Dürer Publishing

Dürer Publishing was a Buenos Aires publishing house and gathering point for Nazi exiles, combining the propaganda work of its magazine Der Weg with practical aid and personal connections. Under Eberhard Fritsch, it offered a cultural platform for writers censored in postwar Europe while helping former Nazis establish themselves in Argentina; its decline followed the confrontation between that circle’s denial of Nazi crimes and Adolf Eichmann’s detailed account of the extermination program.

Foundation and purpose

Fritsch founded Dürer Publishing to assist soldiers and other German-speaking exiles. Its principal publication, Der Weg, provided space for writers associated with Blood-and-Soil ideology whose work had been suppressed in Europe. The publishing house thus presented itself not merely as a commercial venture but as support for a community of displaced comrades.

The assistance was tangible as well as ideological. When supplies were scarce, Fritsch arranged special offers of stock cubes, tinned meat, and cocoa powder for writers. The journal and publishing house also connected its readers and contributors to wider networks in Buenos Aires, offering a rallying point to Germans living far from Europe.

A Nazi hub in Buenos Aires

At its headquarters at 542 Sarmiento Avenue, Dürer Publishing brought together people with Nazi and collaborationist histories. Josef Mengele, using the name Gregor, visited Fritsch there after finding the journal’s listings and deciding he could leave his hiding place. He gave Fritsch an account of his wartime service while withholding his identity and his posting to Auschwitz. Fritsch responded with sympathy and assurances that Argentina offered safety from questions about the past.

The journal’s circle included Josef Schwammberger, a former commandant of forced-labour camps, and Reinhard Kopps, a specialist in conspiracy writing who had worked for Himmler’s intelligence agencies in the Balkans. Willem Sassen, whose articles Mengele had already noticed, was another central figure. These encounters show how the house’s publishing activity overlapped with the cultivation of personal ties among former Nazis and collaborators.

Fritsch’s political commitments shaped the institution’s character. He had attended a Hitler Youth rally in Germany as a fourteen-year-old and rejected reports of Nazi atrocities as hostile propaganda. He also recalled the wartime German presence in Argentina and its political ambitions in South America. In this setting, Der Weg’s literary platform, its denial of Nazi crimes, and its network-building reinforced one another.

Eichmann interviews and rupture

For six months, Sassen and Fritsch interviewed Adolf Eichmann. In their conversations, Eichmann described mass killing, gas chambers, forced labour, death marches, and famine, confirming the scale of the extermination program to the men associated with Dürer Publishing. The revelations unsettled a circle that had resisted acknowledging such crimes. Fritsch and Sassen distanced themselves from Eichmann after the interviews, while the publishing house cancelled the planned book. Sassen retained the recordings.

The episode exposed a defining tension in Dürer Publishing’s role. The house had offered a platform to those who denied the atrocities, yet its own interviews produced a record that confirmed them. Eichmann’s testimony did not lead to publication: instead, the project was abandoned, and the men who had sought to use his account as material recoiled from what it established.

Closure and aftermath

Der Weg faltered after the interviews, and Fritsch closed Dürer Publishing in early 1958. Banned from publishing, he moved to Austria and took work as a night porter at a hotel in Salzburg. The closure ended the house’s visible role as a publishing center, although Sassen continued his journalistic career and kept the interview tapes.

Dürer Publishing’s history traces the limits and consequences of an exile network built around denial. It could supply goods, introductions, and a public voice to its members, but it could not make Eichmann’s account conform to the version of the past its circle had defended. The cancellation of the book and the house’s closure marked the collapse of that particular platform, not the disappearance of the people who had gathered around it.