The Nazi Escape Plan

By Steve Rodan and Elly Sinclair

In the summer of 1945, U.S. authorities began to notice the flight of thousands of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe. Many of them went south to Italy and Spain, where they boarded ships to the Middle East. Others sailed to South America, where a Nazi infrastructure was already in place.

The Allies looked away.

The escape plan was the brainchild of the most popular SS official with the West and not a small number of Jews. In a little more than a decade, Walter Schellenberg rose up the ranks of the SS to head of foreign intelligence at age 34. An ambitious workaholic, he was instrumental in the supply of military goods for the extermination of Jews in the Soviet Union. Unlike many of his colleagues, he foresaw Hitler's defeat and through Swedish and Swiss intermediaries reached out to the Allies for what began as a separate peace with the West to the escape from justice for he and his colleagues. There is sufficient evidence in the official U.S. archives that Britain and the United States accepted much of what Schellenberg offered.

A few months after World War II, Schellenberg's escape proposal was reported to U.S. military authorities. Roswell McClelland was the representative of the U.S. War Refugee Board in Switzerland and in steady, albeit indirect, contact with SS and other German personnel during the last year of the war. In October 1945, McClelland was interviewed by the military office that was preparing for the prosecution of leading Nazis in Nuremberg. He was asked about European figures involved in Jewish rescue, particularly former Swiss President Jean-Marie Musy.

Musy had met Schellenberg and other leading German officials in the winter and spring of 1945. Musy, backed by more than $1 million raised by Orthodox Jews and the American Joint Distribution Committee, was credited with obtaining SS permission for the transport of 1,200 Jews from the Czech camp of Theresienstadt to Switzerland in February 1945.

The deal

In April 1945, the last month of the war, McClelland said, Schellenberg offered Musy a deal that could save tens of thousands of Jewish inmates. The SS intelligence chief told the Swiss intermediary that the former could ensure that the inmates of the German camps would not be forced on what was termed death marches in Germany and what remained of the Third Reich. Instead, the inmates would be allowed to stay put until the arrival of the Allied armies, expected to take place within weeks.

In return, Schellenberg was quoted as saying, the Germans would require assurances that the SS guards at these camps would be allowed to flee. They would not be shot by Allied forces and, if captured, would be treated as prisoners of war, "provided, of course, that they did not offer resistance."

To McClelland, this was a strange request. Although there were some massacres by Allied armies, the British and Americans did not generally kill surrendering enemy troops. Still, the American relayed Schellenberg's request to his superiors in Bern, Switzerland as well as the War Refugee Board in Washington.

"The War Refugee Board in Washington replied to me that neither they nor I were authorized to deal with such matters," McClelland said. [1]

McClelland recalled that he did not relay the American response to Musy. Instead, the U.S. representative tried to stall for time until the German camps would be captured by the Allies and make any deal moot. He reassured Musy that the Americans would not shoot "anyone regularly wearing the uniform of the German military, or associate organization, who did not offer resistance."

"I know that the Americans never gave any such assurance, formally or informally, but I do know that Musy telephoned my reply to him, onto Schellenberg," McClelland said.

That marked the end of the testimony by McClelland found in the U.S. National Archives. There is little objective evidence that Schellenberg kept his part of the bargain. Himmler's orders, which stemmed from Hitler, was to kill all of the Jewish inmates. In some cases, the Jews revolted and the SS guards fled within hours of the arrival of the American troops.

Allowed to flee

But other documents indicate that the Americans and British allowed the SS guards as well as thousands of other German military and security personnel to flee in an organized fashion. Many of the Germans merely removed their uniforms, adopted fake names and, even when arrested, were released within a year after the war. One of them was Adolf Eichmann, the SS bureaucrat who killed more Jews from his desk than any other Nazi.

In the spring and summer of 1947, Vincent La Vista, the U.S. military attache in Rome, investigated the flow of Nazis and others from Europe. In a report, La Vista concluded that the Germans were aided in their flight from Europe. The biggest facilitator was the Vatican. After the Catholic Church came the Zionist movement and its friends.

"The Vatican, of course, is the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants," the report said. "The second largest is the group of Jewish Agencies and individuals and the third could be considered, not as the Hungarian alone, but as an international group of Hungarians and other Nationals, Stateless and purely displaced persons."

La Vista asserted that the Zionists were using the same escape route as the Nazis -- Austria, through the Alps, to Italy. In the Italian town of Merano, the Zionists ran kibbutz-style facilities while the Germans were given forged identity papers, particularly Red Cross documents, by Jaac Van Harten, who worked for the Jewish Agency in smuggling gold to the SS network. For the price of 500,000 Italian lira, or about $250, a Nazi or anybody else could gain passage to Egypt or Palestine.

"...there has been and still are large groups of Nazi-Germans who come into Italy for the sole purpose of obtaining fictitious identity documents, passports, and visas, and leave almost immediately via Genoa and Barcelona for Latin America," the report said. "...The exact connection between the remains of Schloss Labers [Merano] and the Jewish underground is known at the present time, but the link seems to exist." [1]

Notes

1. McLelland Roswel [sic] D. I. Oct. 25, 1945. NAID: 57328140. NARA. National Archives NextGen Catalog

2. Subject: Illegal Immigration Movements in and Through Italy. May 15, 1947. Cited in "Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Escaped Justice. Gerald Steinacher. Pages 165-167. Oxford University Press. 2011

Below: Roswell McClelland and his wife Marjorie in 1940.