by Veruska Carballo Fontevecchia
After Nazis found refuge in Argentina, a network of German schools helped them spread their dangerous ideology in their new home. Decades later, those schools are still fueling a culture of antisemitism in the country.
Mónica Bensel was only a child when she started learning about her father’s past. “He was a hard man, he kept everything to himself,” she says. But Mónica, astute and observant, started piecing together the details of his story. There were the nightmares that would wake him up in the middle of the night screaming. There were the years-old wounds that showed in his body and the way he moved around. There was the timing of his arrival in Argentina, shortly after the end of World War II.
For Mónica, Udo was her father, a stoic German factory worker who had moved to the outskirts of Buenos Aires looking for a fresh start. In a previous life, however, Udo had been a Nazi soldier.
Drafted into the Nazi troops at the age of 18, Udo was never a high-ranking official, but his involvement with the German side was substantial. He spent most of the war in North Africa, working closely with General Erwin Rommel, the infamous military strategist known as “the Desert Fox.” The rest of the war Udo spent in a German hospital, recovering from a major injury he sustained when a grenade exploded near his face.
After his recovery, Udo was supposed to continue his career with the German military. While in the hospital, he had also fathered a child with a nurse. German norms dictated he should marry his child’s mother and recognize his new son. Dissatisfied with the prospect of a life in the military and a marriage he did not want, Udo decided to escape to Argentina, where Nazi war criminals and lowly soldiers alike had found refuge at the end of the war.
In Argentina’s Casa Rosada sat Juan Domingo Perón, a notorious Nazi sympathizer. Perón had worked in secret to allow high-ranking Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann entry into Argentina. Well-known fugitives like Eichmann required fake travel documents and were forced to assume a new identity on arrival, but for low-ranking soldiers like Udo, entering Argentina was significantly easier. No visa or fake identity was required. Their lower status granted them the gift of anonymity.
Mónica says her father was not a Nazi, and didn’t hate Jewish people. “They were indoctrinated,” she says of her father and his neighbors, who made up one of the many German communities in the country. “They didn’t necessarily support Hitler, they just didn’t have an option,” she says.
Many of the soldiers who left Germany during and after the war were in fact against Adolf Hitler’s regime. But even if they didn’t support his politics, they had still internalized his belief in the superiority of the Aryan race.
Even Germans who had left the homeland years before Hitler’s rise to power were not immune to this kind of indoctrination. German schools had been a feature of the Argentine private education system for decades, as they were built to serve the thousands of German immigrants who had trickled into the country since the late 1800s. But during the war—as a 376-page report from Argentine intelligence officials uncovered—these schools played a significant role in spreading pro-Nazi sentiments in the German-Argentine community.
Mónica attended one of these institutions, Goethe-Schule, where she describes instruction akin to military training. “They made us swim laps in an outdoor pool in the middle of the winter, and we started every morning with 10km runs,” she says. The parents were afraid of another war, and wanted to “toughen up” the children.
After the war, the school’s political indoctrination diminished—but remnants of the pro-Nazi period remained. “The belief of racial superiority was still there,” says Mónica, who attended school in the 60s and 70s.
For Mónica, who inherited darker Southern European features from her Argentine mother, the anti-Latin racism brought up conflicting feelings. She identified as Argentine and Latina, but was still part of the German community that discriminated against them. She would usually hear her father and others in the community refer to Latinos, as “cabecitas negras,” a racial slur referring to Latin Americans’ skin color. In 1982, when war with Great Britain broke out over the Malvinas Islands, her father made his racial preferences clear again. “He said he hoped the British would take over the whole country so that we could finally be governed by someone capable,” she says.
Pro-Nazi indoctrination in schools was quickly outlawed by the Argentine government, but that didn’t stop German school officials from promoting racist and antisemitic beliefs under the guise of teaching ‘German values.’ As part of the post-war curriculum, schools taught German language and culture courses that subtly hinted at the existence of a superior race.
It is unclear how much attending one of these schools affected Mónica’s own racial and religious beliefs. She was very open about her own Christian values but when asked about her views on antisemitism in Argentina, she quickly changed the subject.
Away from Buenos Aires, stories of indoctrination at German schools also abounded. One of these was Instituto Capraro, in Bariloche. When Erich Priebke, an SS commander and convicted war criminal moved to the southern city, he became intimately involved with a German school there. For decades, he was in charge of organizing school plays and delivering speeches, and often spent time with students.
Soledad Acuña, current secretary of education for the city of Buenos Aires, attended this school. In 2o2o, a picture of her and her classmates posing with Priebke in 1992 surfaced on the internet. While Acuña firmly disagreed with the accusations that her school indoctrinated students, other alumni recalled how school officials wouldn’t let them watch Schindler’s List, or read books by Jewish authors.
Acuña has been supportive of Jewish schools in Buenos Aires, and major Jewish cultural organizations publicly defended her after the news broke. However, it’s a sign of Argentina’s official tolerance for Nazi fugitives that up until his extradition in 1994, a Nazi war criminal was allowed to be heavily involved in the education of Argentine students.
Argentina has a problematic and racist past, as many former colonies do. But the arrival of German immigrants and Nazi refugees during the 20th century cemented the an alreadycountry’s strong current of anti-semitic practicepresence.
Ironically, Argentina also became a safe harbor for Jewish people, becoming home to the largest Jewish community in all of Latin America. As these two groups have coexisted in the same country, hate crimes have been a reality for Jewish people in Argentina.
In 1994, a bombing destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. It remains the biggest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. The investigation into the attack was mired by government cover ups, and never truly concluded. In 2015, Jewish-Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was mysteriously murdered in his home while leading a special investigation into the attack.
The attack was perpetrated by Hezbollah in coordination with Iranian operatives, but a handful of Argentine citizens were implicated in the case as well. The attack, and the impunity that stemmed from it, have also contributed to an atmosphere of unsafety for the Jewish community in Argentina. Even today synagogues are some of the most heavily guarded buildings in Buenos Aires, almost always protected by security guards and bollards.
Six years after the attack, President De La Rúa formally apologized for Argentina’s haboring of Nazis. But 20 years later, not much has improved for Jewish Argentines.
The antisemisitsm brought about by Nazi refugees and German schools still persists. In 2016, students from the German School of Lanús showed up to a party dressed up as Adolf Hitler with swastikas around their arms and painted-on mustaches. They aimed to provoke students from a Jewish high school that were also in attendance.
Most recently, this November, two young men attended a Halloween party in the upscale neighborhood of Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, dressed up as Nazis and chanting antisemitic phrases. The event was reported as a hate crime but the status of the report is still unresolved.
Antisemitic hate speech is on the rise in Argentina, some of it fueled by conspiracy theories that blame George Soros for the Covid-19 pandemic. Nowadays, most of it is happening online, creating a dangerous rhetoric often conflated by the spread of misinformation. Decades after Nazis first found safe haven in the country, the antisemitic culture they brought with them lives on.