"All Germans carry an image of Adolf Hitler inside them," I said. "Even the ones like me, who hated Hitler and everything he stood for. This face with its tousled hair and postage-stamp mustache haunts us all now and forevermore and, like a quiet flame that can never be extinguished, burns itself into our souls. The Nazis used to talk of a thousand-year empire. But sometimes I think that because of what we did, the name of Germany and Germans will live in infamy for a thousand years."
-Bernie Gunther

WSJ: How did Directive 11 come about and what was its intention?

Mr. Kerr: Argentina had one of the largest populations of Jews in the world. Sometimes that is a precursor for anti-Semitism, as it was in Poland and Russia. You could argue the same was true there. The junta that took power in the 1930s was very impressed with Nazism and decided that despite the large and productive Jewish population, they didn't want any more. They created a specific directive forbidding anymore Jews to come to Argentina. It's fair to say that similar decisions must also have been made by other governments around the world that refused to take Jewish refugees. But Argentina was the only country that actively repatriated illegal Jewish immigrants. And when they were asked by the German government what to do with Argentine citizens who were Jewish, the Argentines said, do what you want with them. That's what encouraged me to take a leap into the "what if." What if there had been a Directive 12 that created an Argentine concentration camp?
    -INTERVIEW: Exploring Argentina's Anti-Semitic Past: Philip Kerr's latest novel, "A Quiet Flame," examines Directive 11, a secret order issued in 1938 that barred Jews from entering Argentina (JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG, 3/17/09, WSJ)