What were the ratlines? The ratlines were the routes that many Nazis used to escape from Germany after the end of World War 2. Many of them escaped to countries in South America, but some were even accepted into the United States.
At the time, the name “ratline” was only used to refer to Croatian war criminals fleeing to South America. It was only when it was used in a 1983 report by the US Department of Justice about the escape of Klaus Barbie that it gained wider traction. The name came from the name of a ladder on a ship. Sailing ships had a rope made of thin pieces of rope going up into the sails that was called a ratline. Sailors used these ropes to get up into the sails, but if a ship was sinking, people could climb the ratlines to get as high as possible. It was a last-ditch attempt at escape and was considered pretty much hopeless because the sails would sink as well.
The idea of the ratline gives the impression that there were routes organized by powerful entities that whisked major Nazis out of Germany to freedom. There were powerful people who offered help, but these were usually individuals and there were no conspiracies. A lot of the people that escaped did so by making use of the confusion at the end of the war to slip away. That is not to say that there weren’t some official organizations conspiring to capture Nazis for their own purposes, but those were not connected to the ratlines.
World War 2, at least the European part, ended on May 8th, 1945. The Soviets entered Berlin at the end of April and Hitler killed himself on April 30th. The Soviets took over the whole city and the Americans and British entered in early July to take over their half of the city. General Alfred Jodl signed an unconditional surrender document in France on May 7th, then Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed another one the next day because the Soviets hadn’t been present at the first. This is the official end of the war. The Allies began to arrest the prominent Nazis and take them into custody. By October of 1945, the top 24 Nazis that had been captured were charged and the Nuremberg trials commenced. Other Nazis were added as and when they were captured and by the end of the trials in 1946, 199 people had been tried. Out of those, 37 were sentenced to death and hanged, 124 were sentenced to prison terms, and 38 were found not guilty. There were also millions of German prisoners of war held by the western allies and the Soviets. These were slowly released over the following years. All of this shows that the ending of the war was mayhem.
There was not one single route used by Nazis to escape at the end of the war and there was not one single method. A common method was to get rid of all documentation that would prove who they were and use documentation that was attained from another person. This is how Josef Mengele escaped. These people were helped by some sympathizers along the way. There is some argument that they were helped by people in the Catholic church, but these were just sympathizers, and it was not the Catholic church itself. The Red Cross helped people escape as well, but they were overwhelmed, and it was very easy for escaping Nazis to take advantage of them. The only institution that did help in a big way was the government of Argentina. However, it helped more by turning a blind eye and then refusing to extradite people. The ratline appears to be a name given after the fact to the process of people escaping Germany through the confusion, rather than an actual route.
That being said, the US did have a system and that was called Operation Paperclip. It wasn’t only the US, but Canada and Britain as well. As the Allies swept into Germany, they realized the extent of scientific research that had been going on and they saw how many experts the Nazis had. The attention of the West very quickly turned from fighting the Nazis to being very scared of Soviet power and the rapidly expanding Communist empire. The US program was called Operation Paperclip and they took in 1,600 German scientists after the war. A lot of these scientists chose to surrender to the Americans for fear of what would happen if they were captured by the Soviets. The people that surrendered or were captured were moved out to small villages where they were interrogated, and then on to the West. Many of these scientists were employed at NASA and Wernher Von Braun, who had worked developing V2 rockets, ended up becoming the director of Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket, which took the Apollo spacecraft to space and the moon. Many of these scientists were members of the Nazi party, but only one was ever tried for war crimes. And that is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/nazis-escaped-on-red-cross-documents
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3yKShfkRx3SW5yc7QX3rhcb/nazis-on-the-run-the-ratline
https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/4b485dcd-cf77-4418-b559-a4aa3c47f86a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/07/where-does-the-word-ratline-come-from.html
https://www.etymonline.com/word/ratline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_World_War_II_in_Europe
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/nuremberg-trials