• The Raoul Wallenberg Foundation objected one of the people honored for having been collaborator of the nazi regime.
• There are another fifteen people who are not worthy of a distinction.

The permanence at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a plaque in homage of twelve Argentine diplomats who helped victims of Nazism threatens to become a headache for the authorities of that Ministry.

The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation (IRWF), created in honor of the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War, objected the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because it says that one of the men included in the plaque is related to nazism and the rest of the people have not made enough to justify a homage, because they are just Argentines who helped fellow countrymen.

In a letter that the IRWF sent to the minister Rafael Bielsa, to which LA NACION newspaper had access, it was asked for the plaque to be removed immediately, for considering that there were names included whose trajectories contradict flagrantly the merit for which they are paid homage.

The foundation considers that the alluded diplomats at best saved Argentines of Jewish origin. To distinguish them as heroes, the IRWF says, would be a discrimination, because to help countrymen, independently of their religion, was the duty of those twelve officials.

Even more irritant was considered the inclusion of the name of Luis H. Irigoyen, official at the Argentine embassy in Berlin between 1937 and 1945, to whom in the letter, signed by the president of the Argentine branch of the foundation, Presbyterian Horacio Moreno, is pointed out as seriously committed to the extermination of about one hundred Argentines in the holocaust.

Officials of the Ministry interviewed by LA NACION did not hide their dislike to the letter sent by the IRWF and ratified that those names were selected after an investigation of the Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina (CEANA in Spanish), created during Guido Di Tella’s period. In different official offices, they gave to understand that the objection would be to promote Uki Goni’s book (“The real Odessa”), the investigation about which the IRWF has based most of its accusations, or an “internal controversy” within the Jewish community, because during the ceremony of the presentation of the plaque, in July 2001, the former Israeli ambassador, Benjamin Oron, and authorities of the World Jewish congress and the B’ nai B’ rith were present.

Internal controversy

In spite of the dislike, some officials feel that the placing of the plaque was unnecessary and it satisfied the needs of former administrations. Other officials, on the other hand, defended that homage and considered that removing it would be a disaster. They all agreed on that final decision was Bielsa’s.

Besides Irigoyen, the diplomats whose names are on the plaque placed within the building of Arenales and Esmeralda streets are Jose Angel Caballero, Federico Fried, Miguel Angel Gamas, Juan Giraldes, Jacobo Laub, Roberto Levillier, Luis Luti, Hector Mendes, Jose Ponti, Alberto Saubidet, Leon Schapiera.

History, as it was said, started as an investigation carried out during Guido Di Tella’s period. The plaque was placed by the Minister of the Alliance, Adalberto Rodriguez Giavarini, and the first objections of the IRWF came up when Carlos Ruckauf was in charge of the Argentine diplomacy.

When Bielsa took office, the foundation insisted on its complaint and its authorities achieved to be received by the Minister on September 8. At that moment, Moreno and Baruj Tenembaum, founder of the IRWF, praised Bielsa’s attitude as a completely different one from the previous ministers. He created then a commission to investigate the background of the abovementioned diplomats on the plaque, headed by the Minister of Religion, Guillermo Oliveri.

Oliveri himself had set himself November 15 as deadline to issue a report. Days before the expiration of the term, the commission delivered Moreno all the available documents about Irigoyen. Sources of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with access to those copies explained that the file does not shows that Irigoyen has been a nazi collaborator.

The Commission did not present any document to sustain the inclusion of the rest of the diplomats in the plaque, a fact that produced the letter of complaint. The IRWF considered that the necessary explanations to justify the homage had not been given.

Interviewed by LA NACION, Oliveri ratified his absolute tendency to the investigation requested by the Wallenberg foundation. He pointed out that he would send the file to the Human Rights director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alicia Oliveira, and he added: “He have given it all the attention necessary at the Ministry. The fact that the investigation moves to the corresponding area does not mean that it will not have the celerity it must have.”

On the other hand, Oliveira was excited to continue with the investigation, though she avoided setting terms because she says that it has to be done seriously. She explained that she will ask for more documents about Irigoyen and that she will open the files about the other eleven diplomats.

The protagonists

• Rafael Bielsa
  The minister ordered an investigation, but the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation considered it incomplete and asked the plaque to be removed.
• Alicia Oliveira
  The human rights director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took over the investigation and promised to extend it.

• Listen to the interview (RealAudio and WindowsMedia formats)

HOST:

The president of Argentina has ordered an investigation into whether government employees secretly destroyed files that contained details about Nazi war criminals who came to the country after World War Two. The inquiry comes in response to a book entitled ”The Real Odessa,” which accuses the government of trying to hide its past collaboration with escaped Nazis. NPR’s Martin Kaste reports from Buenos Aires.

The book, written by Argentine journalist Uki Goni, accuses the Argentine government of systematically harboring war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele after the war. What has come as a shock to many Argentine readers is the author’s account of the present-day government’s reaction when he asked the immigration office for its files on specific war criminals.

GOÑI:

A storm broke over my head. Dark words were uttered against the Jews. I was told, ”We would be glad, if you didn’t return tomorrow.”

For the last decade, the government has had an official policy of disclosing the details of its involvement with escaped Nazis. But Goni says that spirit of disclosure wasn’t evident — even when higher authorities gave him written permission to see the files.

GOÑI:

So I went to migrations, and said, ”Okay, I’m here, I’d like to see the files,” and they said, ”please come outside,” and they took me outside, and they said, ”Look, we couldn’t put it in writing, but those files contained information that was very embarrassing for Argentina, and two years ago we burnt them in a fire behind the migrations building here.”

Goni’s story troubles Argentine Jews such as Gustavo Jalife. Jalife is a board member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a group that tries to improve relations between Argentine society and the Jewish community — South America’s largest.

In the national Catholic cathedral, Jalife proudly shows off a memorial to the Holocaust — a large silver frame containing pages salvaged from old Jewish prayerbooks from Europe.

JALIFE:

This kind of memorial you will not find it in New York or London or any other capital of the world, in history, this is the first time such a memorial is installed inside a Christian temple.

But the memorial also reveals the dark side of the Jewish experience in Argentina: some of the prayerbook pages were recovered from the Buenos Aires Jewish community center that was bombed in 1994. That crime — which killed 86 people — remains unsolved.

In a cafe near the cathedral, Jalife and other members of his organization say they’re worried that the story of the missing files is evidence that the Argentine government is STILL not willing to come clean about the past. Albert Kaplan recalls the post-war government of Juan Peron, whose fascist sympathies were no secret. Peron is long gone, but not his peronist party.

KAPLAN:

I feel that all this attitude is trying to cover up is the fact that the same party that is now running the country was in those days fifty years ago was strongly anti-semitic. I think they’re trying to change history if they may.

The new Peronist president — Nestor Kirchner — recently asked the national anti-discrimination agency to find out what happened to the war criminals’ immigration files — if they ever existed. But this move came only after months of pressure by U.S.-connected groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and even a congressman from New York.

Some Argentines betray a certain weariness about foreigners’ undying fascination with this topic; Tocruato DiTella is Argentina’s secretary of culture.

DITELLA:

In the United States and in Europe, very often, there’s a feeling that peronismo is really ”incorrigible,” and that basically, they are not if not fascists then they were and are now philo-fascists, and that they cannot be trusted.

DiTella, who serves on the government’s commission investigating the Nazi history, has advised Americans to ”avoid conspiracy theories.” Statements such as this have caused some Jewish groups to wonder whether official Argentina is now more interested in whitewashing the past.

Sitting in a restaurant near the rebuilt Jewish Community Center, Adrian Jmelnizky [Chmelnizky] looks tired just thinking about the task ahead of him. He’s an experienced researcher of the Nazi past, and he’s likely to be the one who’ll be asked to wade into the chaos of the immigration archives to try to find the Nazi files.

JMELNIZKY:

”They told me there’s a warehouse called the ‘flea warehouse,’ where there are rats and vermin,” he says… and he’s been told that in order to research in there, he’ll have to wear a mask and gloves. As far as Jmelnizky is concerned, researchers such as himself have already established the fact that war criminals were harbored by the Peron government, and he wonders what information the missing files could possibly contain that would be worse than that. Nonetheless, he says he’s willing to put on his gloves and keep searching.

Martin Kaste, NPR news, Buenos Aires.

The initiative is the first of a series of presentations that the Wallenberg Foundation is planning to organize in several cities of the world with the aim of clarifying one of the darkest chapters of the Argentine foreign policy: the one referred to the relations between the Argentine State and the Nazi war criminals.

With that purpose, a distinguished board of specialists on the subject gathered at the auditorium of the Goethe Institute, in the city of Buenos Aires, willing to not only express their points of view but to also exchange impressions and information with the audience.

Uki Goñi, writer, author of the book ”The Real Odessa”; Dr. Carlota Jäckisch, senior researcher for the Friedrich von Hayak Foundation and Lic. Beatriz Gurevich, one of the most renowned authorities in the world on the subject and author of the two-volume work ”Project Testimony” were present.

Dr Rudolf Barth, Director of the Goethe-Institut, welcome the attendance of more than 150 people. Gustavo Jalife, Executive Director of the Wallenberg Foundation, moderator of the debate, presented the program and the panelists.

In his exposition, Uki Goñi emphasized the numerous difficulties he had to face in order to have access to the documents kept in the Argentine official archives. After his short period in the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA), founded by former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Guido Di Tella, he resigned due to irreconcilable differences of criteria with the academic authorities. He started then, a difficult but productive task as independent researcher. Goñi stated that. in spite of the multiple obstacles set by officials belonging to different dependencies of the Argentine State, such as the National Direction of Migrations, he was able to write two revealing books by having access to that information in files of the United States, Great Britain and other European countries: ”Peron and the Germans”, (Sudamericana, 1998) and ”The Real Odessa” (Granta Books, London, 2002); the latter published in Spanish as ”La Auténtica Odessa”.

The documents denied to Goñi and to other academic institutions as well as NGOs, have been object of a note published in The New York Times, and of investigations of the US Congress and the Argentine Parliament.

Carlota Jäckisch, told the audience the results of her investigation for CEANA about the quantification of Nazi war criminals according to Argentine sources, with an amount of 180 criminals who arrived Argentina between 1946 y and the mid fifties.

Beatriz Gurevich exposition was based on the answers of the Argentine State and the requests of extradition of the war criminals Pierre Daye and Ante Pavelic. Gurevich stressed the arbitrary answers given to the requests of extradition and the paralegal mechanisms of extradition that went through the granting of the immigration permits.

At the end of the expositions an intense debate started with the audience, which extended the activity for two hours. Among the numerous questions it is worth mentioning the ones related to the luck of the Argentine Jews in the Third Reich, a not very well known chapter in the history of the Holocaust until the appearance of Goñi’s book.

It greatly surprised the information about the fate of a hundred Argentines who died in the extermination camps abandoned by the Argentine authorities, in spite of the efforts of top rank Nazi authorities to try to save their lives. The news, developed by Goñi in Chapter four of ”The Real Odessa”, had been revealed to the people by the Wallenberg Foundation in articles that appeared in the year 2002 in Página/12 and Buenos Aires Herald newspapers.

José Ignacio García Hamilton, historian; Professor Holger Meding, researcher at the Cologne University in Germany; Beatriz Gurevich, researcher on Nazi activities in Argentina; Gloria Rodrigué, President of Sudamericana and the author participated in the prensentation.

More than 100 people attended the debate, among whom it is worth mentioning Professor Robert Potash, writer Marcos Aguinis and journalist Robert Cox, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald daily newspaper during the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), to whom Uki Goñi pointed out as the ”Argentine Wallenberg”.

A surprise

Minutes before the meeting started, arrived Professor Guy Von Dardel, Raoul Wallenberg’s brother, who read an acknowledgement declaration to The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation for the spreading of the Swedish diplomat’s case who at the age of 32, and after saving the lives of tens of thousands of persecuted people in Nazi occupied Hungary in the Second World War, disappeared after being kidnapped by the Soviet army. His destiny is still unknown. The translation into Spanish of the declaration was read by Mrs. Evelyne Szelenyi, Chief of Staff of US Congressman Tom Lantos who is the promoter of Wallenberg´s proclamation as American honorary citizen in 1981 by the US Congress.

Dear Sir:

”The national executive branch has extended by Decree No.390/2002, the mandate of the Commission for the Clarification of the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA, in Spanish); an organization that depends from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As an Argentine, I cannot but be surprised and also react sadly to this latest news. Far from clarifying, CEANA has added more doubts to those already existing concerning the relations between Argentina and the Third Reich.

As was especially emphasized in my article, ”The Wealth of Nations”, published in La Nacion on 30 January 2003, there are questions that remain to be clarified, even more so since recent investigations brought to light, and prove, if not complicity, at least extreme carelessness in the treatment of a delicate chapter in Argentine history.”

Professor Jaime Krejner
International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation
Jerusalem
krejner@netvision.net.il

It all shows that Argentina’s friendly relations with the Third Reich will continue to be a repugnant fact, something not to be talked about. The official answer of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a letter sent by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation shows that its refusal to permit an investigation of that shameful period still remains State policy. The letter deals with a thorny matter: according to the Chancellery there are eleven Argentine diplomats ”who saved Jews” and deserve tribute and remembrance. But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs never provided the documentation in support of the acts of the officials. Moreover, the list includes the name of none other than Luis H. Irigoyen, of whom it is documented that he did everything he could to ban the Jewish emigration to Argentina during the war. He even refused to help Argentine Jews living in Europe. In fact, the Nazis exterminated these countrymen because of his intervention.

The Wallenberg Foundation honors the Swedish diplomat who saved hundreds of lives by the end of the Second World War and paid with his life for his activities in support of Jews and other persecuted groups. By mid November, the Foundation wrote Chancellor Carlos Ruckauf asking him for help in clarifying ”a situation” that intrigued them. It seems that the Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina, CEANA (in Spanish), is dedicated to compiling a list of ”Argentine diplomats who saved Jews.” The people on this list were paid tribute during the last Book Fair in an exhibition called ”Visas for Life”. The Wallenberg Foundation observes that the State Department letter intermingled these Argentines with ”authentic, proven saviors” such as the Vatican Nuncio Angelo Rotta, the Portuguese Sousa Mendes and Wallenberg himself.

It is not that the Foundation questions the presence of the Argentines in this context. What it requests, however, is the documentation demonstrating that they deserve to be there, the kind of documentation that they requested from the CEANA ”more than once” and never received.

The Ministry, in contrast to the CEANA, answered the Foundation. But it did not give, or offer to give, any documentation. Signed by the deputy secretary of Foreign Politics, Ambassador Fernando Petrella, the note is a model of diplomacy which explains that the list was developed not only by the Ministry but also by researchers belonging to the CEANA and, partially, by the Center of Social Studies of the main political institution of the Argentine Jewish Community (DAIA). It also points out that Israel and the International Jewish community implicitly accepted their list of names, because the Israeli Ambassador, Benjamin Oron, spoke during a tribute paid to these individuals, attended also by ”representatives of the World Jewish Congress and the local branch of the B’nai B’rith”.

Petrella attaches ”the biographical synopsis” of eleven individuals ˆand not twelve, as appeared on the list at the Book Fair” They are described as ”native and naturalized Argentines” whose ”humanity and solidarity with the victims of Nazism supported their being registered in the Argentine and German official records”. As a safeguard against possible misunderstanding, Petrella adds that the officials are not on the list of the ”Righteous among the Nations” which can only be determined by the Israeli Yad Vashem Holocaust authority.

What Petrella does not include are the concrete references to the ”Argentine and German official records” which he mentions in a general way, and the documentation that would prove the humanity of these diplomats. This detail is relevant, because it not only demonstrates once more that the files of the Ministry of Foreign Relations are impenetrable, but that this lack of documentation also includes the lack of justifying the presence of Luis H. Irigoyen on the list.

The Argentine Chancellery describes Irigoyen as a career diplomat who was a civil attaché to Berne and Berlin between the years 1927 and 1937, and second secretary in Germany between 1937 and 1944, in charge of business affairs between 1937 and 1942. Petrella’s note indicates that ”the German files” reveal that Irigoyen ”got interested” in achieving that the Nazis would allow Ilse Sara Schnapek, a Jewish employee from Poland at the Argentine embassy in Vienna, to emigrate to Argentina, together with her mother and sister. According to the same sources, says the note, Irigoyen interceded on behalf of an Argentine Jew, Rosa Kulka, who received rationing cards in 1943. Further, the secretary had averted the deportation of the Argentine, Israel Hecht, and he was thought to have protested the deportation attempts to Germany of the Argentine Jewish community in Greece and the imposed use of the yellow star by these countrymen.

Since the State Department never says which German files they refer to in particular, it is hard to know whether they refer to the same ones that the Argentine researcher Uki Goñi consulted for his book The Real Odessa. In this troubling story of how Juan Peron assembled a vast network of intelligence to bring to the country hundreds of German, Croatian, Italian, French, Dutch and Belgian war criminals, Goñi deals with a remarkable level of detail and documents the relentless Argentine foreign policy of resisting the arrival of European persecuted people and of collaborating with the Nazis, before, during and after the war.

The shocking thing is the volume of documentation offered by Goñi, carefully written and footnoted in detail. What Argentina still keeps secret, Germany has already opened up to investigators. The German documents cited by Goñi describe Irigoyen very differently, i.e., as a diplomat who exasperated the German Chancellor Ribbentrop because Irigoyen flatly refused to evacuate the Argentine Jews from Europe. Ribbentrop defended this group of Jews in particular to maintain good relations with a country that was an ally, and did not really understand the Argentinian’s apathy toward taking advantage of the opportunity to save fellow Argentines.

Irigoyen denied that hundreds of Argentines residing in Europe were in fact Argentines when the Germans submitted to him a list they -and not he- had developed. The final destination of those fellow countrymen was the gas chambers.

But all this indicates that not even that investigation, so well documented, with file number, folder, box and even shelf, can move the Argentine State. Similarly, that it does not see anything remarkable in the fact that a strident anti-Semite such as writer Hugo Wast is still honored with a special hall in the National Library. Or that Irigoyen is forced on lists of righteous men, while he surrendered Argentine citizens, whom he was supposed to defend, to the Nazis.

© 2000-2002 Pagina12/WEB República Argentina – Todos los Derechos Reservados

Still, ever since his book ”Perón y los Alemanes” – ”Perón and the Germans” – came out in 1998, life has taken an odd turn. ”I was being interviewed on a television program when the book came out. We were talking about Perón and the Nazis and the word ‘Jew’ had not been mentioned at any point. That book doesn’t deal with antisemitism at all. And out of nowhere, the interviewer suddenly says ‘How do you, as a Jew, feel about these issues?’ Which was very strange, because, as I said, we hadn’t even been talking about Jews. We’d been talking about Perón during the war years, his relations with Germany.”

On that television program Goñi replied simply that he was not a Jew. ”But then I realized that this was just the first time, and from then on everyone I meet either privately or when I’m being interviewed brings up the issue of the Jews.”

And so it has gone during the last few weeks, thanks to the publication of another book, this one also not about Jews. ”The Real Odessa” published in English by Granta Books and based on six years of archival work, painstakingly describes a postwar organization established by then-president Juan Domingo Perón to bring Nazis to Argentina. The book has led to invitations for Goñi to speak in front of Jewish groups and to collaborate with Jewish organizations. Granted, few non-Jews work in the field, but Goñi senses a dark element at play. ”For non-Jewish society, it is a way of off-loading a very difficult problem. I write about the Nazis, who are not supposed to be a Jewish issue but an issue that interests the enlightened world – right? Yet the people who invite me are always Jewish organizations. And I really find it very alarming.”

Meanwhile, Goñi’s social life is no longer what it once was. ”Privately, the issue always comes up with something like ‘Uyyy, the Jews! Still harping on about that!’ So I say ‘It isn’t the Jews; it’s me harping. We’re talking about Nazis here!’” Goñi shrugs, looks furtively around the café where we he is sitting with a reporter, then bursts out in slightly nervous laughter.

”The most uneasy thing is the silence that starts surrounding you when you deal with something like this,” he said. ”For example, sometimes in my groups of friends, when they start talking about the Jews, as they will, somebody appears on television and they’ll go, ‘ah, he’s Jewish.’ And suddenly they’ll all turn around and say, ‘oh, lets not talk about the Jews, because Uki’s here.’”

His family is also bewildered by the intellectual turn he has taken. In fact, they are less than thrilled. On page 33 of ”The Real Odessa” Goñi discusses a man who served at the Argentinean consulate in Bolivia in the early 1940s and who ”rigorously” applied a secret Argentinean government directive preventing the immigration of Jews. The diplomat, Santos Goñi, is the author’s grandfather.

With a small smile, Goñi says he has become ”sort of a spy,” privy to a hatred others, including members of the Jewish community, prefer not to see. In Goñi’s view, assimilating as an Argentine implies accepting a certain level of antisemitic behavior; the Jews don’t have much of a choice. It is almost the standard for national belonging. ”It is so prevalent,” he said, ”it is accepted as normal here.”

In ”The Real Odessa,” Goñi tells of being approached by a high Foreign Ministry official following the publication of his 1998 book. The official congratulated him, and then said he’d thought of a subject for a follow-up: ”You should write about the Argentine Raoul Wallenberg.” Goñi replied that he was unaware of any Argentine who might have helped Jews escape to Argentina. The official replied, ”Well, somebody let them in; there are so many of them.”

”The conducting line,” Goñi said, ”whether we’re talking about the disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s or the antisemitic bombings in the 1990s or Argentina closing its ports to the Jews in the 1930’s, the conducting line is, ‘this is difficult, so let’s not deal with it, let’s not talk about it. There is no antisemitism, the desaparecidos don’t really exist, and well, let’s forget about the fact that they blew up 126 people here just a few years ago.’

”It is difficult to say, and difficult for people to accept, but I have to say I myself am antisemitic, just because of the upbringing that I had, just because it forms so much part of the society that I’ve lived in,” he said. ”If I don’t say it in the same way somebody would else says ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ then I live in the other situation, which is denying that there is any antisemitism in Argentina. Which, until very recently, I still believed.”

After a life following his father’s diplomatic assignments, Goñi arrived in Argentina in the mid-1970s with a British girlfriend in tow. The girlfriend had an aunt, a survivor of Auschwitz, living in Buenos Aires, and the young couple went to see her one afternoon for tea. The aunt’s tattoo of her concentration camp number was visible and conversation, at one point, turned to Hitler. The young Goñi, fresh from Europe, said, ”Well, Hitler built the autobahns, he wasn’t all bad. – ”I actually said this,” he told the Forward. – The aunt remained calm. ”She said, ‘you’re a young man, and though you might not realize it now, one day you will realize the enormity of what you are saying.’ And I immediately realized what an absolute idiot I was.”

Today, he is unforgiving. Antisemitism, never much of a preoccupation before, has become for him the litmus test of whether Argentina can be a transparent, democratic society or not. ”If it can’t deal with the issue of antisemitism here, which is pervasive, then we can’t pass the test of a transparent democratic society, full stop.”

Few chapters in modern history have been so studied and documented as the one called ”Kristallnacht”, ”The Night of the Broken Glass”, the pogrom that took place in all Germany on the night of 9 November, 1938.

However, even though Kristallnacht, as well as the luck of many German-Jews who emigrated from Germany before and after November 9th, are chapters on which there is a lot of literature of different nature, little is known about one hundred Argentine Jews abandoned in the Third Reich despite of the efforts of the Nazi regime to try to save them.

There are well-known stories of dozens of diplomats who, opposing direct orders from their governments and risking themselves beyond prudence, helped people persecuted by Adolf Hitlers´s regime.

Raoul Wallenberg (Sweden), Aristides de Sousa Mendes (Portugal), Chiune Sugihara (Japan), Harry Bingham IV (United States), Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas (Brazil) or Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Vatican), among many others saviour diplomats, make us remember that courage and solidarity are eternal values that must be passed on from generation to generation.

These modern heroes could have chosen to enjoy a good life full of comforts, by doing exactly what is expected from a diplomat. Nevertheless, thanks to the fact that they did not forget that a diplomat is above all a public servant, who is firstly accountable to the people before their bureaucratic superiors; thousands of lives were saved from the Holocaust, the greatest industrial extermination in history. Due obedience is not precisely a high priority concept in the set of values of a public official.

In his book ”The Real Odessa” published at the beginning of the year 2002 in London, which recently appeared in the US and is to be published shortly in Argentina, Argentine writer Uki Goñi tells the story of one hundred Argentine Jews ignored by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, in spite of continuous efforts by high ranking Nazi hierarchs to avoid their extermination.

”Once and again Berlin offered Argentina the opportunity to repatriate its Jewish citizens” -around one hundred- ”who lived in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy and Greece. The Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, expressed his concerns about the fate of these people.” says Goñi.

Von Ribbentrop, a conspicuous anti-Semite and the first war criminal to be hanged after the Nuremberg Trials, did not act out of any noble humanistic feelings. His strategy was to preserve, in spite of strong opposition by Heinrich Himmler, the top leader of the SS, the excellent relations that Hitler’s Germany had with an Argentina then run by Perón’s colonels. Argentina provided Germany with a discrete, yet efficient, cover for a vast network of Nazi espionage as well as an ideal ground for laundering US dollars and the provision of essential supplies required for the war effort.

In January 1943, Goñi states in an impeccably documented work, the Argentine ambassador to Vichy, Ricardo Olivera, was called by the Germans to discuss the repatriation of about fifteen Argentines living in France. The Nazis wanted to let them go and gave Olivera three months to arrange their exit. Six months later an answer had yet not been received. Von Ribbentrop even sent Adolf Eichmann in person a memo in which he reminded him of the need to preserve the lives of Argentine citizens.

In March of the same year Luis H. Irigoyen, the Secretary of the Argentine Embassy in Berlin -a delegation with many sympathisers of National-Socialism, many of them in Himmler’s secret service pocket, according to Goñi – was called and told that 59 Argentines survived in Krakow, seven in Holland and many others in Greece. Sixteen Argentine identity cards were shown to Irigoyen as proof of what was being stated. The diplomat barely glanced at the documents and said: ”They are fake. The Argentine Embassy is not interested in the bearers of these apocryphal documents”.

On January 26th, 1944, and as a result of the intense Allied pressure, Argentina finally broke diplomatic relations with the Third Reich. The Argentine Jews no longer enjoyed protection and were detained and transported to the Bergen-Belsen camp.

Not much is known about the fate of these Argentine citizens but it is presumed that most of them were exterminated. ”Argentina thus became the only country in the world to refuse the repatriation of its own citizens.”, underlines the author.

According to Goñi, Irigoyen followed the instructions of the secret Directive 11 issued by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José María Cantilo that, without mentioning them, referred to the Jews when he instructed all the Argentine consulates around the world to ”reject visas, even those of transit or tourism, of all those people who abandoned their country of origin because they were undesirable or because they had been expelled, whatever the reasons”. Directive 11, signed on July 12th, 1938, ”was the equivalent of a death sentence for thousands of European Jews”, Goñi points out.

At best, it is at least curious, that Luis H. Irigoyen should have been included, together with other eleven Argentine diplomats, in a ”List of diplomats who saved Jews”. The list was elaborated by the ”Commission for the Clarification of the activities of Nazism in Argentina” (CEANA), an organism of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the exhibition ”Visas a la Vida” (Visas for Life), presented in the last edition of the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

It would be a great contribution to the historical truth that this obvious contradiction is clarified so that all the people of good will can honor unequivocally the memory of the true saviors. The Argentines who perished in the Holocaust deserve to be remembered with dignity and respect.

* (With José Ignacio García Hamilton, Jack Fuchs and the Rev. Horacio Moreno)