Establishment of the Argentine European Reception Service

The Argentine European Reception Service (SARE) was established in 1948 to receive and process applications for residence in Argentina from selected European refugees. Created through cooperation between a transnational exile network and the government of Juan Perón, it turned private political contacts into an officially recognized mechanism for migration—and made Spain a point of departure for people the network judged urgent to save.

Origins and Political Sponsorship

The Service emerged from a proposal discussed by Perón and a group of European émigrés and collaborators. The issue was too sensitive to settle in a single audience: Perón received the group again the following day to refine the arrangements, and personally suggested creating a reserved official body to receive this category of immigrant. The idea was therefore not simply an informal rescue initiative. It was designed from the outset to have a discreet institutional form and a connection to the Argentine presidency.

The political relationships behind that access included the Freude family. Rodolfo Freude, entrusted with convening an earlier meeting, was the son of Ludwig Freude, a wealthy German businessman and Nazi Party member whom the Allies accused of acting as Hitler’s unofficial ambassador in Argentina. When extradition efforts nearly succeeded in 1945, Perón produced a false citizenship letter that allowed Ludwig to remain in the country. Ludwig later financed Perón’s 1946 election campaign; his son’s role in convening the meeting placed the European network in contact with the future president.

Founding and Organization

SARE became a reality on 28 June 1948, when its steering committee met at Radu Ghenea’s home to sign its statutes. Pierre Daye, who had designed the organization, attended with René Lagrou as representatives of the Belgian exile community. Ghenea represented the Romanians. Other participants spoke for displaced people of several nationalities, including Germans, Austrians, French, Slovaks, Italians, and Croats; among them was Ferenc Luttor, a Hungarian diplomat to the Vatican who had escaped in 1947 using a Vatican passport.

The Service quickly acquired formal standing. Pablo Diana, director general of Migration, officially recognized its authority to accept and manage residence applications for the Argentine Republic. The city’s archdiocese provided a building on Canning Street for its headquarters. The account stresses the urgency of these practical arrangements: by the time the committee signed the statutes, the machinery was already operating.

Selecting People to Be Rescued

The records show that SARE’s work depended on referrals and selection as well as immigration administration. In a letter dated 25 February 1948, Daye told Víctor de la Serna that his group’s contacts with the presidency had continued regularly. He asked De la Serna to prepare lists, organized by nationality, of political refugees in Spain and to identify those most urgently in need of rescue. The refugees themselves, Daye explained, would not have to submit requests; the network would handle what was necessary.

Daye recommended three trusted intermediaries for this task, including Clara Stauffer. Her role connects the Service’s administrative purpose to the broader network that linked European political contacts, Spanish-based refugees, and Argentine authorities. The lists were not presented as an open application system: the network identified prospective migrants and undertook to process the arrangements on their behalf.

Routes, Secrecy, and the Meaning of Reception

The Service’s establishment belongs to a wider history of successive displacement. In 1939 Manuel Arroyo Benítez had returned to Geneva, where he worked under an assumed name as Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, meeting representatives of neutral and Allied countries and sending reports to Taplow. He was lonely and materially constrained, but regarded his relative safety in Switzerland as a privilege compared with the hunger and anguish facing many Spanish exiles in Europe. His earlier life makes clear that exile was not a single passage from one country to another: it involved changing identities, insecure work, and repeated decisions shaped by borders and political danger.

By 1946, Arroyo was able to re-enter Spain through Gibraltar under the cover of an American visiting his parents’ homeland. France would have attracted less attention, but the border was closed, while an illegal mountain crossing risked a fall that could endanger his mission. His passage illustrates the importance of controlled routes and plausible documentation in the world surrounding SARE. In Argentina, meanwhile, Jan Schmitt concealed the Argentine passport he used after abandoning his Belgian papers, while presenting himself as undocumented to avoid having its number recorded. Such episodes expose the tension within refugee reception: a service that could facilitate legal residence operated amid political flight, concealed identities, and the need to avoid scrutiny.

SARE’s creation thus marks an institutional turn in the novel’s account of postwar mobility. It offered a route into Argentina for people selected through a politically connected network, while the story’s other migrations show how precarious and reversible exile could be. Decades later, the contrast becomes stark: the Argentine dictatorship’s terror forced thousands to flee, and Spain became a destination for many, including Spanish republicans who had first left their country in 1939 and returned almost forty years later as foreigners, with nothing. The history of reception therefore sits between two movements—Europeans routed toward Argentina after the war and Argentines driven abroad by state violence—and makes refuge inseparable from the political circumstances that determine who can move, who is selected, and who must leave again.