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<i>Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice</i> (review)

2012; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2012.0007

1534-0708

John Jay Hughes,

European history and politics

Reviewed by: Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice John Jay Hughes Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice. By Gerald Steinacher. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xxviii, 382. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-199-57686-9.) Historians have long known that relatively few Nazi war criminals faced justice; those tried at the Nuremberg War Crimes Court, and individuals apprehended much later, such as Adolf Eichmann (tried and executed in Israel in 1962) and Klaus Barbie (sentenced in France in 1987 to life imprisonment; he died in 1991). Thousands of others escaped. This has given rise to conspiracy theories, notably the claim by the Jewish Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that a powerful secret organization of former SS members, ODESSA (Organization der ehemaligan SS-Angehörigen), facilitated the escape of thousands. In Nazis on the Run Gerald Steinacher writes: “An all-powerful, mythical organization like ODESSA never existed” (p. xviii). In support he cites Heinz Schneppen’s Odessa und das Vierte Reich: Mythen der Zeitgeschichte (Berlin, 2007). Such an organization was unnecessary. In “the chaos of the post-war years [with] millions of refugees in transit” (p. 2), escape from justice was easy. Steinacher’s book is the fruit of exhaustive primary research, documented in fifty-two pages with 1154 endnotes, plus twenty-two pages of bibliography and sources. The result is a mind-numbing account of how countless individuals got away. Most fled to “the Nazi bolt-hole” of South Tyrol (p. 32). To this day ethnically and linguistically German, the province was detached in the Versailles Treaty of 1919 from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian monarchy and given to Italy. Once these individuals reached South Tyrol, they were in Italy, where “fake IDs were not a problem after the war” (p. 42). Moreover, the Italian authorities “had great interest in encouraging the emigration of refugees as quickly as possible” (p. 64). Most boarded ships in Genoa and Naples for Argentina and other South American countries. The International Red Cross also was helpful. Although there is no evidence that the organization deliberately supported an escape route for ex-Nazis (p. 99), it had issued at least 120,000 transit documents by 1951 (p. 56). Even before that date the United States was actively recruiting former Nazis for service in the cold war against the USSR, and Juan Perón’s Argentina was doing the same to build up its economy and military. Readers of this journal will be especially interested in the role of Catholic clergy in assisting escapees. Two names recur constantly in Steinacher’s account: the Croatian monsignor Krunoslav Dragonavić and the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal—the latter a notorious loose cannon who was increasingly embarrassing to the Vatican and was never Pope Pius XII’s protegé, as Steinacher claims (p. 126). The two men facilitated hundreds of escapes. However, their activities never constituted the much-trumpeted “Vatican Ratline.” Steinacher concedes that “the Vatican was not a monolithic bloc”: there were “different voices and positions within the Catholic Church” (p. 285). [End Page 150] A full account of these “different voices” may be obtained from Hunting Evil: How the Nazi War Criminals Escaped and the Hunt to Bring Them to Justice (London, 2009) by Guy Walters, who, like Steinacher, is a non-Catholic. Steinacher does not understand that conditional baptism, often administered to those seeking church documentation, was routine practice and not a trick devised to facilitate escape (pp. 148ff). Although he credits West Germany with publicly acknowledging German guilt for the Holocaust (p. 275), he is silent about that nation’s payments of reparations to Israel. Steinacher’s most serious omission is complete silence about the documentation of church persecution by the Nazis supplied to the Nuremberg War Crimes trials by Pope Pius XII. He met personally with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor; and Jesuit Edmund Walsh, who transmitted the Vatican documentation, said the material was “of great value to us.”1 John Jay Hughes Archdiocese of St. Louis Footnotes 1. Cf. Patrick H. McNamara, A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anti-Communism (New York...