Casa Rosada is where Juan Perón receives six visitors on 4 December 1947, turning a meeting ostensibly devoted to his “third position” into a discussion of Argentina’s plans to welcome people connected with the Third Reich. The meeting’s private purpose gives the presidential residence a consequential role in the machinery of postwar escape: Perón convenes the group again the next day, and the discussions lead toward an official body to manage such immigration.

The December 1947 meeting

The six visitors appear, at first, to be a disparate group: only one is Argentine, their nationalities differ, and five have entered the country on legal Spanish passports made out to false identities. They have settled in Buenos Aires, but share a more consequential distinction: all are wanted by their respective countries for collaboration and/or crimes against humanity. The sixth man is visiting under his real identity, having travelled a long way specifically to attend.

The gathering’s stated subject is Perón’s “third position” in the postwar international order. He presents himself as opposed both to Marxism and liberalism, communism and capitalism, and claims to lead a popular movement beyond the division between left and right. His guests applaud a position familiar to them from speeches in their own languages. The ideological address, however, quickly gives way to the meeting’s operative concern: Perón’s interest in bringing in civilian and military technicians and scientists associated with the Third Reich, with the aim of making Argentina a power.

Attendees and purpose

The visitor list connects Casa Rosada to a wider network of European escape and collaboration. The oldest visitor is Pierre Daye, a journalist and politician born near Brussels who enters Argentina as Pierre Adan. An intellectual reference point for Léon Degrelle’s Rexist Party, Daye admires both Francisco Franco and Perón, whose protection he has successively enjoyed. René Lagrou, another Belgian, had been a leader of the Flemish National Union; sentenced to death in absentia by a court in Antwerp in 1946, he arrives in Buenos Aires under the name Reinaldo van Groede.

Horst Alberto Carlos Fuldner, an intelligence operative in the SS, has a particularly direct connection to escape routes. Walter Schellenberg had assigned him to find ways out for Nazi Party leaders once the war was considered lost; by the meeting, Fuldner has moved from Madrid to his country of birth and lived there since February. The Spanish attendee, Víctor de la Serna, is the son of a journalist and grandson of the writer Concha Espina. An editor at Informaciones, he is regarded by the Allies as fascist and pro-Nazi like his father. His correspondence with Daye uses talk of exporting a car as an evident code for helping a fugitive cross the Atlantic.

De la Serna’s presence is not explained simply by his role in helping collaborators and war criminals escape Francoist Spain. He has been invited by Rodolfo Freude, Perón’s right-hand man, to a meeting officially called to discuss the president’s international doctrine. The account makes clear how the public language of political alignment and the practical organization of refuge coexist within the same gathering.

From audience to reception service

Perón’s interest is shaped by a Cold War calculation: he expects a future conflict between the West and the Soviet Union to turn those regarded as enemies in the present into useful allies later. He is ready to receive them. The meeting is too sensitive to settle in one audience, so Perón receives the same group again the following day to work through details and personally suggests creating a discreet official organization for this category of immigrants.

That proposal becomes concrete on 28 June 1948, when the governing committee of the Argentine European Reception Service, SARE, meets at Radu Ghenea’s home to sign its statutes. Daye, who designed the organization, attends with Lagrou as a representative of Belgian exiles. Ghenea represents Romanians; others represent fugitives of various nationalities, including German, Austrian, French, Slovak, Italian, and Croatian. Soon afterward, the director general of Migration officially recognizes SARE’s capacity to accept and process residence applications. The city’s archbishop lends it a building on Canning Street for its headquarters. The account describes the organization as urgently needed because its work is already underway.

Narrative significance

Casa Rosada is more than a prestigious backdrop: the sequence at the presidential residence marks the movement from informal welcome to an effort to organize reception through an official but reserved body. The false passports, wanted attendees, and coded correspondence establish the stakes behind the meeting’s respectable public topic. Its aftermath shows political refuge being translated into administrative capacity, with SARE empowered to handle residence applications and given a headquarters.

The location also anchors the novel’s contrast between declared ideology and practical action. Perón speaks of a political position beyond the conventional left–right divide, while the meeting turns to receiving people tied to the defeated Reich. Casa Rosada thus becomes the setting where Cold War anticipation is made operational: the visitors are not only welcomed as individuals but considered in relation to Argentina’s ambitions and future alliances.