First of all I am grateful for his swift response to my inquiry, and I am no less an admirer of his work. I owe him and readers an apology for my hasty misconstrual of his “Author’s Note”: as Kerr’s remarks in an e mail below make clear the 200,000 figure is from the effects of the secret, sinister anti-semitic “Directive 11″ and the Argentine government’s wartime denial of refuge to Jews, not to the post war work of Nazi war criminals and their sympathizers in the Argentine government although his novelistic speculation is based on the ersistence of strories to that efffect.

The exposure of long denied “Directive 11″, the work of historians like Uki Goni was something new and shocking to me and the fact of its forgottenness after exposure makes Kerr’s novel all the more important. As does his revelation of the presence of death camp designers such as Hans Kammler in Argentina which give some credence to stories circulating about the work of Nazi war criminals in Argentina –as Kerr puts it speculation “about the possiblity of a concentration camp for Jews in Argentina’s remote forests”.

Kerr adds something chillling in his “Author’s Note”: “According to Uki Goni Argentine governmment ministers demanded ‘ a solution to the Jewish problem’ in the country. But the existence of such a camp has, Kerr notes, not “been confirmed”. Which is why he wrote his novel. To explore the not-unthinkable possiblility. And to spur the investigation into the shameful reality of Argentine complicity with Nazis and Nazi practices that made it thinkable.

Here’s what Kerr e mailed me via his publisher:

1) Directive 11 was a secret edict signed into being by the Argentine government in 1938. It stopped Jews coming to Argentina. There were lots of Jews who wanted to go to Argentina because Argentina already had a very large Jewish population. The Junta was certainly anti-Semitic in that it felt there were too many Jews in the country. Plus the Junta were greater admirers of the Nazis. When Uki Goni suggested in his book that 200,000 Jews died as a result of the Junta’s policy in relation to the Jews, what he means – and by extension what I meant – was that 200,000 European people who wanted to go to Argentina between 1938 and 1940 were prevented from going there and, as a result, died in European death camps. That’s a very different thing.

I do not mean that 200,000 were murdered in Argentina. And nowhere do I say this.  Other countries refused Jews, of course. But certainly the Argentine government was the only government that refused to repatriate Jews who were actually their own nationals, knowing full well what would happen to them in Germany.

2) The Argentine Government kept Directive 11 a secret. Especially after the war when they began to curry favour with the USA. All documentation was destroyed in 1955. Truth be told even the Argentines themselves probably don’t know what really happened between 1938 and 1945.

3) Goni mentions that there were rumours in Argentina of some kind of concentration camp in the jungle for illegal Jews during or after the war. I wanted to make use of that idea in my novel. In other words my novel treats this rumour as the ‘What If’ basis for the story. What if it had been true? What if there had been a Directive 12. But I make it clear in the author’s note that no such camp has ever been confirmed as having existed.

4) However, I felt this was a fair ‘What If’ scenario because of Argentina’s human rights record then and afterwards when thousands of its citizens disappeared for political not racial reasons. There were indeed plenty of prisons and camps were political opponents were kept. Most of them were never seen again. Many of them were indeed thrown out of airplanes.

Another reason I felt it was a fair ‘What if’ scenario was because Argentina was one of the few countries in the world where, for a while, thousands of Nazi war criminals lived quite openly. As many as eight thousand. And of course, it’s almost certainly true that large sums of Nazi money ended up in Peron’s hands.

5) Hans Kammler the architect of the death camps, and the Nazi missile program boss was indeed the second most powerful man in  the SS at the end of the war. It seems likely that he was one of the ’scientists’ who went to the USA as part of the paperclip program. I have no evidence for saying that he went to Argentina beyond the fact that almost everyone else went there including Mengele and Eichmann.

6) I dare say there will be many Argentine people who might get upset by what’s in my novel. And they should remember that it is only a novel.
However, it does also seem to me now that it is an inevitable corollary of having had thousands of SS war criminals in your country that other people such as myself should speculate as to what they might have got up to while they were there. We can say that each country had its tame Nazis, but this was nothing on the scale of the numbers that were in Argentina. When Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann from Argentina, the official government line was that he wasn’t in the country at all. Nor was Mengele.

And let’s not forget the public reaction in Argentina following Eichmann’s kidnap was not to say how could a man like that be here in our country, but to spark a wave of anti-Semitism. From the announcement that Eichmann was in Jerusalem until the trial had ended,  in 1962, it was not safe to be a Jew in Buenos Aires. There were several anti-Semitic riots. Many Jews in the city were kidnapped and murdered. One girl had a swastika carved on her body before she was murdered.

In 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was attacked; 29 people were killed and hundreds injured. A Jewish community centre was bombed in 1994.

This was not a country that was ever comfortable with its Jewish population.
I might say it still isn’t. As recently as 2005 the US government issued a memorandum expressing concern about anti-Semitism in Argentina.(see
www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism.)

Hope this helps to make things clear.
Phil

It may be no accident that the Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop, recently re-instated from excommunication to justified cries of outrage, made his home in a seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

It was a fortuitous coincidence that the controversy broke out just as I was finishing the galleys of what I believe should be an explosive new book by the British writer Philip Kerr called The Quiet Flame. Kerr’s novel, out in March from Putnam/Marian Wood books, takes the form of the fifth in his series of novels about a Hitler era Berlin homicide detective Bernie Gunther whose Berlin Noir trilogy and its follow up The One From the Other I’ve praised before.

But this one is different. it’s an investigative detective story, based on forgotten facts which brings to light a terrible buried episode in the history of Nazi criminality:

The long covered-up Holocaust which escaped Nazis are alleged to have perpetrated with the complicity of Juan Peron’s government in Argentina in the years immediately after the war when, according to Kerr’s research, up to 200,000 refugee Jews may have been murdered by escaped Nazi war criminals.

It’s long been forgotten amidst facetious jokes about Nazis, even Hitler, having escaped to South America, that hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped there during and after the war as well. And it’s almost been obliterated from the historical record that the Nazis in South America may well have continued doing what the Nazi in Europe did with such horrific proficiency.

In an afterword to his novel Kerr credits his revelations in this novel of the collaboration of the Peronist government–and the Perons–in this crime, revelations almost entirely new to me, to the study of The Real ODESSAby Uki Goni, (ODESSA was the post war Nazi escape network) who points to the existence of a secret Argentinian “Directive 11″ which, Kerr says was “signed into existence by the Argentine Foreign Minister Jose Maria Cantilo on July 12, 1938 [and] condemned as many as two hundred thousand European Jews to death. It’s existence is denied by some to this day.”

I hope Kerr’s novel, executed with his usual trans-generic brilliance will open up a debate among historians over the truth and denial of this charge, about the fate of these forgotten victims of the Holocaust, aparently murdered by one of our “allies” and why this crime has been allowed to have been erased from history and memory. We will all owe Kerr a debt for not allowing it to have been, as they say in Argentina “disappeared”.

*I couldn’t have made it more clear that Kerr based his novel on the investigation into “Directive 11″ and its consequences by historian Uki Goni. Yet I notice more than one commenter seems to have ignored this. It is, unfortunately as this link demonstrates all too real.

***Further clarification: on re reading Kerr’s “Author’s Note” it’s clear that the 200,000 figure refers only to those condemned to death by Directive 11. Condemned to death in Europe by real Nazis because they were denied the refuge they sought in Argentina by Directive 11. To some, apparently this kind of death in some way doesn’t “count”, although it clearly counted as a guilty secret for the Peronists and their successors who denied the existence of Directive 11 until, as the link above demonstrates, an irrefutable long lost copy was found. As for deaths at the hands of Argentina’s Nazis, local and imported, Kerr’s “Author’s Note” states that speculation about the “existence of a concentration camp for Jews in Argentina’s remote forests” persists but he doesn’t give a number. I’ve written him to ask for more details.

UPDATE; See the next post for Kerr’s response and correction.

1) Sometimes people just refuse to actually read what you write or assume you’re writing something they’d like to read.

For instance Jonah Goldberg. “Ron Rosenbaum says he knows about a some enormous sex scandal…” Not exactly. I wrote that I heard from a DC media insider that his fellow insiders thought they knew about such a scandal. There’s a difference. I know what they think they know. I don’t know it for a fact myself. But the fact they think they know such a potentially devastating matter is significant

But yes, I was writing about a rumor and I think that in some cases, not all, this can be part of legitimate media criticism. I was writing about the fact a DC media insider told me he and his colleagues believe the LA Times has been sitting on a major presidential campaign sex scandal. The point was: people who write about politics can be influenced by what they think is about to be forthcoming and it can skew their coverage in a way that they can’t or won’t share with their readers. One person from the LATimes says he knows of no such story, that the paper of course runs down all kinds of leads and rumors, but doesn’t have any such story “in the can” as another DC insider who’s heard the rumor put it. But that doesn’t affect the fact that DC insiders may believe there’s a story out there, maybe about to break.

2) You can’t not write something you think worth writing–like about the way coverage of a presidential campaign can be skewed by rumors that sway insiders (see above) just because some people are going to misinterpret it, read it carelessly, use it to confirm their hatred of the media for being either “part of the Clinton smear machine” or “part of the Republican smear machine” or because other people are going to turn it into a a giant guessing game.

3)The “Depth Charge” effect. This post by Slate’s Mickey Kaus argues for the salutary value of bringing things to the surface to be examined before the nominations are locked in:

“Depth Charge: Jonah Goldberg reports that his email box is filling up with theories about stories that would fit the bill of a “potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate” that Ron Rosenbaum hears the LAT is sitting on. Rosenbaum’s post seems to be functioning as a sort of depth charge that threatens to bring all the various rumored scandals about all the candidates to the surface. It would be funny if they all turned out to be true! And then the initial rumor Rosenbaum wrote about–that the LAT is sitting on something–turned out to be not true! … I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just saying that would be funny. … In any case, the campaign certainly needed a depth charge. … Let all the scandals that lurk in the mud hatch out. … [What's to stop some blogger from doing this in every campaign?--ed Nothin'. I assume depth-charging will become a permanent feature of electoral politics. They tell me the Internet has changed things! Is there a problem? The true rumors will be confirmed and the phony rumors won't be confirmed. But it will be harder to suppress the former. Isn't the purpose of primary campaigns to find out everything about the candidates before they are nominated?]
___________________________

4)Rumors can be worth writing about because they can tell us something about the psyche of the nation, its unconscious, its id. (And the psyche of the media who shape the psyche of the nation). .

I’d argue the study of rumors can be illuminating in the study of history and historical explanation. In researching my book, Explaining Hitler (see panel on the left) I spent some time analyzing why the rumor (false) that Hitler had “Jewish blood” was so appealing to some as an “explanation” for his exterminationist anti-semitism. (Because it allowed people to in a twisted way to blame the Jews, blame the victims, for Hitler with superficial, bogus psychologizing–as in he wanted to kill exterminate “the Jew within” himself

5) Thus: a rumor can be a Rorschach blot: people project onto it their own inner fantasies. Which means you can learn something about the national psyche you wouldn’t be otherwise able to access by studying rumors and the responses to them.

6) Rumors can be a spur to investigative reporting.

Thus in a recent Slate column I made a conscientious effort to separate a disturbing paranoid rumor (”Bush is plotting a coup to cancel the elections”) from a disturbing truth (the reality of emergency post attack “National Security Presidential Directive 51″ and the need to subject it to close scrutiny”.

7)) The acknowledgment of the role of rumors can be the sign of a healthy democracy.

Here’s an excerpt from a thoughtful letter my friend the writer and student of history, David Samuels whose work appears frequently in Harper’s and The Atlantic wrote me:

“I agree that rumors are a wormhole into the collective psyche. I’d
add — without wanting to push my pseudo-Freudian point TOO far –
that the surfacing and analysis of rumors is actually an important
sign of a healthy press, and that the repression of rumors (often the
precursors to news; all news is preceded by rumors) is usually a sign
that something is wrong with the press, and creates an opening for
purveyors of dangerous alternate realities. Taken too far, of course,
you end up with the Italian press, which consists, as far as my bad
Italian lets me figure, of drunk, crazy people spouting slanderous,
inane and entirely contradictory conspiracy theories from morning to
night.

Today, in part because of the war on terror, and the ideological
rigidity that has made writing such a depressing chore, I think that
we are operating in a particularly weird landscape where the
“official story” of both the right and the left diverges from fact in
so many places that people are forced to construct a manageable
reality by walling off large areas of inconvenience from their ken.”

But the real threat to the press, he adds, are court decisions which cause over lawyered publishers to be too cautious about what they can publish:

“Another point I’d make is that the current repressive atmosphere is also backed by a sea-change in the legal climate in which reporting takes place. Where you
could once count on publicity-hungry publishers and editors spoiling
for a fight with the government or big corporations, we now have a
corporate-owned media with corporate lawyers who consciously and
subconsciously identify their own interests with those of their
parent corporations. As a result, there has been very limited
resistance to the ongoing criminalization of what used to be normal
reporting. I think the beginning here was the Food Lion case, where
the ABC reporters were fined millions of dollars for minor lies on an
application to work at a supermarket chain in order to film how the
company was deliberately dressing up rotten meat for sale and
endangering the health of its customers. Reporters today are caught
between lawsuit-happy corporations, who perceive that they can win
suits against journalists, an increasingly secretive government that
forces reporters to turn over their notes, and employers who see
themselves as corporations and would rather avoid the threat of a
lawsuit. One reason why so little investigative reporting takes place
these days is that lawyers simply won’t let it happen.

Which brings me to point number
It’s possible, but rare to have a reasoned discussion about legitimate media issues arising from, or provoked by, a rumor regardless of whether the rumor is true. The key thing, to repeat myself, is that media insiders may believe it true and allow it to affect their coverage. That was the point of my post.