundation sent significant humanitarian aid. In 1951 during their visit to Buenos Aires, Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir expressed their gratitude for this aid.

....................................................................................................................................................................

While Juan Perón's Argentina allowed many Nazi criminals to take refuge in the country following World War II, the society also accepted more Jewish immigrants than any other country in Latin America. Today Argentina has a population of more than 200,000 Jewish citizens, the largest in Latin America, the third-largest in the Americas, and the sixth-largest in the world.[63][64][65][66] The Jewish Virtual Library writes that while Juan Perón had sympathized with the Axis powers, "Perón also expressed sympathy for Jewish rights and established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949. Since then, more than 45,000 Jews have immigrated to Israel from Argentina."[67]

Sid Guttridge
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#21

Post by Sid Guttridge » 28 Mar 2017, 18:02

Hi Michael,

The peak periods of Jewish immigration to Argentina appear to have been the decade after 1933 and the 1960s. Peron achieved his first political prominence in 1943 and was President in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s. So it doesn't look as though he was a comparitively active or successful sponsor of Jewish immigration.

I am not aware of any Peronist policy to prevent Jews migrating to Argentina immediately after the WWII, but it does appear to have been more difficult for them to enter than immediately before the war. On the other hand, Peron was reportedly sympathetic to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The pull factor for post-war Jewish immigration may have been the existence of an existing substantial Jewish population who had arrived before the war.

Cheers,

Sid

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red devil
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Re: Secret Base in Chile

#22

Post by red devil » 30 Aug 2017, 14:28

sorry about delay in replying, been very busy my end. Thank you all for the informations provided. It is appreciated.

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