The award-winning investigative series returns, in which Mike Thomson takes a document as a starting-point to shed new light on past events.
Nazis fleeing to Argentina
MondayÌý21 January 2008
Mike Thomson investigates claims that senior officials from the Swiss police allowed Germans to travel to Argentina without the correct paperwork during the Second World War. View a picture gallery of images related to this edition.
It is well known that many senior Nazis escaped to Argentina after the war.
The mystery has been how they managed to get there given that no German was allowed to leave the country without an Allied approved pass. The investigative history series, Document, returns with a possible answer.
Records from the time reveal that in 1948 a representative of the Dutch airline KLM asked Swiss police to ease travel restrictions for Germans travelling to Argentina without the proper paperwork.
In the years that followed many wealthy Germans each spent the equivalent of an average man’s wages on luxury KLM flights to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires.
It’s suggested that this was all part of an elaborate covert plan to help former Nazis flee from justice.
Sixty years on Dutch MPs are calling on KLM to open it’s books and allow an independent enquiry. Mike Thomson travels to the Netherlands to investigate.
