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They called them "ratlines."

In the final days of the Third Reich, when its demise was imminent, adherents realized that if they didn't escape they would go down with it. So they devised a system of escape - ratlines - that funneled thousands of war criminals through Spain to points west and south. Abetted by Third Reich sympathizers, many swarmed into South America, beginning new lives from Brazil to Argentina.

Argentina is now where myths, rumors and historical facts of that time collide. The stories say Nazis arrived by rubber dinghies off the coast of Patagonia, bedraggled from the long journey. The stories say crates of Nazi gold hit the beaches, then vanished into the foggy Andes Mountains. The stories say Hitler himself found new life in an Argentine idyll, "doddering peacefully in the Andean foothills attended by faithful Nazi servants."
[The aggressive Nazi-bred cows that caused havoc on a modern farm]
Some stories are more true than others. It's true that the Argentine government, under the command of Nazi sympathizer Juan Domingo Perón, did bring in hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis. "In those days, Argentina was a kind of paradise to us," Nazi Erich Priebke remembered in 1991. And it's true that some major Nazi operators escaped there, including Adolf Eichmann, a Holocaust mastermind arrested in 1960 in Buenos Aires and later executed in Israel.

According to a fresh findings announced over the weekend, it's also true the Nazis made it deeper into the Argentine jungle in search of refuge than anyone imagined. Hundreds of miles north, along the border with Paraguay, rises the Parque Teyú Cuare. A path winds into the nature preserve, opening to a trove of "mysterious buildings" that are "battered by time," reported the Argentine newspaper Clarin. "What were these buildings? Who built them? For what?"

It now appears there may be an answer. According to a team of Argentine researchers led by Daniel Schavelzon of the University of Buenos Aires, the three buildings were built by Nazis. The signs are everywhere. The team found several German coins with dates between 1938 and 1944. They found some German porcelain engraved with "Made in Germany." And perhaps most telling, they found Nazi symbols, including a swastika, were etched into the buildings.

"We can find no other explanation as to why anyone would build these structures, at such great effort and expense, in a site which at that time was totally inaccessible, away from the local community, with material which is not typical of the regional architecture," Schavelzon told Clarin, taking a team of journalists to see the site and capture remarkable images of buildings atrophying in the jungle humidity.
[Scientists find stunning ruins in the Honduran jungle - and anger other scientists in the process]
There are three of them, Schavelzon said. One was used for housing. Another was for storage. And the final was intended as something of a lookout. The site, Schavelzon contended, was built as a jungle hideaway for Third Reich leaders. Less than 10 minutes from the Paraguayan border, it had various escape points - a "protected, dependable site where they could live quietly," Schavelzon said.

"Apparently, halfway through the Second World War, the Nazis had a secret project of building shelters for top leaders in the event of defeat - inaccessible sites, in the middle of deserts, in the mountains, on a cliff or in the middle of the jungle like this," Schavelzon argued.

It isn't likely the site, which hints at one of Argentina's darkest chapters, got much use. That's because at the end of the war, it turned out Nazis didn't need to hide. "Nazis who found refuge in Argentina after the war ... lived without incident," the New York Times said, attributing the country's "open-door" immigration policy that forged what it later called a "haven for Nazis."
[Greece heads for showdown with Germany over World War II debts]
The best-selling British novel " The Odessa File," published in 1972, illustrated some of the suspicions swirling about Nazis and the Argentine administration at that time. It told of a secret society of Nazis who did everything they could to facilitate the escape of their brethren, culminating in the pursuit of one Nazi leader to Argentina. The account was "not only believable, but also contained many elements of the truth," according to author Uki Goni, who uncovered links between the administration and Nazis.

"It was [President] Perón's intention to rescue as many Nazis as possible from the war crimes trials in Europe," Goni wrote.

Eichmann was one of the most notorious escapees. He made it to Argentina in 1950 and lived there for the next 1o years. Argentina was known for turning down extradition requests for those accused of war crimes. So the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, launched a daring capture mission, got their man - and in the process shined an international spotlight on Argentina's cooperation with the Nazis.

And now, a lifetime later, that same spotlight has again fallen on Argentina. This time, it's trained on the northern jungles, where a deteriorating structure pays homage to a dark history.
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Secret Nazi hideout believed found in remote Argentine jungle

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They called them "ratlines." In the final days of the Third Reich, when its demise was imminent, adherents realized that if they didn't escape they would go down with it. So they devised a system of escape - ratlines - that funneled thousands of war criminals through Spain to points west and south.

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The Nazi village

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(Image: Alamy)

With its Alpine-style houses, Bariloche would not look out of place amid the mountains of Europe.

It is not surprising, then, that the Argentinian town in the foothills of the Andes has attracted German immigrants for over 100 years.

Or that Nazis fled there after the Second World War - possibly including Adolf Hitler himself.

It was in Argentina this week that police found chilling evidence of the region's appeal in a huge stash of swastika-emblazoned artefacts.

When the Fuhrer was defeated in 1945, 9,000 Third Reich cronies and collaborators escaped to South America. As well as Argentina, where Bariloche became known as "The Third Reich Capital in Exile", they flocked to Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.

They included Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death, and Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust. Many still believe Hitler faked his suicide and lived out his life in Argentina and Paraguay.

He allegedly died aged 95, though the claim is dubious. But Bariloche certainly became a home from home for Nazis. Historian Hermann Rueder said: "Bariloche was the place where they recreated Berchtesgaden, site of Hitler's holiday home.

"The old Nazis would celebrate, often not so secretly, all the high days of Nazism there - Hitler's birthday, the founding of the Third Reich, numerous other anniversaries."

So was Hitler the guest of honour? What is beyond doubt is the draw of South America for Nazis. It boasted remote locations, corrupt leaders and the pioneering plastic surgery that was being developed in the region.

Other Nazis who went there include Erich Priebke, a Gestapo boss who became director of the town's German school, the Colegio Aleman. He and his wife held Nazi-themed evenings with dancing to old Third Reich tunes.

He was finally tracked down, arrested and got a life sentence in Rome, where he died in 2013.

Exorcising Bariloche's many ghosts is not easy. Mengele would visit to lap up the town's German architecture and festivals. It also boasted a mountaintop restaurant called The Berghof - the name of Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat.

One of Priebke's regular guests in Bariloche was SS colonel Walter Rauff, a hero of Hitler's who created gas vans that murdered 100,000.

He had fled to Chile, where he blended in as an air-conditioning salesman. He died there in 1984.

He was joined in Chile by Paul Schafer , a one-eyed Nazi soldier who became a pastor, establishing Villa Baviera - which was essentially a paedophile's paradise. In 2006, Schäfer was sentenced to 33 years for sexually abusing 25 children. He died in 2010, aged 88.

Uki Goni, author of The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, said: "Argentina stands out among the countries on the American continent that Nazis escaped to. It was Argentina that made a concerted effort to rescue as many Nazis as possible.

"Some of the first SS and Nazi officials who arrived in Argentina were received by President Juan Perón at the Casa Rosada, Argentina's equivalent of the US White House. They were sent back to Europe with Argentine passports on a Nazi rescue mission that facilitated the arrival of the worst mass murderers of the 20th century."

With Peron sympathetic to the fascist regime and desperate for the technology and scientific advances the Nazis brought, Argentina became one of the greatest refuges for fleeing Germans.

His wife, Eva Peron , also gained financially from the scheme. "It is still suspected that among her possessions, there were pieces of Nazi treasure that came from rich Jewish families killed in concentration camps," said Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira in their book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Latin America.

Nazis fled Europe through undercover routes to Italy and Spain, before being transported across the Atlantic. Several high-level figures in the Catholic Church are alleged to have been helpful in smuggling them.

Up to 2,000 went to Argentina, where Eichmann posed as Ricardo Klement in Buenos Aires. After being kidnapped by Mossad agents, he was tried in Israel and executed in 1960.

But it was not just corrupt leaders in South America who aided the fleeing Nazis.

Gestapo chief in France Klaus Barbie - The Butcher of Lyon - set up home in Bolivia with the help of America's CIA. They smuggled him in and used his deadly skills to hunt down revolutionary Che Guevara. The Americans may have hated Nazis but they had one thing in common - a loathing of Communism.

Perhaps the most notorious Nazi to flee to South America was Mengele. Germany issued a warrant for his arrest but he was never found. Some say he had plastic surgery.

He fled to Argentina initially, around 1950, and briefly lived in neighbouring Paraguay. He lived out the rest of his days in Brazil, where he died of a stroke in 1979, aged 67.

Disturbingly, while in South America, he adopted the pseudonym Dr Helmut Gregor and performed abortions in an illegal practice. In 2009, a book claimed Mengele's continuing experiments may have been responsible for one in five pregnancies in the Brazilian town of Candido Godoi resulting in twins - most of them blond-haired and blue-eyed. Residents say Mengele made repeated visits in the early 1960s.

In 1978 film The Boys from Brazil, Gregory Peck played Mengele in exile in Paraguay as he continued his experimentation and attempted to conspire with other Nazis in the region. The idea also featured in Frederick Forsyth's 1972 book, The Odessa File - the 1974 film adaptation of which led to the capture of Nazi fugitive Eduard Roschmann, known as the Butcher of Riga, in Argentina.

Forsyth said it was "screened in a fleapit cinema south of Buenos Aires, where a man said, 'I know that man, he lives down the street from me'.

"He decided to make a run for it to Paraguay and died of a heart attack on the river crossing. They buried him in an unmarked gravel pit. I hope they tossed a copy of the book in."

The idea that Hitler fled to South America surfaced as early as 1945 - suggested by Soviet Marshall Georgi Zhukov. Abel Basti, in his book Hitler in Exile, claims the Fuhrer escaped his Berlin bunker via a tunnel and a helicopter whisked him to Spain.

From there, he was said to have travelled to the Canary Islands, where a U-boat waited to take him to Argentina. Hitler allegedly spent a decade there before moving to Paraguay, where he lived under the protection of President Alfredo Stroessner, who had German roots.

Basti believes he died there in 1971. He said: "Wealthy families who helped him over the years were responsible for his funeral. Hitler was buried in a bunker, which is now an elegant hotel in the city of Asuncion.

"In 1973, the entrance to the bunker was sealed and 40 people came to say goodbye to Hitler."

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The Argentine town where thousands of Nazis and maybe Hitler fled to after WW2

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With its Alpine-style houses, Bariloche would not look out of place amid the mountains of Europe. It is not surprising, then, that the Argentinian town in the foothills of the Andes has attracted German immigrants for over 100 years. Or that Nazis fled there after the Second World War - possibly including Adolf Hitler himself.

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Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years.

After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins - with startling results.

He reveals how, after working with cattle farmers in Argentina to increase their stock, Mengele fled the country after fellow Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped by Israeli agents.

He claims that Mengele found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil - the farming community of Candido Godoi.

And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

"I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele's laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans," he said.

"There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople.

"He told us he was a vet," said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer interviewed by Mr Camarasa. "He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man."

Another farmer, Leonardo Boufler, said: "He went from farm to farm checking the animals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out artificial insemination of cows and humans, which we thought impossible as in those days it was unheard of."

But the Nazi eugenicist did not concentrate on animals alone.

A former mayor and town doctor, Anencia Flores da Silva, set out to try to solve the town's mystery. He interviewed hundreds of people, and discovered one character who crept on cropping up: an itinerant medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: "In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood."

The people of Candido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war criminal was an inadvertent guest of theirs for several years in the early 1960s. The town's official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a "Farming Community and Land of the Twins". There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

While the twins birthrate varies widely in different countries, it is typically about one in 80 pregnancies - a statistic that has left Mr Camarasa certain in his claim that Mengele was successfully pursuing his dreams of creating a master race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.

"Nobody knows for sure exactly what date Mengele arrived in Candido Godoi, but the first twins were born in 1963, the year in which we first hear reports of his presence," he said.

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Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele 'created twin town in Brazil'

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Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled. In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor's mysterious later years.

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CLOSE

DES MOINES -- At the party, people asked to snap a photo of the tattoo on his left forearm.

Each time he pulled up his sleeve, David Wolnerman's unease faded further, as had the blurry blue numbers - 160344.

For a long time, he didn't show the numbers that the Nazis put on his arm in 1940 at Auschwitz or tell what happened afterward. But he is 88, and he and his wife, Jennie, are the last known survivors of the Nazi concentration camps left in central Iowa.

He wants people to see it now, including the 12-year-old girl from West Des Moines who wrote about his experiences in A Lucky Lie, a book written for students that was unveiled at the April 16 party in Waukee, Iowa.

The hidden meaning behind that number, he told young author Sydney Pearl, came to him only later in life. Add the individual numbers together and they equal 18.

Wolnerman had lied when he stood in line in 1940. Josef Mengele, the Nazi nicknamed "The Angel of Death," stood before him with a stick, pointing it to a line to the left or right as each person approached him.

Wolnerman, then 13, noticed that the old, young and sickly were in a line to the left. When Mengele asked his age, Wolnerman said, "I am 18."

Mengele pointed his stick to the right.

The left line was eventually sent to the gas chambers.

"I didn't have brains to say this," said Wolnerman on a recent afternoon in his condominium in Des Moines. "I believe God told me. If not, I wouldn't be here."

In Hebrew, the number 18 is symbolized as chai, or "life." At 18, he was liberated from the camp.

And what a life. All these years, he has acutely understood the slim margin between death and life. It affected every day, the way he worked and the spoiled food he couldn't throw away because he couldn't bear to waste it.

In the concentration camp, they didn't talk much because they didn't know what was going on in the world or even know what day or year it was.

"We had no mind. You had mind like cow," Wolnerman said in his broken English. "The only thing we could think was bread, bread, bread."

"They saved my life. I never forgot this."

They got two slices a day. If a boy took the bread of another, a shovel handle was held to his throat, he said, because stealing bread was like a death sentence to the theft victim.

He worked in the crematorium and gas chambers and watched them "throw the live ones in the oven." He loaded cement blocks on trucks, and he prayed. He listened to boys tell of their castrations and watched people "die like flies."

He wondered about his mother back in Modrzejow, Poland, only about 30 miles from Auschwitz. His father had died three months before the war, and when the Nazis came, he was told that to save his family he must report to the work camp. He would later find out that his mother, Hannah, brother Abraham and sister Gertrude died in concentration camps.

Inside, he could really think only of survival. He moved from one camp to another - Birkenau to Theresienstadt to Dachau and others - and once a lice infestation grew so bad that he contracted typhus.

At one point, with no food or medicine or water, he was waiting to die in a wooden bunk without straw, beside another sick boy. One day, a Nazi SS soldier appeared at the bunk, lifted up the boy and threw him out the window.

"I thought he was sleeping," Wolnerman said. "But I had been lying next to a boy that was dead for two weeks."

Somehow - by God's grace, he thinks - he survived.

His group in camp followed the counsel of an older boy, who one day turned to them all with a question: What would you do if the Germans said you could have all the bread you want, but we will shoot you after you eat it?

"Every boy said, 'Then give me bread and shoot me,' " Wolnerman recalled. "Because I never thought I'd be free."

In later years, he often thought about the older boy, who had become a father figure to him because he was wise to the ways of the camp. He said he would eat the bread, too.

He was freed by American soldiers on April 29, 1945. He was only 80 pounds, he said. The soldiers gave them rations, and the boys shoveled them down and threw up all night, their digestive systems so unaccustomed to food.

He settled in a displaced persons camp outside Munich, and every day he went to a group of Catholic nuns for breakfast. He asked for bread and was given five spoons of oatmeal. The next day he asked for bread, and was given six spoons of oatmeal. Each day, their stomachs were readied for more food.

"They saved my life. I never forgot this," Wolnerman said. "I was like a brother to them. (Later in life) two nuns from Africa were brought to my house, and they came back to have coffee and cookies and pray with me and my wife. I never forget the nuns. Every day for five years, I go to nuns."

During his five years in postwar Germany, he met his wife, Jennie, at the displaced persons camp. She had survived the concentration camp because a female Nazi guard "took a liking to her" and brought her a bowl of soup every day, which she shared a spoon at a time with her fellow prisoners, he said. The guard even offered her a chance to leave, but she wouldn't abandon her friends.

As his recovery continued for two years, one day he met another survivor who was an old friend of his brother's.

"I don't believe in God anymore," the man told Wolnerman, who was surprised because he thought the man would one day be a rabbi. "Where was God when they were throwing away the kids alive, 5 months old, 1 year old?"

"I believe in God more than I ever did," Wolnerman told him, then recounted his near-death experiences in the camp. "So how can somebody say that I survived all this if they don't believe in nothing. It had to be God.

"I don't care what you believe, but believe."

David and Jennie Wolnerman came to America in 1950. He didn't speak English, but they began work in a printing plant in Cleveland because the owner knew German. On his first Thanksgiving, the couple went to the company party. They both stared at their plates of turkey and sweet potatoes. They had never seen the food before and were too nervous to eat it. They stopped for a hamburger on the way home.

They soon moved nearer to Wolnerman's surviving immediate family member, his sister Bluma, in Gary, Ind., and got into the grocery business with Bluma's husband, Josef.

David Wolnerman worked seven days a week without a vacation for the next 42 years. The concentration camp stayed with him mentally.

"You guys tell me this normal?" he asked. "Work 42 years with no vacation. This normal?"

He was obsessed with wanting for his two sons what he never had, an education. He had been through only the third grade.

"This is the best country in the world," he told his sons. "You should get up in the morning and kiss the ground."

"My boys laughed. 'Look at the old man talking.' Now they know."

Michael Wolnerman and his brother, Allen, went on to pharmacy school at Drake University in Des Moines. His parents followed them here in 1983 after his father's heart problems forced his retirement.

"I learned how to stay strong and not give up. And that happiness comes from within you."

"I learned from him that you can survive anything, and I learned about perseverance," said Michael, 52, of Des Moines.

But for years he didn't know much about that number on his father's arm.

"He would always joke that it was the number of his old girlfriend," Michael said.

His father spent a few years living near Miami to avoid the cold of Iowa before returning two years ago. Walking the streets there, he would see a piece of food lying on the sidewalk, and it made him sick. He would pick it up and place it for the birds to see and eat so it didn't go to waste.

One day at a gathering in Florida, he encountered a man, and they exchanged pleasantries. The man told him his voice was familiar. Was his name David?

Wolnerman said it was and hurriedly parted, unsure how the man knew his name.

"Come back here," the man said. "18."

Wolnerman stopped in his tracks. The numbers on his arm added up to 18. When he heard the number, he realized the man was the older boy from the concentration camp who had been like a father figure to him.

They didn't talk about the time in camp. They both knew what they had seen.

Wolnerman was nervous for the party at the Caspe Terrace in Waukee earlier this month. He had been taking care of his wife in Des Moines for two years as her Alzheimer's disease advanced. His son would come to his condo and throw out the molded bread he couldn't bear to throw away.

He barely left the place, even as friends urged him to. He grew teary-eyed.

"Sixty-six years together. How could I leave her?" he asked. "I cry when I see the good of her. I cry when I see the bad of her."

He wanted everything to be perfect for the party. So many people were coming, family members and friends and the young author who told his story.

The Holocaust remembrance event was put on by the Jewish Federation and local congregations to honor Wolnerman with the publication of the book. Author Pearl was chosen to tell his story by A Book by Me, an Illinois company that taps children to tell stories of Jewish survivors for other children. Its books are part of history lessons in schools nationwide. Pearl said she learned a lot about life from Wolnerman.

"I learned how to stay strong and not give up," she said. "And that happiness comes from within you."

Jewish Federation officials say the Wolnermans are the last Holocaust survivors in Des Moines, where once there were 50, and perhaps the state's last concentration camp survivors.

He is left to tell everyone not to be angry. It's been too long, the "bad people" are dead, and he has lived a good life.

"Forgive," he says, "but don't forget."

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1GyNmNc

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Holocaust survivor recalls 'Lucky Lie' that saved his life

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CLOSE DES MOINES -- At the party, people asked to snap a photo of the tattoo on his left forearm. Each time he pulled up his sleeve, David Wolnerman's unease faded further, as had the blurry blue numbers - 160344.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXlbU5ZENy0

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The Oscar Schindler Story, Emilie, Survivors

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drone footage of Auschwitz

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Auschwitz: Drone video of Nazi concentration camp - BBC News

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Nazis in Argentina

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A relief of Adolf Hitler found in the collection. Photo: DPA

A large collection of Nazi artefacts found in Argentina this week may have come from the town of Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The Buenos Aires antiques dealer who was in possession of the Nazi relics told news agency DPA on Wednesday that most of the artefacts bore the stamp of the Solingen weapons manufacturer Carl Eickhorn, a company founded in 1865 that specializes in army knives. The company currently trades under the name Eickhorn Solingen.

Among the artefacts that bore the Carl Eickhorn stamp was an official Nazi eagle emblazoned with a swastika.

Around 75 Nazi objects, which Argentine officials say they believe to be genuine, were found in the private residence of the antiques dealer. Among them were pistols, busts of Adolf Hitler, swords and harmonicas.

The dealer told DPA that the Nazi trove was one of 20 private collections he had at his home, which also included a large stock of erotic curiosities. He said that he had gathered the collection over a 25-year period from a single Argentinian seller.

An hourglass found in the collection. Photo: DPA

The dealer denied having done anything illegal, adding that he had not attempted to sell the Nazi relics, but had them on display in a private room in his house.

Argentinian police have seized the antiques claiming that they were of "illegal origin." A police source told the Associated Press that "they suspect they are originals that belonged to high-ranking Nazis in Germany during World War II."

Several high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, fled to Argentina after the end of the Second World War.

But the Rheinische Post has a more mundane explanation for how the Nazi objects could have ended up in Argentina. The relatively large German community in the country during the 1930s was strongly pro-Nazi - around 10,000 Germans took to the streets of Buenos Aires to celebrate the Anschluss (joining) with Austria in 1938. The objects could have easily been shipped across the Atlantic by various Hitler supporters during the period before the German defeat in 1945.

The relics are set to be handed over to the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum at the end of the investigation.

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Clues link Nazi trove found in Argentina to German town of Solingen

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A relief of Adolf Hitler found in the collection. Photo: DPA A large collection of Nazi artefacts found in Argentina this week may have come from the town of Solingen in North Rhine-Westphalia.