Perón receives European war-crime fugitives was a December 1947 meeting at the Casa Rosada that converted the postwar flight of wanted Europeans into a matter of Argentine state policy. Six visitors arrived under the public pretext of hearing Juan Perón explain his “third position”; the decisive subject was his willingness to welcome people connected to the Third Reich, and the meeting led to a second audience and preparations for an official body to manage their arrival.

The visitors and their concealed identities

On December 4, 1947, the six visitors appeared to form a heterogeneous group: only one was Argentine, and the others held nationalities different from one another. Yet all had entered Argentina that year on legal Spanish passports. Five passports supported false identities, and their holders had settled in Buenos Aires despite being wanted by the courts of their respective countries for collaboration and/or crimes against humanity. The sixth man’s passport matched his real identity; he had travelled from far away specifically to attend.

The announced subject and the real purpose

The meeting was officially convened so Perón could explain his “third position” in the international order after the Second World War. He presented himself as opposed to both Marxism and liberalism, communism and capitalism, and as the leader of a popular movement that surpassed the division between left and right. His guests applauded a familiar ideological performance, but the discussion soon shifted from political positioning to the practical question of who Argentina would receive.

Perón wanted to attract civilian and military technicians and scientists linked to the Third Reich, believing that another conflict between the West and the Soviet Union could turn the defeated and compromised into useful allies. He was prepared to welcome them. In this calculation, the fugitives’ present culpability did not rule out their future value: the prospect of a new Cold War reordered who might count as an enemy or an asset.

From audience to reception machinery

Rodolfo Freude, Perón’s close aide, had been tasked with convening the meeting. His father, Ludwig Freude, a powerful German businessman in Argentina, had faced an Allied extradition demand in 1945. When extradition seemed imminent, Perón produced a false citizenship letter that allowed Ludwig to remain; Ludwig later financed Perón’s 1946 election campaign. Rodolfo invited Víctor de la Serna, one of the six visitors, and that invitation explains his presence in Buenos Aires.

Agreement among the attendees did not settle the matter in one sitting. Perón received the same group again the following day to work out details, and became personally involved to the extent of suggesting a confidential official body to receive this class of immigrants. The meeting therefore marks a transition from private contacts and passport-based concealment toward a more organized system of reception.

The Argentine European Reception Service, SARE, became real on June 28, 1948, when its governing committee met at Radu Ghenea’s home to sign its statutes. Pierre Daye, who had designed the organization, attended with René Lagrou representing the Belgian exile community; Ghenea represented the Romanians, while other participants represented fugitives of several nationalities. Argentina’s director general of migration later recognized SARE’s capacity to accept and manage residence applications, and the city’s archdiocese provided a building on Canning Street for its headquarters. The network had acquired an institutional address and an authorized role in handling immigration.

The meeting in the novel’s wider history

The audience sits within a larger pattern of escape and political protection. In Madrid, Clarita Stauffer’s covert organization helped wanted Europeans obtain documents and employment; the Allied List of 104 identified her as a principal organizer of a secret aid association involved in false papers and postwar activity. The narrative also recounts how Jean-Jules Lecomte, responsible for deportations and the killing of Jewish children and nuns in Chimay, was sentenced to death in absentia but was never captured. Such cases give the Buenos Aires meeting its stakes: the people being received were not simply displaced Europeans, but individuals sought for grave crimes, whose movement across borders could frustrate prosecution.

The scene also echoes the novel’s treatment of exile as a succession of crossings and assumed identities. Manuel Arroyo Benítez, living in Geneva under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez, had endured solitary intelligence work for the Spanish Republican government in exile and distrusted the political theatre around him. Elsewhere, a fugitive crosses into Spain through Gibraltar under an American cover identity, while another survivor learns to live under a false name, measuring the boundary between identities through daily walks across the Castellana. Against these precarious individual routes, Perón’s audience shows state power organizing refuge for fugitives. Its consequence is not immediate justice or resolution, but a durable apparatus through which Cold War calculation could shelter men wanted by other countries.