by Jim Marrs
In 1955, Peron was ousted in a military coup and forced to flee to neighboring Paraguay and later to exile in Madrid, Spain. He left without the body of Eva, who had died from cancer in 1952, at age thirty-three. Her popularity was such that eight persons were trampled to death in the tumultuous crowds who flocked to see her embalmed body lying in state.
According to Manning, the relationship between Bormann and Peron “became somewhat frayed around the edges after Peron left for Panama and then exile in Spain in 1955, but [Gestapo] Mueller today [1981] still wields power with the Argentinian secret police in all matters concerning Germans and the [Nazis] in South America.”
THE IMPACT OF transplanted Nazis continues to be felt in South America. “Those aging fascists accomplished much of what the ODESSA strategists had hoped,” noted Georg Hodel, adding, “The Nazis in Argentina kept Hitler’s torch burning, won new converts in the region’s militaries and passed on the advanced science of torture and ‘death squad’ operations. Hundreds of left-wing Peronist students and unionists were among the victims of the neo-fascist Argentine junta that launched the Dirty War in 1976.”
SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon,” after working for the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps following Germany’s defeat, ensconced himself in Bolivia under the name Klaus Altmann. Using his contacts in the Kameradenwerk, he began running guns between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. “The gun trade eventually led them into the drug trade,” wrote Levenda.
On July 17, 1980, Barbie abetted right-wing officers in the army during a coup over the left-of-center Bolivian government. “Barbie’s team hunted down and slaughtered government officials and labor leaders, while Argentine specialists flew in to demonstrate the latest torture techniques,” wrote Hodel. With Barbie’s aid, Bolivia was soon a primary and secure source of cocaine for the emerging Medellín drug cartel. Two years later, Barbie was captured and extradited to France, where he died in 1991 from cancer while serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity.
ODESSA also turned to gun-running as a means of financing its operations. In fact, it was never intended only as an escape route for Nazis, but, at Bormann’s instructions, it was set up as a profitable business enterprise as well. The plentiful supply of surplus arms in Europe turned out to be an immediately profitable commodity.
In late 1945, U.S. military authorities became aware of a huge black market enterprise being operated out of Passau, a picturesque city located ninety miles northeast of Munich at the confluence of the Danube, Inn, and Ilz Rivers. It was a connecting point between Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and a collection center for Axis arms. It was here that the weapons from three complete armies—the Hungarian Fifth Army and the German Fifth and Twelfth Armies—were stockpiled in an American-run depot. Rifles, machine guns, and ammunition were gathered at Passau while millions of dollars worth of vehicles were cached at Mattinghoffen, Austria.
About $10 million worth of these war materials went missing, sold by black marketers, mainly ODESSA agents, German officials, and criminals, aided by a few Allied soldiers. In one of the greatest ironies of history, the bulk of this material was being shipped to Palestine for use both by Jews trying to create the state of Israel and by Arabs who violently opposed such an effort.
On January 5, 1946, U.S. military intelligence officers under the command of Colonel William Weaver of General Patton’s G-2 staff were sent to Passau to make arrests. Instead, the agents were murdered and the house in which they were staying was burned.
One agent, Lieutenant William H. Spector, survived. Hospitalized with a kidney stone, Spector narrowly missed the massacre at Passau. Vowing to avenge his slain fellow officers, Spector was nonplussed to find that the entire affair was hushed up on orders of superior officers who declared it a “security issue.” Spector did learn that one of the men involved with the stolen arms as well as the agents’ deaths was a Romanian national named Robert Abramovici. Abramovici later changed his name to Robert Adam and started an arms company called Intermecco Socomex, which became closely associated with the CIA’s arms company, Interarmco.
The arms deals in Palestine were handled by Joseph Beidas and Eduardo Baroudi and his brothers, who sold weapons to both Arabs and Jews. Baroudi later became a vice president of Intrabank, based in Beirut, Lebanon, a major conduit for black market funds.
Millionaires were made immediately after the war by both war surplus and black market arms deals. “But none were to achieve the profitability of ODESSA, whose agents ranged throughout Europe and even behind the Iron Curtain,” explained Manning, adding:
They bought and sold surplus American arms to Arab buyers seeking to strengthen the military capabilities of Egypt and other Middle Eastern Arab nations. Palestine was to be partitioned into a Jewish homeland, and they intended to destroy it at birth. But now, Jewish buyers, funded from America and elsewhere, entered the marketplace. They were barred from purchasing guns and American surplus P-51 Mustang fighter planes by President Truman, and their only recourse for survival was to trade on the European black market, which, unknown to them, was rapidly coming under the control of ODESSA agents. However, the Jewish agency’s buyers might have purchased from the devil himself if it meant survival of the small, defenseless nation, just come into being on May 14, 1947.
Again, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of wealthy globalists can be seen in the creation of modern Israel. This began in 1917, when 2nd Baron Rothschild, Lionel Walter Rothschild, received a letter from British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour replying to his query regarding Balfour’s position on Palestine. Balfour expressed approval for the establishment of a home for Jews there. This letter later became known as the Balfour Declaration. In 1922, the League of Nations approved the Balfour mandate in Palestine, thus paving the way for the later creation of Israel. Lord Rothschild was an ardent Zionist, who had served as a member of the British Parliament. The Zionist movement, composed of both Jews and non-Jews, had been working toward the creation of Israel since the late 1800s. Lord Rothschild was the eldest son of Nathan Rothschild, who had controlled the Bank of England and funded the Cecil Rhodes diamond (and secret society) empire. Another Rothschild, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who built the first pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and founded the Israel General Bank, was called “the father of modern Israel.”
It also appears that the Zionists employed blackmail to aid in the formation of Israel. Their most famous target was Nelson Rockefeller, who in 1940 was named to the intelligence position of coordinator of inter-American affairs by Secretary of Defense Forrestal. In 1944, Rockefeller was selected to serve as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. It was a post most suitable to Rockefeller, whose primary purpose, according to authors Loftus and Aarons, was “to monopolize Latin America’s raw materials and exclude the Europeans.” Due to the extensive business dealings between the German Nazis and American globalists, as detailed previously, Loftus and Aarons noted that during the war, the Germans in South America got anything they wanted, from refueling stations to espionage bases, while the British had to pay cash. “Behind Rockefeller’s rhetoric of taking measures in Latin America for the national defense stood a naked grab for profits,” they wrote. “Under the cloak of his official position, Rockefeller and his cronies would take over Britain’s most valuable Latin American properties. If the British resisted, he would effectively block raw materials and food supplies desperately needed for Britain’s fight against Hitler.”
Soon, Rockefeller controlled much of South America and was able to bring that influence to the newly created United Nations. But when Rockefeller pushed through UN membership for pro-fascist Argentina over the objections of President Truman, he lost his government position. He returned to the world of business. According to Loftus and Aarons, his “partner in moneymaking just happened to be John Foster Dulles, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and a fellow conspirator in smuggling Axis money to safety.”
> In 1947, when Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was desperate for votes to ensure the passage of a UN resolution partitioning Palestine and thus creating the state of Israel, he turned to Nelson Rockefeller. According to several former U.S. intelligence agents, Ben-Gurion “blackmailed the hell out of him.”
Rockefeller had been able to deflect several investigations into his family’s prewar and wartime dealings with the Nazis, but according to Loftus and Aarons, “Then the Jews arrived with their dossier. They had his Swiss bank records with the Nazis, his signature on correspondence setting up the German Cartel in South America, transcripts of his conversations with Nazi agents during the war, and, finally, evidence of his complicity in helping Allen Dulles smuggle Nazi war criminals and money from the Vatican to Argentina.”
Loftus, as a U.S. attorney with unprecedented access to classified CIA and NATO files as well as former intelligence operatives, in 1994 joined with Australian broadcast journalist Mark Aarons to produce a national bestseller titled The Secret War Against the Jews, which probed the role of Western intelligence agencies in the affairs of Israel. These authors interviewed one of the Jews present at the meeting with Rockefeller. He gave this account:
Rockefeller skimmed through the dossier and coolly began to bargain. In return for the votes of the Latin American bloc, he wanted guarantees that the Jews would keep their mouths shut about the flow of Nazi money and fugitives to South America. There would be no Zionist Nazi-hunting unit, no testimony at Nuremberg about the bankers or anyone else, not a single leak to the press about where the Nazis were living in South America or which Nazis were working for Dulles. The subject of Nazis was closed. Period. Forever. The choice was simple, Rockefeller explained, “You can have vengeance, or you can have a country, but you cannot have both.”
The deal was made and Rockefeller delivered. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution recommending the partition of Palestine. The vote shocked the Arab world, which had not foreseen several Latin American countries switching their vote at the last minute. The Jews had traded silence for their new country’s security, but they didn’t take it lying down. To this day, Israeli leaders have in turn blackmailed the Western employers of Nazi refugees and war criminals, guaranteeing nearly unconditional support for Israel and its policies.
The creation of Israel also explained the inability of U.S. officials to interdict the flight capital out of Germany. John Pehle worked with Orvis Schmidt in the U.S. Treasury’s Foreign Funds Control office. “In 1944 emphasis in Washington shifted from overseas fiscal controls to assistance to Jewish war refugees,” Pehle explained. “On presidential order I was made executive director of the War Refugee Board in January 1944. Orvis Schmidt became director of Foreign Funds Control. Some of the manpower he had was transferred, and while the Germans evidently were doing their best to avoid Allied seizures of assets, we were doing our best to extricate as many Jews as possible from Europe.”
It is apparent that the globalists in both Europe and America were more concerned with gaining a foothold in the oil-rich Middle East than in pursuing escaped Nazis and their treasure.
ALONG WITH THIS outpouring of Nazi assets, capital, scientists, SS men, and former officials within ODESSA were other, more secretive, assistance groups such as the Die Spinne, Sechsgestirn (or the Constellation of Six), and the Deutsche Hilfsverein (or German Relief Organization).
Through such organizations, SS men and Nazi officials escaped through southern France and across the Pyrenees into Spain. These were not-for-profit enterprises like ODESSA, but still they received funding and orders from the Bormann group.
Die Spinne was a creation of commando Otto Skorzeny and was largely composed of troops from his old wartime commando unit. It was funded through the Bormann program. After the meeting with Eva Peron in 1947, many Spinne members made their way to Argentina.
“[T]he number of Germans who went to South America, both along these…routes and by less organized means after Martin Bormann had declared his flight capital program in August 1944, totaled 60,000, including scientists and administrators at all levels, as well as the former SS soldiers commanded by General Mueller,” noted Paul Manning.
Even before the end of the war, the Nazis used concentration camp prisoners and hired specialists to manufacture respectable-looking but phony identification papers. With these and aided by the general chaos in Europe at war’s end, they developed their own effective witness protection program. Many of these false identities have withstood the test of time and are still in use.
While on the run at the end of the war, Bormann controlled his vast commercial empire through an elaborate but well-planned communications system. “Wherever positioned, he turned his hiding place into a party headquarters, and was in command of everything save security,” explained Manning. “Telephones were too dangerous, but he had couriers to bear documents to Sweden, where a Bormann commercial headquarters was maintained in Malmö [Sweden] to handle the affairs of a complex and growing postwar business empire. From Malmö, high-frequency radio could transmit coded information to listening posts in Switzerland, Spain, or Argentina to form a continuous line of instructions.”
The deputy fuehrer’s escape had not gone unnoticed. It was substantiated by a file on Bormann sent to the FBI and obtained by Paul Manning. “When the file…was received at FBI headquarters it revealed that the Reichsleiter had indeed been tracked for years,” he wrote. “One report covered [Bormann’s] whereabouts from 1948 to 1961, in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Chile. The file revealed that he had been banking under his own name from his office in Germany in Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires since 1941; that he held one joint account with the Argentinian dictator Juan Peron, and on August 4, 5, and 14, 1967, had written checks on demand accounts in First National City Bank [now Citibank] (Overseas Division) of New York, the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., all cleared through Deutsche Bank of Buenos Aires.”
Then there was a police report from Cordoba Province dated April 22, 1955, in which a police agent with special knowledge of Bormann spotted the Nazi in the company of two other men in a hotel and trailed them. He overheard one of the men acknowledge the short, balding man who obviously was the superior of the three by saying, “Jawohl, Herr Bormann.”
By 1972, it was apparent to anyone who desired to know that Martin Bormann had been operating in South America for some time. Researcher and author Ladislas Farago caused a minor sensation in that year with his articles published in England’s Daily Express, detailing Bormann’s activities. In 1974, Farago used his findings on Bormann in his book Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich.
His investigative work led to a New York Times story published on November 27, 1972, and datelined “Buenos Aires.” It stated, “Argentine secret service sources said today that Martin Bormann was sheltered in the country after World War II, but could not confirm reports that he still lived there. Sources in Salta confirmed that the ranch where Bormann was said to have lived was owned by German industrialists. The intelligence sources said other Nazis arrived in Argentina with Bormann and were sheltered there, particularly by Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Italian dictator.”
Of course, only Bormann, Mengele, Eichmann, and a few other leading Nazis garnered occasional news headlines. Thousands managed to slip through the hands of authorities unnoticed, thanks to business connections or passports provided by the Vatican.
It seems apparent that it was not only business interests protecting the Nazis but individuals within the American government. For example, someone with access to U.S. archives later took steps to obliterate any record of Kammler or his fate. Nick Cook tried to trace Kammler and hit a brick wall. “Protracted searches by archivists at the U.S. National Archives for any data on Kammler had failed to locate a single entry for him,” wrote Cook. “Given Kammler’s range of responsibilities in the final months of the war, this absence of evidence was remarkable; so much so, that one arch
ivist at Modern Military Records, College Park, Maryland, said…Somebody…had been in and cleaned up [the records].”
THE NAZI ORGANIZATION that may have made the greatest impact on the United States was not a ratline but a spy network created by General-major Reinhard Gehlen. This Nazi network was to become America’s eyes and ears in the early days of the Cold War.
The son of a Catholic bookshop owner, Gehlen was born in 1902 and joined the German Army in 1920. His middle-class family nevertheless boasted military officers on both sides. In the 1930s, Gehlen moved from the German Staff College to the Army General Staff with the rank of captain. In 1940, he was promoted to major and served on the staffs of two German generals. By 1942, Gehlen, now a Lieutenant colonel, became the head of Fremde Heere Ost, or Foreign Armies East (FHO), a curious title for the section of the German General Staff analyzing all intelligence on the Russian Front.
In an attempt to avoid conflicts with the Abwehr, Germany’s counterintelligence service, Gehlen created his own network of spies and informers. This system soon began making major contributions to the Nazi war effort by upgrading the level of intelligence on the Soviets. Gehlen made use of whatever anticommunists could be found and in particular the anti-Soviet spy network of Russian general Andrei Vlasov, a Russian officer who began working with Gehlen and the Nazis against the Stalin regime. (With Germany’s defeat, the Allies turned Vlasov and his “Russian Liberation Army” over to Stalin, who had them all executed.) Gehlen soon put together a remarkable network of agents and spies, all sworn to utmost secrecy, even from their own families. This combined Vlasov/Gehlen operation became known as the Gehlen Organization, a spy network that was continued by U.S. authorities long after the war.