We will probably never know the exact number of Nazi war criminals who escaped from Germany in the aftermath of WW2 and made their way to South America but some of the more infamous ones are Adolf Eichmann, who was later captured in Buenos Aires, brought to trial in Israel and executed in 1962, and Josef Schwammberger, who was arrested in Argentina and returned to West Germany for a trial in 1992 (he was sentenced to life in prison and died there). At the same time, there have been reports that as many as 9,000 Nazi officers and collaborators found a safe haven in countries like Brazil and Paraguay under new identities and were never arrested for their war crimes. This unsettling realization inspires the narrative of Philippe Condroyer’s A Man to Kill (French title: Un Homme a abattre, 1967), a fictional espionage thriller that focuses on a suspected concentration camp officer who resurfaces in Barcelona years later as a low profile German architect.
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Cinema Sojourns 