Juan Perón

Juan Perón is the political patron whose postwar ambitions turn the suspected Nazi escape route through Spain into an organized Argentine reception system. His public language of a “third position” and his calculation that Cold War alignments could rehabilitate yesterday’s enemies converge at a December 1947 meeting in the Casa Rosada, where welcoming Third Reich personnel becomes more than private sympathy: Perón commits the state to receiving them.

Political Context and the Madrid Connection

The mission to investigate the Stauffer network begins with an uncertain trail. Information gathered by Sole suggested that Clara Stauffer’s house at Galileo 14 was receiving foreign fugitives, feeding and clothing them, and supplying documents linked to Spanish birth records. The investigators still needed to establish that named visitors were who they claimed to be, verify the suspected Argentine connection, and prove that Stauffer’s assistance went beyond sheltering German soldiers. Their working theory was that fugitives were being given Spanish papers and sent onward to Argentina, but they lacked evidence sufficient to make the case internationally.

The Argentine connection mattered in part because Perón’s government was already conspicuous in the account as the only government that disregarded the blockade and sent Spain ships carrying grain and frozen meat. Manuel Arroyo was therefore instructed to investigate the network not merely in Madrid but, if circumstances allowed, as far as Buenos Aires. To get close to its organizers, he was to assume the role of a Spanish Nazi war criminal whom Stauffer would consider important enough to smuggle out of the country. The proposed infiltration rested on the suspicion that Spain’s escape infrastructure and Argentina’s willingness to receive fugitives formed consecutive stages of one route.

The Casa Rosada Meeting

On 4 December 1947 Perón received six visitors at the Casa Rosada. They appeared to be a varied group: only one was Argentine, the others held different nationalities, and all had entered the country during 1947 on legal Spanish passports. Five passports supported false identities. Their holders had settled in Buenos Aires and were wanted by their respective countries for collaboration or crimes against humanity; the sixth visitor, whose passport matched his real identity, had travelled from far away specifically to attend.

The meeting’s official subject was Perón’s “third position” in the postwar international order. He presented himself as opposed both to Marxism and to liberalism, communism and capitalism, and as the leader of a popular movement that surpassed the left-right division. His European guests applauded a political formula familiar from speeches they had heard in their own languages. The declared doctrine, however, soon gave way to the meeting’s practical concern: Argentina’s interest in receiving civilian and military technicians and scientists connected to the Third Reich.

Perón’s reasoning was explicitly shaped by the prospect of another conflict between the West and the Soviet Union. He believed that a new Cold War confrontation might transform the people regarded as villains in the present into useful allies in the future. Argentina, in this calculation, could acquire expertise and strength by opening its doors to former Third Reich personnel. The welcome was not presented as a temporary act of charity; it was tied to the ambition of making Argentina a power.

From Audience to Government Policy

The agenda continued beyond the first audience. Perón received the same group again the following day to settle further details, and the account stresses his personal involvement: he proposed creating a discreet official organization to receive this category of immigrants. His intervention shifted the scheme from a network of personal contacts and private assistance toward a proposed administrative mechanism.

That proposal became concrete on 28 June 1948, when the governing committee of the Argentine European Reception Service, or SARE, met at Radu Ghenea’s house to sign its statutes. Pierre Daye, who had designed the organization, attended as a representative of the Belgian exiles. Ghenea represented the Romanians, while other participants represented fugitives of several nationalities, including Germans, Austrians, French, Slovaks, Italians, and Croats. The account thus presents SARE not as an informal gathering alone but as an organization with statutes, a committee, and representatives for multiple national groups.

The organization soon gained official capacity. Pablo Diana, director general of Migration, formally recognized SARE’s ability to accept and manage applications for residence in Argentina. The city’s archbishopric provided a building on Canning Street for its headquarters. The administrative recognition and the provision of a dedicated office gave institutional form to the reception system Perón had proposed; by the time those arrangements were in place, the machinery was already operating.

Significance and Limits of the Evidence

Perón’s role joins ideological presentation to administrative sponsorship. At the Casa Rosada, the language of a political position beyond left and right supplied the public frame, while the conversation turned toward recruiting Third Reich-linked personnel and receiving people entering under Spanish papers, including false identities. His proposal for a reserved official body provided a bridge between that policy discussion and SARE’s subsequent statutory and administrative existence.

The narrative distinguishes established activity from what investigators still had to prove. Before the Buenos Aires meeting, the Spanish-based route and Stauffer network were described as a strong but incompletely documented theory; the investigators sought confirmation of identities, contacts, and onward movement. The later account of Perón’s meeting and SARE’s formation supplies evidence of Argentine organization and state-linked reception, but the character’s significance is not reduced to a single speech. It lies in the sequence: a strategic rationale, a meeting with fugitives and intermediaries, a second session to work out details, and a discreet agency able to process residence applications.