Aunt Anna's was a safe house, an inn in Merano, that was an often used stop for SS members, Nazi perpetrators, and war criminals on their escape, in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Reinhard Kops, for example, a member of the German espionage network used the inn and told of w:de:Emil Gelny, the SS doctor chiefly responsible for the euthanasia murders in the mental institutions of Gugging and Mauer-Öhling also having reached this destination.[1]
Nazi flight in the post war years centred on Italy, an all-important highway for war criminals (Reichsautobahn für Kriegsverbrecher), and South Tyrol in particular, - a "natural hub for members of SS and business circles to reunite and forge connections between Germany, Italy, Spain and Argentina that would secure their escape".[2] The German speaking population of the South Tyrol, Alto Adige, kept strong ties with German ethno-nationalism and it was the first German-language region on the route used by Nazi war criminals to be freed from Allied military government controls, by the end of 1945. (Eichmann used the escape route via the Alto Adige to Genoa in 1950, by which time this escape route was widespread knowledge in SS circles - having reached Sterzing he moved to the Franciscan monastery in the South Tyrol's capital of Bolzano).[3]