>> use our web site, booktv.org, and press the alert button. or use your mobile phone. text the word "book" to 99702. standard message rates apply. >> up next, gerald steinacher reports on the many nazi war criminals who averted capture following the end of world war ii. the author examines the routes that were used for escape and questions the role the vatican and the international committee of the red cross had in allowing passage. this is about an hour. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. my name is nick mueller, and i'm still the president and ceo of the national world world war ii museum, since some of you have been here and seen me great you before. and welcome to all of our regulars as well as our newcomers to our lecture series and presentations that we have here at the national world war ii museum. it's just great to have you and to see the continued vitality of this program. and you're here tonight to receive a wonderful presentation, and it's also especially great to welcome c-span. to broadcast this evening's presentation and the discussion which will be viewed far and wide. but before we start tonight's program, i'd like to ask if we have any world war ii veterans here in the audience with us tonight. it's our tradition to recognize you if you are here. please, stand up. if you're standing, wave your hands. but do we have any world war ii veterans here tonight? here we have one right here. [applause] >> we're honored to have you here, sir, and honored by your presence. of course, you're a volunteer here, so we're happy to have you with us. we also have some distinguished friends, general sands who's a frequent visitor. he's almost a regular. he could come up here and do my introduction, i think he's been here so many times and a great friend of this museum. i think history professor and former vice chancellor bobby dupont i see in the background was involved in the early years with launching this museum when we were still thinking it might one day be at the research park, and we got some sense into us and brought it downtown. tonight's event is an outgrowth of a special relationship between the national world war ii museum and the university of new orleans which is the home to many fine programs in military history and public history. as some of you may know, stephen ambrose and i started this museum. i was an administrator and professor of history back from 1969 until i retired there in 2002, and we were colleagues at the university of new orleans and had established the eisenhower center for american studies. and this was the center that was the early repository for the oral histories that form a foundation of our collections which have now grown, heard from our resident historian, keith, to almost 3,000. most of them now high-definition video. but it was the oral histories collected by steven am rose for -- ambrose for his great work on d-day and citizen soldiers back in the '90s that ultimate -- '80s that ultimately led to the idea of this great museum which is now not any longer the d-day museum, although locals continue to refer to it that way as i do myself, but congress changed our name, as you all know, in 2003, and we are expanding and growing. and within a few months you're going to see steel coming up out of the ground over there by the down ramp on camp street for the united states freedom pavilion, the boeing center, which is going to be the iconic pavilion on this museum campus. as some of you know, i was also involved in the founding of another wonderful center at the university of new orleans in the 1990s, and that is also closely related to our museum. and that is center us a ri ya -- austria. and be center austria is the co-sponsor of tonight's event. tonight's presentation, you'll hear in just a moment as you hear that introduction of our or speaker, focuses on the nazi era, the post-nazi era. and as all of you know that hitler and the nazi german period is a source of endless fascination for people not only in this country, but around the world. as is evidenced by the strong showing of people here for this session this evening. so i'd now like to introduce the director of center austria, dr. gunther establishoff, and i would like to say that our speaker has also got a special collection to the university of new orleans going back to the '90s. and now a connection especially to this museum as well. so, gunther? [applause] >> thank you very much, dr. mueller. my name is gunther establish shaw, i teach history at the university of new orleans. it's a great pleasure to introduce this evening's speaker. before i do that, just a couple special welcomes. a special welcome from friends from vienna that are here. so the visitor come from far and wide as we all know, so special welcome to the family from vienna and to my world war ii seminar graduate students this spring at unl. special welcome to you too. [applause] i'm very pleased to have the opportunity to introduce dr. gerald steinacher who is from austria. he did his studies at the university of innsbruck and while studying at the university of i innsbruck like many studen, like myself, given the intimate relationship between the university of i said brook and new orleans and a relationship that dr. nick mueller, in fact, started with a summer school almost 40 years ago, i had the pleasure to study with dr. ambrose at unl, and actually dr. steinacher when i started teaching at unl fell into my hands when in 1996, 1995-'96 he came as a student for a year as so many innsbruck students do. we will have this fall more than 50 students coming from innsbruck studying for a semester. dr. steinacher was working then, beginning to work on a dissertation on the -- [speaking german] we're going to hear about that. after the fall of italy it was sort of a special region that the nazis organized in the northern italian region. and he was still groping with the sources, and we did a special course together where i recommended to him that he work on intelligence sources. that is, you can't do this without also looking at oss sources. and this was a bit of a revelation to him. but then lo and behold once he delved into the oss sources, he became a veritable historian of intelligence. and, in fact, his dissertation about the region at the end of the war and to oss' work in that region which was very important at the end of the war really became his dissertation. a very notable book. and then he continued to work wk this that area. he became an archivist after he finished his ph.d. in the provincial archives of the south, region. the region south of the brenner pass that, as we like to say in austria, due to woodrow wilson became italian. so woodrow wilson is a president that's still not very much love inside austria because we lost the region as a result of him we say. [laughter] so he continued to work at that region as an archivist and then began his work on the book he is going to present to us tonight which was -- [speaking german] that postdoctoral thesis that a person who wants to become a professor in the german-speaking world needs to do. and he finished that and publish bed a book out of -- published a book out of it which was the traveling version of the book that was just now published by oxford university press in be english and is already getting rave reviews in publications like "the wall street journal" and "the statesman." he has been a fellow at the u.s. holocaust museum. this past year he was a fellow at harvard university at the center of the european studies there. this is one of the most distinguished fellowships that an us austrian can hold in the united states, i think comparable to a rhodes if you though what that is. and he is just finishing in cambridge, and he has the very good luck of gotting a ten-year track position at the university of nebraska. now, you might say, wow, nebraska. who would want to teach there? but if you're a historian in this day and age, you're very happy to get a tenured position anywhere. [laughter] and he is. without further ado, i'd like to introduce gerald steinacher to talk about "nazis op the run -- on the run." a flight through italy to latin america. dr. steinacher. [applause] >> thank you very much for that kind introduction. and thank you very much for having me. it's great to be back in new orleans after so many years. [laughter] little bit older and with some gray hair. [laughter] i will talk for half an hour half an hour to present my book, that's not much time, but i will do my best, kind of give you an overview what my book is about. and after 35 minutes, 30 minutes we will have time for a q&a. and i'm sure you have many questions, and i'm hoping that i can answer at least some of your questions. you're going to raise. i'll show you some slides a little powerpoint presentation, some documents. i hope you can see the documents more or less well. it's a little bit bright light in here, so i will do my best. um, but i think it's important to have original documents so you can have, you know, a firsthand look on the research i did or i am doing about this work after '45. just before i start just a few remarks. my book is not just about war criminals, perpetrators of the holocaust, but also former nazis, ss members, collaborators from all over europe. so fascists, for example, from croatia, fascists from italy, from slovenia and so on and so on. so, actually, my book you have very high numbers if you consider these people who maybe not in a legal sense were criminals, but they were former fascists and nazis, ask i talk about them in my book because these people, they use the same underground routes the same way like the major perpetrators, like eichmann. you know, a simple nazi member or former ss officer took the same route as eichmann. and in the next 0 minutes i'll -- 30 minutes i'll try to explain how these people gowt got out of europe and at least e caped justice for many years, some of them forever. they were never caught and never brought to justice. >> and before we start to talk about the facts, we have to talk about fiction first. um, just let me start with one other remark. 66 years after the second world war, after the end of the second world war -- and this is still very much in some ways an open topic. sure, most of you will know the case of -- [inaudible] he was a ukrainian who worked, as we now know, as a camp guard in soviet extermination camps. and in 1951 he emigrate to the united states and later became a u.s. citizen. and just in may of 2011 he was convicted by a german court. so very recently. you see, this topic is very much still alive, and for many years we didn't really know how these people got out from europe and how they escaped justice. and the explanation was after '95 for decades, mythical one. i'm sure you heard about the odessa organization. odessa stands sort for organization of former ss members -- [speaking german] and the odessa story is, basically, based on books, writings by the famous nazi hunter from vienna. he wrote in his books that thanks to this odessa organization, perpetrators, war criminals could escape justice after 1945. and for him this was an organization who was kind of almighty, who had unlimited resources of swiss banks, who had very influential people in politics and everywhere. so according to simon it was the odessa organization who enabled eichmann and many others to escape justice after the war. simon worked closely with a british writer, frederick forsyth, and frederick forsyth's novel, "the odessa file," became famous as you probably all know. based on on the novel, a film was made, very successful with famous people, actors mic max mill yang shell, fellow austrian, and the music was composed by andrew lloyd weber. so it was really a best seller, and the movie was all over the place. and since then imagination was dominated by the odessa. whenever you were talking about these perpetrators, of eichmann and many other well known perpetrators, you would immediately talk about odessa. but the to december saw was -- but the odessa was mostly fiction. an organization like the odessa almighty with unlimited resources and responsible, kind of worldwide responsible for the escape of these perpetrators never did exist. it's, basically, fiction. it's a mythical story. it has nothing to do with the facts. the reality was much more complex. simon, why did he do it? there are a couple reasons for that. one reason was, certainly, he wanted to keep this topic alive. in the 1950s and 1960s especially in austria, but, yeah, basically in the whole western world and in the east the same, people were not interested anymore in these so-called old stories. it was the time of the cold war, and simon was reminding people in austria and elsewhere that there are still perpetrators out there who are not brought to justice, who made it to america and other destinations and still live there. and he used this popular imagination for his o own goalses and to his own, you know, interests. but anyway, only since the end of the end of the cold war, basically, after 1989 things started to change. we moved away from fiction from this model of the odessa, from the odessa organization to history writing. and why after '89? the explanation is quite simple; it was the end of the world war, and there were two reasons why suddenly research on this particular topic was possible. the first reason was a political reason. the layer of protection dropped away for nazi war criminals still alive and in hiding. and in the 1990s there were a couple of war crimes trials. for example, in italy very prominent ones like the trial against -- [inaudible] who was responsible for war crimes in rome in march 1944 for executing 335 italians, italian partisans, military and jews. he lived in this argentina all those years under his real name and was extradited only in the 1990s to italy and then persecuted. by the way, he's still very much alive. he's under house arrest in rome. and, um, so the -- [inaudible] case is also very good example for this n. the 1990s things started to change, and these people were brought to justice. there was no political protection anymore. the cold war was not there anymore, so justice departments began to investigate again and to find these old files in some old archives. the other thing maybe more important even, archives opened. suddenly there were a commission of historians who are kind of dealing with this past, not, you know, very important was the commissioner of historians in argentina. they opened the archives there, the swiss archives, the red cross archives very important to my research, actually, archives in many other countries. and these archives enabled us to look deeper at what happened after '45 and how some of these people were protected by governments and intelligence agencies. so as a consequence, more and be more structures came to light, and we started to understand how these people got away from justice after 1945. and, again, this was one of the few areas that were not very well researched until the 1990s. again, until the 1990s you still had to the deal with the odessa. still to this very day whenever i talk to people about my research, they say, yeah, yeah, i know what you're writing, you're writing about the odessa. [laughter] i say, no, i'm not. and then, of course, i have to explain to them it's a fictional story, but it really stick with the people, and nowadays you have to write against the odessa myth, basically. so let me talk about my findings, how did it really work, how did -- what criminal perpetrators of the holocaust, ss members and nazis, actually got away, got out of europe? one of the fist things i learned -- first things i learned being an archivist in italy was most of these people got out through italy. italy, basically, was the nazi escape hatch for most of these perpetrators. for most of these war criminals and nazis who got out of europe after 1945, italy was the way out. and you may ask, why italy? well, a couple of reasons for that. one reason is for people in central europe, in southern germany and austria, italy is the closest way, especially the italian seaboard. from yes noaa you had, you know, the ships going overseas, and it was easy to reach this area. one other reason is in italy there was no allied military government anymore. ending in the december '45, the allies kind of, you know, stopped the military government, and the italians were in charge again. so once these perpetrators, nazis and fascists from all over europe made it to italy, made it over the border to italy they kind of were safe. they kind of were protected. the border area of south tirile, it's a little bit -- no? see it here? played a particular role. gunther mentioned it, talked about woodrow wilson, and this border area was and is still mostly german speaking. and the people there, of course, were very german-friendly. and so german-speaking refugees of people on the round there, german background, they were not handed over to the italian authorities. they were hidden by the people there. and south tirile really became the perfect hideout for these nazis on the run. italy was the lodge cay way. south tirile was the first stopover, and it was one of, basically, the only region german-speaking without allied control over the war. so it was perfect location for acquire agnew identity and to get new identity papers. the situation in south tirile and in italy in general was also unique because there were many refugees in europe. millions of people were on the move after 1945, survivors of the holocaust, slave laborers, prisoners of war, all kinds of people. and many of these people wanted to get to italy in order to get to the seaports and in order to leave europe and to start a new and better life. not just the perpetrators, not just the nazis and not just the fascists but also, for example, the victims, the survivors of the holocaust. and simon describes it well in one quote. he writes about the strange situation in italy where perpetrators and victims actually met after the war. both groups trying to get out of europe and to start a new life. and there's a very good quote by simon, and i show you this quos. he writes: i know a small inn where every now and then illegal nazi transports and illegal jewish transports spent the night under the same roof without knowing about each other. the jews were hidden on the second floor and instructed not to stir; and the nazis on the ground floor were urgently warned not to let themselves be seen outside the establishment. i'm not sure where this location or where this hotel, where this place exactly is. it doesn't really matter. what he describes, he describes it very well. the situation's a very unique situation in italy when you have all these refugees there, perpetrators and victims meeting. sometimes using the same routes, the same smugglers, the same hiding places, the same structures in order the get out of europe. and also sometimes using the same ways in getting new travel documents, sometimes on on the real, sometimes under false names in order to leave europe. and italy was the best place and the easiest way to do so, to get out of there. once in italy you had, basically, only one problem; you needed travel documents in order to travel overseas. most of these refugees from all over europe didn't have pass ports, of course. sometimes they could hardly save their own lives, and they didn't have documents whatsoever. so they would have the international red cross to issue them travel documents, and that's where the international red cross comes into place. this was especially true for ethnic germans who were expelled from central and eastern europe, hundreds of thousands of them were in italy. they were hoping to get out from italy to south america and elsewhere. and the