Argentina declares war on the Axis

On 27 March 1945 the President of Argentina, General Edelmiro Farrell, signed Decree No. 6945, by which his country abandoned the neutrality it had maintained since September 1939. The document was also signed by all the ministers, headed by the Vice-President and Minister of War, Colonel Juan Perón. The order of its provisions is telling. The first article announced Argentina’s adherence to the Final Act of the inter-American conference in Mexico; the second declared a state of war with Japan, in the name of solidarity with the American republics that had been attacked at Pearl Harbor. Only the third extended the state of war to Germany, “as an ally of Japan”. The fourth instructed the ministries to take the measures appropriate to a belligerent state, including combating activities that threatened the security of the state and the war effort of the United Nations.

The popular account according to which Argentina was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to declare war on Germany therefore needs two qualifications. First, the decree named Japan first and Germany almost in passing. Second, Argentina was the last of the American republics to abandon neutrality towards the Reich, but not the last to declare war at all: Chile, which had broken off relations with the Axis as early as 1943, declared war on Japan only in April 1945 – the Chamber of Deputies approved it on 11 April and President Juan Antonio Ríos signed the decree on 13 April. Argentina’s war, like many other declarations of those weeks, remained purely formal in any case: it was accompanied by no mobilisation and no part in the fighting.

Neutrality by choice

For decades Argentina had been bound economically to Britain: British capital had built its railways and ports, and Argentine beef and grain flowed to Britain. German and Italian influence was also strong – large immigrant communities, German schools, firms and military missions training the army. Neutrality had a long tradition in the country going back to the First World War and enjoyed broad support, from conservatives to nationalists and – until June 1941 – the communists. The war reached Argentina’s shores as early as December 1939, when after the Battle of the River Plate and the scuttling of the ship the crew of the Admiral Graf Spee was interned in Argentina and her captain, Hans Langsdorff, took his own life in Buenos Aires.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor almost every Latin American state broke off relations with the Axis or declared war on it, and Brazil and Mexico entered the war in 1942. At the Rio de Janeiro conference in January 1942, however, Argentina – together with Chile – opposed a mandatory breach of relations, and the outcome was merely a non-binding recommendation. The government of the conservative President Ramón Castillo held to neutrality to the end.

The colonels and pressure from Washington

On 4 June 1943 the army overthrew Castillo. Behind the coup stood a secret officers’ lodge, the GOU (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos), one of whose leading figures was Colonel Perón. The first head of the junta, General Arturo Rawson, who is said to have promised the British a swift break with the Axis, lasted only two days; he was replaced by General Pedro Ramírez. The new regime was authoritarian, nationalist and in large part well disposed towards Germany, though more as a counterweight to the British and Americans than out of ideological conviction. The government closed down part of the press and dissolved the political parties, while Perón, first as head of the labour department and then as Minister of War and Vice-President, built up a base of support among the workers.

The United States regarded Argentina as a breach in the hemisphere’s defence system. Secretary of State Cordell Hull refused arms deliveries, blacklisted Argentine firms linked to the Axis, restricted exports and froze Argentine assets; he called Buenos Aires a centre of Nazi influence in the Western Hemisphere. In the autumn of 1943 the British detained in Trinidad an Argentine envoy, Osmar Hellmuth, who was travelling to Europe partly in order to buy arms in Germany. Compromised, the Ramírez government finally broke off relations with Germany and Japan on 26 January 1944 – the last in Latin America to do so. Outraged nationalists in the army, however, forced him to step down in February, and power passed to General Farrell. Washington refused to recognise the new government, recalled its ambassador in the summer of 1944 and persuaded most of the American republics to do likewise.

The British viewed this policy with unease. Argentine beef and grain were an important part of Britain’s food supply, and ships under the neutral Argentine flag were in principle not supposed to be U-boat targets – though even this did not always protect them: in 1942 the Germans sank, among others, the Argentine steamer Río Tercero. Winston Churchill argued to Franklin Delano Roosevelt that harsh sanctions threatened food supplies and might push Argentina into the arms of the Axis, and London tried to conclude a meat supply agreement with Buenos Aires, which the Americans opposed. Historians differ on how much weight to give this factor. Some see British commercial interests as the main reason why Argentina was able to cling to neutrality for so long; others stress above all domestic reasons: the tradition of neutrality, the nationalism of the military and their distrust of the United States. They agree that on the question of Argentina, London and Washington pulled in opposite directions.

The road to the decree

At the turn of 1944 and 1945 the situation changed. The ailing Hull resigned in November 1944, and his successor, Edward Stettinius, and Nelson Rockefeller, who was responsible for Latin America, sought an accommodation that would preserve the unity of the hemisphere before the founding conference of the United Nations. Perón, for his part, concluded that an Allied victory was a foregone conclusion and that clinging to neutrality to the end risked isolating the country in the post-war world.

The issue was settled by the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, which met from 21 February to 8 March 1945 at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City. Argentina was not invited. On 3 March the participants adopted the so-called Act of Chapultepec, which pledged the joint defence of the American states against aggression, including aggression by another American state, and in the Final Act, signed on 8 March, they expressed the hope that Argentina would join the common policy and take its place among the states fighting the Axis. The way was clearly indicated: adherence to the Final Act and a declaration of war. The deadline set at Yalta for the future guests at San Francisco, 1 March, had already passed, but the Latin American republics, which had themselves declared war on the Axis en masse in February, wanted Argentina at the table. A few weeks earlier, on the other side of the world, Saudi Arabia had made a similar calculation.

Farrell and Perón accepted the terms. Even before the decree was signed, the government began to restrict the activities of German organisations, banned Nazi demonstrations and started seizing German property. The decision was not popular at home: some nationalists regarded it as capitulation to Washington, and the democratic opposition as a cynical manoeuvre by a regime that had favoured the Reich to the last. The decree was announced at a moment when the Allies were forcing the Rhine and the Red Army stood on the Oder. Argentina’s war was to last less than five months and cost it not a single soldier.

Nazi money and fugitives

It is sometimes written that Argentina’s policy towards fleeing Nazis was already under scrutiny at that time. In March 1945, however, other matters were chiefly under the spotlight: the activities of the German intelligence networks that had operated in Buenos Aires throughout the war, the assets of German firms and fears that Reich funds would end up in Argentina. The Americans demanded that this influence be eliminated, and that was one of their conditions. The mass influx of fugitive officials of the Third Reich and their collaborators came later, during Perón’s first presidency (from 1946). Along the so-called ratlines, through Italy and Spain, often with the help of some clergy and the Red Cross, those who reached Argentina included Josef Mengele in 1949, Adolf Eichmann in 1950, Erich Priebke and the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić. The scale of the phenomenon is disputed: research carried out since the 1990s, including for an Argentine government commission, speaks of numbers ranging from well over a hundred to several hundred people, while higher estimates, running into the thousands, are regarded by historians as exaggerated.

What came of it

On 9–10 April 1945 the United States, and with it Britain, France and the Latin American republics, recognised the Farrell government. At the end of April, after Roosevelt’s death, Argentina was admitted to the San Francisco conference – despite fierce opposition from Vyacheslav Molotov, who reproached it for its fascist sympathies and demanded in return an invitation for the Polish government recognised by Moscow. American consent, forced through by the votes of the Latin American bloc, became one of the first frictions in the nascent United Nations. Argentina signed the United Nations Charter as one of the founding states.

The reconciliation with Washington did not last long. The new American ambassador, Spruille Braden, openly supported Perón’s opponents, and in February 1946 the State Department published the so-called Blue Book on the links between the Argentine military and Germany. The effect was the opposite of what was intended: Perón won the election under the slogan “Braden or Perón”. In the summer of 1945 two more German submarines, U-530 and U-977, put into Mar del Plata, their crews preferring to surrender to the Argentines rather than the Allies – an epilogue that long fuelled legends of Argentina as a haven for Nazis. The belated declaration of 27 March closed the story of the most stubborn neutrality on the American continent and secured Argentina a place in the post-war order, but it did not dispel the suspicions that were to weigh on its relations with the United States for years to come.