Jim Marrs - The Rise of the Fourth Reich

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THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH

Tour” of Europe, greeted royally by Spain’s Franco and a private audience with Pope Pius XII. While in Spain, she reportedly met with Otto Skorzeny, who headed a ratline known as die Spinne or the Spider, and arranged the transfer of millions in Nazi loot to Argentina. She also traveled to Genoa, where she met with Argentine shipping fleet owner Alberto Dodero, who within a month was ferrying Nazis to South America. But the primary purpose of the trip appeared to be the meetings Evita held with bankers in Switzerland.

“According to records now emerging from Swiss archives and the investigations of Nazi hunters, an unpublicized side of Evita’s world tour was coordinating the network for helping Nazis relocate in Argentina,” wrote Hodel. “Though Evita’s precise role on organizing the Nazi ‘ratlines’ remains a bit fuzzy, her European tour connected the dots of the key figures in the escape network. She also helped clear the way for more formal arrangements in the Swiss-Argentine-Nazi collaboration.”

In 1955, Peron was ousted in a military coup and forced to flee to neighboring Paraguay and later to exile in Madrid, Spain. He left without the body of Eva, who had died from cancer in 1952, at age thirty-three.

Her popularity was such that eight persons were trampled to death in the tumultuous crowds who flocked to see her embalmed body lying in state.

According to Manning, the relationship between Bormann and Peron “became somewhat frayed around the edges after Peron left for Panama and then exile in Spain in 1955, but [Gestapo] Mueller today [1981] still wields power with the Argentinian secret police in all matters concerning Germans and the [Nazis] in South America.”

THE I M PACT OF transplanted Nazis continues to be felt in South America. “Those aging fascists accomplished much of what the ODESSA strategists had hoped,” noted Georg Hodel, adding, “The Nazis in Argentina kept Hitler’s torch burning, won new converts in the region’s militaries and passed on the advanced science of torture and ‘death squad’ operations. Hundreds of left-wing Peronist students and unionists were among the victims of the neo-fascist Argentine junta that launched the Dirty War in 1976.”