How the Nazis Escaped Germany

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 some of its most egregious war criminals sought to escape justice by fleeing Europe, most famously to South America. The escape routes they used, established by Nazi sympathisers, came to be known as 'ratlines'. The escaping Nazis had helped from an unexpected source; senior figures within the Catholic Church.

The story of SS officer Walter Rauff exemplifies how these networks operated and the subsequent lives of the escapees. Rauff was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during the Second World War and was a key perpetrator of the Holocaust. After escaping to Chile, he would eventually come to work for the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. There he would go on to inflict further miseries on the Chilean people. Rauff was never put on trial, but is it possible to obtain a different kind of justice for his numerous crimes?

Philippe Sands, a renowned British-French lawyer and author, joins Dan to provide insights from his book '38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia', which explores Rauff's life and actions and the involvement of the Catholic Church.

Produced & edited by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, welcome Dan Snow's history. As the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945,
0:08.0	you will not be surprised to learn that many Nazis and fascist war criminals were pretty desperate to escape justice.
0:15.0	They were desperate to get out of Europe. They did not want to stand trial or be summarily executed for the monstrous crimes they'd committed during the war.
0:25.1	They and their supporters forged, they trailblazed various routes out of Europe.
0:31.1	And help came from a very surprising quarter, senior figures within the Catholic Church.
0:36.7	Particularly in Rome, in post-war Italy,
0:40.5	these clergymen helped get war criminals out of Europe to South America.
0:45.0	These networks became known as rat lines,
0:47.5	because they were like rats leaving the sinking ship.
0:51.0	In this episode, we're going to hit all about those rat lines,
0:53.8	and we're going to take a
0:54.6	deeper look at the story of one of the particular escapees, a man called Walter Ralph, to really
0:59.0	illustrate how they worked and also what people got up to in their lives after the war.
1:05.3	Ralph was an SS officer known for his brutality, known being ruthless. He's accused of being
1:10.3	responsible for, well, it could be hundreds of thousands of deaths
1:13.0	during the Second World War.
1:15.0	In 1949, he made his way to South America on one of these ratline networks.
1:21.6	In fact, it was the same network that got many other high-profile Nazis to South America,
1:25.9	those included Frans Stangel, the commanding officer
1:28.7	of the Treblinka death camp, Gustav Wagner, commanding officer of Sobibor death camp, Alwa Brunner,
1:34.9	who is in charge of all the deportations of Jews from Slovakia to Nazi concentration camps,
1:41.0	and the infamous Adolf Eichmann.
	...

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