How top Nazi used 'ratline' escape route to flee to South America after the war, by daughter of woman he seduced
Nazi ratlines that spirited thousands of war criminals to freedom are revealed in a new book chronicling the murderous reign of a top foreign office official during the Third Reich.
The life of Horst Wagner, a man with the blood of at least 350,000 Jews on his hands, is detailed in Beloved Criminal: A Diplomat In The Service Of The Final Solution.
Wagner was the link-man between the foreign office and the SS In this role, he aided in the round-ups, deportation and extermination of both German and foreign Jews.
This first major work on him by Gisela Heidenreich is also an intensely personal one for the author - her own mother Edith met and fell in love with him during the war.
During his years in exile Wagner remained in contact with Edith by post, letters which her daughter uses in her work chronicling the escape routes and mini-Reich that the fugitives built for themselves in Argentina.
Heidenreich, who works as a family therapist, has the blood of the Nazi regime in her. She was born into a Lebensborn home - set up by the S.S. for unmarried mothers to give birth and donate their children to the Nazi state.
Her father was the commander of the SS officer school at Bad Toelz in Bavaria.
Wagner, she said, dreamed of becoming her stepfather after he began his affair with her mother.
After escaping from a Nuremberg jail in 1948, he later explained to Heidenreich's mother how he was aided on his way to South America on the so-called Kloster Line, being given sanctuary in a number of convents and holy orders in Austria before heading to Rome.
There the German bishop Alois Hudal, priest-confessor to the German Catholic community in the city, arranged for him to get a Red Cross passport in 1951.
He sailed out of Genoa to Argentina to join such killers as Adolf Eichmann, the supreme mastermind behind the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, the perverted 'Angel of Death' of Auschwitz, notorious for his grotesque medical experiments.
Comments
Post a Comment