Latin America, Nazi Party in
Before Adolf Hitler joined the German government in 1933, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was already represented in Latin America. World War I veterans had founded party branches, out of their own initiative, in major cities in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.
Often personal ambition motivated them to further their notion of National Socialism in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. Before 1933 the largest number of party members lived in Brazil (343), Chile (189), and Argentina (156). Paraguay followed with 62 members and Guatemala with 51. Once Hitler became head of the government in Germany, membership mushroomed over the next four years. An internal party census from 1937 counted 2,903 members in Brazil, 1,500 in Argentina, and 985 in Chile. Between 200 and 310 members were part of the ethnic German communities in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Venezuela, Paraguay, and Peru. The AO (Auslandsor- ganisation, Nazi Party Abroad) headquarters in Berlin counted 169 members in Bolivia and 143 in Uruguay. Smaller numbers of party members, always under a total of 70, resided in every other Latin American country. In 1937 the party’s administrative AO section VII in Berlin, in charge of Latin American members and party branches, counted a total of 7,602 party members, the largest total number of foreign party members based on membership by continent (National Archives of the United States 1937).In Germany the NSDAP headquarters tried to influence such initiatives through written correspondence. In 1932 a party organizer traveled from Spain to visit select South American branches for the first time. He gave speeches, provided propaganda, and advised about how to organize a party fundraising operation that collected donations from party members and political sympathizers. Before 1933 party branches focused on collecting money for the electoral victory in Germany, local community politics, and very limited social service activities.
The Chilean branch, led by Willi Koehn, quickly established itself as a model. It operated out of a central headquarters and maintained vibrant branch offices in other urban and rural regions, but also followed propaganda directives from the German home office. Hitler’s rise to power and the NSDAP’s establishment as the party of the state posed the question of the future function of NSDAP branches abroad. In March 1933 power struggles between Nazi leaders Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Robert Ley postponed a redefinition of the party’s purpose. In October 1933 Hess emerged victorious and delegated the task of administering foreign party branches to Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, who had grown up in South Africa. Bohle was an unknown party inspector without a personal power base inside the NSDAP. Nazi political theory, and its racist ideal, demanded total political and social control over all German citizens and ethnic Germans living abroad. This claim met strong resistance from within the German communities in Latin America. In particular, members of conservative and social democratic parties were determined to defend the cultural and political autonomy they had developed in the 1920s. Previous attempts by NSDAP branches to take over community leadership had been brushed aside. Bohle’s first task remained to establish the NSDAP’s political monopoly inside ethnic German communities abroad. Bohle understood his task as the unification, somehow, of all German citizens and ethnic Germans without citizenship into one organizational body. Then they would become a “tool” that, one day, could be used by Hitler. Bohle’s vision received support from Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, Nazi foreign policy theoretician Alfred Rosenberg, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and General Wilhelm Faupel, the head of the Ibero-American Institute, Berlin.In public, Bohle restrained his political and racial fervor. However, behind the scenes, working through expanding government and NSDAP organizations, he fought without restraint.
Rival political parties had to close down and alternative Nazi visions were repressed. Disobedient party leaders were removed from office and alternative political priorities, emerging from the midst of ethnic communities, were discounted. Regardless of local or national host country particularities, by 1935 Nazi Party branches manipulated innocuous cultural and social organizations toward forced unification. Bohle promoted Chilean party leader Koehn to party commissar for South America. Central American and Mexican party branches were administered directly from Germany. In October 1934 Bohle himself assumed control over party work in Brazil.After President Paul von Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Bohle rose further inside the Fascist state. Hess entrusted him with the liaison position that connected the ethnic policy department of the NSDAP and German government offices. During the next twelve months, Bohle focused on developing a bureaucracy that could administer the ideal of an imagined racial community that was not based on German citizenship. Traditional social organizations and government groups, now under party control, provided the avenues to transmit the new directives into Latin America. Their traditional appearance camouflaged their changing work. They intensified racial indoctrination but also support for Fascist economic barter deals and procurement of raw materials for rearmament. By the end of 1935, Bohle could report to Hess that the NSDAP’s political and propaganda monopoly had been established. In Berlin, the NSDAP Foreign Branch had established links with most government agencies. It administered party branches all across the globe. Finally, Bohle revived the idea of creating a ministry of ethnic Germans abroad. Increasingly, the party attacked turf that had been administered by the German Foreign Ministry before. Diplomats increasingly had to work in tandem with party branch leaders.
Foreign affairs, however, began to change the context of Nazi Party work in Latin America.
Soviet Comintern support for a failed coup in Brazil in November 1935 and intensifying activity in republican Spain were increasing fears among Latin American governments about subversive foreign interference. Previously, the Italian Fascio had also been active in select Latin American countries, propagating fascism. Naturally, concern also extended to the expanding presence of the NSDAP branches. Increasingly, the question was raised whether German “racial” separatism might also serve hidden political separatist agendas. Party branch leaders in Latin America reinforced fears. In Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico branch leaders had begun to share official duties with German diplomats. Hess had addressed the issue for the first time in mid-1935. He moved control over party branches in countries under British influence, former German colonies, and the United States away from Bohle to the rising NSDAP foreign policy star Joachim von Ribbentrop. Latin American party branches, however, continued their activism under Bohle, until the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s use of the Falange—at first influenced by the NSDAP—introduced a Spanish-speaking Fascist activism into the Western Hemisphere that went beyond ethnic German communities. In Germany, the rise of Heinrich Himmler and the SS in all political spheres became a new domestic challenge to Bohle and his party bureaucrats. Racial reconstruction began to rival political party activism. Once again, rivalries between Nazi leaders affected political work. Tensions festered until February 1937. Then Ribbentrop and Himmler established complete control over ethnic and racial activism by creating a new coordinating agency called the Volksdeutsche Mittel- stelle (Ethnic German Coordination Office). It favored racial work abroad and devalued overt political work. Racial ideals replaced early Nazi political universalism. The expansion of the Nazi influence in Europe gained priority. Also Fieldmarshall Hermann Goring, head of the Four-Year Plan, insisted that Bohle put economics for rearmament ahead of creating a political tool for Hitler. Brazilian and Argentinean governments, as well as Mexican unions, focused intense parliamentary and press attention on alleged illegal Nazi Party work after 1937. In general, a new emphasis on ethnic assimilation was propagated by Latin American governments. The activities peaked in 1939 during publication of the Juerges forgery proclaiming a Nazi plot that targeted Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia. Bohle’s stature in Germany declined further when Ribbentrop became German foreign minister in 1938. Party work went into a holding pattern and had to focus on administration. A limited amount of salaried positions in the party branches were created and Bohle received a modest secret fund. Political work focused on the indoctrination of ethnic German youth and on eliminating Jewish owners and employees from the economic sectors of communities abroad. Established structures and influence had to be preserved until Hitler and Hess might put the party again ahead of the SS. Party workers abroad busied themselves with education, propaganda, and supplementary intelligence. But party work also meant counseling ethnic families on how to emigrate back to a Germany governed by the Nuremberg racial laws. The Munich Crisis of September 1938 triggered the mobilization of European armies. In Latin America, party branches switched to defensive work. Bohle had received an additional appointment in Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and administered education inside the party in anticipation of the coming war. Once Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939, the party in Latin America worked on keeping the ethnic communities in line, always in expectation of a Nazi victory over Europe. However, Nazi control over all of Europe was never established, and party work never again could move ahead of short-term military needs. Hess’s flight to England in 1941 sidelined Bohle inside the Nazi Party. More then ever, Hitler, Goring, and Himmler focused on racial and economic policies in Europe. In Latin America, German ethnic communities faced economic blacklists and political investigations by Allied intelligence services. The NSDAP network did not protect them and, increasingly, even opted for voluntary dissolution. Berlin’s weakness and the communities’ deteriorating economic situations brought a revival of more individual ethnic German activity in Latin America.Friedrich E. Schuler
See also Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Faupel, Wilhelm; Latin America and Nazi Economic Policy; Mexico
References and Further Reading
Jacobsen, Hans Adolf. Nationalsozialistische Auβenpolitik, 1933—1938. Frankfurt/M, Berlin: Metzner, 1968.
Muller, Jurgen. Nationalsozialismus in Lateinamerika: Die Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP in Argentinien, Brasilien, Chile und Mexico, 1931—1945. Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1997.
National Archives of the United States. Statistik der AO NSDAP. Captured Records of the German Foreign Ministry, 1937 (June 30) Collection # T-120, Roll 78, Frames 60139-60165.
Newton, Helmuth C. The Nazi Menace in Argentina 1931-1937. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1992.
Pommerin, Reiner. Das Dritte Reich und Lateinamerika. Die Deutsche Politik gegenuber Mittel und Sudamerika, 1939-1942. Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1977.
Schuler, Friedrich E. Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1998.