In December 1939, three months after the start of the Second World War, rather than let the British Royal Navy sink the German Panzerschiff Admiral Graf Spee, its captain ordered his ship to be scuttled in the River Plate and his officers and crew put on the Tacoma and taken ashore . Most were landed in Buenos Aires, the rest in Montevideo. Following diplomatic pressure from the British, the Argentinian and Uruguayan governments agreed to intern the officers and men.
Over the following months, the Abwehr, Germany's Military Intelligence and the German Naval Attaché in South America assisted most of the Graf Spee officers and some of its men to escape. Their aim was to get their highly trained men back on board the Kriegsmarine ships and submarines and further contribute to the German war effort.
Concern that Argentina and Uruguay were breaking the Geneva Convention is allowing interned men to escape and continue fighting, the British Admiralty put pressure on the British Foreign Office to insist that the Argentine and Uruguayan governments properly interned the Graf Spee and Tacoma personnel and, at the end of the war, that they were repatriated to Germany. The British Secret Intelligence Service, the clandestine Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services were involved with propaganda and deception.
Using predominantly contemporary British documents and newspaper articles from several continents, Bernard O'Connor's two-volume Internment, Escape and Repatriation is a documentary history. It tells through a British filter, the human story of German sailors, Abwehr officers, the British officers in the Admiralty, the Royal Navy, Foreign Office officials and British, American, Argentinian, Uruguayan and Vatican government officials, diplomats and members of the business community.