Nazi officials hid from justice in Paraguay. In the 1930s or 1940s, for any Jewish immigrant getting a passport and moving to a faraway land such as Paraguay, was a process full of requirements to meet and challenges to overcome. On the other side of the spectrum, after the fall of the Third Reich in Europe, that same process of obtaining immigration documents and crossing the Atlantic also became available and accessible to Nazi officials who were escaping the law. Perhaps, the most important factor was the protection offered by authoritarian regimes that took over Latin America in the second half of the 20^th century.

For Mengele and Rochsmann, among other Nazi officials who lived comfortably in Paraguay, having Alfredo Stroessner in power and as an ally represented this safety net that they needed. Alfredo Stroessner came to power in 1954, and would despicably rule Paraguay for 35 years, until 1989. According to “The Final Report of the Truth and Justice Commission,” during his regime there were: “19,862 arrested either arbitrarily or illegally; 18,772 tortured; 59 executed extrajudicially; 337 disappeared; and 3,470 forcibly exiled.”[1] In other words, it was a regime founded upon violence, repression, and fear. In this atmosphere of constant terror, Nazi officials found a safe haven by being in good terms with the dictator. And while Stroessner´s dictatorship in and of itself represented a paradox of having close ties with the United States, which “stood for” democracy and human rights while supporting these dictatorships to antagonize communism, it also opposed the West´s demands to arrest and try Nazi escapees for their crimes. In this complex environment, Nazi officials stayed safe by being on the dictator´s good side.

With Stroessner as an ally, it was not only safe for Nazi criminals to escape and live in Paraguay, but the whole process of immigration was sometimes expedited and supported by the supreme dictator. In 1957, Stroessner himself wrote a letter to a European consul asking him to grant a passport to a Nazi official who was supposedly travelling to Paraguay to conduct research.[2] Similarly, due to his close relationship with Hans Rudel and after having met Mengele, according to some documents in the Archives of Terror, an extensive document collection of police and governmental repression during the dictatorship, Stroessner provided Alban Krug, one of Mengele´s helpers in Paraguay, with money to support the Nazi criminal.[3] While Stroessner was the head of the country and of these illicit operations of covering up war criminals, some of his loyal employees in governmental institutions also played a role. When in 1958 an extradition order for Josef Mengele arrived at the Palace of Justice in Asunción, the judge Oscar Cuevas ordered that the document be immediately archived,[4] thus protecting Mengele from the law by doing so.

Furthermore, an episode that took place in 1960 clearly portrays the differences in treatment between a Jewish immigrant and a Nazi escapee in Paraguay. During a meeting with the German Consul in Asunción, Stroessner was once more asked by the diplomat to help with the extradition of Josef Mengele to Germany so that he could face trial. The German consul suggested that Mengele´s documents were obtained illicitly because the Nazi criminal claimed to have lived in Paraguay for years when applying for Paraguayan citizenship when he truly had not. Thus, the consul claimed that he should have not been granted citizenship, that the Paraguayan government should aid in the extradition, and ultimately not protect someone who was not truly a Paraguayan citizen. Nevertheless, the consul did not receive a positive response. His request unleashed the dictator´s anger and as a response he said: “Once a Paraguayan, a Paraguayan forever!”[5] The day after the German consul met with Stroessner, the German Embassy´s walls were covered with the following writings: “Jewish Embassy. Free Mengele! It´s an order!”[6]

Moreover, while the time frames are not the same, and the documents in question are not entirely the same either, this episode exposes the dissonance between Paraguayan immigration policy. In 1939, when the passengers of the SS Conte Grande were denied entrance to Paraguay because of their passports, they were not granted the same treatment as Mengele, who fraudulently became a Paraguayan. In other words, for Jewish immigrants, Paraguay as a safe haven did not always end up being what they had imagined, and in some cases, the doors were closed before they even arrived. On the other hand, for Nazi officials who also embraced Paraguay as a safe haven, an authoritarian regime with an all-powerful dictator meant safety from the international actors that attempted to enforce justice for their war crimes. Unlike the Nazi officials who, as Stroessner claimed, were once Paraguayan and therefore always Paraguayan, Jewish immigrants with Paraguayan passports were not always welcomed in the country that they had envisioned as their future home.