Newly declassified files from Argentina’s national archives have revealed fresh details about how a Nazi war criminal evaded justice for nearly 40 years after arriving in the country under a false identity.
Walter Kutschmann, a former Gestapo officer, lived in Argentina undisturbed for decades. Although he was denounced to authorities in 1975, he was not arrested until 1985, records released by the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) show.
The documents detail Kutschmann’s time in the country, including how he entered Argentina in 1948 using forged papers obtained in Franco’s Spain. He assumed the name “Pedro Ricardo Olmos” and led a low-profile life, initially working in a hardware store, then as a taxi-driver, and later as a purchasing director for the Argentine branch of the Osram lighting firm.
Dark episodes in Kutschmann’s life, however, came to light. He was accused of ordering two mass executions of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942: 65 people in Drohobycz and 500 in Tarnopol.
Witness accounts described victims being forced to dig their own graves before being shot at close range. Testimonies also link him to sexual crimes, including the murder of a teenage girl, who was forced into domestic labour at a concentration camp and allegedly killed by Kutschmann after she transmitted to him a venereal disease.
In July 1975, the Asociación Israelita de Sobrevivientes de la Persecución Nazi, a Holocaust survivors’ group in Argentina, informed then-president Isabel Martínez de Perón’s government that Kutschmann was living in the country under a false identity. They provided details including his alias, address in Miramar and employment at Osram.
A few months later, journalist Alfredo Serra of Gente magazine tracked Kutschmann down and photographed him at his flat in Miramar. Despite the public exposure, no action was taken. No activity appears in Kutschmann’s file until 1983.
In 1985, Interpol arrested the former Gestapo officer at a home in Florida, a district of Vicente López in Greater Buenos Aires. Initially denying his identity, he reportedly told officers, “Well, the chase is over. I will not run away.”
But Kutschmann was 71 at the time and in declining health. While awaiting extradition to West Germany, he died on August 30, 1986, at the Hospital General de Agudos Juan A. Fernández.
He was buried later in Los Polvorines, Malvinas Argentinas, Buenos Aires Province.
Kutschmann had been a member of the Hitler Youth, served as a Luftwaffe sergeant and fought in Spain’s Civil War in Franco’s Moroccan Legion before joining the Gestapo in 1939.
The release of his file is part of a broader digitisation project by the AGN, which has begun in earnest to make documents on Nazi fugitives accessible to the public.
– TIMES/PERFIL
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