When I was at UVa, I was in a distinguished history majors seminar and we had to read a dopey anthropology book on Eva Peron for Brian Owensby. In the discussion, I reasonably asked why the book never even mentioned Juan Peron's ties to the Nazi regime. Owensby was really dismissive and said that there was absolutely no connection between Peron and the Nazis. The next week, Thomas F.X. Noble, the faculty coordinator, played some silly game where people supposedly got upset by some comment or something.
Of course, they were utterly wrong.
Peron's autobiography Yo, Juan Domingo Peron states -
En Nuremberg se estaba realizando entonces algo que yo, a titulo personal juzgaba coma una infamia y como una funesta leccion para el futuro de la Humanidad. Y no solo yo, sino el pueblo argentino. Adquiri la certeza de que los argentinos tambien consideraban el proceso de Nuremberg como una infamia, indigna de los vencedores, que se comportaban como si no lo fueran. Ahora entonces dandonos cuenta de que merecian haber perdido la guerra. Cuantas veces durante mi gobierno pronuncie discursos a cargo de Nuremberg, que es la enormidad mas grande que no perdonara la historia!
My Spanish may be a little rusty but condemning the Nuremberg War Trials, stating that the Allies deserved to lose the war, and repeatedly telling his nation that the war crimes trials themselves were the great misdeed that would not be forgiven by history seems to show Nazi sympathies.
Of course, systematically rescuing and harboring Nazi war criminals would tend to confirm it.
In 1984, Argentine journalist and author Tomas Eloy Martinez published the study Peron and the Nazi War Criminals while he was a fellow at the Wilson Center. Eloy Martinez was well prepared for the task having twice interviewed Peron while he was exiled in Spain. He detailed how Peron had various motives for facilitating the immigration of thousands of Nazis to Argentina. These included his military training in an environment dominated by German military theories and discipline and his sympathies for authoritarian forms of governance. Peron also had more practical motivations, given that he along with the Allies and Soviets believed that his nation could materially profit from expertise provided by "useful" German officials. In the end, Eloy Martinez drew more than a symbolic connection between Peron's active recruitment of known war criminals and the "Dirty War" era of right-wing militarism and torture that his nation was just escaping. He concluded, “No country can open its doors to this class of criminal and sleep soundly. No nation crosses these dark boundaries of history with impunity.”
In 1995, the year of our class discussion, Martinez, then director of Latin American studies at Rutgers, published Santa Evita. It would go on to be the most successful novel in Argentine history. In an interview from the time, he was skeptical of more provocative claims about Eva Peron's own actions that lacked direct historical evidence but said that she possessed "many of the qualities I detest in any human being: authoritarianism, intolerance, fanaticism."
Subsequent historical research in Argentine archives has only strengthened the case concerning the Peron regime and its Nazi ties. In 2003, Uki Goni published his critically acclaimed The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina. This review in Foreign Affairs is representative -
A chilling, detailed story of one of Argentina's most shameful secrets: the enthusiastic role of dictator Juan Peron in providing cover for major Nazi war criminals as the Third Reich collapsed, allowing them to lead prosperous and protected lives after the war. Few characters get off easily in this passionate account, which untangles the networks and escape mechanisms that made it all possible. Coming to Peron's assistance were numerous institutions and individuals: the Vatican, the Argentinean Catholic Church, the Argentinean government, and the Swiss authorities who cooperated through a secret office set up by Peron's agents in Bern. Operatives from Heinrich Himmler's secret service arrived in Madrid as early as 1944 to prepare an escape route; in 1946, this operation moved to Buenos Aires, establishing its headquarters in the presidential palace. Eventually, this operation's tentacles stretched from Scandinavia to Italy, aiding French and British war criminals and bringing in the gold that the Croatian state treasury had stolen from 600,000 Jewish and Serb victims of the Ustasha regime. Ingrained antisemitism, anticommunism, greed, and corruption all fortified these clandestine protection rackets. Today, the stain remains, as does the secrecy. This astonishing book delineates in gripping detail what was long suspected -- and also hints at how much remains to be told.
So Brian Owensby said some incredibly stupid and profoundly offensive things. It's obviously not the first time a UVa history professor has made an ass of himself by not knowing his ostensible subject matter. Merrill Peterson repeatedly and indignantly upbraided Fawn McKay Brodie for having the temerity to argue that Thomas Jefferson had probably fathered children by a woman he owned. I think we all know how that historical argument turned out. Oh well, Owensby is probably better suited for such intellectual pursuits as Semester at Sea cruises or whatever global studies thing he's doing. As for Tom Noble, one would have thought that he wouldn't have acted in a way that kind of concealed the Vatican's involvement in helping Nazi war criminals escape before he went to Notre Dame. Then again I always had to listen to that Jesuit priest on the faculty at UVa, Jerry "the self-identified Mick" Fogarty, take extreme umbrage at people pointing out the ties between the Vatican under Pius XII and the Nazis.
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