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Report: Eva Peron got rich helping Nazis

 
Published Nov. 5, 1996|Updated Sept. 17, 2005

The reinvention of Eva Peron as a tragic heroine in the musical Evita has been blown apart by claims that she set up secret Swiss bank accounts on her husband's behalf to hide millions of dollars gained from looted Nazi gold, cash and art treasures.

A month before the opening of Alan Parker's lavish film version of Evita, with Madonna in the starring role, allegations have emerged from Spain and Argentina casting Eva and Juan Peron as the perpetrators of a racket to smuggle up to 15,000 Nazis out of Europe at the end of World War II in exchange for cash.

According to an investigation published in one of Spain's leading magazines, Interviu, the Peron regime _ even as it belatedly declared war on the Axis powers in March 1945 _ was setting up a secret "air bridge" via Spain and Portugal to help leading Nazis flee.

The magazine cites declassified U.S. intelligence reports, among them one filed by Gen. B.R. Legge, a senior U.S. military liaison officer stationed in Berne, Switzerland, in 1945.

According to Legge, whose report is dated only two days after Peron's declaration of war, Peron had already established the existence "of a regular air bridge between Germany and Spain" whose purpose was to facilitate the escape of senior Nazis as well as the transfer of funds.

The deal, according to the magazine, was that fleeing Nazis would find a haven in Argentina in exchange for looted cash, gold and art.

The magazine cites a recently declassified CIA report, filed on March 23, 1972, as proof of Eva Peron's involvement in the racket. The CIA report says then-Argentine President Alejandro Lanuse was maneuvering to appropriate "millions of dollars deposited in a Swiss bank," according to Interviu. The report adds that there was reliable evidence that those millions provided by fugitive Nazis were appreciating in value as part of the Eva Peron Foundation.

The magazine claims the accounts to handle the stolen funds were set up by Eva Peron during her tour of Europe in 1947 when she changed her itinerary to visit Swiss bankers in Geneva, Berne, Neuchatel and Lucerne.

The magazine's claims are given credibility by new research undertaken by the World Jewish Congress, to be published this month.

According to Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress in New York, researchers in Buenos Aires have established from previously secret Argentine and U.S. records that the trade in Nazi war criminals netted the Perons hundreds of millions of dollars.

The research suggests that rather than hundreds, perhaps as many as 15,000 Nazis ended up in South America via Argentina.

It also challenges conventional wisdom that these Nazis _ including Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Croatia's Ante Pavelic _ arrived on an ad hoc basis.