Nazi-Hunt

After the Second World War, a large number of Nazi criminals and collaborators fled to South America. However, there were soon attempts from various parties to track down the outlaws who had escaped the hands of justice and to bring them to trial. Daniel Stahl investigates the protagonists in this Nazi-hunt: private individuals, non-governmental and state institutions. He shows that the Nazi hunt should be understood not only as post-event history following National Socialism, both reflecting and driving forwards a change in the perception of Nazi crimes. It also became an integral aspect of dealing with repression at the hands of authoritarian regimes in South America: dissidents and human rights activists assumed that the escaped Nazi perpetrators and collaborators continued to be involved in violent crimes in the service of South American dictators after 1945, and gave their full support to all endeavours to find them. In this way, the Nazi hunt is told as a story of interplay between the avengement of Nazi crimes and the fight against the repression of South American regimes, as a part of transnational interconnections in dealing with violent crimes perpetrated by the state.

The search for Nazi criminals and collaborators within the political context of South American dictatorships.

Rights sold:
Romania: Corint Publishing

The Author
Daniel Stahl, born in 1981, studied modern history in Asunción and Jena and is a research associate at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.