Anticomunismo de la Guerra Fría

Anticommunismo de la Guerra Fría is the postwar political logic that recasts the Soviet Union as the principal enemy and makes former Nazis, Franco’s Spain, and later Latin American military regimes useful partners. In the novel, it is not merely a change in rhetoric: it reshapes the memory of the Second World War, obstructs accountability, and gives authoritarian rule a language of strategic necessity. Its consequences reach from the Spanish Civil War’s divided Republican rear to the Nazi escape networks in Spain and Argentina, and ultimately to state terror in Argentina.

From wartime dependence to postwar realignment

The logic begins before the Cold War has fully taken shape. In besieged Madrid, Republican factions are divided, and suspicion surrounds Soviet influence. The disappearance of Andreu Nin inflames the small POUM community and its anarchist supporters, while socialists remain fractured and communists and socialists agree chiefly in backing the Valencia government and the Madrid Defense Council. In this setting, opposition to Soviet control is constrained by military dependence: the Republic needs Soviet aircraft, tanks, and heavy weapons, and breaking with Moscow risks leaving Spain to Franco. Anticommunism therefore takes shape amid an unresolved conflict between political autonomy and the need to keep fighting.

The later international reversal makes that wartime dilemma newly consequential. At a meeting with Pablo de Azcárate and Juan Negrín, Manuel Arroyo warns that the public story of the war is changing: the Soviet contribution to Hitler’s defeat is being diminished while the Normandy landings receive greater emphasis. He foresees a version of history in which children might be taught that the Americans took Berlin. That alteration is more than a dispute over credit. Franco can present himself as a champion of anticommunism, while the Western democracies conduct the Nuremberg trials in public and, according to the rumors Arroyo describes, recruit former SS officers for work against Soviet interests. The juxtaposition makes the new moral hierarchy visible: Nazi crimes are condemned, but Nazi expertise can still be treated as useful.

The conversion of former enemies into useful allies

Sal Burnstein confronts this reversal after learning that the Nazi camps have destroyed his family. His grief becomes a political commitment to remember and seek justice for his mother, siblings, and nephews. Yet the atmosphere in Washington is shifting toward the view that the Soviet Union is the decisive danger to peace and Western civilization. Former SS officers disappear from Allied prisoner lists as British and American authorities recruit them for anti-Soviet work. The danger Burnstein identifies is not simply that prosecutions may be incomplete; it is that an emerging strategic consensus can repaint those who escaped prosecution as acceptable partners.

Burnstein organizes Democratic politicians in contact with a network of Jewish businesspeople and financiers. Their effort is to counter arguments that any means are justified to avert a new war with the Soviet Union. Public sympathy for Burnstein’s loss proves easier to obtain than political support: people offer kind words and genuine compassion but will not risk their careers. As rumors spread about war criminals fleeing under false identities, Burnstein makes locating their protection networks his central objective, hoping that public exposure will force Washington to act. The political structure of the moment frustrates that strategy: moral outrage can be expressed without disturbing the anti-Soviet policy that enables evasion.

The same calculation appears in the American view of Franco’s Spain. When Manuel tests the attitude of a CIA officer through his assumed identity as Peter Louzán, he describes a family supposedly punished for loyalty to the Republic. The officer remains unmoved and says that Franco is a tyrant but a great enemy of Stalin, and therefore useful. This exchange reduces Spanish suffering to an acknowledged but expendable cost. It also explains why official condemnation of Franco does not necessarily imply a willingness to isolate or overthrow him: anticommunist value outweighs the democratic claims of Spaniards.

Franco’s Spain as refuge and intermediary

The novel connects this strategic tolerance to the practical machinery of escape. Pablo de Azcárate tells Manuel that the Argentine route is not a fantasy about submarines carrying Reich gold: South America is a real destination for Nazis seeking to evade international courts. The suspected cooperation between Clara Stauffer’s network and Juan Perón’s government rests on a concrete chain of assistance. Stauffer can provide Spanish documents, using birth certificates supplied by friendly priests and contacts within the state; Argentina, meanwhile, resists the blockade and sends Spain grain and frozen meat. The suspected route is plausible, though Azcárate stresses that they cannot yet prove it. They need an infiltrator.

The protection of Léon Degrelle illustrates how refuge can be made durable through state action. After Spain hands Pierre Laval to the French authorities in 1945, Degrelle remains protected despite Belgian demands for his extradition. In 1954, the regime secures his position by making him, officially, the Spanish citizen José León Ramírez Reina. That false identity supports a construction company which receives abundant public contracts. The novel presents this as a repeatable method: retroactive nationality and authentic papers for an assumed identity can shield Nazi fugitives in Spain or facilitate their onward journey elsewhere.

The allied list of 104 exposes the same conflict in diplomatic form. Its subjects are not merely Germans who followed orders; they are described as active contributors to Hitler’s power, with outstanding claims before German courts. Yet by late 1947 the Cold War has changed the international conditions created by Hitler’s defeat. Spain’s foreign minister delays the Allied representatives and eventually produces documents and certificates they have never seen before. The process turns bureaucratic delay and paperwork into instruments of protection, as the victorious powers’ demands meet a Spanish government that has learned to exploit their changing priorities.

Political language and the preservation of power

Anticommunism also operates through publicity and social influence, not only military alliances or official papers. Hans Lazar’s dinners bring selected journalists into contact with Francoist officials and Nazi diplomats. His polished hospitality and personal charm cultivate loyalty alongside the envelopes he distributes. He helps infiltrate the newly founded EFE news agency and disseminate Berlin’s views in Latin America, while concealing the embassy’s role through other Spanish organizations. This social and media work builds a pro-Axis public opinion in a nominally neutral country; its postwar significance lies in how political influence can survive defeat and adapt to new conditions.

Lazar’s disappearance of the embassy’s assets makes that continuity material. When Allied representatives finally enter the German Embassy in Madrid on 5 June 1945, the building has been stripped: documents, money, gold, antiques, artworks, and even furniture are gone. The only person they encounter is Lazar, in a silk dressing gown, who says that he is simply living in his private residence. Years later, Manuel suspects that the treasures and missing records were moved into a secret hiding place. The book links the diplomatic world of accommodation to the movement of wealth: art looted from Jewish owners and occupied territories, precious objects, and possibly gold and foreign currency can travel through the same protected networks that shelter people.

The Argentine meeting organized through Rodolfo Freude makes the ideological bargain explicit. Perón presents his “third position” as opposed to both Marxism and liberalism, and as a popular movement beyond left and right. But the gathering’s practical purpose is to welcome civilians and military or technical specialists associated with the Third Reich, with the goal of making Argentina a power. Perón believes that a future conflict between the West and the Soviet Union may turn today’s villains into tomorrow’s allies. The language of a position beyond the conventional political divide thus coexists with a direct offer of refuge to people linked to the Nazi regime.

From Cold War security to state terror

The concept’s far-reaching consequence appears in the later history of Latin America. By March 1976, Argentina is the only country in the Southern Cone that still retains a democratic regime, surrounded by military dictatorships in Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. The novel places the Argentine dictatorship within the National Security Doctrine, a Cold War policy that treats the defeat of left-wing movements as justification for military rule and repression, with support from Washington.

Statements by American officials make this support plain. William P. Rogers anticipates extensive repression in Argentina, including a search not just for terrorists but for union dissidents and members of the ruling parties. Henry Kissinger says that the coup leaders will need some support and that the United States should not make them feel besieged. This posture helps explain the impunity with which the Argentine military regime makes state terror central to its rule. The logic that once allowed Franco’s authoritarianism to seem strategically useful now authorizes the support of military governments elsewhere: a claimed struggle against communism expands the definition of the enemy to include political and labor dissent, while the consequences fall on those marked as threats.

Across these episodes, anticommunism works by changing the terms of judgment. The question of whether an individual, government, or network is responsible for past violence gives way to whether it can serve a new struggle against the Soviet Union or the left. Trials and condemnations continue, but their force is undercut when the same political order recruits former Nazis, tolerates Franco, and assists military rulers. The novel’s recurring contrast is between public declarations of principle and private accommodations: the rhetoric of justice remains available, even as strategic usefulness determines whose crimes are pursued and whose are allowed to persist.