Escaping Hitler Book

[Janne Evers]

Mostnon-Jews neither aided nor hindered the "Final Solution" and relatively few people helped Jews escape. Among those who helped Jews were various local and international Jewish organizations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and the World Jewish Congress. In addition, sympathetic non-Jews, motivated by opposition to Nazism, by moral and religious principles, or by human compassion, provided assistance to Jews at sometimes tremendous personal risk.

Between 1939 and 1941 nearly 300,000 Polish Jews, almost 10 percent of the Polish Jewish population, fled German-occupied areas of Poland and crossed into the Soviet zone. While Soviet authorities deported tens of thousands of Jews to Siberia, central Asia, and other remote areas in the interior of the Soviet Union, most of them managed to survive. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, more than a million Soviet Jews fled eastward into the Asian parts of the country, escaping almost certain death. Despite the harsh conditions of the Soviet interior, those who escaped there constituted the largest group of European Jews to survive the Nazi onslaught.

Neutral Sweden provided sanctuary for some Norwegian Jews in 1940 and for virtually the entire Danish Jewish community in October 1943. The Danish resistance movement organized the escape of 7,000 Danish Jews and 700 of their non-Jewish relatives across the Sund Channel from Denmark to Malmo, Sweden.

From 1937 to 1944, the Zionist movement organized the escape of 18,000 central and east European Jews to Palestine. At first Greek harbors were used to embark on the voyage to Palestinian ports. Later, Jewish refugees left via Black Sea ports in Bulgaria and Romania. Many of the boats needed to refuel in Turkish ports. Despite Turkey's efforts to prevent these ships from docking, more than 16,000 Jews passed through Turkey en route to Palestine. In a tragic incident, the Struma, a ship carrying refugees bound for Palestine, was sunk off the Turkish coast. Although the cause of the sinking is not definitively known, it is assumed that the "Struma" was mistakenly torpedoed by a Soviet submarine.

Italian forces protected Jews in the Italian occupation zones in Yugoslavia, France, and Greece. From mid-1942 to September 1943, Italy gave aid to Jews in several areas under its occupation. These included Dalmatia and Croatia, where 5,000 Jews found refuge; southern France, where at least 25,000 Jews fled; and Greece, where 13,000 Jewish refugees found temporary shelter. Despite unceasing demands and protests from the Germans, Croatian fascists, and the Vichy police, the Italian authorities refused to hand over these Jews. The Italians also extended protection to Jews in Tunisia.

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During the 1930s and 1940s, Latin America became a perfect place for exiles from Europe to find shelter, not only Jews fleeing persecution during the war, but for Nazis escaping prosecution as war criminals.

In the search for solutions to escape Nazi Europe, thousands of people eventually emigrated to South America on tourist visas. Traditionally, the Americas were viewed as lands of economic prosperity and traditional immigration.

The post-war period saw a new wave of immigration to the continent. This time it was Nazis fleeing Europe to avoid facing trials. Latin America appeared to be a good place to hide. Most of them would end up living their lives there, sometimes without even changing their names. Others, like Adolf Eichmann or Klaus Barbie, were eventually caught by the Mossad or Nazi hunters.

Born in Transylvania in 1901, George Mantello was a successful Jewish financier and textile manufacturer. During one of his business trips, he met and befriended Salvadorian consul Jos Arturo Castellanos Contreras.

Small countries that could not afford an extensive staff of diplomats, often offered positions to businessmen who were trying to escape the Nazis. Jos Castellanos appointed Mantello as the first secretary to the Salvadoran consulate in Geneva to save him and his family from deportation.

In an effort to stop the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz George Mantello sent more than 120 Swiss newspapers reports of the Auschwitz protocols and details of the operations inside the camp. The revelation triggered massive street protests in Switzerland and reactions from several governments. This contributed to the Hungarian authorities to stop the trains that had been deporting 12,000 Jews per day at the time.

In most Latin American countries, antisemitism was on the rise in the 1930s and the immigration policies of traditional destinations such as Argentina or Brazil started becoming more and more restrictive. For some countries, however, the migration of Jewish refugees was a political and economic opportunity.

An unlikely haven was Bolivia. Following the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, it was one of the only countries in the world to welcome Jews. From then until the end of the war, 20,000 refugees, mostly from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia settled in the country.

Following the end of the war, another wave of refugees came to Bolivia. Among them Holocaust survivors trying to reunite with their families, and also a few Nazis, the most famous being Klaus Barbie. The living conditions of Bolivia, with social problems, high instability and inhospitable climate made it difficult for the refugees to actually stay in the country at the end of the war. Most of them either moved to neighbouring countries, such as Argentina and Brazil or went back to Europe.

In the 1930s, Latin America became a haven for political refugees. All over the continent, associations and journals were created to oppose antisemitism, often rooted primarily in the local Jewish community. In Argentina for example, the newspaper Alerta! Was publishing the report: Por la Fraternidad, contra el odio racial.

The group created the Club Enrique Heine under the presidency of German writer Anna Seghers and published a newspaper, Alemania Libre (Free Germany). The club presented various cultural events in German such as concerts, conferences, or operas. The creation of the newspaper was a big step for the organisation and its first issue, in 1941, a direct provocation to Nazi fascism. With a print run of around 4,000 copies, the paper advocated for a clear opposition to the German Nazi community in Mexico.

The main medium of Nazi propaganda all around Latin America was the press, much of which constantly played on fears of Jewish and Communist invasion. The antisemites would exaggerate the size of the Jewish population present in each country in order to scare the readers. Jewish immigration was also often associated with the Bolshevik threat, as reflected in the Argentinian newspaper Clarinada.

In 1938 in Buenos Aires, the Yiddish language was forbidden at public meetings by the police and bombs were placed in front of a number of synagogues. Under president Roberto Ortiz (1938-1942), supposedly more sympathetic to Jews, Jewish teachers and physicians were dismissed from public institutions and Jewish patients excluded from hospitals.

One of the main obstacles to the emigration of Jewish refugees to Argentina was the presence of Santiago Peralta, an energetic antisemite, who was head of the Immigration Office until 1947. His department issued a number of laws making Jewish immigration harder. The selling of visas by Argentinian diplomats became commonplace in response.

Some of the people who escaped arrest and prosecution for their crimes via the Argentinian ratline include former SS Erich Priebke, Gerhard Bohne and Josef Schwammberger, and also some of the most famous Nazis on the run: Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann.

Josef Mengele was born in 1911 in Bavaria. He is best known for having been a physician in Auschwitz. He conducted diverse experiments on the prisoners and was part of the team that selected victims to be killed in gas chambers.

While in prison, he obtained fake documents as Fritz Hollmann and managed to hide for a few years while his name was mentioned regularly in the press and at the Nuremberg trials. Because Mengele was one of the most wanted Nazis, he had to wait until 1948 to be able use a ratline to Argentina under the new identity of Helmut Gregor.

Mengele went on to live hidden, first in Paraguay and then Brazil, still protected by the people who helped them escape Europe in the first place. He eventually died by drowning in 1979 without ever expressing remorse about his actions during the war.

There was a strong connection between European fascism and the various dictatorships that the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil) experienced in the 1970s. In Chile, some of the most notorious criminals of the time, Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko and Paul Schfer Schneider, had either personal or familial ties to the Nazi party.

Antisemitic acts have continued and the terrorist attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 (29 deaths) and the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association bombing of 1994 (85 deaths) triggered a wave of Jewish immigration to Israel since the 2000s.

Flight Lieutenant Bram van der Stok had managed to get out of Holland when the Nazis invaded, and had flown with the RAF during those first months of the war. Because of his zeal for escaping, his intelligence, his familiarity with the countryside, and his gift for languages, the Escape Committee [formed by prisoners at Stalag Luft III] had rated his chances of making a home run very highly, and he was among the first 20 through the tunnel.

At the station he left Bram to his own devices, and the first thing Bram discovered was that the heavy raid on Berlin had delayed his train by three hours. Bram wished someone could have told the chief of Bomber Command what trouble he was causing his fellow air force men.

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