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February 2, 2002
Flight of the Fascists
By PADDY WOODWORTH
The Ustashi, the Catholic fascists of Croatia, did not mince their words.
"Unlike their Nazi masters," wrties Uki Goni, "the Croatians carried out their
Holocaust in broad daylight." So much so that Heinrich Himmler received reports
from his own agents complaining about the 'bestiality" of Ustashi atrocities
against Orthodox Serbs.
If these people were an embarrassment to Berlin, you might imagine the
Vatican to respond with mass excommunications, perhaps substituting sackcloth
and ashes for papal finery.
Well, perhaps not. We know too much by now about Vatican complicity with the
far Right to be naive about such matters. After the war, war criminals flocked
to Rome in their hundreds, where they found "men of good will,, in very high
places, ready and eager to assist them find new lives. They got help too, from
the Red Cross, and even from British and US intelligence when the Cold War sent
moral compasses into a spin.
But today we know significantly more, thanks to Uki Goni, who has filled in
a missing chapter in the story of how the dying Third Reich threw its living
tentacles around the world. Its sermons were, indeed, international. And they
were heard very clearly in Goni's native Argentina, where they continued to
detonate bombs up to the 1990s. They may yet do so again.
The Real Odessa -How Perun Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina is a
copiously documented account of the close relationship between Buenos Aires and
Hitler's Berlin, and the even more intimate friendship between Argentinian
Catholic nationalism and the Latin fascist movements of Italy Spain and Croatia,
Gofli has traced missing links in the stories of Nazi escapees such as Joseph
Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death', and Adolf Eichmann, the man directly in
charge of Hitler's genocide programme. Even more significant is the accumulation
of smaller stories, dozens of them, which add up to a fierce indictment of a
culture of complicity and, above all, silence.