Juan Perón

Juan Domingo Perón was born in Lobos, Buenos Aires Province, on 8 October 1895. He was the son of Juana Sosa Toledo and Mario Tomás Perón. The Perón branch of his family was originally Spanish, but settled in Spanish Sardinia, from which his great-grandfather emigrated in the 1830s; in later life Perón would publicly express his pride in his Sardinian roots. He also had Spanish, British, French and Tehuelche ancestry.

Perón's great-grandfather became a successful shoe merchant in Buenos Aires, and his grandfather was a prosperous physician; his death in 1889 left his widow nearly destitute, however, and Perón's father moved to then-rural Lobos, where he administered an estancia and met his future wife. The couple had their two sons out of wedlock and married in 1901.

His father moved to the Patagonia region that year, where he later purchased a sheep ranch. Juan himself was sent away in 1904 to a boarding school in Buenos Aires directed by his paternal grandmother, where he received a strict Catholic upbringing. His father's undertaking ultimately failed, and he died in Buenos Aires in 1928. The youth entered the National Military College in 1911 at age 16 and graduated in 1913. He excelled less in his studies than in athletics, particularly boxing and fencing.

Perón began his military career in an infantry post in Paraná, Entre Ríos. He went on to command the post, and in this capacity mediated a prolonged labour conflict in 1920 at La Forestal, then a leading firm in forestry in Argentina. He earned instructor's credentials at the Superior War School, and in 1929 was appointed to the Army General Staff Headquarters. Perón married his first wife, Aurelia Tizón (Potota, as Perón fondly called her), on 5 January 1929.

Perón was recruited by supporters of the director of the War Academy, General José Félix Uriburu, to collaborate in the latter's plans for a military coup against President Hipólito Yrigoyen of Argentina. Perón, who instead supported General Agustín Justo, was banished to a remote post in northwestern Argentina after Uriburu's successful coup in September 1930. Nevertheless, he was promoted to the rank of major the following year and named to the faculty at the Superior War School, where he taught military history and published a number of treatises on the subject. He served as military attaché in the Argentine Embassy in Chile from 1936 to 1938 and returned to his teaching post. His wife was diagnosed with uterine cancer that year and died on 10 September at age 36; the couple had no children.

The Argentine War Ministry assigned Perón to study mountain warfare in the Italian Alps in 1939. He also attended the University of Turin for a semester and served as a military observer in countries across Europe – holding positions as a military attaché in Berlin and in Rome.

He studied Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascism, Nazi Germany, and other European governments of the time, concluding in his summary, Apuntes de historia militar (Notes about military history, first published in 1932, 2nd ed., 1934), that social democracy could be a viable alternative to liberal democracy (which he viewed as a veiled plutocracy) or to totalitarian régimes (which he viewed as oppressive). He returned to Argentina in 1941, and served as an army skiing-instructor in Mendoza Province.

Relationship with Che Guevara

Che Guevara and Perón were sympathetic to each other. Pacho O'Donnell states that Che Guevara, as Cuban minister, attempted to arrange for the return of Perón to Argentina in the 1960s and sent financial support for that end. However, Perón disapproved of Guevara's advocacy of guerrilla warfare as antiquated. In Madrid, Perón and Guevara met twice. These meetings, as the meetings Perón held with other leftists in Madrid (such as Salvador Allende), were arranged with great secrecy to avoid complaints or expulsion from Francoist Spain. According to Enrique Pavón Pereyra, who was present at the second meeting between Guevara and Perón in Madrid, Perón would have discouraged and warned Guevara of his guerrilla plans in Bolivia: "you will not survive in Bolivia. Suspend that plan. Search for alternatives. [...] Do not commit suicide."

Enrique Pavón Pereyra was only present for the first part of the meeting; he then served mate so that Perón and Guevara could drink together and left the meeting room to provide them with some privacy. Pavón Pereyra speculated about the conversation that followed in his absence: according to him, Perón would likely have explained to Guevara that he could not compromise support for his planned operations, but that "when" Guevara "moved activities" to Argentina he would provide Peronist support. After the encounter, Perón commented to a friend in a letter about meeting Guevara, calling him "an immature utopian – but one of us – I am happy for it to be so because he is giving the yankees a real headache."

Under the influence of John William Cooke who combined Marxism with Peronism, Perón praised the Cuban Revolution and discussed the parallels it had with his own 'revolution', and would increasingly adapt the Cuban rhetoric in the 1960s. After vising Perón in Madrid, Che Guevara argued that Peronism is "a kind of indigenous Latin American socialism with which the Cuban Revolution could side". Perón maintained a close relationship with Guevara and paid homage to him upon his death in 1967, calling him "one of ours, perhaps the best" and remarking that Peronism "as a national, popular and revolutionary movement, pays homage to the idealist, the revolutionary, Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, Argentine guerrilla dead in action taking up arms to seek the triumph of national revolutions in Latin America."

Protection of Nazi war criminals

After World War II, Argentina became a haven for Nazi war criminals, with explicit protection from Perón, who even shortly before his death commented on the Nuremberg Trials:

In Nuremberg at that time something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity. I became certain that the Argentine people also considered the Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors, who behaved as if they hadn't been victorious. Now we realize that they [the Allies] deserved to lose the war.

Author Uki Goñi alleges that Axis Power collaborators, including Pierre Daye, met with Perón at Casa Rosada, the President's official executive mansion. The Swiss Chief of Police Heinrich Rothmund and the Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganović also helped organize the ratline.

An investigation of 22,000 documents by the DAIA in 1997 discovered that the network was managed by Rodolfo Freude who had an office in the Casa Rosada and was close to Eva Perón's brother, Juan Duarte. According to Ronald Newton, Ludwig Freude, Rodolfo's father, was probably the local representative of the Office Three secret service headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop, with probably more influence than the German ambassador Edmund von Thermann. He had met Perón in the 1930s, and had contacts with Generals Juan Pistarini, Domingo Martínez, and José Molina. Ludwig Freude's house became the meeting place for Nazis and Argentine military officers supporting the Axis. In 1943, he traveled with Perón to Europe to attempt an arms deal with Germany.

After the war, Ludwig Freude was investigated over his connection to possible looted Nazi art, cash and precious metals on deposit at two Argentine banks, Banco Germanico and Banco Tornquist. But on 6 September 1946, the Freude investigation was terminated by presidential decree.

Examples of Nazis and collaborators who relocated to Argentina include Emile Dewoitine, who arrived in May 1946 and worked on the Pulqui jet; Erich Priebke, who arrived in 1947; Josef Mengele in 1949; Adolf Eichmann in 1950; Austrian representative of the Škoda arms manufacturer in Spain Reinhard Spitzy; Charles Lescat, editor of Je Suis Partout in Vichy France; and SS functionary Ludwig Lienhardt.

Many members of the notorious Croatian Ustaše (including their leader, Ante Pavelić) took refuge in Argentina, as did Milan Stojadinović, the former Serbian Prime Minister of monarchist Yugoslavia. In 1946 Stojadinović went to Rio de Janeiro, and then to Buenos Aires, where he was reunited with his family. Stojadinović spent the rest of his life as presidential advisor on economic and financial affairs to governments in Argentina and founded the financial newspaper El Economista in 1951, which still carries his name on its masthead.

A Croatian priest, Krunoslav Draganović, organizer of the San Girolamo ratline, was authorized by Perón to assist Nazi operatives to come to Argentina and evade prosecution in Europe after World War II, in particular the Ustaše. Ante Pavelić became a security advisor of Perón. After Perón was overthrown in 1955, Pavelić, fearing extradition to Yugoslavia, left for Francoist Spain in 1957.

As in the United States (Operation Paperclip), Argentina also welcomed displaced German scientists such as Kurt Tank and Ronald Richter. Some of these refugees took important roles in Perón's Argentina, such as French collaborationist Jacques de Mahieu, who became an ideologue of the Peronist movement, before becoming mentor to a Roman Catholic nationalist youth group in the 1960s. Belgian collaborationist Pierre Daye became editor of a Peronist magazine. Rodolfo Freude, Ludwig's son, became Perón's chief of presidential intelligence in his first term.

Recently, Goñi's research, drawing on investigations in Argentine, Swiss, American, British and Belgian government archives, as well as numerous interviews and other sources, was detailed in The Real ODESSA: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina (2002), showing how escape routes known as ratlines were used by former NSDAP members and like-minded people to escape trial and judgment. Goñi places particular emphasis on the part played by Perón's government in organizing the ratlines, as well as documenting the aid of Swiss and Vatican authorities in their flight. The Argentine consulate in Barcelona gave false passports to fleeing Nazi war criminals and collaborationists. Recently declassified files from Brazil and Chile reveal that during WWII Péron sold 10,000 blank Argentine passports to ODESSA – the organisation set up to protect former SS men in the event of defeat.

Tomás Eloy Martínez, writer and professor of Latin American studies at Rutgers University, wrote that Juan Perón allowed Nazis into the country in hopes of acquiring advanced German technology developed during the war. Martínez also noted that Eva Perón played no part in allowing Nazis into the country. However, one of Eva's bodyguards was in fact an ex-Nazi commando named Otto Skorzeny, who had met Juan on occasion.

Perón's biographer Jill Hedges wrote on Perón's attitude and actions regarding the Nazi immigration to Argentina:

Unquestionably the Perón government, like others elsewhere, received former Nazis after the war, not least in a bid to attract skilled scientists and technicians; Perón himself would describe this as 'good business', saying 'what costs us a plane ticket cost Germany millions of marks invested in training those scientists and technicians'. Many also found their way to Argentina through the offices of the Vatican and, in some cases, through the willingness of some Argentine diplomats in Europe to sell them Argentine passports. Later investigations in the 1990s would identify 180 Nazis and collaborators who entered Argentina after the war, of whom around 50 were identified as war criminals, notably including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele (with whom Perón had at least one conversation about his genetic experiments). This represented indifference rather than Nazi ideology on Perón or the government's part.