Perón Meets European Collaborators and Escape Network Members

Perón Meets European Collaborators and Escape Network Members was a 4 December 1947 meeting at the Casa Rosada that gave political purpose and prospective official backing to the arrival of European collaborators and fugitives in Argentina. Its six visitors, five traveling under false identities on Spanish passports, connected the postwar escape networks operating from Spain with Juan Perón’s ambition to recruit people associated with the Third Reich. What began as an announced exposition of Perón’s “third position” shifted toward a practical project: receiving such immigrants and turning their expertise into national power.

The visitors and their identities

The group appeared diverse in nationality and background, but the narrative draws attention to a common circumstance: all six had entered Argentina in 1947 with legal Spanish passports, and five passports concealed false identities. Those five had settled in Buenos Aires and were wanted by their respective countries for collaboration and/or crimes against humanity. The sixth visitor’s passport matched his real identity; he had come from far away specifically to attend. The distinction between lawful travel papers and the truth they concealed frames the meeting as an encounter between public diplomacy and an existing system of evasion.

The eldest was Pierre Daye, born in Schaerbeek near Brussels in 1892, who entered Argentina under the name Pierre Adan. A journalist and politician, Daye was an intellectual figure in Léon Degrelle’s Rexist Party and had admired Francisco Franco and Perón even before receiving protection from both in turn. His presence joined political advocacy to the work of refuge: Daye was not merely a fugitive seeking safety but a figure who would help design the organization that emerged from the meeting.

René Lagrou, another Belgian visitor, had been a leader of the Flemish National Union before the war. Although his name was French in form, his political role was Flemish; after a court in Antwerp sentenced him to death in absentia in 1946, he arrived in Buenos Aires in July using a passport issued to Reinaldo van Groede. His false papers made the route into Argentina possible while his conviction made the political stakes of that route plain.

Georges Gilbaud had served as a senior official in the Vichy government and led the collaborationist French Popular Party. Sentenced to death in absentia after escaping across the Pyrenees, he had reached Argentina in May, a month before Daye and Lagrou. His arrival shows that the gathering brought together fugitives from different national settings rather than members of one national movement alone.

Radu Ghenea, formerly ambassador in Spain for the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, had remained in Madrid after the war. Antonescu, head of a state aligned with the Third Reich, was tried and executed in Romania in June 1946. Protected by Spanish friends, Ghenea evaded Romanian justice and emigrated to Argentina under a false name; he was the fourth visitor received by Perón. His journey made visible the role of Francoist Spain as an intermediary refuge, not simply a stopping point on the way overseas.

The fifth man, Horst Alberto Carlos Fuldner, was the visitor the Allies would have considered most important. A member of the SS intelligence organization, he had been tasked by his superior, Walter Schellenberg, with finding escape routes for Nazi Party leaders once the war was recognized as lost. He was the first of the group to move from Madrid to his country of birth, where he had lived since February. His presence connected the local gathering to an organized search for routes of escape for leading members of the Nazi Party.

The sixth visitor was Víctor de la Serna, a Spaniard whose real identity matched his papers. The son of a journalist of the same name and grandson of the writer Concha Espina, he was editor in chief of Informaciones. A photographer from the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación had captured him on the steps of the plane that brought him from Madrid on 6 November. The Allies regarded him as fascist and pro-Nazi, like his father, and he was personally acquainted with the other invitees from their years in Spain. After Daye’s departure, he maintained extensive correspondence with him, using a notably obvious code in which an “exported car” meant a fugitive whom they sought to help across the Atlantic. His invitation to the Casa Rosada therefore had a practical connection to the escape networks, beyond the stated political topic.

The official theme and the actual purpose

The meeting was convened under the pretext that Perón would explain his “third position” in the international order after the Second World War. In his public-facing formulation, he presented himself as opposed both to Marxism and liberalism, and to communism and capitalism. He described his movement as popular and as transcending the division between left and right. The visitors applauded a political language that resembled arguments they had heard repeatedly in their own languages.

That applause soon gave way to the gathering’s more consequential business. Perón was interested in receiving civilian and military technicians and scientists connected to the Third Reich, with the stated aim of making Argentina a power. He interpreted the emerging Cold War as an opportunity: if a new conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union came, he believed, the people regarded as villains in the present might become useful allies in the future. He was prepared to welcome them accordingly. The meeting thus linked Perón’s anti-communism to a policy of recruitment and refuge, recasting postwar stigma as a temporary political liability that might be reversed by a new international alignment.

The visitors’ circumstances gave this proposal a concrete human and political dimension. They were not simply experts invited to Argentina on ordinary terms: the narrative identifies them as people sought by the justice systems of their countries, several living under fabricated identities arranged through Spanish documents. Perón’s willingness to receive them placed prospective state support alongside private connections and escape logistics already in operation. The gathering’s concealed purpose did not displace the official speech so much as reveal what the speech could make politically legible: an anti-communist alliance in which former collaborators and Nazi-linked personnel might be treated as future assets.

From audience to institution

The discussions exceeded the time available in a single audience. Perón received the same group again the next day to settle details, and his involvement became personal and concrete: he suggested creating a reserved official body to receive this category of immigrants. The two-stage meeting therefore marks a transition from ideological welcome to administrative planning. Its consequence was not merely that influential fugitives met a sympathetic president, but that the project acquired a proposed institutional form.

The Argentine European Reception Agency (SARE) became real on 28 June 1948, when its steering committee met at Ghenea’s house to sign its statutes. Daye, who had designed the organization, attended with Lagrou as representatives of the Belgian exile community. Ghenea represented the Romanians. Other participants represented refugees of various nationalities, including Germans, Austrians, French, Slovaks, Italians, and Croats; among them was Monsignor Ferenc Luttor, a Hungarian diplomat to the Vatican who had escaped in 1947 with a papal passport. The agency’s composition turned the informal gathering’s international range into an organized receiving structure.

The Argentine director general of migration soon formally recognized SARE’s capacity to accept and manage residence applications in the country. The city’s archbishop lent it a building on Canning Street for its headquarters. These steps supplied official recognition, a practical office, and an operating remit to a process the Casa Rosada meeting had helped set in motion. The meeting’s significance lies in that chain: a group of wanted collaborators reached Perón through escape networks; a public ideological performance opened onto a discussion of recruitment; and a second audience produced a proposal that became an official service for European arrivals.

Significance

The scene sets the contrast between a changing postwar order and the continuities that fugitives could exploit. The five false identities did not erase the visitors’ political histories; they allowed them to cross borders and assemble under protection. Spain appears as an important bridge in that movement: the visitors’ Spanish papers, Ghenea’s protection in Madrid, and de la Serna’s correspondence about helping a fugitive cross the Atlantic link Francoist Spain to Argentina’s reception plans.

Perón’s “third position” is presented both as a political declaration and as a framework for action. His opposition to communism and capitalism offered a language of national independence, but his interest in Third Reich personnel was grounded in an expectation that Cold War conflict could rehabilitate people whose wartime record made them fugitives. The episode accordingly shows political respectability and clandestine assistance operating together: a presidential audience and a proposed reserved agency on one side, assumed names, disputed pasts, and covert routes on the other.

The meeting is also a hinge in the narrative’s treatment of exile and impunity. Those seeking refuge were individuals with particular biographies and routes, but the institution proposed around them could process arrivals across nationalities. The later SARE headquarters on Canning Street gives durable administrative form to the compact first discussed in the Casa Rosada. What began as a meeting of six men thus helped turn Argentina’s welcome into an organized state function.