Captain Langsdorff was buried by the Argentine military with full military honors in Buenos Aires’s North Cemetery. Most of his crew, in dress uniform, attended. His pallbearers were Graf Spee seamen. They then marched off into internment.
Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the senior German intelligence officer, who in World War I had been interned in—and escaped from—Argentina, immediately dispatched German intelligence officers to Buenos Aires to arrange for escape of the interned crew of the Graf Spee.
With the Graf Spee gone, there was no longer a chance for the Germans to shut off the supply of matériel to the British using a sea raider or other surface navy warships. German Admiral Erich Raeder turned to submarines. Because of the distance from the submarine pens in France, this was an enormously difficult task.
Neutral Uruguay was sympathetic to the British chiefly because of a large English colony and the enormously popular Brit ambassador, Sir Eugene Millington-Drake. But neutral Argentina was predominantly—though by no means entirely— pro-Axis.
The Argentine army was armed with Mauser rifles, wore German helmets, sent their senior officers to the Kriegschule in Germany, and had their headquarters in a handsome, enormous building—the Edificio Libertador—built by the Germans as a manifestation of their solidarity with the Argentines.
Its navy, however, largely British- and (to some degree) U.S.-trained, was sympathetic to England.
Moreover, there was a large Jewish colony in Argentina—including forty thousand Jewish gauchos—that was by no means sympathetic to Hitler, and there were large numbers of other European refugees who were decidedly anti-Axis.
The practical result of all this was that while pro-Axis Argentines did their best to see that German submarines not only managed to get fuel and supplies but were advised of departing British merchant ships so they could be intercepted and sunk, there were anti-Axis Argentines who did their best to keep the supplies flowing to England.
Things changed soon after the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. Brazil declared war on the German-Italian-Japanese axis in January 1942. That gave the U.S. Army Air Corps immediate access to Brazilian airfields, and the U.S. Navy to Brazilian ports and fuel.
B-24 bombers were soon prowling the South Atlantic just outside the Argentine and Uruguayan territorial limits. These aircraft had most of their machine-gun turrets removed—to increase range by reducing weight and drag—and their bomb bays loaded with special antisubmarine bombs.
This was not entirely a heartwarming manifestation of Brazilian-U.S. cooperation to fight a common enemy. American intelligence agents reported their strong suspicions that the artillery, tanks, and ammunition requested by Brazil of the “Arsenal of Democracy” were as likely to be used by the Brazilians against the Argentines as they were against the Axis.
A war between Argentina and Brazil, the two largest countries on the South American continent, was not going to contribute much to a war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The flood of supplies to Brazil dwindled to a trickle.
And then American intelligence agents in Europe began to hear whispers of two secret German operations, which sometimes overlapped.
One was that it was possible for German Jews outside Germany to purchase the freedom of their relatives from Nazi concentration/extermination camps, followed by transport to Argentina and Uruguay.
The second secret German plan, called Operation Phoenix, was to establish in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay safe havens for senior Nazi officials—possibly including Hitler himself—to which they could flee when the Thousand-Year Reich went down to defeat.
The overlap between the two plans, intelligence officers reported, was that Operation Phoenix would be funded at least partially—and possibly substantially— by the ransom paid to get Jews out of Nazi death camps.
In something of an understatement, United States intelligence activities in neutral Argentina increased considerably about the time of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the second battle of Kasserine Pass.
I
[ONE]
Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo Near Pila Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1130 22 June 1943
The Fieseler Storch, a small, high-wing, single-engine aircraft, flew at one thousand feet over the verdant Argentine pampas.
The pampas—from the Indian word for “level plain”—runs from the Atlantic Ocean just south of Buenos Aires to the Andes Mountains. The flat, fertile plains cover 300,000 square miles, an area roughly half the size of Alaska, a little larger than Texas, and just about twice as big as California. The pampas has been accurately described as incredibly vast, incredibly fertile, and incredibly silent.
The Storch was freshly painted in the Luftwaffe “Spring and Summer Camouflage Scheme.” The two sergeants who had accompanied the plane to Argentina had dutifully complied with the appropriate Luftwaffe maintenance regulation, even though June in Argentina was winter.
The original idea the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office had had was to send the airplane to Argentina and, after demonstrating its extraordinary capabilities to as many Argentine officers as possible, to give it to the Ejército Argentino as a gesture of friendship and solidarity.
Manfred Alois Graf von Lutzenberger, the slight, very thin, career diplomat who was ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina, had seen how useful the airplane had been in moving around the country—and especially between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay—and somehow the gift had never been made.
The sergeants had done a good job. The random shaped patches in three shades of green and two of brown had been faultlessly applied. The black crosses identifying a German military aircraft had been painted flawlessly on both sides of the fuselage aft of the cockpit, and the red Hakenkruez of Nazi Germany had been painted in white circles on the vertical stabilizer.
There were two men in the Storch, both wearing Luftwaffe flight suits, a sort of brown coverall with many pockets. The pilot, Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, was serving as the acting military attaché of the embassy until an officer of suitable rank for the position could be selected and sent to Buenos Aires to replace the attaché who had been killed.
The passenger, sitting behind von Wachtstein in the narrow fuselage, was Korvettenkapitän Karl Boltitz. Korvettenkapitän is the German naval rank equivalent to a Luftwaffe major—and to that of a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and Army/Marine Corps major.
Both officers were tall, blond, well-set-up young men. Under their flight suits they wore nearly brand-new well-tailored woolen suits. Clothing was strictly rationed in Germany, but there was no clothing ration in Argentina— for that matter, no rationing at all—and both had taken the opportunity immediately on their arrival to buy complete wardrobes, from fine fur felt hats down to finely crafted shoes of the best Argentine leather.
On the endless rolling grass plain beneath the aircraft, von Wachtstein scanned the literally countless cattle spread as far as the eye could see. He thought their low-level flight over the pampas could have turned into a chasing of the cattle—except not one of the cows paid the slightest attention to the airplane.