Likely of more interest to spy-story aficionados than Latin American historians, this monograph synthesizes three decades of far-flung research on Axis and Allied diplomatic and intelligence officers working in and around Argentina during World War II. The title is a bit misleading, given that eight of the book's 14 chapters follow diplomats and spies reporting to Germany or the Nazi Party; another four chapters deal with US operatives, and two others with their British counterparts. The dizzying array of dramatis personae, an annotated list of whom would have been helpful, include German ambassador Edmund Freiherr von Thermann, German military intelligence officers Dietrich Niebuhr and Friedrich Wolf, Nazi Party intelligence officer Johannes Siegfried Becker, Argentine military attaché Servando Santillana, and Argentine foreign minister Enrique Ruíz Guiñazú.
Concluding that German foreign policy toward Latin America was fairly mundane, Dimitrakis's book offers additional support for Max Paul Friedman's seminal Nazis and Good Neighbors, which highlighted the Nazi Party's limited goals in the land of Washington's hegemonic Monroe Doctrine. Perhaps because of their strategic circumscription, Nazi German diplomatic and intelligence tactics are worthy of study, not least for the lessons they provide regarding other tenuous extra-hemispheric challenges to the Monroe Doctrine before and after World War II.
A subplot of this book is the secret struggle by British intelligence to provoke Washington's fears of German influence in the Southern Cone while still maintaining London's handful of minor protectorates in the region, such as the Falkland Islands (the Malvinas) off the coast of Argentina. German aims were meanwhile divided between those members of military intelligence and the diplomatic service who sought to maintain listening posts in the Western Hemisphere by encouraging neutralist impulses before and after Pearl Harbor, and Nazi Party ideologues whose ham-fisted front operations sometimes threatened Berlin's normal military and diplomatic relations.
As for the Western Hemisphere's ruling classes, whose aims are vaguely theorized here thanks to Dimitrakis's triangulating use of German, British, and US perspectives, Argentines and other Latin Americans seemed to care little for the war effort. To paraphrase a British report from early 1941, the region's diplomats sometimes appeared pro-Ally to London and pro-Axis to Berlin, but were really just in favor of maximizing benefits for their own countries (60). Cold War historians have recently made note of similar nationalist strategies toward Washington and Moscow, documented in my recent co-edited Latin America and the Global Cold War, which reveals Janus-faced foreign policies that become more visible when United States documents are compared with archives from the Soviet Union and its allies.
Largely descriptive and sometimes lacking a sense of unity, the book draws extensively on previous work, especially Richard McGaha's 2009 doctoral dissertation on German and Nazi operations in Argentina, which is more focused and fluid but unfortunately was never published. Dimitrakis complements his synthesis of secondary literature with illuminating research in British and US archives, and it is particularly interesting how this book makes use of Allied sources to reveal Axis and Argentine activities, which (as in Marc Becker's The FBI in Latin America) were tracked and documented via a combination of simultaneous intercept and postwar interrogation. Without a broader takeaway for Latin American or international history, however, this book will likely be of more interest to those specifically looking for a short if slightly disorienting summary of German and Nazi operations in Argentina.
