Post-WWII Argentina - Fact or (Detective) Fiction?

In my previous post, I reviewed one of my favorite streaming series with a link to southernmost South America but, while I’ve been unable to travel there (spoiler—I’m scheduled to fly to Buenos Aires on March 6^th), I haven’t been purely a video couch potato. I’ve also been reading and, while I love detective stories, I’ve been doing it in a way that has more content than just potboilers.

In A Quiet Flame, German detective Bernie Gunther investigates a possible serial killer in Argentina.

Over most of the last year, I’ve been recovering from ankle surgery that requires me to do rehabilitation exercises three times daily, followed by elevating the joint to reduce the swelling for 15 minutes at a time. I use that time to read and, recently, I read the late Philip Kerr’s novel The One from the Other, in which Bernie Gunther—a former Berlin detective and anti-Nazi drafted into the Schutzstaffel (SS) during WWII—tries to track down war criminals and finds himself unjustly incriminated. Kerr’s plotline is so complex that I won’t go into more detail here, except to add that, in the end, Bernie has to flee to South America in the company of some pretty notorious “comrades.”

In real life and the novel, the Giovanna C carried both refugees and war criminals from Italy to Argentina.

That, of course, aroused my interest—especially so when the edition I read included the first chapter of A Quiet Flame, which describes Bernie’s 1950 arrival in Buenos Aires on the steamship Giovanna C in the awkward company of two notorious Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann. As in Germany, Gunther doesn’t hesitate to make fun of his companions, and Kerr gives provides him dialogue no less acerbic than Raymond Chandler gave Philip Marlowe and Dashiel Hammett gave Sam Spade. In one case, Bernie remarks that he repels an opponent with a punch that he compares to legendary Argentine boxer Luis Ángel Firpo.

Bernie Gunther claims to pack a punch like the legendary Argentine heavyweight Luis Ángel Firpo, who once knocked Jack Dempsey onto the canvas (Firpo now resides in Recoleta Cemetery).

Like his companions, Bernie arrives under an alias but, in a meeting with then-President Juan Domingo Perón (and Perón's poodles), he has to reveal his true identity and, under pressure, he’s persuaded—forced, rather—to investigate a murder and another disappearance with links to a German-speaking community in Buenos Aires and the northern province of Tucumán (with additional links to a cold case he failed to solve in pre-war Germany).

Unlike Marlowe and Spade, Gunther had worked as a private detective when employment under the Nazi regime became untenable—a situation that may well have contemporary parallels (He had also served in Ukraine, for what that's worth). Parenthetically, Bernie manages to make some blatantly sexist comments about Evita Perón’s appearance, but also sympathizes with the health problems that killed her just a few years later.

Bernie's investigation leads him to a sinister site in the subtropical sierras of Tucumán Province.

More significantly, Bernie learns of the notorious Directive 11, by which the Argentine government denied Jewish refugees entry into the country. Through him, Kerr speculates as to the existence of a Directive 12, which would have established a concentration camp in Tucumán’s subtropical forests.

 

According to a 2009 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Kerr (who died in 2018) decided against visiting Argentina because “I thought about it and decided that what I wanted was a historic picture, rather than the Argentina of today.” In my opinion, though, even allowing for poetic license, this novel would have benefitted from a visit to the country. In one instance, for example, Kerr appears to confuse the Argentine capital’s central shopping district of Florida with a neighborhood in the town of Vicente López, in the city’s northern suburbs—where the Nazi refugees had a safe house and Eichmann later resided for many years. Through Bernie, he's also unnecessarily harsh on a Tucumán he never saw (though it's clearly a different place today). At the very least, the publisher should have hired a proofreader familiar with Argentina—the airport city of Ezeiza, a southern Buenos Aires suburb, is consistently misspelled “Ezeira.”

Uki Goñi's book details the Perón government's complicity with the Nazis. 

At the risk of being labeled a pedant, I’ll still recommend both these novels and others by Kerr, who manages to convey the complexities of surviving in an authoritarian or even totalitarian ambience while still seeking truth and justice—even for a flawed figure like Bernie Gunther. What I'd really like to see is somebody turn all 14 novels into a streaming series.

In the course of writing A Quiet Flame, the novelist relied on Uki Goñi’s The Real Odessa, an historical account of the Nazi presence in post-war Argentina, including documentation of the Perón government’s complicity (Full disclosure: Goñi is a personal acquaintance).

 

Addendum

Another personal acquaintance of mine, the late geographer Dan Gade, had direct contact with another ex-Nazi, the SS officer and ethnobotanist Heinz Brücher, but it was only after Brücher’s murder in 1991 that Gade unearthed the extent of Brücher’s role in WWII and continued adherence to Nazi ideology. Questioning the impartiality of Brücher’s South American research—he also worked in Paraguay—Gade’s article might suggest that Goñi’s extensive and incisive research was only a starting point for a continued assessment of the post-war German presence.

 

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Argentina's Heroic Forger

Late last year, I briefly noted the publication of Sarah Kaminsky’s Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life, the tale of her father’s service in the French Resistance of World War II. That interested me, partly because Kaminsky is an Argentine, and partly because the Resistance provided forged identification that helped my 94-year-old uncle, who lives in Los Angeles, escape the Nazis after being shot down over France in November of 1943. His own account of traveling across France and into Switzerland is positively cinematic.

The English and Spanish-language versions of Kaminsky's story

I received a copy of Kaminsky’s book from the US publisher but, on my recent trip to Buenos Aires, I purchased a copy of the Spanish-language edition Adolfo Kaminsky El Falsificador, primarily because it includes a prologue about Kaminsky’s boyhood in the Argentine capital. Though he spent only five years there before his parents returned to Europe, he offers surprisingly vivid memories of a free-range boyhood in an immigrant neighborhood that sounds like the edge of Barrio Norte (he mentions living on Calle Ecuador, apparently near Avenida Córdoba, but is not more specific than that). 

The intersection of Ecuador and Paraguay is roughly where the Kaminskys lived in Buenos Aires.

Kaminsky’s mother, born in Tbilisi, married his Russian-born father in Paris during World War I. Given the disorder in Europe, heightened by the Bolshevik Revolution, the family had moved to Buenos Aires, where Adolfo was born in 1925. Interestingly, when the family returned to France, what struck him was the contrast with Buenos Aires, the noise from the cars, trams and trucks that crowded Parisian streets—“It was so different from Calle Ecuador!” In the ensuing century, Buenos Aires has more than caught up.

The return to Europe didn’t go as expected because the French would not grant the family immediate residence, and they spent two years in Turkey waiting for permission to return. The lack of papers, Kaminsky implies, may have inspired his interest in falsifying documents: “Nothing destined me to become a forger but, however, those papers that my family needed when I was a child were going to govern my life.”

Only 14 when World War II broke out, Kaminsky (and his Jewish family) survived the earliest years of the German occupation because of their nationality—Argentina remained a neutral country until nearly the end of the conflict. Adolfo, meanwhile, had acquired skills in printing, dyeing and photography that allowed him to produce passports and other papers that saved as many as 3,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Eventually, the Kaminskys themselves had to scatter and hide—with the help of Adolfo’s bogus documents—but after the liberation of Paris he provided Allied forces with new forgeries that helped them infiltrate German lines. After the war, he assisted European Jews in reaching Palestine—though he deplored Zionism—and then helped figures in the Algerian independence movement move between North Africa and Europe. He prided himself in never charging for his services—everything was pro bono for causes that he either supported or saw as a better alternative to the status quo.

Kaminsky did his last forgery in 1971 and lived in Algeria for a decade, marrying a Tuareg woman, before finally returning to France in the early 1990s. His daughter’s persistent inquiry into her father’s murky history eventually resulted in this book, presented as a memoir from a hero who, accustomed to staying in the background, refrained from boastfulness.