Priory of Sion - the Fraud Revealed and a Light Shined on the Real Underlying Mystery

[David Guyatt]

[FONT=&amp]Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld married into the Dutch family pre WWII when he was an SS officer and worked for I G Farben's notorious spy department NW7. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&amp]Here we see Bernhard with his wife, Daughter, Queen Beatrix and his Grandson, Prince (now King) Willem-Alexander - all members of SMOM, the Knights of Malta[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]King Willem-Alexander married Maxima Zorreguieta in 2002, in a world-wide televised glittering marriage. Maxima is the Argentine born is the daughter of Jorge Zorreguieta, a former Argentine Minister of Agriculture in the regime of General Jorge Rafael Videla, who came to power following a military coup d'etat in 1985 when he deposed Isabel Martinez de Peron, the wife of Nazi supporter Juan Peron. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&amp]In 1951, Prince Bernhard awarded the Grand Cross of the Orange Nassau to Evita Peron, the first wife of Juan Peron and the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Arggentine's General Videla later faced a trial for crimes against humanity that occurred under his rule. These included forced disappearances and extrajudicial murder. He was well known for harbouring many Nazi's in Argentina, including Juan Peron, Alfredo Stroessner, the former Nazi leaning president of Paraguay as well as Hugo Banzer, the former dictator and president of Bolivia and yet another who was politically on the far right.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&amp]Prince Bernhard owned a large estate of approximately 1,500 acres called the Estancia Pipilcura in Pilcaniyeu, Argentina, lofted in the province of Patagonia and close to the town of Bariloche that is dominated by German ex-pats a great many of whom arrived immediately after WWII. [/FONT]
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[FONT=&amp]Readers may recall that there is now excellent evidence revealing that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun did, in fact, escape Berlin at the end of WWII and spent ten years living in a large villa looking over Lake Nahuel Huapi just outside of Bariloche, Argentina.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&amp]There is a great deal that can be said on this subject. But the fact is that it has already been said and rather than copy and piece material parts, I'll simply copy and entire article that has the basic facts of the case.[/FONT]
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Bariloche and Soestdijk

Last tango in Bariloche

Máxima, Jorge Zorreguieta, Willem-Alexander, Prince Bernhard: they all come to San Carlos de Bariloche, the chic Argentine winter sports paradise. However, there is also a dark side to this «Bavaria at the foot of the Andes».

René Zwaap
February 2, 2002 - appeared in no. 5

San Carlos de Bariloche - Traveling through Patagonia, the deep south of Argentina, is a surreal experience. Not only because of the overwhelming landscape, with massive mountains and eternal snow, the immense azure blue lakes, the desolate plains and the thousands of miles of deserted beaches, but mainly due to the penetrating presence of pan-Germanic culture, and all that about 1700 kilometers south of Buenos Aires.

In the chic ski resorts of Patagonia, such as Cerro Catedral, where Willem-Alexander and Máxima stayed for two weeks late last year, yodel music, the Münchner Bierstuben shoot the visitor from all sides and the dominant architecture is entirely Tyrolean style, complete with cuckoo clocks and oak pergolas. There is actually a Saint Bernard dog shuffling around.

Máxima spent an important part of her youth here. Father Jorge had a holiday home in the Cerro Catedral. Until 1996, the year in which a large fire, of which the traces are still visible, a large part of the buildings laid in the ashes and Jorge Zorreguieta sold the site. A neighbor can still remember the family well, even though she never had direct contact, because before that the Zorreguieta family said she was "much too high". «Always romping with the boys, that Máxima», according to the neighbor. «A wonderful girl. Very good that she becomes Queen of the Netherlands. Good for the fraternization of our peoples. "

At the time that the Zorreguieta family came to ski in the Cerro Catedral every year, the instructors present were strictly German-speaking. Bariloche and the surrounding area were even more exclusive than at present. It emphasizes the Germanophile traits of the Zorreguietas, whose daughter was raised by German nuns at the primary school in Buenos Aires.

San Carlos de Bariloche, with its eighty thousand inhabitants, is also in the Tyrolean-Teutonic atmosphere. On top of the Cerro Otto, the mountain above the town, lies the Berghof. In the alpine hut there lived until his death in 1989 Bariloche's prominent resident Otto Meiling, an alpinist from Bavaria who acted as ski instructor of the legendary dictator Juan Domingo Perón. Meilings Berghof is now a museum and is still in perfect condition. A poem carved in a wooden blade says something about the philosophy of this legendary "hombre de montaña":

"Kommt mit auf den Berg, Kamerad / Hoch were wir steigen / Bis oben aus Hoffen und Tat / Schliessen wir der Reigen".

Meiling came to Bariloche in the early thirties. He was one of the driving forces behind the Hitler Jugend in Argentina, which could operate undisturbed until well into the thirties. In 1931, together with four other German emigrants, Meiling was co-founder of the Club Andino Bariloche (CAB), officially an association for organized snow fun, in reality a mantle organization for virulent pan-Germanic intelligence in Patagonia.

The German agitation in Bariloche was already quite manifest in the 1930s. On top of the building of the German language school Primo Caparo (the name of an Italian fascist who had settled in Bariloche) the swastika flag flew and the teachers from Germany were obliged members of the League of National Socialist Teachers. Hitler's Mein Kampf was the most important exercise book. In 1938, the chosen Argentinian president Roberto Ortiz put an end to these "anti-Argentine activities". The institute was disbanded, after the Second World War, when dictator Peron once assumed office, to be re-established by Nazis who had fled to Bariloche.

Downstairs, in the tourist town itself, people feel as much in Teutonic spheres. The houses and shops do not differ from the Germanic model in any way. The most important export product of the town is chocolate. In the Stube of the Weiss family, smoked red deer and mulled wine are served. In the establishments Der Biergarten, El viejo Munich and La Alpina you will find a variety of German beers. The hotels Edelweiss, Pirker and Wickter contribute to Bariloche's name as "the Bavaria of Argentina". The Belgrano district houses so many German migrants that it is popularly called "el barrio alemán", the German Quarter.

Only the scenes on the square in the center of Bariloche, where an angry mob has gathered and throws stones at the town hall in protest against the failure of the salaries, make it clear to the visitor that he is still in deep economic crisis entangled Argentina.

San Carlos de Bariloche was founded in 1902 by the German consul in Chile, Carlos Wiederhold. The decades-long massacre of the stubbornly opposed indigenous population was at that moment in its completion. The vast area - Patagonia has 787,163 square kilometers and covers one third of the state of Argentina - urgently needed repopulation. On the large lake Nahuel Huapi, forty kilometers from the border with Chile, Wiederhold founded the merchant house La Alemana, where the Sociedad Anónima de Importación y Exportación de la Patagonia of José Menéndez and Mauricio Braun did good business and would grow into the largest supermarket chain of South America, La Anónima, now accounts for an annual profit of three hundred million dollars a year. From the merchant house La Alemana - now the town hall - the town of Bariloche grew.

In 1910, a prince from the German royal family Schaumburg-Zur Lippe, a distant relative of prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld (Juliana's first biographer J. Waterink mistakenly referred to Bernhard in his book Our young Queen at home in 1936 as Prince Schaumburg-Zur Lippe), the San Ramón estate located fifteen kilometers outside Bariloche. This "estancia" counted no less than thirty thousand hectares and was managed locally by Baron Ludwig von Bülow, who in 1915 accommodated Wilhelm Canaris, the later chief of Hitler's Abwehr. Canaris, as the second mate of the German cruiser Dresden, fought in the name of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1914 against the British on the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas), which lies opposite the extreme south-eastern point of Patagonia. He was captured in Chile, but then escaped to Bariloche with a few confidants. There he received a warm welcome from Baron Von Bülow in the estancia San Ramón.

The later admiral and spy chief immediately saw the strategic value of the location. In 1926 San Ramón was transferred to the German company Treuhand - the later business branch of the NSDAP - and then to the brothers Dietrich and Christel Lahusen from Bremen, business relations of the already mentioned Mauricio Braun. In collaboration with Prince Stephan von Schaumburg-Zur Lippe, adviser to the German embassy in Buenos Aires, the Lahusen brothers from San Ramón created a center of German espionage activities. Conveniently, the estancia was the only airport in the region from 1940 onwards.

Argentinian politician Silvano Santander accused Prince Schaumburg-Zur Lippe and the Lahusen brothers of providing hand and sports services to the Third Reich. In 1941, these accusations were investigated by the Comisión de Actividades Anti-Argentinas of the parliament in Buenos Aires, which had to cease its activities two years later at the insistence of the Nazi-friendly Peron.

After the Second World War, the influx of German emigrants to Argentina could not stop at all. Patagonia was by far the most popular travel destination, because anyone who had arrived there was hardly traceable anymore.

Previously, the American gangsters Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, better known as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, who had robbed the First National Bank of Winemucca, Nevada in 1900, found a safe haven in Cholila near El Bolsón. , about 120 kilometers south of Bariloche. Even the fanatical thieves of the detective agency Pinkerton could no longer find them there. If the duo had not gone further with the robbery of banks (in 1909 an attempt to arrest the recession of a mine in Bolivia became fatal) they could have spent their days undisturbed in Patagonia.

Juan Perón began his presidential career in 1945. At the last minute - three weeks before the German capitulation - he did declare war on the Axis powers, but that was only for the form, a diplomatic gesture towards the Americans and the British. In practice, Perón, who had been deeply impressed by the fascist movement as an Argentine ambassador in Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s, supported the Nazis wherever he could. According to a statement by his adviser Pedro Bianchi in 1979, Perón sold two thousand passports and eight thousand blank identity cards to Nazi circles in Europe alone in his first term at the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. It did not do the dictator any harm. Perón, with the current price level, would have earned six million dollars in this mediation, his confidant told Bianchi proudly.

Between 1945 and 1955 an estimated 80,000 Germans, Austrians and Croats in all started a new life in Argentina. About fifteen thousand of them did so with false identity cards, which gives a cautious indication of the Nazi population in Peron's Argentina.

Evita Duarte Perón also personally interfered with the so-called "rat lines". To this end, the Argentinean first lady toured Europe in the summer of 1947, visiting Franco in Spain, Pope Pius XII and representatives of the Swiss government. A secret emigration office was set up in Bern, Switzerland, led by former SS man Carlos Fuldner. A flight to the pampas cost the traveler, including adapted proof of identity, about fifty thousand dollars. Less wealthy fugitives had to do with a trip on one of the many ships of Uruguayan ship owner Alberto Dodero, a personal friend of the couple Perón.

This immigration flow did not go unnoticed at San Carlos de Bariloche either. Journalist Abel Basti of the local newspaper Mañana del Sur made it his life's work to map the Nazi population of his hometown. He did so in numerous reports for his newspaper, which often led to national news, and in a "tourist guide to Nazi locations in Bariloche" that had not yet been published. «Maybe it can be published in the Netherlands», he sighs. "The Argentinian public is not quite ready for this yet, at least, nobody wants to spend it."

Basti became interested in the matter when in 1995 ex-SS and former Gestapo officer Erich Priebke was arrested in Bariloche and deported to Italy, where he was accused of leading and personally participating in a massacre in the caves of the Fosas Ardeatinas near Rome in 1944. 335 Italian men and boys, all civilians, were executed by way of reprisal for an action by partisans. Priebke arrived in Argentina in 1948 by boat. With a passport from the Red Cross in the name of Otto Pape in his pocket he settled with his wife and two children in Bariloche. There he became the manager of a delicatessen, specializing in smoked ham.

Soon he felt so safe that he again used his own name, which many exiled Nazis in Argentina used to do. In Bariloche Priebke was a key figure in public life: he was founder of the local Asociación Cultural Germano-Argentina and of the German language institute Primo Capraro, of which he was also chairman. He regularly traveled to Europe. The former SS man had just planned to retreat to an estate that he had purchased just outside Bariloche when the Simon Wiesenthal center in Vienna got air from him.

In 1994, Nazi hunter Rick Eaton landed in Bariloche in search of the still very active Nazi propagandist Reinhard Kops, alias Juan Maler. The Kops / Maler born in Hamburg in 1914 was a secret agent of the Nazis during the Second World War in Albania. In 1948 he had moved to Argentina, where he was the publisher and editor of the Neo-Nazi struggle Der Weg in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, a magazine banned in Germany. In Bariloche he was the manager of hotel Campana in Bariloche's «barrio alemán».

Wiesenthal's agent managed to win his trust in a meeting at the Edelweiss hotel in Bariloche as a millionaire willing to donate a lot of money to the international neo-Nazi movement. Kops / Maler said that the money would be donated to various underground cells in Germany. These statements were recorded on a tape and played by CNN. Once confronted by a reporter from the American news channel, Kops / Maler continued. "I am only a small cog in the organization," he exclaimed. "Why do not you go after the brain, why do not you take Priebke?"

So the curtain fell for the executioner of Rome. At the request of the Italian justice he was arrested and in November 1995 the Supreme Court of Argentina decided with three to two votes to actually deliver him. In Bariloche, this led to some indignant reactions, according to Abel Basti. «Priebke, also called Uncle Erich, was a welcome figure, especially in the better circles of this city. Many saw him depart with dismay. But once it became known what Priebke had done exactly during the war, most of them felt that he deserved his punishment. Except of course the many comrades he left here. "

The large international publicity surrounding the Priebke case led to the setting up of a special commission for the then Argentinean government led by President Carlos Ménem to map the activities of Nazis in Argentina. This Comisión de Esclarecimento de las Actividades Nazis and Argentina (CEANA) delivered a fairly elaborate piece of work in 1999, although it was emphatically concerned to go into the dominance of the numerous Argentine entrepreneurs still living with Nazi relations. Ménem also set up a Center against Racism and Discrimination in Bariloche. This Instituto Nacional Contra la Discriminación, Xenophobia y Racismo already exists in 2002. Apparently it was nothing more than a PR stunt, mainly intended for consumption abroad. The sincerity of the Peronist Ménem may be questioned in this matter, according to Basti.

For Basti, the Priebke case was the reason to exhaustively map the Nazi connections of his home town. Where possible, he also searched the men themselves for an interview. Anyone who has read his "guide to Nazi tourism in Bariloche eo" looks at the seemingly idyllic town at the Nahuel Huapi lake. Joseph Mengele, the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz, according to the research of Basti, would have lived for several years in the barrio alemán. In 1948 or 1949 Mengele even got his driving license in Bariloche, a former municipal official said to the reporter. Mengele would return to Bariloche several times, where he would be a welcome guest at the estancia of the wealthy entrepreneur Ludwig Freude and his son Rodolfo, private secretary of the Peron couple from 1946 onwards.

Opposite Basti, Mengele-hunter Simon Wiesenthal stated that the former camp doctor was recognized in Bariloche in February 1960 by a 48-year-old tourist from Israel named Nora Eldoc, who was a survivor of Auschwitz and was personally sterilized by Mengele. Eldoc came across Mengele during a party in a hotel. She stood face to face with him for a few seconds, then left the hotel in haste and warned the police. A few days later, on February 12, 1960, the body of the woman was found in a cave in the mountains outside Bariloche. The finder was the Slovenian mountaineer Vojko Arko, the friend and biographer of Berghof resident Otto Meiling. He told Basti that the dead woman, in his opinion, was "an agent of the Mossad." Van Mengele himself was missing every trace. It was not until 1995 that a mortal remains was found in Brazil that, according to the local authorities, belonged to the Angel of Death.

Also the Austrian Adolf Eichmann would have been spotted in Bariloche, and in 1956, when an Israeli secret agent who only became known as BA settled down in a café at the Nahuel Huapi lake and heard a group speak in German. One of these men talked with some authority about his collection of Austrian stamps. When BA later came to Buenos Aires and found a picture of the wanted war criminal in a newspaper, he recognized the philatelist from Bariloche. This would eventually lead to the kidnapping of Eichmann in 1960 by a group of agents of the Israeli secret service in Eichmann's residence Buenos Aires. In the book The fatal friendships of Adolf Eichmann of the Belgian Stan Lauryssens based on conversations with Eichmann's confidant Willem Sassen, this fact is missing. It does make clear, however, that Eichmann had received an offer to work in Patagonia as overseer in the process of beating oil wells. Eichmann would have rejected this offer. If he had accepted it, Eichmann, according to Sassen, would never have been found by the Israelis.

Intriguing in Basti's guide is the story that Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann would have stayed in Bariloche. The Italian magazine Tempo reported in 1960 a tombstone with the inscription M. Bormann to have found. Shortly after this this grave turned out to be gone. Officially, Bormann died in Berlin in May 1945. According to Basti, the Deputy Fuehrer continued undisturbed in Patagonia under the name Ricardo Bauer, where he was still photographed on the side of a local beauty. From the photograph that Basti shows, in any case, speaks a stunning resemblance. Basti: "I think there is enough reason for research, but even the Wiesen thal center does not want to. A certain nazi fatigue has developed. "

According to the journalist, the vast deserted coast of Patagonia was visited many times by German submarines immediately after the German capitulation, which transferred the stolen treasures of the Third Reich plus the surviving leaders to what the Fourth Reich should become. Basti: "The fact that the Patagonian coast was frequented by U-boats before and after the German capitulation is a fact confirmed by many reports from the Argentinian Navy. Still years after the war, people in Patagonia's hinterland reported that they had seen German U-boats. A few years ago I spoke with a captain of the Argentine navy who had participated in the war with the British for the Malvinas. He swore at high and low that in 1982 he had observed Nazi-under-sea-men. Call it local folklore, but it remains fascinating. "

The SS man Horst Fuldner played a crucial role, together with Priebke founder of the Asociación Cultural Germano-Argentina in Bariloche. Fuldner was convicted in absentia by the Nuremberg tribunal. In Argentina, he held a high adviser position with the first government of Peron. In Córdoba, north of Buenos Aires, he founded the Fuldner Bank. In this province, the Nazi activity was already large before the Second World War. Thus the brothers Walter and Ullrich Eichhorn drove the gigantic and internationally renowned hotel Eden in the village of La Falda. The Eichhorns were Hitler fans from the very beginning. As early as 1925, they transferred large sums of money to the NSDAP. Hitler was so happy that he later invited the Eichhorns as special guests on the NSDAP party days in Nuremberg.

Fuldner was responsible for the arrival of Kurt Tank, a well-known Nazi scholar, to Argentina. Tank, initially hiding in Argentina under the name of Pedro Matthies, took a large proportion of its employees from the Nazi company Fucke-Wulf and the designs of the latest model Messerschmidt. In Córdoba, Tank of Perón got his own factory, El Instituto Aeronáutico de Córdoba, where he designed the Pulque II, the supersonic fighter plane that the engineer donated to the "New Argentina" by Juan Perón, and that the pride of the Argentine air force. As a test pilot, Tank Hans Ulrich Udel took part from Germany.

In Bariloche, both Fuldner and Rudel were registered as members of the Club Andino Bariloche. From Argentina, former Colonel of the Luftwaffe Rudel, in 1952, again acted as leader in the Bundestag elections in Germany on behalf of the Deutsche Reichs Partei, but the German government stuck out because of his membership of the NSDAP.

One of the first non-Argentineans to admire the Pulque II with his own eyes was Prince Bernhard, during his legendary tour of South America in 1951. Bernhard was on April 3 that year as a "goodwill ambassador" of the Dutch business community. Buenos Aires arrived, after having first visited Rio de Janeiro and Uruguay.

Bernhard's assignment was "to cultivate the land for Dutch trade in Argentina". As a translator during the conversations of the Prince with the Perons, the Dutch SS Willem Sassen, former editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf in 1944 and in Argentina worked as a PR advisor and translator of the couple Peron. Via Sassen, war criminal Klaus Barbie in Argentina would have had access to the prince. However, that only led to some consternation much later, when the weekly De Tijd put an article on September 14, 1984.

The official deployment of Bernhard's mission in Argentina was a million-dollar order for the Dutch job track, which had been trying to win an Argentine mission since 1936. The Argentine rail network was traditionally built with British expertise and materials, but it was the Dutch entrepreneurs who learned that Peron wanted to break that tradition. This was due to the fact that his wife was not welcome in England during her big European tour in 1947.

The construction of the Argentinian rail network was now the subject of open registration. So Bernhard arrived in his wake a procession of entrepreneurs per Fokker Friend ship in Buenos Aires, with in his luggage the Grand Cross in the Order of Orange-Nassau for Evita (Juan already had it) and a load of precious jewels. Later on, the list of gifts - at least that article VS Naipaul and the Argentine historian Felix Luna - would be extended with five thousand automatic pistols and 1500 machine guns for the benefit of the peronist militia. Anyway, the mission succeeded. NV Werkspoor received an Argentine order amounting to 250 million guilders, which for a large part would be contracted out again to the rising Krupp group in Germany. In addition - according to vindictive British sources - thirty million guilders would have to be repaid by way of bribes on secret Swiss bank accounts of the Peron couple.

However, the Argentine mission of Bernhard was not yet finished. In Buenos Aires he was welcomed at a demonstration of the Pulque II. Both Bernhard and his pilot Gerben Sonderman were particularly impressed, writes Bernhard's secretary FA de Graaff in his travelogue With the Prince on his journey.

However, there was another fruit of German-Argentinian cooperation that interested Bernhard even more, and that would lead him to San Carlos de Bariloche. It is an episode that has remained very underexposed in the Netherlands so far, but it was examined and described in detail in Argentina, by the renowned physicist Mario AJ Mariscotti of the University of Buenos Aires in his book El secreto atómico de Huemul (1996).

On the day Bernhard began his journey to South America, on March 24, 1951, Juan Peron announced at a spectacular press conference that Argentina had developed a proprietary process for the development of nuclear energy through a controlled process of thermonuclear atom fusion. All this, Perón said, was thanks to his nuclear scientist Ronald Richter, who had built a nuclear reactor a year earlier on the island of Huemul in the Nahuel Huapi lake near Bariloche.

Argentine nuclear plans have been a concern in international relations for some years. In 1944 the Asociación Física Argentina was founded, which according to sources in England, America and Brazil would be aimed at the development of an atomic bomb. This was followed by the establishment of an Argentine atomic agency, the Instituto Nacional para la Energía Atómica, chaired by Peron itself and funded by the wealthy entrepreneur Otto Bemberg, owner of tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in Patagonia and other parts of the country, and the Menéndez conglomerate -Braun clan.

In the international scientific environment Ronald Richter was a big unknown. The reactions to Peron's announcement were therefore skeptical. Mariscotti writes that Richter, a born Austrian, worked in 1942-1943 in a private laboratory of baron Manfred van Ardenne in Berlin.

In 1946 he met Kurt Tank in London, who was already on his way to Argentina. However, Richter preferred to wait and see if the Americans might be interested in his services. When that turned out not to be the case, he left for Buenos Aires, where he spoke with Peron on 24 August 1948. Richter stated that he could supply his own atomic bomb to American model for six million dollars, but that he also had his own, considerably cheaper method for the generation of nuclear energy on offer, although two or three more discoveries were needed.

It was a challenge that the Argentine dictator liked to respond to. In November of that year Richter got his own laboratory within the workshop of Kurt Tank in Córdoba. Tank had already made the dictator tasty with the prospect of the development of an atomic submarine, so that Peron thought he could beat two birds with one stone. In 1949 Richter refused to continue working in Córdoba. There had been a fire in his laboratory, presumably due to a short circuit, but Richter immediately thought of sabotage and threatened to leave for America. The atomic scientist demanded his own autonomous workplace, where his secret could be kept well.

The choice fell on the island of Huemul, seven kilometers outside Bariloche. It was inaccessible to the outside world and the lake of seven hundred square kilometers provided sufficient cooling water for the reactor to be built.

Bariloche was then still a small village. The rest of the area was totally depopulated. The Nahuel Huapi area had already been declared a protected reserve in the 1920s, as a result of which the residents had been rigorously expropriated and sent away. Richter could work here on his top secret project in peace and quiet.

In March 1950, Ronald Richter, now an Argentinean citizen, settled in Bariloche. Under his supervision, four hundred soldiers, electricians and carpenters worked on the construction of the laboratory and the reactor. Richter had received carte blanche from Juan and Evita Perón, who quickly visited him that year.

Especially at night, when the bright lights from the reactor burned over the water of the giant lake, the Atomic Island made a mystical impression on the inhabitants of Bariloche, Mariscotti writes. Nobody knew what exactly happened on the island, only that it was very secret. Some whispered that Perón had a hydrogen bomb built here.

Exactly what was being done on Huemul remained shrouded after the historic press conference of Peron and Richter on March 24, 1951. For safety reasons it was not possible to make a complete public disclosure of the precise experiments, as they told the press. Richter wanted to say that there had been no danger for the immediate environment. This contradicts a secret memorandum from his hand that Mario Mariscotti found in the archives: it showed that Richter had indeed warned of possible dangers, such as the fertility of the men in the vicinity of the reactor.

Four days after the announcement, on March 28, Richter received the peronist medal of Honor, the highest distinction of the country, at a special ceremony in the Salon Blanco of Perón's Casa Rosada. He also became doctor honorary causa at the University of Buenos Aires, among other things "because of his work in continual mortal danger". In the Argentinian parliament, Perón was adored by his paladins "because he solved the now cleaved problem of Argentina for the honor and glory of the fatherland and for peace in the world".

Together with the Pulque II of Dr Tank, the nuclear breakthrough in Bariloche was the definitive proof for Peron's prophecy of the arrival of the "New Argentina", a new superpower in the world.

Naturally, the spectacular news was also mentioned in the various tête-à-têtes by Bernhard and the presidential couple. On Bernhard's side, there was more than just interest: he offered cooperation.Professor Richter, according to his own words, had found the recipe for the nuclear big bang, in practice he had many important elements before there could be any Argentine nuclear industry. For example, he lacked the know-how to make electromagnetic energy conductor, a cyclotron; an indispensable part of a nuclear reactor. Coincidentally, Philips Duphar in Amsterdam had just managed to manufacture one of the largest cyclotrons in the world in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam. As a result of this development, the Netherlands had an important step as a future nuclear power, independent of British and American technology, precisely what Peron wanted for its country.

Bernhard offered to the Amsterdam professor CJ Bakker to Bariloche with a model of the cyclotron from Philips. Peron eagerly accepted that offer. Bakker was not yet on the plane or the New York Times reported that the Netherlands and Argentina worked together in the nuclear field. Peron feared that this would lead to irritation with his beloved atomic scientist Richter. On May 23, 1951, Peron wrote to Richter: "When Prince Bernhard visited me recently, he Showed That he was willing to providence us with products from Philips' That would be of great use to us. I accepted the offer and he offered to send someone to investigate in which form we could cast the cooperation.You must understand clearly that what he offered was an industrial cooperation, and no scientific cooperation, which we do not need either. The publicity that preceded Bakker's visit made a bad impression on me, because it is the impression that it would be a part of the scientific research, which, however, is exclusively in your hands. all atomic works in Argentina. For these reasons, I ask you to be very careful with everything you say to Dr. Baker. I tend to continue on the path I have chosen, with the utmost caution, so that Philips can supply you with the desired items and nothing more. "

Dr.Bakker arrived in Bariloche that same month. For four days he hero conversations with Richter, but he did not allow him on the reactor island. On 27 May, Bakker returned unsatisfied to Buenos Aires.

"Professor Bakker received us with the greatest possible kindness and we did everything we could to make his visit to Bariloche as interesting as possible", Richter wrote to Peron. "We asked for our experimental installations, which we had to reject in the most friendly terms in accordance with your wishes." Richter also argued that he would find the purchase of the Philips Duphar Synchro Cyclotron a good purchase. Bakker, he wrote, had expressed the "fear of what is happening in the event of nationalization" (apparently people's feared patent rights).

On 30 June the sale was concluded for an amount of 790,000 dollars. From the Dutch side it was still stipulated that the equipment would be used for "peaceful purposes". Fortunately, this clause did not have to be tested. In 1952, Ronald Richter was exposed to other Argentine nuclear scientists as a charlatan. His spectacular discoveries were mainly based on autosuggestion. Working never did his reactor.

His island was dismantled and Richter left Bariloche. The Centro Atómico Bariloche moved to the mountains just outside Bariloche, where Richter's place was occupied by another Nazi scholar, Wolfgang Meckbach, who died in 1998 after forty years of faithful service.

Just before the unmasking of Richter took place, Bernhard came to Bariloche at the end of March 1951 at the invitation of Peron himself. He descended with his retinue into the exclusive Llao Llao hotel, which was entirely available to the Dutch delegation. The prince stayed there three days before traveling back to the Netherlands. At Peron, Bernhard clearly could not work anymore. The prince in turn was very impressed by this part of Patagonia, where he would return year after year.

In the same hotel Llao Llao, another typical example of Patagonia-Tyrolean architecture, Willem-Alexander introduced himself in August 1999 to his future in-laws. The first photographs that appeared in the Argentinian press of Willem-Alexander and Máxima were also tasks in the mountains of Bariloche. And Argentine television reported this week that the couple will be traveling to Bariloche again after 02-02-2002.

Apparently the spouses are caught by the South American grandeur in a Tyrolean jacket of the landscape here. But to avoid misunderstandings, they have to declare that so many Nazis in one place are seriously spoiling the environment.

[FONT=&amp]From: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/laatste-ta...-bariloche and translated to Googlish.[/FONT]