The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Early on the morning of February 21, the Brazilians launched their fifth assault on Monte Castello, not a disastrous frontal assault as they had attempted before, but on its flanks. By late afternoon, as the battle raged, testy U.S. generals visited Mascarenhas’s command to ask why the BEF’s reserve did not go into action to complete the conquest of the mountain. Mascarenhas said the time wasn’t opportune. The generals conceded that the Brazilian was, after all, in charge, but as soon as they left Mascarenhas sent a message to Zenóbio. The crest must be reached while it was still daylight to afford artillery support. “We will not lose the confidence of the American commanders,” Mascarenhas said.

  Zenóbio’s field commander said he was maintaining a slow pace to avoid undue casualties. “But my dear fellow,” answered Zenóbio, “do you want to conquer Monte Castello with men or with flowers?” At 4:20 p.m. Brazilian artillery commenced pounding the mountain in a merciless barrage. An hour and a half later Zenóbio picked up the phone and called Mascarenhas. “The mountain is ours,” he said.

  At home in Brazil the press went wild. The nation now surely would be invited to join the other five world powers in the Supreme Allied Council, said the Rio daily A Manhã, reflecting the hopes of a nation. Brazil would help shape the postwar world.

  The Smoking Cobras became unstoppable, taking the city of Castelnuovo on March 5 and helping to take the town of Montese overlooking the lush Pantaro Valley in April, after a wrenching four-day battle that cost 426 dead and wounded. A few days later, Mascarenhas received news that a well-supplied German division, its officers veterans of the African and Italian campaigns, was attempting to break through to the Po Valley from the south toward Parma, among Italy’s most prosperous cities. The Brazilians blocked the roads and met the Germans at Collechio, a town eight miles southwest where they set up mortar positions in front of a church. When a field commander wanted to stop fighting and camp for the night, Mascarenhas objected. “The old general acted with the enthusiasm of a lieutenant,” the soldier said. Zenóbio, too, fought hard.

  “That Zenóbio was crazy,” recalled a Brazilian soldier who was firing mortars during the battle. Writing after the war, the soldier recalled that, faced with incoming fire, “like everyone else, I was lying down, with that machine gun firing close.” But Zenóbio “didn’t move, didn’t lie down, did nothing of the sort.”

  At nearby Fornovo, the Brazilians made their last stand of the war. Outnumbered by Wehrmacht infantry and Panzers, soldiers of the Fascist Italian National Republican Army’s Bersaglieri, and Alpini mountain soldiers, the Brazilians led Allied troops to a standstill with the enemy. Mascarenhas demanded unconditional surrender; the Germans refused. A local priest was enlisted to carry notes back and forth across the lines. The Brazilians guaranteed safety. Unable to escape or counterattack, the Germans saw they were trapped.

  In their last act of World War II, the Smoking Cobras captured fourteen thousand enemy soldiers and three generals—members of the German 90th Panzergrenadier and the iconic Italian Bersaglieri Corps, and the entire 148th division of the German army.

  IT ONLY REMAINS TO GO HOME

  And now—now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don’t forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

  —CLARICE LISPECTOR, WHO NURSED BEF SOLDIERS IN NAPLES

  By June 1945, almost all the Brazilians in Italy had shipped for home—a few who married Italian women stayed or later brought their wives to Brazil. In July in Rio de Janeiro, General Clark, Vernon Walters, and other U.S. officers sat in a reviewing stand in sight of Sugar Loaf Mountain. General Zenóbio led parading troops down the boulevard on the sparkling bay. The city’s old cannons fired rounds of salutes, hundreds of boats gathered in the harbor, church bells rang, and crowds cheered.

  Within a few weeks, however, the veterans of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force were being purposely ignored by a dictatorship that feared soldiers who had fought for democracy. “They turned their backs on us,” Eronides João da Cruz told me. “We were intelligent and trained, but here we were treated as dogs.” Da Cruz could not find a job when he returned. The force was disbanded, its soldiers scattered around the country. The government did not allow them to unite as a veterans’ group until the 1970s.

  General Mascarenhas, the old-school officer who led the Brazilian division through glory and low times, wrote a series of memoirs after his return.

  Minister of war General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, who had visited troops in the Serchio Valley, helped to depose President Vargas in 1945. Dutra was elected president in 1946, and Brazil returned to democracy under a new constitution. But Dutra turned back the clock on Vargas’s populist development programs. He broke unions, lowered wages, and cooperated enthusiastically with postwar U.S. free-market economic policy.

  Vargas remained so popular, however, that when the next elections were held, he won the presidency again in free and fair voting. General Zenóbio became minister of war. But Vargas’s enemies among top generals eventually demanded the president’s resignation. It was Zenóbio who delivered the news on the night of April 26, 1954. Two hours later, Vargas shot himself in the chest with a Colt police revolver.

  The fiercely anticommunist Brazilian military established a dictatorship supported by the United States from 1964 to 1985 that included officers of the Smoking Cobras. When Dutra was president, he had established with U.S. assistance the national Superior School of War that taught anticommunism and the U.S. view of the Cold War; several plotters of the 1964 military coup graduated from the school.

  Castello Branco, Mascarenhas’s operations officer in Italy, became chief of state in the coup. Vernon Walters, by now a close friend of Castello Branco, was serving as U.S. defense attaché in Rio. Castello Branco abolished political parties and ordered jurists to draw up a new, authoritarian constitution.

  In 1960, the remains of the men who had been interred at the monument in Pistoia were transferred to Brazil, where they rest at a monument in the Flamengo neighborhood of Rio. In the state of Minas Gerais, home of many soldiers on the front line at Monte Castello, a small museum with BEF artifacts invites visitors, while elderly veterans in the state of Parana sometimes gather at the Expeditionary Museum in Curitiba. In the coastal city of Fortaleza on the Brazilian hump, a neighborhood christened Montese commemorates the battle for that Italian city.

  Apart from these, there are few traces of the Smoking Cobras in Brazil today. When I asked at the main tourist information center in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, where I might find a monument to the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, young staff members said it was news to them that Brazilians had participated in the war.

  In Italy, however, numerous reminders remain. At Pistoia, Mario Pereira, the son of late BEF veteran Miguel Pereira, tends the monument visited by increasing numbers of Brazilian diplomats, veterans, and travelers. “They find it on the internet,” said Pereira. There is a museum for the history of the Smoking Cobras and the Colorado division in the town of Iola de Montese; a spectacular monument to the Brazilians in the shape of a towering silver arc in sight of Monte Castello; and plaques of remembrance in small towns liberated by the Smoking Cobras in the provinces of Pisa, Modena, and Bologna.

  And there is the annual ceremony with the picnic and laying of the laurel wreath at Sommocolonia, overlooking the Serchio Valley. A room attached to the parish church holds gas masks from both sides, flags torn by bullet holes, uniforms marked with bloodstains gone black, and flyers from the Germans to their Brazilian “comrades.”

  Against a stone wall is a plaque showing the bright green cobra with a smoking pipe in its mouth. A salute is rendered in Italian and Portuguese in bold black letters:

  IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS OF THE BRAZILIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE WHO, TO DEFEND LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY, CROSSED THE OCEAN TO FIGHT IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

  PART V

  The
End Without an End

  13.

  RATLINES

  In 1949, Walter Rauff, who developed the mobile gas vans in which thousands died during Hitler’s Reich, was sailing on a ship out of Genoa headed for South America on an escape route run by the Vatican. Rauff had spent his time since the end of the war working for U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies and starting a Syrian intelligence service in Damascus based on the Gestapo. Now he looked forward to a comfortable life in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Rauff was part of the greatest mass flight of criminals of the century—fascists with blood on their hands who came to the Americas after the war by way of the system known as the Ratlines (Rattenlinien).

  The Roman Catholic Church had a powerful reason to help Nazis like Rauff, who were viscerally against Bolshevism. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Communists waged a war against religion, turning Russian Orthodox churches into museums or wedding halls, killing hundreds of priests, and torturing believers who clung to their faith. They plundered and liquidated monasteries and convents, ridiculed and eliminated objects of popular reverence. Atheism became the law of the land.

  As World War II ended, certain understandings were clear from the Vatican’s point of view: Communists were bent on spreading their system to the world, and conflict between communism and the Church was a zero-sum game—only one could survive. Fascists could be depended upon never to accommodate themselves to communists of any kind. They had experience in the fight and must be saved. This was the same thinking that drove Western intelligence agencies looking ahead to the Cold War to hire Nazi war criminals like Walter Rauff.

  In a remarkable feat of casuistry, those who greased the Ratlines purported that the good in National Socialism—its hate for Bolshevism—could be separated from the bad. The Vatican imagined that because of its sacred origins, history, possessions, and ways of thinking, the Church was the repository of the values of Western Civilization, which was under threat. If fascists were allies in the new war, so be it.

  * * *

  In the popular imagination, the escape routes to Latin America were a project of Nazis intent on establishing a Fourth Reich, as described in 1972 by one of the most successful thrillers ever, The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth. The book was fiction. SS officers like Rauff helped comrades escape, and once in Latin America, they often openly associated with each other. But the Ratlines involved a tangle of participants far wider and more insidious than what The Odessa File described.

  To move those on the lam, the Church used its vast infrastructure, from Vatican City to bishoprics to village parishes. Routes in Italy, to which escapees from the Reich began to flee as early as 1944, went through safe houses including convents and along the self-explanatory “monastery route” taken by Adolf Eichmann. Funds often came from projects for legitimate refugees and persons left stateless after the war, but in one spectacular case, a Nazi slush fund created by an SS counterfeiting operation produced gold and cash that supported escapes.

  Operation Bernhard, as the scheme was called, was based in one of the charming mountain districts of the South Tyrol, where the old Habsburg town of Merano lies in a balmy green valley circled by snowy alpine peaks. Since the 1850s, Merano has been a destination for the ill or merely idle. Famous writers including Franz Kafka and Ezra Pound came for the climate and waters reputed to bring health and well-being. From a promenade dotted with palm plants along the Passer River, a visitor can hire a taxi to drive through an elegant spa district into hills covered with apple orchards and centuries-old castles now used as private houses or hotels.

  In 1943, a businessman working with the SS, Friedrich Schwend, bought one of the rambling old castles, Schloss Labers. Perfect for his assignment, Schloss Labers looked out across the Passeier Valley to a ring of peaks, snowcapped even in summer. Guards could see anyone approaching. Schwend took on the identity of an SS major by the name of Wendig, who had been killed in an Italian partisan attack. Sometimes as Schwend, sometimes as Wendig, he oversaw Operation Bernhard over the next two years, a complex plot to undermine the economy of Great Britain and, eventually, of the United States. Schwend answered directly to Heinrich Himmler, an architect of the Holocaust and chief of the SS. By flooding the market with false sterling notes, they aimed to do what the Luftwaffe and food blockade had failed to do: bring England to its knees.

  Operation Bernhard also manufactured counterfeit documentation for the Reich’s worldwide espionage web. The project hid gold and valuable artifacts in old mining tunnels in southern Austria should it be required for future Nazi needs, for a guerrilla war in case of Berlin’s defeat, or for the security of SS personnel after the war. Eventually, profits from Operation Bernhard helped to fund the Ratlines.

  Today Schloss Labers is listed on travel sites as a hotel, but one April day when I visited it was closed for the season. Through the windows of a vast enclosed porch I could glimpse a grand salon with high ceilings. The place included several outbuildings, perhaps once used to store valuables or loads of currency. Mountain hikers passed on a Sunday afternoon, but in photos from the World War II era I had seen in the Merano civic archives, Schloss Labers looked isolated on its promontory, unrelievedly bleak. Schwend lived comfortably with a full household staff, his children enjoying a Christmas tree that rose almost to the high ceiling and decorating eggs at Easter. On the roof, hidden from below, stood an antiaircraft gun.

  Merano was virtually an outpost of the Reich, occupied by Nazis, and Schwend did not seem to fear for himself, taking out his white horse regularly in the mornings for a ride through the hills. But a contingent of Waffen-SS soldiers from the Sonderstab-Generalkommando III Germanisches Panzerkorps, the special staff of the headquarters of the Third German Armored Corps, kept guard atop the house and behind bushes. Schwend seemed to travel quite a bit, but he otherwise cut a quiet figure in the hills.

  An agent of the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Division later called Schwend’s Operation Bernhard “the most elaborate and far reaching scheme that an invading army ever devised for the wholesale counterfeiting of the money and credentials of other countries.”

  At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of Berlin, SS Sturmbannführer Bernhard Kruger oversaw 140 Jewish engravers, jewelers, and other skilled craftsmen who created plates for the bogus British pounds sterling, and to a lesser extent for U.S. dollars. They used a special rag commissioned from a paper factory in northern Germany and special inks. The Jewish artisans stayed alive as long as they produced quality work, while prisoners around them were annihilated or starved to death. The currency was shipped from Sachsenhausen to Merano by train, brought up to Schloss Labers and stored in hidden passages, then distributed along Schwend’s global networks.

  Agents of the operation purchased art and gold with false notes in the galleries of Paris and Berlin, the souks of the Middle East. They paid the Reich’s spies. They laundered bills by buying real estate. Sometimes Himmler, Schwend’s boss, squabbled with other branches of the Nazi bureaucracy over Operation Bernhard: the German foreign ministry and the central bank did not want to destabilize global monetary systems, even those of enemies. Occasionally the frustrated Reichsbank found itself stuck with the worthless currency.

  Schwend’s phony money, including fake U.S. military payment certificates—scrip—did disrupt economies slightly, especially in Italy. But Operation Bernhard’s beautifully crafted notes did not destabilize the world’s currencies, as planners hoped. Schwend did not have enough time. “Had this counterfeiting operation [been] fully organized in 1939 and early 1940, results of World War II may have been quite different,” said the Holocaust scholar Rabbi Marvin Hier. But the scheme did support the escape of fascists from Europe to South America.

  Trucks laden with money and gold left Schloss Labers heading south to Rome. Among the spires and cupolas of the Eternal City, Operation Bernhard’s riches and infrastructure of transport and safe houses contributed to the Ratlines that were already under protect
ion of the Church.

  * * *

  Communist Stalin might exterminate people by the thousands and watch millions starve, and fascist Hitler might kill millions for being the people they were born—Jews, homosexuals, Roma, the disabled. But members of the Church saw a difference between the two, and believed they could live with one worldview but not the other. The anticommunist ardor of certain princes of the Church made the Ratlines work.

  An Austrian bishop in the Vatican, Alois Hudal, protected many of the most infamous Nazi war criminals, including Rauff, Eichmann, and Franz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka death camp. As a seminarian Hudal, the son of a shoemaker from Graz, delved into the history of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church, separated from Rome for a millennium over doctrinal issues. He became obsessed with a guiding principle—a desire, really—that would remain with him for his entire life: someday the Eastern Church in the Balkans would reunite with Rome. This could only happen, he believed, if Communist Russia were rendered decisively weak, unable to impose itself upon Eastern Europe. For Hudal, a strong Germany was Christianity’s sacred bulwark, the West’s only hope of keeping atheistic Bolshevism from sweeping across the continent.

  While volunteering as an army chaplain in World War I, Hudal wrote a book of sermons for soldiers that previewed his beliefs later in life. The sermons conflated national loyalty with “loyalty to God.” Later, Hudal also wrote about Jews, who were linked, he warned, to the “nefarious” tendency toward democracy. Jews were the portal to liberalism and Bolshevism, and Christianity must stand up to them. Nazism was a tool for the purpose.

  In time, Hudal fancied himself as a mediator between Germany and Rome, saying that the Vatican’s line with Hitler was too severe. He maintained that the Fuehrer was not an extremist, although some of his followers were. A Christianized National Socialism might save the world.