How top Nazi used ‘ratline’ escape route to flee to South America after the war, by daughter of woman he seduced

  • Author Gisela Heidenreich chronicles the life of Horst Wagner, responsible for the deaths of 350,000 Jews, in new book
  • Her mother fell in love with mass killer during World War Two and kept in touch during his exile in Argentina
  • Her father was commander of SS officer school

By
Allan Hall

Last updated at 6:31 PM on 10th February 2012


War crimes: Horst Wagner at the Nuremberg Trials. He escaped from jail in 1948 and went on the run before fleeing to Argentina in the early 1950s

War crimes: Horst Wagner at the Nuremberg Trials. He escaped from jail in 1948 and went on the run before fleeing to Argentina in the early 1950s

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.

Route of a rat: Wagner made his way from Germany, through Austria and into Italy before setting sail for Argentina in 1952

Route of a rat: Wagner made his way from Germany, through Austria and into Italy before setting sail for Argentina in 1952

Hudal also
arranged the paperwork for Franz Stangl, the commandent of the
extermination camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, to flee to Brazil on a Red
Cross passport using Vatican funds.

Stangl,
who was eventually extradited back to Germany in the 1960s and died in
jail while serving a life sentence of his crimes, oversaw the murder of
an estimated 1.4million people at the two camps.

Wagner settled in Bariloche, 1,000miles
south of Buenos Aires on the edge of Patagonia, and celebrated weekly in
Bavarian-style houses with old S.S. comrades, drinking beer and singing
the marching songs of the lost regime.

‘The
line from Germany to South America lay across Austrian monasteries and
an intermediate stop in Slouth Tyrol where the Nazis were to recover
from the strains of their journeys,’ said Heidenreich.

Gisela Heidenreich

Beloved Criminal: A Diplomat In The Service Of The Final Solution by Gisela Heidenreich

Author Gisela Heidenreic (left) chronicles the life of Wagner in her book Beloved Criminal: A Diplomat In The Service Of The Final Solution (right). Her mother Edith was Wagner’s lover during the war

‘Once in Genoa they received the friendly assistance of the Vatican, in particular from Bishop Hudal who furnished them with the International Red Cross passports.’

Using the letters Wagner wrote to her mother, Heidenreich set out to reconstruct the odyssey of the Nazi fanatic and even went to Bariloche to draw a fascinating portrait of how this chilling old boys clique lived so many thousands of miles away from the scenes of their crimes.

‘It was a parallel world,’ she said, ‘developed so far away and with no condemnation in postwar Germany by the public or politicians.’

The Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945: Wagner was accused of 'fully endorsing SS methods' of exterminating Jews, before he escaped from a Nuremberg jail

The Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945: Wagner was accused of ‘fully endorsing SS methods’ of exterminating Jews, before he escaped from a Nuremberg jail

Here’s what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts,
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The comments below have not been moderated.

Allen,if u don’t want to read it,don’t read it pal.

Yes but…….all this happened 70 years ago. It’s gone. It’s over. The world has learned from the mistakes. Why do you have to keep churning this up again and again?? Give us news that is important to our lives today. Yawn.

The Roman Catholic Church’s complicity in aiding these evil criminals to escape sickens me.

Now -a-days we don’t punish war criminals, we make them “Middle East Envoys” and help them to make millions on the back of their crimes.

Money has always talked.

Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen: ODESSA; it really existed. Maybe it still does.

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