His Love of Nazism Lives On

The long pale hands fumble a bit as the elderly German unchains the iron gate.

But he still moves with military correctness as he leads the way through a frontyard enclosed by a high hedge and into his home. He sinks into an aged armchair in a dim living room filled with books and an air of solitude. At 88, he is courtly, wary, nostalgic. His blue eyes glow when he recalls the day Joseph Goebbels introduced him to Adolf Hitler.

“Goebbels was outdoors, and he asked me to bring him some papers,” the man says. “He was with Hitler and the dog that always accompanied him. I approached, and first I saluted Hitler. He shook my hand, and Goebbels told him who I was. Hitler . . . looked at me and nothing more. But it was impressive. I can’t say anything else. Today they say so many bad things about him; I never experienced anything like that. . . . I admire him. That’s the position I take, and I will take it until the day I die.”

His name is Wilfred von Oven. He was a German army lieutenant and personal aide to Goebbels, who was Hitler’s propaganda minister and mastermind of the Nazis’ demented genocidal ideology. Since arriving in this country 49 years ago, Von Oven has applied the teachings of Goebbels as a journalist, author and, according to a recent report by the Argentine government, “one of the key figures in neo-Nazi and neo-fascist networks” here and in Europe.

Von Oven evokes a dark past that haunts Argentina: that of the fugitive Nazis who found shelter here after World War II. He is not a war criminal, although Argentine authorities tried unsuccessfully to prosecute him 10 years ago for praising Hitler. But Von Oven was prominent in a cadre of pro-Nazi writers and intellectuals who greatly influenced Argentine political culture.

Today, in his small house in this Buenos Aires suburb dominated by army bases and extremist right-wing politics, he continues to write and speak out, an unrepentant father figure to a new generation of hatemongers.

After half a century of denial and silence, Argentina is confronting its role as one of the world’s top refuges for war criminals and their ideas. The government and independent researchers have delved into the ghosts and myths and showed how Nazis helped foster the authoritarian politics, violent anti-Semitism and state terrorism from which Argentines are still recovering.

The government’s Commission for the Clarification of Nazi Activities in Argentina has convened academics, Jewish leaders and others in the first official attempt to document an evil chapter of history. The panel was created in 1997 by then-President Carlos Menem, whose Peronist party has been skittish about the issue because its founder, late President Juan Peron, was key to the arrival and protection of Nazis.

Argentines, who replaced dictatorship with democracy 17 years ago, want to overcome their “culture of secrecy,” according to Ignacio Klisch, academic coordinator of the commission. That means facing the truth about Peron, an enigmatic figure who admired fascism yet appealed to leftists and Jewish admirers.

In a voluminous report completed in December, the commission found that Peron’s presidential palace hosted a meeting in 1947 in which a pro-Nazi Belgian war criminal and others conspired to give safe passage to like-minded immigrants and fugitives.

“If any war criminal disembarked on our coasts through this group, the ultimate responsibility lies with the chief of state--that is, Peron,” Klisch said.

Best-Selling Book Details Secret Alliance

The report identifies 180 war criminals who found refuge here. They range from Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann and death camp doctor Josef Mengele to such lesser-known but sinister figures as Ante Pavelic and Radislaw Ostrowsky, the pro-Nazi leaders of Croatia and Belarus, respectively.

The report was preceded by the breakthroughs of Uki Goni, an Argentine journalist whose best-selling 1998 book, “Peron and the Germans,” will be published in English next year as “The Real Odessa.” The title refers to “The Odessa File,” Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel about an underground railroad for fleeing Nazis.

Goni unearthed Argentine, German and U.S. government documents detailing how Argentine leaders established a secretive alliance with leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich and tried to spread the influence of fascism in South America. Debate persists about whether Odessa existed under that name, but Goni asserts that Peron--who was a powerful Cabinet member in the last years of the war and became president in 1946--gave free rein to a comparable organization of German operatives. Those spies here and in Europe, along with the Vatican and Allied intelligence services, aided hundreds of fugitives.

The network, according to the book, was run by the Presidential Information Service, an Argentine espionage agency. The key figures in that office were two German Argentines: Rodolfo Freude, chief of the information service, and former German SS Capt. Carlos Fuldner, who set up a company that employed Eichmann.

Freude, who lives in Buenos Aires, has not granted interviews or commented on Goni’s book, which is praised by U.S., German and Argentine experts.

Goni’s book “leaves no doubt about the structure that existed in the Argentine state to cover up the Nazis,” said Sergio Widder, representative here of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. “This was not an isolated policy of Peron. He was ousted in 1955, and the structure survived.”

Expatriates’ Legacy Lasted in S. America

Transplanted Nazis became industrialists, scientists, military advisors and political activists. Their legacy endured here and in Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia, which also endured bloody dictatorships, Goni said in a recent interview. Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie participated in atrocities by Bolivian security forces.

“How can it be a coincidence that countries that had Eichmann and Mengele in their midst could produce a [Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet or [Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael] Videla?” Goni said.

Authoritarianism and anti-Semitism here predate the Nazis. But the recent research shows how postwar extremist ideologies infected Argentine society through Von Oven and his peers, especially Belgians and French who had a cultural affinity with Argentines as fellow Roman Catholics.

Among them was Jacques de Mahieu, a French immigrant who was a top Peronist intellectual--and the anti-Semitic author of a theory that the Vikings were the true indigenous people of Latin America. He remained politically active until his death in 1990.

De Mahieu “was my best friend here,” said Von Oven. “He was a great Peronist. He had an incredibly good intellectual formation.”

Von Oven combined the careers of writer and soldier. He was born in 1912 of German parents living in Bolivia, where his father was a banker. But the family soon returned to Germany, and Von Oven still speaks Spanish with a German accent.

Von Oven embraced Nazism as an angry young man after World War I, when the economic wasteland of Germany was fertile soil for anti-Semitic hatred.

When he recalls those years, his lined and angular face undergoes a chilling metamorphosis in the shadows of the living room. His tone hardens. His words drip contempt.

“My family lived at that time in Silesia,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds of Jews arrived from the east, with their strange and dirty and poor clothes. They got on trains, went to Berlin and, in a few years--well, they were obviously better at managing money than the Germans. And they gained very important positions. And a very negative atmosphere grew among the two races. I know this very well because at that time I was 15 or 16 years old. And that is the fighting age, when you are ready to do anything.”

Although Von Oven has associated with neo-Nazis who claim the Holocaust never happened, he gets cagey on this matter. He noted that he is still a citizen of Germany, where denying the Holocaust is against the law. He acknowledged that Eichmann, who was executed in Israel in 1962, and Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979, were war criminals. But he also insinuated that many slain Jews were guerrillas fighting behind German lines.

Von Oven said he first saw combat with the Condor Legion, a German force that fought on the side of fascism in the Spanish Civil War. In World War II, he fought on the Russian front in a tank company. Later he was recruited to be the propaganda minister’s aide. From 1943 to 1945, he was Goebbels’ shadow.

“I accompanied him day after day, in all of his trips, to all of his homes. In the last year and the last months, we ate lunch and dinner together all the time. He enjoyed talking, and in me he had a man whose official duty was to listen. . . . Today it is not very practical to say it: I had a great respect for this man. Goebbels always had a relationship with the working masses; he was a revolutionary from head to toe.”

Goebbels’ name has become synonymous with perversely manipulative propaganda. His writings and broadcasts drove the Nazi regime’s propaganda machine, which generated the frenzy leading to the slaughter of millions. Yet Von Oven claimed that matter never came up.

“The Jewish issue was not an issue of our daily conversations,” he said of the Holocaust. “We didn’t talk about it. I knew nothing about this. I cannot confirm it.”

Minister and disciple parted on April 22, 1945, as the Allies were attacking Berlin. Goebbels took refuge in the bunker where, eight days later, he killed his wife and children and, like Hitler, committed suicide. Von Oven said he pilfered a couple of machine pistols from Goebbels’ home as souvenirs.

By 1951, Von Oven had been cleared of war crimes by the Allies--he displays a sheaf of yellowing documents that attest to his denazification--and departed for Argentina. He wrote articles and books (including a memoir about Goebbels) and became an editor of German-language newspapers here, notably the far-right Freie Presse. Under his stewardship between 1952 and 1962, the newspaper attained a circulation of 30,000--at the time, the biggest of any German publication outside Europe.

Von Oven and his friends also were published in Argentina by the Durer publishing house and Der Weg, a stridently anti-Semitic magazine influential in international neo-Nazi circles. The Argentine commission report quotes a 1974 article by Von Oven lauding the magazine for “stopping the sea of lies” and “reinforcing the ethnic consciousness of Germans all over the world.”

Fascist influences contributed to the spiral of violence and nationalism that culminated in Argentina’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. The echoes were evident in the military regime’s secret camps decorated with swastikas; the especially sadistic treatment of Jews; even the elaborate, bureaucratic language of the so-called Process of National Reorganization--the state terror campaign that is believed to have killed as many as 30,000 people.

The dictators were later tried and convicted, but amnesty laws allow many of the killers and torturers to walk the streets.

Criminals Lived Undisturbed for Years

As for Nazis, the last two major war criminals extradited from Argentina were tracked down by journalists, not the authorities. Dinko Sakic, a concentration camp commander convicted last year in Croatia, and former SS Capt. Erich Priebke, who was convicted two years ago by an Italian court, lived unmolested as “respectable” citizens for decades. Priebke used his real name; he even admitted his role in the 1944 massacre of 335 Italians in a book published here three years before ABC News “discovered” him in 1994 in the Andean resort of San Carlos de Bariloche.

Von Oven recalled that Priebke called and “asked me what I would do in his position. I said: ‘Do you have a good firearm? I would put a bullet in my temple.’ ”

Today, Von Oven remains in contact with the new generation of neo-Nazis. He shows off a plaque he received from an “association of free journalists” during a trip to Germany two years ago. In Argentina, the Wiesenthal Center successfully pressed the government to file hate crime charges against a neo-Nazi group active on the Internet whose video catalog features an interview with Von Oven.

Entrenched intolerance goes beyond fringe groups. The reputation of the security forces remains sinister, especially the police of Buenos Aires province. An ex-commander and three officers of the force will soon go on trial on charges that they were accomplices in an unsolved 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in which 86 people were killed.

Despite the objections of the Wiesenthal Center and other human rights advocates, the man recently named to oversee the provincial police is former army Col. Aldo Rico, a leader of a commando unit that attempted uprisings in the late 1980s. The commandos later formed a far-right political party with links to anti-Semitic figures. The party’s political base includes Bella Vista, this suburb where several former Nazis settled.

In his home here, Von Oven is asked if he has any remorse, any doubts about an ideology that has caused so much suffering. He does not seem to accept the premise of the question. Saying he prefers to talk about tanks, he takes down from the mantelpiece a model of an elite Tiger tank used by SS troops during World War II and reminisces about its prowess.

But Von Oven makes it clear that he is encouraged by developments on the international front. With a knowing smile, he all but invites a question about his views of Joerg Haider, the key figure in the extreme-right Freedom Party that recently joined Austria’s ruling coalition, causing an uproar in Europe.

“Haider is a good man,” Von Oven says. “Some friends wanted me to travel to Austria to meet him, but I don’t think I’m ready for a trip like that. After all, I’m 88 years old.”