The Hidden War in Argentina

British and American Espionage in World War II

Panagiotis Dimitrakis

• Éditeur: I.B. Tauris
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786725530
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Military Biographies

Though officially neutral until March 1945, Buenos Aires played a key role during World War II as a base for the South American intelligence operations of the major powers. The Hidden War in Argentina reveals the stories of the spymasters, British, Americans and Germans who plotted against each other throughout the Second World War in Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Johannes Siegfried Becker – codename 'Sargo' – was the man responsible for organizing most of the Nazi intelligence gathering in Latin America and the leader of 'Operation Bolivar', which sought to bring South America into the war on the side of the Axis powers. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the US state department pressured every South American country to join it in declaring war on Germany, and J Edgar Hoover authorized huge investments in South American intelligence operations. Argentina continued to refuse to join the conflict, triggering a US embargo that squeezed the country's economy to breaking point. Buenos Aires continued to be a hub for espionage even as the war in Europe was ending – hundreds of high-ranking Nazi exiles sought refuge there. This book is based on newly declassified files and details of the operations of MI6, the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the FBI, as well as the OSS and the SOE. Most significantly, The Hidden War in Argentina reveals for the first time the coups of Britain's MI6 in South America.

CHAPTER 1

THE AMBASSADOR

The passersby, dock workers, sailors, customs officers and merchants had stopped working and stared at a crowd of people greeting an officer disembarking from a vessel. He looked menacing in his foreign black uniform, giving the Nazi salute and at the top of his voice singing with the ecstatic crowd:

The flag on high! The ranks tightly closed!

The SA marches with quiet, steady step.

Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries

March in spirit within our ranks.

Comrades shot by the Red Front and reactionaries

March in spirit within our ranks.

Clear the streets for the brown battalions,

Clear the streets for the storm division!

Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope . . .

They were singing the anthem of the Nazi party. It was 10 December 1933 when the SS officer, accompanied by his wife, stepped down the ladder, receiving the welcome of his compatriots.¹ At that time the Nazi party in Argentina had registered only 500 members, but soon their number would reach 2,000 and more. This SS officer later admitted ‘people were arriving from Germany and if you wanted a chance, you had to be a member of the Party, so the numbers increased all the time.’²

Nonetheless, he was no real SS officer but a diplomat. Edmund Freiherr von Thermann was born to a wealthy Prussian family in 1884. Since 1913, he had served with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Auswärtiges Amt (AA) based in the famous Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. Prior to his appointment as Minister in Buenos Aires, he had been Consul General in Danzig for nine years and earlier had served in the diplomatic missions in Paris, Madrid, Brussels and Washington. The usually cautious and, like all German diplomats of his age, conservative Thermann became pro-Nazi, rejecting the provisions of the Versailles Treaty on Danzig. Once he returned from Danzig in late 1932, having befriended Himmler, Thermann joined the SS as an honorary member – ever keen to wear the black uniform.³ His wife Vilma was a domineering presence and, according to some American and British diplomats, she was the driving force behind his political and social aspirations. Indeed, Thermann’s social connections were precious to him: in 1939 his daughter married Baron von Hadern, Himmler’s adjutant who was killed in Russia in 1943. Afterwards, she was engaged to Fritz Darges, one of Hitler’s adjutants. Himmler supported Thermann’s son, Wolfgang, urging him to learn Japanese and enter the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Main Security Office which controlled the SD, Gestapo and the police). Eventually Wolfgang joined the Waffen SS and was killed in combat in 1944. Thermann himself was trusted by Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, who kept him in his post in Argentina for nine years.⁴ The circumstances of Thermann’s appointment foreshadowed things to come: in January 1933, Heinrich Ritter von Kaufmann-Asser had been appointed head of the German diplomatic mission. Kaufmann, a sophisticated, Spanish-speaking diplomat who had served in Vienna and Santiago, was soon to be sacked. The German Law of the Reform of the Civil Service, passed on 9 April, banned citizens of Jewish ancestry from public service. Kaufmann-Asser lost his position, but had to wait in his post until a suitable successor was appointed. The successor was the honorary SS officer, Thermann.⁵

Eight hundred thousand ethnic Germans lived in Brazil, 500,000 in Argentina and 250,000 in Chile, and Thermann, to his dismay, soon found that the large German community in Argentina, and in Latin America as a whole, was not keen to support Hitler’s racial understanding of the world. Besides this, Thermann experienced what it was like to deal with the Auslands Organization (AO) and other smaller organizations of the Nazi Party which recruited teachers who were party members for the German schools in Latin America. Stalin was suspicious of the German community in Argentina and had directed NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) Soviet agents to lead sabotage and intimidation against them; a German bookshop in Buenos Aires was burned down and other incendiary attacks followed on German stores.⁶

Ribbentrop and his trusted diplomats did not give priority to devising a clear strategy on Argentina, something Thermann and his chargé d’affaires Erich Otto Meynen complained about, in a bid to sideline the vociferous Nazi Party functionaries claiming authority in foreign policy-making.⁷ Thermann called Meynen a muss-Nazi, ‘a Nazi out of necessity’, a man who in order to save his career decided in 1937, rather belatedly, to join the Nazi Party. Indeed, Meynen’s wife was strongly anti-Nazi and the diplomat disliked the AO.⁸

Thermann admired Hitler, but the latter had little interest in, or knowledge of, South America. Despite growing German immigration to Argentina since the late nineteenth century and the rise of German entrepreneurs there, in the 1920s, Hitler assumed that it was within the US sphere of influence due to the Monroe Doctrine. (Since 1823 Washington had deemed hostile any attempt of European powers to interfere in North or South America; in parallel the United States abstained from any policy which could challenge European colonial interests elsewhere.) In Mein Kampf he merely wrote: ‘North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower coloured peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale.’⁹ In his second unpublished book, Hitler made a passing reference to Argentina:

Emigration does not take place according to region or take place by age group, but rather according to the capriciousness of fate, it always pulls out of the population the boldest and bravest, the most resolute, most defiant members of a community. The farm boy who emigrated to America 150 years ago was the most determined and boldest in his village, just like the worker who goes to Argentina today.¹⁰

A large part of the German community, the businessmen, were angry with the sacking of Kaufmann and regarded Thermann with suspicion. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, the fanatic head of the AO, was always antagonizing the Auswärtiges Amt. Bohle was born in Bradford in 1903 and emigrated with his family to South Africa three years later. He subsequently returned to Europe, where he studied political science and business administration in Cologne and Berlin. He then worked for eight years as a company manager before joining the Nazi Party in 1932. In September 1933 Bohle joined the SS and reached the rank of Lieutenant General by 1943. He worked under Hans Nieland from December 1931, who was the head of AO responsible for South and South-West Africa and North America. In March 1933 he succeeded Nieland, was appointed Gauleiter and became a confidant of Rudolf Hess.¹¹ Bohle criticized the Germans living in Latin America, as he considered that they:

Tended to take on a very different outlook than was generally considered fitting for good Teutons; they became much more lively and lighthearted, and often assumed a rather Latin attitude toward life, which made them rather hard to handle at times.¹²

Thermann called them narrow-minded, having a kleinbürgerlicher Horizont: a petty bourgeois horizon of views.¹³

The German communities were not incorporated into Latin American politics. Antonio Delfino, the head of a famous German-owned shipping company, remarked, ‘The Germans are like orphans; they know no one and no one knows them.’ From 1930 the AO local groups made a sustained propaganda effort to persuade the German communities to join the Nazi cause.¹⁴ Thermann also pursued a propaganda campaign, first to show that he was a true Nazi and also to increase the influence of the embassy against the AO which operated independently. Thermann was described by Charles Dodd, the British chargé d’affaires, as ‘an ardent Hitlerite’ who was ‘always studiously polite and friendly’; ‘A hard worker in the interests of his country. Both he and his wife, who hails from the Baltic Provinces, are excellent linguists. They have made a good position for themselves in Buenos Aires society by entertaining lavishly, in their very good Embassy.’ Dodd added that he found Thermann ‘a pleasant and correct colleague, and his wife an agreeable if somewhat exotically attired table companion’.¹⁵ In 1936, Thermann, in an impeccable black suit, attended the reception in honor of President Roosevelt in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, his swastika armband was found odd and rather offensive by Argentine and foreign officials.¹⁶

Thermann presented himself as an SS soldier, a devoted Nazi, loyal to the directions of Berlin, but in reality he was a semi-autonomous strategist in a faraway land. Commercial Attaché Richard Burmeister, Heinrich Volberg, head of the AO’s economic office in the embassy and chargé d’affaires Meynen handled trade and economics issues.¹⁷

Throughout the 1930s, employing propaganda and bribes in the local press, Thermann tried to convince the Argentine Government and the public that Nazi Germany was a paradigm to be followed and that Latin America should resist American policies in the Western Hemisphere. He raised the issue of the Argentines’ shared kinship with Spain after the victory of Franco in the civil war in 1939. During this period the Argentine Government was angry with the US embargo on their beef products, for health reasons, as the US Department for Agriculture claimed. Authoritarian tendencies in the military suggested that there could be a closer relationship with Nazi Germany. Many Argentine officers were trained by the German military mission from the late nineteenth century and throughout World War I. Argentine officers had confidence in German arms. The companies Staudt & Co, Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert had set up the Compañía Argentina de Comerico (Coarico) to promote German arms sales. Eventually, the Argentines purchased Junker Ju-52 transport planes, as well as licenses to build 20 Focke-Wulf trainers in Argentina. Throughout World War I, a German military mission was deployed in Argentina, only to be withdrawn with the defeat of Germany. Nonetheless in 1923 the mission resumed its function, although the advisors were officially retired officers. The Argentines asked for arms and munitions but, despite German promises, this did not materialize; the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 compelled Berlin not to share arms with anyone.¹⁸

Thermann realized that he could not control the groups of AO in Argentina. Volberg, an AO head, and a director of a Bayern company department in Buenos Aires, who had lived in the country since 1928, was blacklisting Germans and German-owned firms who were not co-operating with the Nazi Party or following the propaganda line. The AO monopolized the Foreign Trade Office, whose function was to vet Germans who sought employment in German firms abroad. Volberg was promoting companies headed by Nazi Party members who did not employ Jews. German teachers were compelled to follow a Nazi curriculum and teach Mein Kampf. Thermann was worried by the growing exasperation of the Argentine Government with the AO, which ‘interfered in everything’. Of all the local groups, only the Landergruppe of AO were neither funded nor controlled by the German Embassy.¹⁹

In September 1934, Nazi sympathizers, encouraged by the AO, made a bid to bomb the office of the newspaper Argentinisches Tageblatt, which followed an anti-Nazi line and, in the same year, a theatre screening a film about the persecution of the Jews in Germany was bombed. Thermann pressed for the Landergruppe to abstain from violence, lest they should turn the German communities and the Argentine Government against them. Eventually Bohle agreed to order the Landergruppe to cease from provocation, for the time being. Willi Kohn, a confidant of Bohle, was sent to Argentina for this task.²⁰

Thermann intensified Nazi propaganda by bribing through advertising two newspapers, the Pampero and the Deutsche La Plata Zeitung. Gottfried Sandstede and his brother, both Nazi Party members working for the Antonio Delfino shipping agency, facilitated the bribing of the press. The money was collected in the Presse Fond (the secret funds to influence the local press) of the embassy under the control of Sandstede and Meynen. German diplomats and entrepreneurs contributed up to 50 per cent of their salaries. The Winterhilfe funds (‘Winter Reli...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Secret Pre-Histories
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Ambassador
• Chapter 2. At War
• Chapter 3. The Man from the Abwehr
• Chapter 4. How Britain Bought the Admiral Graf Spee
• Chapter 5. The Islands
• Chapter 6. Argentina and US War Plans
• Chapter 7. The Director
• Chapter 8. Undercover
• Chapter 9. The Manipulator
• Chapter 10. The Man from the SD
• Chapter 11. Get the Envoy
• Chapter 12. On the Run
• Chapter 13. The Special Operatives
• Chapter 14. The Last General
• Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright