The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism: The Patagonia Plot of 1939Author(s): Ronald C. NewtonSource: The International History Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 76-114Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40105102 .Accessed: 22/05/2011 12:16

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The German Argentines between Nazism and Nationalism:

The Patagonia Plot of 1939

RONALD C. NEWTON

around 20 march 1939 the President of the Argentine Republic, Dr. Roberto M. Ortiz, came into possession of a set of documents of potential- ly explosive import. They consisted of photocopies of a secret report, with attachments, concerning Argentina's remote and thinly-settled southern extremity, Patagonia. The report was written on the stationery of the German embassy in Buenos Aires, and was signed by Alfred Miiller, deputy leader of the Landesgruppe Argentinien of the German Nazi party, and Conrad von Schubert, Counsellor of Embassy. It has been sent, under date 1 1 January 1937, to Ritter von Epp of the Colonial Policy Office of the Nazi party at the Brown House in Munich. In it von Epp was informed that the embassy was collecting data on the state of Argentine military defences in Patagonia; that the German Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires, the German banks, and private business firms were all at work assembling economic information on the region; and that such organizations as the German People's League for Argentina (the Volksbund) and the Argentine branch of the German Labour Front (daf) were preparing plans for the founding of German agricultural settle- ments in areas in Patagonia most suitable for the purpose. The report also alluded to aerial photos and to annexes and maps still being compiled from sources within the Argentine Government, including the national petroleum corporation, the national bank, and the war and navy minis- tries. It concluded by observing that despite repeated judicial decisions in international courts affirming Argentine sovereignty in Patagonia, no Argentine administration to date had effectively populated the region and provided it with public services; and that therefore, 'under the aspect of nature', Patagonia was to be considered a no-man's-land - hence available for the taking.1 1 Mttller to von Epp (true copy of disputed document), in: A[uswartiges] A[mt Bonn],

P[olitisches] A[rchiv], Buro des Staatsekretars, Akten betr. Patagonien, Jan. 37- Aug. 39. Two other aa files were kept: Pol Abt ix, Patagonien- Af fare, Mar. 39-May 39, Po 2

The International History Review, in, 1 January 1 98 1

cn issn 0707-5332 © The International History Review

The Patagonia Plot

For about ten days Ortiz kept the matter within his office and made no

public announcement, but at the end of the month his hand was forced. The source of the documents, an anti-Nazi exile named Heinrich Jiirges, who claimed to have photographed them surreptitiously in Germany, passed copies to the daily Noticias Grdficas and the outspokenly anti-Nazi

German-language Argentinisches Tageblatt\ both newspapers published them on 30 and 3 1 March. In the ensuing hue and cry it was alleged that Ortiz had not intended to act upon the documents at all and only did so on

learning that a political opponent, Jose Agusti, the publisher of Noticias

Grdficas, had obtained copies; he then found himself with no choice but to order an investigation.2 As events would show, this was less than fair to Ortiz. He had little enough breathing space in which to sort out a number of issues of great complexity and to choose his course of action.

In March 1939 there could be little doubt that a major European war was about to begin. To most Argentines this was a matter of regret, but the

intensity of that regret declined rapidly in proportion to the years or

generations that separated them from the emigrant's leave-taking of

Europe at Genoa or Trieste, Le Havre or Liverpool, Odessa or Bilbao or

Hamburg. The dominant public mood was complacent and inward-

looking and, in business circles, healthily optimistic. Eduardo Labougle, who returned to Buenos Aires shortly afterwards from ten year's service as his country's Ambassador at Berlin, observed sourly of the Argentines that the booming prosperity had contributed to a sense that 'the Euro-

pean war cannot affect Argentina' other than positively, for they were

anticipating that they would again profit from neutrality as they had

during the First World War.3 But internationalists like Labougle had to be aware of the failure of the international order and of the peril into which weak and more-or-less democratic republics like Argentina were falling. A year before, Austria had been obliterated by the Anschluss. The pre- vious September at Munich the Western powers had delivered Czechoslo- vakia to Germany; even now German troops were occupying Prague and the defenseless remainder of the country. In Spain, Madrid had just surrendered to the Nationalist armies after two and a half years of siege;

Argentinien, Bd 1 ; and Biiro des Chefs der a-o, Argentinien, Fall Miiller, 1 937-40, Bd 75. The affair is discussed in: Arnold Ebel, Das Dritte Reich und Argentinien: die diploma- tischenBezkhungenunterbes.BerucksichtigungderHandelspolitik, 1933-1939 (Koln, 1971), pp. 401- 18; Donald M.McKale, The Swastika outside Germany (Ohio, 1977), pp. 151-2; Reiner Pommerin , Das Dritte Reich und Lateinamerika, 1 939-1 942: die deutsche Politik

gegenuberSud' und Mittelamerika (Dusseldorf, 1977), pp. 65-7; and W. N. Simonson, 'Nazi Infiltration in South America, 1933-1945' Ph.D., Tufts University, 1964, pp. 549-62.

2 us Embassy Buenos Aires 2484, 4 Apr. 1 939, to Secretary of] S[tate], us N[ational] A[rchives,] R[ecord] G[roup] 59, 835.00N/14.

3 Eduardo Labougle, Mision en Berlin (Buenos Aires, 1946), pp. 37-8.

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Ronald C. Newton

the Spanish Republic, shunned by the democracies, abandoned by the Soviet Union after Munich, was expiring in reprisal and recrimination. No one believed it would end there.

The threat to Argentine integrity perceived by Ortiz and his advisors did not include military invasion: Argentina's remoteness from Europe seemed to preclude that. The danger, rather, lay in the ill-defined menace of an internal 'fifth column' (a term which the Spanish Civil War had recently given the world). Argentina's German-speaking minority num- bered a quarter of a million people. At one time the Germans had been prized as among the most desirable of immigrants for their skills, indus- triousness, passion for respectability, and abstention from politics, but more recently doubts had arisen concerning their loyalties. Since early 1933 intensive propaganda had been carried on among them by func- tionaries of the Auslands-Organisation of the nsdap. This had been kept from the public view, however, by the complaisance and press censorship of the previous presidential administration, and it was only with the election of Ortiz himself in September 1937 and the accompanying res- toration of civil liberties that a deluge of incidents and press exposes broke upon an increasingly agitated public. Evidence was also accumulat- ing that the Nazis and the German Embassy had cultivated influential supporters among right-wing Argentines, both civilian and military. Nor could well-informed Argentines fail to be aware of what had been hap- pening in neighbouring Brazil and Chile, both of which also had large, poorly-assimilated, German minorities. In May 1938 the Brazilian fas- cists, the Integralistas, had attempted a coup which was bloodily repressed. In the aftermath the German Embassy was implicated, the Ambassador declared non grata, and diplomatic relations were broken off. In Septem- ber of the same year the Chilean Nacistas had also attempted an uprising; it was suppressed with the loss of sixty-two lives. And how, in March 1939, could anyone ignore the role so recently played by the Sudeten Germans?

Ambassador Labougle returned from Germany with a message for the Argentines. He had approved of the Nazis - particularly their methods of dealing with Bolshevism - when they first came to power, but in the years since 1933 he had grown increasingly alarmed by their cultural nihilism, brutality, and apparently limitless appetite for power. Adolf Hitler had repeatedly assured the world that Nazism was entirely a German concern, that it was 'not for export'; and this had been reiterated by Erich Bohle, Gauleiter of all overseas Germans, and by Bohle's subordinates in Argen- tina. But Labougle no longer believed them. Nor - to judge by his actions in the Patagonia affair - did Ortiz.4

4 loc. cit, also pp. 79, 227-8.

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The Patagonia Plot

Ortiz's response to the revelations of March 1939 was also complicated by anomalies in his own political situation, anomalies which grew out of the course of Argentine statecraft since the 1920s. Argentina in the 1920s was governed under an open presidential and legislative system that seemed, amid the careless prosperity of a boom decade, to be gaining both in sophistication and in the capacity to represent the urban middle classes; even, through the Socialist Party, some sectors of organized labor. The

system was dominated by the Radical Party, nativist and populist, centred in the urban lower middle class, which was largely the creature of its

long- time boss, Hipolito Yrigoyen. These arrangements ended in 1930 because Yrigoyen, at 80, was no longer competent to deal with either the economic repercussions of the world depression or the venality of cronies within his party. He was deposed in September of that year by a military coup which at first had wide popular support. His immediate successor was Lieutenant-General Jose F. Uriburu. Uriburu had been a protege of the pre- 1914 German training missions in Argentina and was later patron of the unofficial German military advisors who returned there in the

1920s. He had been much impressed by the authoritarian, corporatist, and nationalist experiments of Mussolini, Primo de Rivera, and Salazar, and sought to impose a similar regine on Argentina. Outside a small

following, however, his projects met with little approval, even within the

military; in 1931, already mortally ill, he was pushed aside by a rival

military clique headed by General Agustin P. Justo. The traditional landowning classes, although they had ceded political

hegemony, had by no means been dislodged from the economic heights; in a time of worldwide crisis they found it imperative to retrieve one to retain the other. In General Justo the oligarquia had an agent through whom clocks could be set back to the palmy days before the World War when it ruled all Argentina as its own gran estancia. In the 1930s, to be sure, it was not easy to restore the traditional export trade based on grains and livestock products, least of all the vital trade with Great Britain, which was moving towards a system of imperial preferences in agricultural commodities. To retain access to the British market, therefore, the

Argentines were obliged, in the Roca-Runciman Agreement of 1933, to concede sweeping privileges to British investments and imports. The benefits of the restored British tie accrued mainly to a small and senescent elite, while its burdens fell heavily across the social spectrum: on nascent industrialists, on middle-class professionals and bureaucrats (except those, of course, who had made their peace), on workingmen (especially the unorganized), on consumers generally - all of whom became in-

creasingly responsive to nationalistic appeals. To contain discontent, Jus- to resorted to the practices of electoral fraud and police repression that

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Ronald C. Newton

had characterized the oligarquia's heyday. He succeeded in maintaining public order and business confidence and in restoring by 1934 a consider- able prosperity. This was partly cause and partly consequence of the collaboration of the majority of civilian politicians, many of them ex- Radicals (or anti-Yrigoyenists). This collaboration, in perpetuating a re- gime of doubtful legitimacy, limited representation and economic success, was known as La Concordancia.

Justo's selective observance of the Constitution of 1853 required that he have himself elected President in 1932 for a six-year term; and since the constitution specified that a President could not immediately succeed himself, in mid- 1937 he arranged to pass the office to his nominee, Roberto M. Ortiz. It was evident that Ortiz was meant to keep the legacy intact, and that Justo intended to return in 1944 (he didn't, however; he would die in January 1943). In addition to the pressures which Justo, a consummate politician, could bring to bear on his Presidency, Ortiz was also hindered by the Vice-President which Justo's electoral coalition had thrust upon him: Ramon S. Castillo, an arch-reactionary, ex-Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires, and head of the Nationalist Party. Ortiz himself was an amiable legal-trained politician and public functionary with a youthful reputation as a maverick. How- ever, as he had neither an impressive social background nor an indepen- dent political following, there was little reason to suppose that he would violate the expectations with which he had been put in office. And he was known to be in precarious health: he was overweight and suffering from diabetes which was affecting his eyesight. He fought a gallant fight but, by July 1940, advancing blindness compelled him to cede power to Castillo, whom he loathed. He would die in 1942.

Yet once in power, Ortiz made clear his intention to restore Argentine democracy. Civil liberties were reinstated and fraudulent provincial elec- tions dissallowed. With respect to German support for native Argentine fascists and cultivation of the German-Argentine collectivity, Ortiz, dur- ing his year in office, had been fully apprised of the problem; his sym- pathies clearly lay with the anti-fascists. Yet his views were incongruous with those of the political coalition he nominally headed: there, the majority were complacent towards fascism if not mildly approving; a large minority were active collaborators with the Germans.5 At the same time, Ortiz had little reason to trust his natural allies in this issue, a

5 Italian fascist diplomacy was very circumspect. The Germans ascribed this to unwilling- ness to expose the extent of anti-fascist sentiment in Argentina's vast Italian community; they found it regrettable that they could not call on their allies in crises (usually of their own making).

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The Patagonia Plot

dishevelled aggregate of Marxists, Radicals, Jews, and recent anti-fascist exiles from Europe; nor, given the political culture of which he was the figurehead, they him.

The last major element of the equation of March 1939 was economics. That a public airing of the Patagonia documents would provoke a great deal of bluster through German press and diplomatic channels was pre- dictable. Most of it could be discounted, however, for neither side was

prepared to jeopardize a highly valuable economic tie. By 1939 German capital investments in Argentina were exceeded only by those of Great Britain and the United States. The Germans concentrated their efforts in a relatively few branches of industry (chemicals, pharmaceuticals, elec- trical equipment, metallurgical, heavy construction); moreover, to a

greater extent than their rivals, they managed their firms locally, invited the participation of local capital, and reinvested their profits within the

country. In trade, the long-standing problem of an imbalance in Argenti- na's favour had been partly resolved by the conclusion of a new trade

treaty in 1934. It established a 'balanced clearing' system under which

Argentine commodities were sold in Germany against blocked Reichsmark

('Verrechnungsmark'), which were in effect credits usable only for the

purchase of German manufactures. Similar bilateral agreements were the instruments of the German trade offensive throughout Latin America. The Germans thus fell into bitter rivalry with the United States, which for the success of New Deal recovery programs believed itself obliged greatly to expand its export sales in Latin America. The us State Department under Cordell Hull complained endlessly of German trade practices and

proclaimed the virtues of Tan- Americanism' and of 'the open door' in international commerce. German gains in countries such as Brazil, Peru, and Colombia were mainly at British expense rather than American, but the American position in Argentina had undoubtedly weakened since

1929. There the situation was made all the more galling for the Amer- icans by the fact that, unlike their competitors, they had been unable to conclude a satisfactory trade treaty; they were still attempting to obtain one in 1939.6 For their part, the Germans and Argentines were both

eager early in 1939 to close a deal whereby 64 locomotives, 200 railway cars, and other railway equipment would be traded against 100,000 tons

6 Luis V. Sommi, Los capitales alemanes en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1 945), pp. 44, 54; N.P. MacDonald, Hitler over Latin America (London, 1940), pp. 23-6, 67-8; Jiidischer Weltkongress, 'Die deutsche Wirtschaftsoffensive in Sudamerikaa', mss in W[iener] L[ibrary, London]; Royal Institute of International Affairs, Survey of International Affairs 1938, 1. 72-6, 669-74; us L[ibrary of] C[ongress], mss Div, PB 74092, 1.G. Farben Economic Reports: 1 - 1 80 Argentina; lc, mss Div, 62/32/26 1 , Cordell Hull Papers.

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Ronald C. Newton

of wheat and 8,000 tons of wool; it was worth in the aggregate 14,000,000 pesos. But it had not yet been signed when the Patagonia affair burst

upon the Argentine public in the last days of March.7 At 5 pm on 3 1 March, Alfred Miiller, the Deputy Landesgruppenfiihrer of

the Argentine nsdap, was arrested, despite his indignant objection that he was Press Attache to the German Embassy and therefore enjoyed dip- lomatic immunity; he would remain in custody for five weeks. His su-

perior, Von Schubert, had already been transferred out of the country. Also interrogated at this time were the heads of the German Welfare So-

ciety and the Argentine branch of the German Labour Front - the latter, Carlos Fleischer, suffered a bad quarter of an hour trying to explain away the recent revelation that the metal-fabricating firm of Klockner in Buenos Aires was deducting daf dues from employees' pay without their consent and in violation of the Labour Code.8 In remote wind-battered settlements in Patagonia, local police detachments raided German bars and clubs and branches of the great German trading firm of Lahusen and

Company; two German filmmakers working on a nature film near the Chilean border were thrown in jail. In Buenos Aires the investigation was

placed in the charge of a federal judge, Dr. Miguel Jantus, who appointed as a special attorney to report to him, Dr. Victor J. Paolucci Cornejo. On

Jantus's authority well-co-ordinated police raids were carried out on nsdap offices in various quarters of the capital and in provincial cities such as Cordoba, Tucuman, Salta, Bahia Blanca, and Comodora Rivadavia. Prominent German businessmen and bankers, officials of the German Chamber of Commerce, and leaders of the German-speaking community were questioned, and in some cases their houses searched. Large quanti- ties of documents were seized; however, stories of tipoffs by Argentine collaborators circulated, which resulted in the search parties coming up empty-handed.

In the absence of the German Ambassador, Edmund Freiherr von Thermann, who was on home leave, responsibility at the German Embassy fell upon the Charge d'Affaires, Erich Otto Meynen. Meynen was a career diplomat descended, like his wife, from a wealthy industrial- ist family of Cologne. In 1937 he had joined the nsdap to preserve his career, but he, like von Thermann, had little use for men he regarded as

7 Thermann ba an aa 1 8 1 , 30 Nov. 38, aa/pa, Ha Po Abt, Handakten Clodius, Argentinien Bd 4; Buenos Aires Herald, 28 Mar. 20 Apr. and 30 Nov. 1 939; ElMundo (Buenos Aires), 3 Nov. 1939 (editorial); us Dept. of State, memo of conv. with P.C.Jenks, i9july 1939, usna rg 59 635.623 1/85; us Consulate Gen. ba 526, 14 Aug. 1939, to ss, 635.62 17/29; ibid., 29 Nov. 1939, 635.623 1/9 1 ; us Embassy ba 258, 8 Nov. 1939, to ss, 635. 623 1/90.

8 ba Herald, 2 Apr. 1939. See also Juan C. de Mendoza, La Argentina y la swdstica (Buenos Aires, 1941)^.93.

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social upstarts in the leadership of the Argentine Nazi movement; indeed, in the past year, conflict between the Landesgruppe and the Embassy had intensified. Although his defense of German interests in the Patagonia Affair was skilful, Meynen's efforts to obtain Miiller's release from jail do not seem to have been particularly vigorous. He warned the German

Foreign Office on 12 April: 'I have learned that [as a result of the raids] material has been found and seized from which can be determined the role played by Party units in the work of organizing local Deutschtum and

aligning it to the purposes of the Homeland, and the activities they have carried out in detail ... possibly a lot of material will come to light that will be taken critically in the local liberal democratic atmosphere.'9 He recom- mended that the counterattack be concentrated on the questionable au-

thenticity of the Patagonia documents. Heinrich Jiirges claimed to have mailed the documents to President

Ortiz - although Ortiz was notably unceremonious, it is difficult to believe there was no intermediary - and told the press he had been motivated by disillusionment with Nazism. Specifically, he said, his sweetheart Catalina Stohr had been picked up by the Gestapo in Germany, interrogated concerning Jiirges's contacts with surviving members of Otto Strasser's Schwarze Front within the Reich, and held for ten months in a concentra- tion camp. On her release she travelled to Argentina (or Chile) to join him; her health had been so damaged by her experience, however, that she died soon afterwards. According to another version, his mother had also died at the hands of the Gestapo. Jiirges had applied at the embassy for permission to send Catalina's ashes back to Germany but had been rebuffed. Meynen learned that Jiirges had indeed made such a request in

August 1938; he had also promised that he would in return cease his

journalistic activities on behalf of 'the United States' commercial cam-

paign against German interests', and would not participate in 'the Argen- tine investigation of the nsdap'. Jiirges had apparently at one time been close to Goebbels, but according to the Foreign Office he was reputed to be 'politically unreliable'; in the 1930s he had worked for the

Landesgruppenleitung of the Chilean nsdap but had disappeared one day and had turned up somewhat later as an agent of the Schwarze Front.

To the public, however, Meynen merely declared that Jiirges had been convicted several times in Germany in the 1920s on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and forgery; that he had been expelled from the nsdap in

1933; and that he had been stripped of German citizenship in 1937 in

consequence of his work in Chile for the Strasserites. Meynen also

9 Meynen ba an aa 1 056, 1 2 Apr. 1 939, aa/pa, Biiro des Staatsek, file cited. On Meynen see Hoover, fbi, to Lyons, State, 2 1 Aug. 1945; usna RG 59, 'Argentine] B[lue] B[ook],' Box 28, fbi Misc File; fbi memo of conv. with Meynen, Lisbon, 6 Feb. 1946; abb Box 24.

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pointed out discrepancies in the documents which supported his claim that they were forgeries (Miiller, too, insisted they were forgeries, but admitted his signature was genuine). Jiirges did not help his case by changing his story several times about the documents' provenance: first he said they had been brought by Catalina; later he claimed to have received them from a consular secretary in Buenos Aires named Krebs. This was of course denied by Krebs, but he refused to waive diplomatic immunity to testify under oath. Nor would Meynen have permitted him to do so. When asked to produce the original documents from which the

photocopies had been made, Jiirges was unable to. On 7 May, Dr. Paolucci

Cornejo ruled that no physical proof existed that a crime had been committed and ordered Miiller's release; Jiirges was arrested at the same time. He was finally convicted in 1940 on a charge of damaging the relations between Argentina and a friendly power and received a two-

year sentence; the sentence was, however, suspended.10 Amid the uproar, Meynen and the Foreign Minister, Jose Maria Can-

tilo, communicated with each other calmly and professionally, although Meynen's superiors in Berlin frequently made this difficult. On 6 April the Under-secretary of State, Woermann, informed Labougle that the

Foreign Office had conducted its own internal investigation and had found no evidence that the Patagonia documents were genuine; the

Argentines must accept this and consider the matter closed. Cantilo and

Labougle demurred, of course, saying that Argentine opinion could only be satisfied by an Argentine investigation; the Wilhelmstrasse's com- munications thereupon grew increasingly testy and menacing. On 25 April Weizsacker told Labougle that he had lost patience': the German

Embassy's explanation should be the end of the matter. Weizsacker raised his voice for the first time, according to Labougle, and the latter did the same. On the same day Weizsacker ordered Meynen to inform the Argen- tine Foreign Ministry that reprisals would be taken against Argentine citizens residing in Germany if Miiller were not released within forty- eight hours (Wilhelm Faupel's Ibero-Amerikanische Institut in Berlin had already been requested to identify vulnerable Argentines). Labougle was able to blunt this threat, probably by stipulating a date by which the matter would end. * x

10 Gestapo Berlin 11 B3- i479/38g, 6 Apr. 1939 an aa, aa/pa file cited fn. 9; Jiirges an Thermann, 15 Aug. 38: Pol Abtix file cited, 636; Thermann an aa, G 144, 21 May 1937, Inland 11 a/b 83-45A Bd 1 ; Ausbiirgerungsliste 16/1 1 , Anzeiger Nr. 267, 19 Nov. 1937, Inland 11 a/b, 83-76; Meynen an aa, T 1 49 and T 1 50, 5 May 1 939 (on Krebs), T 1 52 , 6 May 39, Biiro des Staatsek, file cited; Thermann an aa, T 1582, 17 Sept. 1941 (on Jiirges's conviction), ibid.

1 1 Three Argentines were detained by the German police on 4 May 1939, Ebel, pp. 408-9; also Labougle, pp. 124-6, 134-5. See Deutsche Diplomatisch-Politische Korrespondenz, 25 Apr. 1939, and Labougle, pp. 137-8, for German press reaction.

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Gauleiter Erich Bohle contributed his share of bluster in a speech at

Leipzig: 'The present-day German Reich is unwilling to stand by with folded arms while its totally guiltless citizens are persecuted. Foreigners must realize that each and every German citizen stands under the protec- tion of a world power, one which will not tolerate that peaceable Germans

living overseas should be mistreated simply because they wish, as honour- able men, to be National Socialists.'12

President Ortiz, for his part, made it clear that more was at stake than an inept forgery and an exchange of diplomatic notes: 'Be the document authentic or no, the incident in itself must be considered as part of the titanic world struggle between opposing politics.'13 On 15 May, following the apparent exoneration of the German leadership, he promulgated a decree directed with special force against the autonomy of the German-

speaking collectivity in the country. Under it, all immigrant associations were ordered to register with the police within ninety days on pain of dissolution. They were forbidden henceforth to use the outward signs or

symbols of nationality, including flags. Their statutes and by-laws were to be published in Spanish exclusively. They must be locally-founded and

governed by local officers democratically elected. They might engage in no activities implying a stand on the politics of third countries. They were forbidden to use threats or rewards to gain ideological adhesion. And

they might receive no foreign financial support aside from small amounts of money devoted to charitable purposes specifically approved by the

Argentine authorities.14 The President's spokesmen denied that the Germans had been in-

vidiously singled out for surveillance: they observed smoothly that should

pro- and anti-fascist sentiment become inflamed in the numerous Italian and Spanish immigrant associations, the potential for public disorder was

great. Most Italian and Spanish community leaders respected the decree, however, whereas the Germans did not. The latter changed the names of all their organizations - the nsdap, for example, became the Federation of German Circles of Benificence - and adopted other measures of

camouflage. The decree was at first enforced haphazardly, but the press and, after mid- 1941, the Parliamentary Commission on Anti- Argentine Activities continued regularly to bring exposes to public attention. Un-

doubtedly the cynicism and deceit thus revealed did more injury to the German cause than immediate compliance with the decree of May 1939 would have done. The responsibility for this, and the consequences, will be considered below.

1 2 Der Auslandsdeutsche (Stuttgart), xn (1939), 510-12. 13 ba Herald, 11 Apr. 1939. 14 Text in Mendoza, pp. 65-8. In German without comment in Deutsche La-Plata Zeitung

(Buenos Aires), 16 May 1939.

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Largely unnoticed amid the clamour, the barter deal between Ger-

many and Argentina, railway equipment for wheat and wool, was signed in the second week of April. It was never consummated, however. Given the international situation, the Argentines were reluctant to deliver com- modities immediately against promises of future German shipments. It was rumoured that the Germans proposed to supply the Argentines with

captured Czech rolling stock, but their own requirements were too great. Cancellation of the deal was announced in November 1939.15

A number of questions need to be asked, and provisional answers

suggested: Were the Patagonia documents forgeries? Almost certainly. At the simplest

level, Meynen's assertion that neither the letterhead, nor some of the bureaucratic language (befehlsgemdss) nor the joint signature (Miiller for the Landesgruppe and von Schubert for the embassy) represented current practice is confirmed by archival material made public since 1945. Jiirges's tangled accounts of the documents' provenance strain credulity. The documents, it should be recalled, purport to derive from a joint venture of the Argentine Nazis and the German diplomatic service, - whose relationship in January 1937 was cool at best - to enlist the services of a great number of private German-Argentine individuals - many of them employees of well-established German or Argentine business firms, the Argentine government, or reputable communal institutions, to carry out a vast amateur espionage operation. This, too, is scarcely believable. It is not impossible that a cabal of Nazi leaders, in a fit of exaltation, sketched some such taradiddle on a beer-stained tablecloth in a Gasthaus in Bel- grano; it is remotely possible that von Schubert on his own authority was somehow involved (the idea was canvassed in the Foreign Office internal investigation, but von Schubert seems to have cleared himself, as did Krebs). Not even the Buenos Aires Herald, the voice of the British commun- ity, could believe in The Plot: 'We took the line that the local Germans were not so foolish as they were said to be. They have their clubs, their parades, their rather absurd training of children, but they certainly never dreamt of snatching Argentine territory for Hitler/16

But according to Labougle, Hitler did not want it either. In their last interview, as Labougle was about to return home in June 1939, the Fiihrer told him: 'Everything the American Jewish press attributes to me is ridiculous - for example, that I want to conquer Canada or even occupy Patagonia!'17 Hitler's statements to foreign diplomats are hardly a definitive source for his territorial ambitions, of course, but in this matter

15 Seefn. 7. 1 6 ba Herald, 6 May 1 939. 17 Labougle, p. 264.

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he can probably be believed, for much recent research confirms his lack of interest in expansion into the Western Hemisphere.18

Who then was responsible? J urges was certainly involved; he admitted as much. But his record does not support the thesis, which the German

Foreign Office eventually accepted, that the Patagonia Affair arose from

Jiirges's solitary 'act of revenge'; Jurges was not that sort of man.19 The reasons why the Germans may have been willing to accept such an ex-

planation will be considered below; for the moment be it observed that before fixing on Jiirges's sole responsibility, they considered two other

possibilities: the Jews and the Americans - the latter presumably eager to

sabotage the pending German- Argentine barter deal. Although the evi- dence is far from conclusive, material that has become available since the war forces one to look at these hypotheses seriously.

To begin with, the Patagonia Affair did not blow up out of the blue in mid-March 1939. Since the beginning of the year rumours of intrigue in

Patagonia had been circulating in Buenos Aires; moreover, a brisk trade had sprung up in purported National Socialist documents. The easiest thread to follow shows up first in the Corresponsal argentino, the organ of the Comite contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo, which had first appeared in

1937. The Comite1 s leaders included prominent non-Jewish Argentines of the near-Left such as the future Radical president, Arturo Frondizi, but there is little doubt that its moving force was the Argentine Communist

Party. In the CorresponsaVs issue of 20 February the lead article was titled

1 8 See the postwar interrogations of Erich Bohle (abb Box 21), L.S. Pamperrien (abb box

24), and Edmund Freiherr von Thermann (especially that of 1 1 July 1945; abb Box 26). The earlier thesis of grandiose Nazi aims in the Americas found in such writers as Frye, Kannapin, Katz, Kossok, Simonson, and Trotz, was challenged as early as 1 959 by the Dutch journalist Louis de Jong, Die deutsche fu'nfte Kolonne im zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1959). For German foreign policy under the Nazis, Jacobsen and Weinberg are basic. For the western hemisphere, see also Holger H. Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1 889-1 941 (Boston, 1976); McKale; Pommerin; and

especially Hans Jurgen Schroder, 'Hauptprobleme der deutschen Lateinamerikapolitik, 1 933- 1 94 1 \Jahrbuchfiir die Geschichte von Stoat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas, xii ( 1 975), 408-33. For Argentina, Ebel is authoritative though indulgent to the Auswar-

tige Amt (not to the Nazis); see also Harold F. Peterson, Argentina and the United States, 1810-1960 (New York, 1964). Ryszard Stemplowski's study of the rivalry between the

Anglo-Saxon powers and the Third Reich over Argentina (Warsaw, 1 975) is inaccessible to most western scholars; its footnotes and Spanish chapter summaries suggest a slender document base.

1 9 See Ebel, pp. 416-17, and Jurges an Thermann, 8 Oct. 1 939, in aa/pa Inland 11 a/b, file cited, for Jiirges's boasting and attempts to extort money from the embassy after the

Patagonia excitement abated. In 1 945, on learning that Thermann might be tried as a war criminal, Jurges denounced the ex-ambassador for the alleged murder of an anti- Nazi German in Buenos Aires in 1939. us Embassy Montevideo 6744, 2 1 Dec. 1945, abb Box 2, File 24.

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'Secessionist Propaganda in Patagonia Must Be Investigated'. It reported that a project to establish 'the United States of the South' was afoot; the new country would be 'nominally independent', but would in fact be 'under the aegis of a powerful European State.' These rumours must have been well known, for the Director of National Territories, Lieutenant- Colonel Guglialmelli, was reported in the article to have said that the charges of foreign subversion were unfounded and would not be investi-

gated. A later issue of the journal reported that Dr. Grassi, President of the Development Commission for the National Territories, had de- nounced the secessionist work of the German National Socialists but had been ignored.

In March the International Congress for American Democracy, with which the Comite was affiliated, held sessions across the La Plata in Monte- video. The Corresponsal gave much space to the activities of the us delega- tion and its head, the Argentine-born, us-trained anthropologist, Dr. David Efron. It was later noted that Efron had taken copies of the

Patagonia documents back to the us and had caused them to be published there as early as 1 2 April. One of the theses considered within the German

Foreign Office was that Efron had been the agent for 'the Jews' in the

Patagonia Affair.20 The Corresponsal of 20 February reported also that President Ortiz had

recently given an interview to Clem J. Randau, Vice-President of United Press. Randau had apparently picked up the rumours concerning Pata- gonia; Ortiz told him, however, that there was no foreign penetration there. Aside from Ortiz's reaction, the conversation is of interest because American newsmen, particularly Henry Johnston of Associated Press, had recently been buying purportedly confidential Nazi documents from German sources; Johnston, in turn, had passed some of these to us diplomats in Buenos Aires. On 7 February the us Consulate-General cited one such document concerning German-American commercial rivalry which had been sent from the nsdap Landesleitung in Buenos Aires to

Parteigenosse Erich Bohle at Auslands-Organisation headquarters in Ham-

burg (but Bohle by this time had been taken into the Foreign Ministry and had his office in Berlin). On 28 February the consulate reported directly 20 El corresponsal argentino (Buenos Aires), xx (2ojan. 1939), xxn (20 Feb. 1939), xxv (5

Apr. 1939); ba Herald, 15 Apr. 1939 (reporting us reaction): Auslandsdeutsche xxu ( 1939), 510-12. Efr6n's father, an official of the Jewish Colonization Assn., was well connected in

Jewish business circles in Buenos Aires. David was a student of Franz Boas at Columbia

University and persuaded Boas to serve as Honorary Chairman of the Congress. If there was an intrigue, he did not mention it to Boas in their correspondence. He was an official of the National Planning Assn. in Washington in 1 942 and a consultant of the coi, predecessor of the oss. After the war he worked for the International Labour Office in Geneva.

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to the Under-secretary of State, Summer Welles, (as it now had permis- sion to do in 'spy matters') on 'Alleged German Activities in Patagonia'. It cited another document from the Landesleitung in Buenos Aires, this one dated 3 January 1939 and directed to Parteigenosse Fleischhauer of the

Weltpressedienst in Erfurt. The anonymous local author wrote, 'We have achieved great influence through our work in Patagonia. Friends won for

Germany by Gunther Pluschow stand today by our side ... also Argentines ... Patagonia has always been treated on the part of the Argentine State as a stepchild ... possibility of obtaining a colony in Tierra del Fuego.'21

On 3 March, S. Pinckney Tuck, Counsellor of the us embassy, for- warded six more documents that he and Consul-General Davis had got- ten from Johnston (the latter had recently been transferred to Santiago and Tuck wanted assurance that he would be reimbursed for the money Johnston had been advanced). The documents covered various matters, including German attempts to gain information from crewmembers of the cruiser uss Phoenix, recently in port at Buenos Aires. He was con- vinced they were genuine. One of the documents had been cited by John Whitaker of the Chicago Daily News. Since then, according to Tuck, the local nsdap had become nervous about traitors within its ranks.22

Who were the 'traitors'} One possibility is Eric Spuerckel, who in 1940 offered his services to the us Consulate. Spuerckel had been twelve years in Argentina and was a house-painter by trade. He had worked for the local nsdap and claimed good contacts among important local Germans: his wife was cook to Christian Zinsser, at that time the resident Gestapo chief. He had already passed titbits to the Americans (date unspecified). In 1941 the State Department carded him as a forger of documents who had sold material on the Nazis to various persons; Spuerckel was then

claiming earlier connections with the us Embassy or the Secret Service. He was a friend of Jiirges.23

The immediate source from whom Johnston received the documents 2 1 us Consulate Gen. ba 27 1 , 7 Feb. 1939, to ss, 800.202 10/243; ibid., no number, 28 Feb.

1939, to Welles, 800.202 10/24 1$. The German Embassy was overjoyed with the Randau interview, for Ortiz had rejected the threat to Patagonia as a 'fairytale'. He was frank about economic problems with the us and spoke approvingly of the pending railroad deal with the Germans. If Thermann's interpretation is correct, the motive for an American intrigue became stronger at that time. Thermann an aa, 4 Feb. 1 939, T 1 20/

218/168276. 22 us Embassy ba, 3 Mar. 1939, to Welles (personal strictly confidential), 800.202 10/247$. 23 us Consulate Gen. ba, memo of conv. 5 June 1940, 862.20235/365; usna rg 59 Purport

Book 800.202 10ES; Freies Deutschland Bewegung [i.e., Black Front], Information (Buenos Aires), 62 1/41 (11 Nov. 1941). Spuerckel had access to nsdap circles but J urges did not. The Information note warns Black Front members against associating with either man. It had been rumoured several years earlier that Jiirges had stolen Black Front funds. He and Spuerckel seem to have been freelances without ideology or affiliation.

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was, however, one Karl Rhodin, a Jewish newspaperman who alleged he had been mistreated by the Nazis. Rhodin in turn got them from an unnamed contact - a man pressed for money with which to keep a mistress on an insufficient nsdap salary - in the office of Paul Gerhard Siemssen. Siemssen had been running the Landesgruppe's press office out of the embassy for three years and was undoubtedly an influential Nazi, yet he remains a shadowy figure. A handwritten note by Dr. L.S. Pamper- rien in the Foreign Office files describes him as: 'Many years a business- man in Chile, in his late fifties. When Herr von Kohn was nsdap Overseas- Commissar for South America and Press Attache in Buenos Aires, he

brought Siemssen with him to work up press material there. Siemssen is

paid by the Propaganda Ministry [Promt].924 Willi Kohn, Siemssen's pat- ron, had been one of the most energetic and ruthless Nazi organizers in southern South America. A one-time travelling salesman in phonograph records, he had been the organizer of the Chilean Landesgruppe and had been called to Buenos Aires early in 1933 to preside over the

Gleichschaltung of the Argentine Germans; in doing so he had supplanted the ineffectual Dr. Gottfried Brandt, nominal nsdap Landesfuhrer for

Argentina. Kdhn's work so impressed Bohle that the latter made him Overseas-Commissar for all South America with headquarters in Buenos Aires. Kohn proved so meddlesome and overbearing, however, that the administrative experiment was eventually abandoned (he was the only nsdap Overseas-Commissar ever named). He irritated the Argentine Nazis

by placing cronies from Chile in high posts; he irritated the embassy by attempting to place nsdap members, starting with himself, on the dip- lomatic staff. This served, of course, to provide diplomatic cover for Party activities; in the snobbish view of von Thermann it also satisfied the

yearning for social respectability from which almost all Nazis suffered.25 Kohn held diplomatic status as Press Attache at the Buenos Aires embassy from August 1934 until he was appointed Consul at Salamanca in Fran- co's Spain late in 1938. Thereafter Alfred Miiller claimed the post, and Siemssen figured as Miiller's assistant (and in fact did the work). By March 1939, however, von Thermann had not yet taken the necessary steps to obtain Argentine recognition of their diplomatic status. When the Pata- gonia affair broke, therefore, Miiller landed in jail and Siemssen re- mained extremely vulnerable.

Given Siemssen's political backing - not only Kohn and Bohle but also Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry - it clearly behooved Meynen to

24 On Meynen's T98, 7 Apr. in Ha Pol, Handakten Clodius Bd 5. 25 On Kohn: Jiidischer Weltkongress, 'Die kunstliche Schaffung deutscher Minderheiten

in Siidamerika', mss in wl, p. 8; Bohle interrogation; Thermann interrogations of 10

May 1945 and 10 Dec. 1945.

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handle his defence with great care. On 7 April Meynen cabled the Wilhelmstrasse for instructions and received the unhelpful advice that

although Siemssen had not been reported to the Argentine Foreign Ministry as a diplomat, he should be treated as an 'embassy employee'. On the 12th, Critica mentioned his name in the public press for the first time. Meynen reported that the idea of slipping him out of the country and into

Uruguay had been broached; he objected, however, that such a trip, if

exposed, would arouse great suspicion. On the 21st, Woermann in the

Foreign Ministry reported that the Propaganda Ministry had no objection to Siemssen's recall in view of the 'danger of his being compromised in connection with the well-known events'; on the 26th, Meynen reported that Siemssen was prepared to leave at any moment despite the risk. About that time, however, the danger began to abate. It is unclear whether he left or not, but his name does not appear again in

Landesgruppe affairs.26 In the diplomatic correspondence no hint appears of the annoyance

Meynen and the Foreign Office must have felt. It seems highly likely, after all, that the Patagonia documents began their journey to Ortiz's desk in Siemssen's office. It may be that Siemssen was negligent in permitting a subordinate to attempt to raise pocket-money by selling off a forgery to the opposition - perhaps, even, he was the principal - or it may be that Siemssen was attempting a venture in 'disinformation' with which to discredit the opposition. In whatever case the venture backfired; Siems- sen's performance can only have been judged most adversely. On this

hypothesis a forger like Spuerckel might have been employed at some

stage to embellish the documents; on the same hypothesis, Jiirges was the

messenger and front man. His previous record establishes his capacity for

forgery, blackmail, extortion, and random mischief with pecuniary ends; his subsequent wartime service as an imaginative and mistrusted infor- mant to the Allies confirms it.27 He does not seem the man for an act of disinterested revenge. That the German Foreign Office so easily accepted

26 Meynen an aa, 7 Apr. 1939; ibid., 12 Apr. 1939; memo, Woermann, aa, citing agree- ment of Propaganda Ministry officials to Siemssen's recall; Meynen an aa, 26 Apr. 1939: Pol Abt ix, 614. This Siemssen should not be confused with August Siemsen (note spelling), a distinguished anti-Nazi leader in Buenos Aires, publisher oiDasAndere Deutschland.

27 When the Hellmuth mission was exposed and Germany and Argentina broke relations in January 1 944, Jiirges published purported German documents to La Razdn of Monte- video, dlpz, 23 and 26 Jan. 1 944. He gave or sold a long report on recent Nazi arrivals to the us Embassy in Montevideo on 26 Sept. 1 944 ; this was sent (with misgivings) to

Washington by cable 908 of same date 862.20235/9-2644. The Buenos Aires embassy checked the data and found most of them pure fantasy, us Embassy ba 16737, 29 Nov.

1944, toss, 862.20235/11-2944.

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this explanation is quite possibly due to reluctance to ventilate Siemssen's activities.

Whom was Jilrges fronting for? It is impossible to say. One must be wary here of the post hoc propter hoc fallacy. Ortiz skilfully took advantage of the Germans' embarassment, for example, but in view of the trade negotia- tions scheduled for March, it is unlikely that he would have sanctioned

any intrigue beforehand. The Americans, for their part, continued as late as April 1939 to complain of the economic influence of German, Italian, and Argentine fascists which prevented them from gaining relief for us

imports; they also complained that 'unfortunately British commercial interests still have the point of view of 1933/ The consulate expressed satisfaction, however, at the Germans' discomfiture and the weakening of their position. But it was not until after the outbreak of war in September that us sales began to rise steeply.28

Granted that the Patagonia plot was a mare's nest, was the Fifth Column danger sufficiently grave to warrant the Decree of 15 May 1939? To illuminate the

perspective from which President Ortiz saw events in early 1939, a sketch of the history of Argentina's German-speaking collectivity is necessary.

Article 25 of the Argentine Constitution of 1853 laid a positive require- ment on government to foment European immigration. Under enabling legislation - openhanded until the depression of the early 1930s - more than 6,000,000 had come; of these, just under half remained to make new homes on Argentine soil. The immigrant flood spread across a broad

undeveloped land whose original polulation numbered little more than 1,000,000 in the mid-nineteenth century. Immigrants not only built the land, to make it by 1914 one of Europe's chief sources of foodstuffs, fibres, and other industrial commodities, they also in the process created a genetically and culturally new Argentine people. This surely had not been foreseen by the founding fathers, whose chief concern had been to attract a cheap and docile labour force; but by the twentieth century the goal of immigration legislation had become, as Dr. Paolucci said in one of the key documents of May 1939, to induce 'the immigrant mass to partici- pate in the formation of a homogeneous national race.'29

28 us Consulate Gen. ba, 14 Apr. 1939, to Welles (strictly confidential), 800. 202 10/31 6; ba Herald, 2 and 19 Dec. 1939.

29 Paolucci's legal opinion of 7 May 1 939 enlarging on the decision not to prosecute Muller, cited in full inMendoza, p. 52. On the history of the Germans in Argentina see Hermann Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen evangelischen Gemeinde Buenos Aires, 1 843-1 943 (Buenos Aires, 1942); Wilhelm Lutge, Werner Hoffmann, and K.W. Korner, Geschichte des Deutschtums inArgentinien (Buenos Aires, 1 955). Both offer much detail on the nineteenth century and are weak on the twentieth. For the twentieth-century antecedents to the Nazi

period see R.C. Newton, German Buenos Aires, 1900- 193 3: Social Change and Cultural Crisis (Austin, 1977).

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Eighty per cent of the immigrants who remained were of Latin origin, mainly Italian and Spanish. In the nineteenth century the Germans contributed only a miniscule portion of the immigrant stream: 25,000 of nearly 1,700,000 up to 1895. Attempts to found closed German-speaking farming communities were unsuccessful; in this respect the Germans' experience in Argentina differed markedly from that in Brazil or Chile. In the cities, however, Buenos Aires above all, they prospered. Agents of German merchant houses began to arrive shortly after independence in 1810, and were soon followed by soldiers of fortune, displaced artisans, and assorted urban types. Many of the early-comers (like early-comers among the English and other northern Europeans) married into

bourgeois Creole clans and/or acquired rural property recently wrested from the pampas Indians; in this way theyjoined the landed oligarquia still in the process of formation. In the same years the city-dwellers created, in the absence of appropriate Creole institutions, a network of churches, schools, clubs, and welfare agencies through which almost all social wants could be met in a German cultural context. The impression of this ethnic

community left by memoirs and the lively nineteenth-century periodical press is that of an intensely convivial, socially-homogeneous, pre- industrial small town.

Between the 1870s and the First World War the raw new country was transformed by European capital, technology, and manpower, and was articulated to the world trading system of which industrial Europe was the motor and principal beneficiary. The population rose to 8,000,000 by 1914, of whom 1,600,000 lived in Buenos Aires. The social composition of the German-speaking collectivity reflected these changes. The upper strata of the business and landowning classes grew immeasurably more

wealthy; the urban artisans were nearly wiped out by the competition of

factory-made European goods and of less-demanding workingmen from southern and eastern Europe. The place of the artisans at the middle of the social order was taken by white-collar office workers and professionals who found employment in the increasing number of German branch concerns, the Argentine schools, and technical branches of the public service. On the land, Russian-German peasants began to found closed settlements in Entre Rios Province in the 1870s. In the decade before the First World War a second wave of Russian-Germans, augmented by land-hungry descendants of the original settlers, founded another zone of compact colonies in southern Buenos Aires Province and adjacent areas of La Pampa Territory. The founding of the German Empire in

1871 had profound consequences: the formerly cosmopolitan merchants turned increasingly to representation of German manufactures and

capital consortia and identification with imperial fortunes. A fervent

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nationalism also overtook the middle classes and was inculcated in the schools. It was given a fillip by the appearance in 1 900 of the first cadres of German military instructors contracted by the Argentine Army and later

by periodic visits by warships of the new Imperial Navy. When war came in August 1914 the Germans in Argentina - perhaps

100,000 of them with ties to the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires - found themselves isolated in a country ostensibly neutral but in fact bound in many ways to Great Britain, France, and the Entente. In 1916 the German Legation, under Count von Luxburg, attempted for the first time to create a lobbying organization to further German interests: the result was the Deutscher Volksbund fur Argentinien (German People's League for Argentina). The strife which overtook the Volksbund almost

immediately was prophetic of much that would occur in the 1930s. A number of its leaders, notably the Swiss-German Alemann family, re-

jected the thesis that the fortunes of the German cultural community worldwide were coextensive with those of the German Empire, and

placed alleviation of local distress higher in the organization's priorities than furtherance of Berlin's wartime aims. The war, in fact, brought unemployment or economic retrenchment to most of the Argentine Germans, but it also brought enormous profits to those merchants of easy conscience who traded with Germany's enemies. The combination of economic distress and patriotic indignation led to the 'popular assemblies' held by the common folk of the Buenos Aires community in November and December 1918 in sympathy with the German Revolution and the

founding of the Republic. The business classes, for their part, remained

openly hostile to Weimar.

Argentina in the 1920s exerted a great pull on the German imagina- tion. As the country had remained neutral throughout the war, the German-controlled economic enclave had not only remained intact but had in fact expanded. It was therefore easy, amid the general postwar hostility to Germany, fears of ruinous reparations, and threats of Ger-

many's internal collapse, to attract German investors. The most notable economic development was the growth of branch-plant manufacturers: Mannesmann, Krupp, Thyssen, Klockner, aeg, Bayer, Merck, Schering, and a host of I. G. Farben subsidiaries were set up; by 1939 several of them were doing a lively export trade to the rest of the western hemisphere.

German-speaking immigrants came also in sizeable numbers, perhaps 130,000 from war's end to the beginning of the depression; their annual

contingents usually ranked third in numbers behind the Spaniards and Italians. They included ex-soldiers, Freikorps volunteers, and ex- Monarchist officials unreconcilable to the Weimar Republic; skilled tradesmen, white-collar workers, students without prospects, shopkeep-

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ers ruined by the inflation; also many peasants and townspeople from former enclaves of German settlement in eastern Europe. Whatever their

provenance, gaining a foothold in Argentina was difficult for the immi-

grants of the 1920s; at least 55 percent of the Reichsdeutsch left again. By this time the grain- and cattle-raising pampa heartland was all but com-

pletely occupied; opportunities there existed only for those in possession of large start-up capital. Would-be agriculturalists were therefore directed to new ventures on the periphery of the pampa: the orchards of the Rio Negro Valley in the south or the cotton plantations of the Chaco and the citrus and yerba mate groves of Misiones in the north. Life in the

pioneer colonies was hard and the economic situation precarious; failures were common. The unsuccessful drifted back to Buenos Aires, there to meld with white-collar immigrants whose situation was little better. By 1938 the German-speaking population of the republic was estimated at

237,000, not including German Jews. Of these, well over half were

peasants of Russian or east European background; 43,600 were Reichsdeutsch. The largest German-speaking community was that of Buenos Aires: 45,000 persons, 20,000 of whom were Reichsdeutsch.

Self-identification as a persecuted minority was all that remained of wartime solidarity. The political split that first appeared in 1918 was

perpetuated in the factional feuding of the 1920s. The left was repre- sented by workingmen's associations grouped around the Socialist club Vorwarts, a Republican Association, and the liberal-bourgeois daily Argentinisches Tageblatt. The right was coextensive with the business elite; it was represented by veterans' associations, a monarchist group, a branch of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, and the daily Deutsche La-Plata Zeitung. Increased immigration and increasing scarcity placed greater financial demands on voluntary associations and at the same time weakened popu- lar support. Large business firms and the very wealthy therefore streng- thened their hold on the leadership of schools, churches, sport and musical clubs, welfare and mutual assistance funds, the hospital, job- placement bureaux, and regional associations (Landsmannschaften). In

1932 there was a total of 119 such associations in the Greater Buenos Aires area alone.

Political bickering was symptomatic of deeper malaise. In part the latter was a function of economic hardship, especially that of newcomers, and of decline in status, especially as perceived by residents of longer standing. But anxiety over socio-economic status was aggravated by anxiety over the rate at which Germans were being assimilated to Argentine society (or linking into Kreolentum'). The fact of assimilation was nothing new: by the

1920s many of the famous founding families maintained only pro forma contact with the German-speaking collectivity. In all but patronymic they

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were Creole oligarchs, and to assimilation at this level of status there had never been perceptible objection. After the 1880s, ascent into the landed oligarquia became less frequent, but by that time the urban communities had created a social environment that insulated them from the absorptive processes at work in the new country. Under oligarchic rule, pressures from above on foreigners to assume the obligations of citizenship were nil - indeed, the oligarchs were quite aware that the smaller the politically- active class, the less the likelihood of disturbance. The more insidious effects on foreign residents worked from below: in language and cus- toms, sports and entertainments, work groups and trade unions, sexual liaison, marriage, and the founding of families. Against these processes, however, the Germans, like other high-status foreign communities, not-

ably the British, threw up sturdy insular defences: bourgeois norms of behaviour, voluntary associations, Protestantism, and extensive educa- tional facilities in the mother tongue. The professional, technical, and clerical occupations held by Germans gave them income with which to

keep up a middle-class way of life. In these occupations they were seldom troubled by competition from Creoles - had, indeed, seldom to be aware of them - until the First World War.

With straitened circumstances after 1918, all this changed. The major- ity, more vulnerable now to assimilative pressures at the everyday level, had also to be aware that Creoles were beginning to rise in the social order to occupational and income levels once monopolized by Europeans. The Radical Party, in power since 1916, was committed to nationalism. Many of its measures were as yet only pinpricks, but one had to fear what might come. Schooling was, of course, a crucial issue, for in this decade the

foreign-language school system, which provided prestigious and often indispensable supplements to the public systems, began to be compelled to employ Argentine citizens to teach the nation's geography, history, and civics; to use Spanish more effectively; and to promote respect for the flag and other patriotic symbols. Many German schools evaded these provi- sions flagrantly, but the process of assimilation went on anyway. After the war not only were relatively few parents able to send their children to Germany for schooling, they could not realistically hope for German careers for them either. The practical considerations in favour of ac-

quiescing in the children's use of Spanish and their vocational prepara- tion for life in Argentina were great. Thus, by 1930 the German-language schools were providing a German component at most to what was essen- tially Argentine schooling.

About 1930 the mood of the German Argentines was compounded of anxiety concerning status (socio-economic and cultural); resentment to-

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wards those more successful in 'Making America'; hostility towards the ever more assertive Creoles; and yearning for a mythicized past of Ger- manic might and prestige. Their mostly inchoate feelings were shaped and expressed by such popular writers as A.E. Gross and Max Rene Hesse, from whose journalism and fiction arises clearly a detailed apolo- gia for the 'left-wing' variety of National Socialism (both men had been leftist activists in the popular assemblies of 1918): a National Socialism which combined denunciations of the Versailles Treaty with denuncia- tions of tired privileged elites and the capitalist order generally; and

promises of German national revindication with promises of a place in the sun for Germany's hard-working little people, its schaffendes Volk. Despite much rhetoric and rodomontade, however, this is not the variety of National Socialism the German Argentines got.

Documentation for the early years of the National Socialist epoch in

Argentine is somewhat scanty. It began early in 193 1 when meetings of a Nazi Vereinigung were held aboard Hamburg-Sud ships at anchor at Buenos Aires, probably on the initiative of Nazi Bordzellen on the ships. In

May a Buenos Aires local (Ortsgruppe) of the nsdap was set up ashore. Its local leadership was drawn from down-at-heel ex-officers. The first (self- proclaimed) Landesfuhrer was one Captain (Inactive) Rudolf Seyd, a sales- man of advertising space for the local German-language newspapers. According to the German Legation in Buenos Aires, Seyd was a known deadbeat who had recently been involved in steamy divorce proceedings - hardly recommendations in a community still dominated by a pinched Wilhelmian gentility. Seyd soon became embroiled in controversy with the local leftists and challenged the editor of the Argentinisches Tageblatt, Dr. Ernst Alemann, to a duel (which Alemann refused disdainfully). His

colleagues simultaneously opened hostilities with the traditionalists by denouncing Chancellor Bruning, President Hindenburg, and members of the diplomatic mission in Buenos Aires. One of them, an ex-major named Schneider, attacked the senior German military advisor to the

Argentine army, Johann Kretzschmar, on a number of counts including the assertion that Kretzschmar was crazy; had the Argentines learned of the scandal, it might have discredited the entire cadre of advisors. Seyd's group disappeared shortly thereafter; however, their antics had made the work of later organizers extremely difficult. By the end of 1932 a

30 aa/pa, Inland 11 a/b, Akten betr. NS-Ortsgruppen im Ausland, Bd 1 ( 1 933-4) bis Bd 7 ( 1 936-7), is a repository for fascinating material from all over the world. It contains

nothing on Argentina. Either a separate file, now lost, was maintained on the tumultuous affairs of Landesgruppe Argentinien, or these seven volumes were combed of such material at some time.

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Landesgruppe Argentinien, comprising the Buenos Aires local, 7 'strong- points', and 315 members, was in existence. Sometime during this period one Bruno Fricke arrived from Germany to take charge. Details of his incumbency have disappeared but it can only have been disastrous, for Fricke later reappeared as leader of Strasser's Schwarze Front in Argen- tina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. In 1935 he was stripped of his German citizenship; until the end of the Second World War he would maintain a hole-and-corner existence as head of the most disreputable strain of the anti-fascist resistance in southern South America.31

When Hitler came to power in January 1933 the Argentine Landesfuhrer was Dr. Gottfried Brandt. Brandt owned a small factory that manufactured chemicals and hair tonic; his passion was amateur theatre. He was later described as 'an idealist', 'not a dangerous man'. He had little

rapport with the working-class firebrands who dominated the local Nazi movement. He resigned as Landesfuhrer in 1934, but not before the

energetic and brutal Chilean-German, Willi Kohn, had been called in - as was noted earlier - to organize the festivities in which the Argentine- German collectivity welcomed the coming to power of the Nazis in Ger-

many. These took the form of mass rallies at which local choral groups sang the Horst WesselLied, community leaders spoke, and the executive committees of the voluntary associations declared their adherence to the New Order. By November 1933, at a rally in support of the German

government's departure from the Disarmament Conference and the

League of Nations, 103 executive committes offered their endorsement. In that month Thilde Deckner of Buenos Aires wrote, on the stationery of the German Women's Club, to a Dr. Boye of Halle: 'All the clubs here, the

sport and school organizations, chamber of commerce, and so on, are entirely behind Hitler and his policies. Unfortunately in the schools there are still some non-conformists, opponents, Communists, who we hope will be fired as soon as the new minister gets here.' But in December Daniel Soemmering, an immigrant then in his sixties who had joined the Party in Argentina, unburdened himself to the newly-arrived minister: 'The opponents of our Third Reich have already been laughing in my

3 1 Vernehmung ehem. Botschafter Edmund Freiherr von Thermann, 9 Oct. 1 947, Staats- archiv Nurnberg; VolkischerBeobachter (Berlin), 26 June 193 1 ; Minister Keller, ba, 878/31, 3ijuly 1931, an aa; ibid., 1023/31, 14 Aug. 1 931, an aa;C. Schneider, ba, an Minister Keller, 3 1 Oct. 1 93 1 : all in aa/pa hi, Po 25 Arg, 1 920-36, Bd 1 ; Keller 616/31,1 June 1931; HemmenBA 1047/31,21 Aug. 1931; Keller 1272/31, 1 7 Oct. 3 1 ; Minister Kaufmann, 471/33, 25 Apr. 1933: all in Kulturabt A-via, Forderungdes Deutschtums in Argentinien, 1920-36. On Fricke see: Denkschrift, 'Argentinien 1936/ s/Franz Schubert (pseud.), Inland 11 a/b, Akten betr. die Schwarze Front, 1935-37; Bruno Fricke, 'Bericht 1945: Die Entwicklung in Lateinamerika seit 1932,' Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Mun- chen, Ed n8,Bd2o.

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face. They say the Hitler regime only holds festivals and praises itself, but

nothing gets done!'32 Unfortunately the Third Reich's diplomatic mission to Argentina was

also getting off to a wobby start. In January 1933 President Hindenburg named Heinrich Ritter von Kaufmann-Asser to the recently vacated min- isterial post in Buenos Aires, and Kaufmann duly arrived aboard the Cap Arcona on 1 7 March. Kaufmann had an excellent record both as an officer in the First World War and as a diplomat. According to the Deutsche La-Plata Zeitung he quickly won the support of the business community with his view that the various 'tendencies' and 'movements' in Germany could now, under Hitler's strong central government, set aside their differences and proceed to rebuild 'the German house'. It is doubtful that such a pluralist view would have been congruent with the Nazi

Weltanschauung', in any case Kaufmann had Jewish forbears and, under the Law for the Reform of the Civil Service of April 1933, he was

summarily dismissed. He was required, however, to remain at his post until a suitable replacement could be found. The implacably right- thinking dlpz never breathed a word of the dismissal until it came time to

report on the round of leave-taking dinners that preceded Kaufmann's

departure on 1 September. At these affairs the leaders of German-

Argentine society seem to have expressed their support and sympathy for Kaufmann in uncommonly blunt terms. His successor's work would be

hampered by the enduring bad taste left by the affair.33 His successor, Thermann, also contributed to his own difficulties.

Thermann too was a career diplomat: he had spent the previous eight and a half years as consul-general in Danzig, where he had had several run-ins with the local Nazis. Early in 1933, however, he had joined the nsdap, and the Schutzstaffel to boot (he later claimed he had been inducted into the ss without his knowledge). He was promoted to ministerial rank and

32 On the Gleichschaltung see Ebel, p. 224; Newton, pp. 181-2. On Brandt see Bohle

interrogation; Thermann interrogations of Sept./Oct./Nov. 1945, reported in omgus

Germany 1434, 30 Nov. 1945, and of 10 Dec. 1945; Hoover, fbi, to Lyon, State, 2 1 Aug. 1945 (reporting conv. with Meynen in Portugal), in abb Box 28, fbi Misc File. The Deckner letter was kept as an example of 'Lesepatenwerk' in nsdap Hauptarchiv, Deutschtum im Ausland, Folder 660: 'Argentinien': Hoover Archive, Stanford, Califor- nia. Soemmering an Thermann, 25 Dec. 1 933, with cover letter Thermann 6 1 0/34, 5 June 1 934, an aa, in which Soemmering is dismissed as a 'typischer Querulant'. In Kulturabt A-via, file cited fn. 34.

33 Ebel, p. 8 1 ; Hans- Adolf Jacobsen, Nazionalsozialistische Aussenpolitik 193 3-1 938 (Frank- furt/Main, 1968), p. 627; Peter Bussemeyer, Fiinfzigjahre Argentinisches Tageblatt: Werden

undAufstiegeinerauslanddeutschen Zeitung (Buenos Aires, 1939), pp. 1 19-20; dlpz, 17, 22 Mar., 1 May, 24 Aug., 1 Sept. 1933; Thermann interrogation 10 May 1945.

34 Bussemeyer, pp. 1 29-30. See also Herbert S. Levine, Hitler's Free City: A History of the Nazi Party in Danzig, 1925- 1939 (Chicago, 1973), p. 101.

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immediately posted to Buenos Aires. The Argentine diplomatic establish- ment was already displeased with the Germans over the treatment of Kaufmann and with Germany's resignation from the League (for Argen- tina had sponsored Germany's admission in 1926); during the leisurely sea-voyage Thermann made things worse by consorting with a well- known Creole fascist and perennial intriguer, General (Retired) Juan Bautista Molina, who was also a passenger. When the ship arrived at Buenos Aires on 10 December Thermann, from the gang plank, con-

veyed Hitler's personal greetings and led the welcoming delegation in

singing Deutschland uberAlles and the Horst WesselLied. There followed a round of receptions, all of them lavishly decked with

the symbols and trappings of the New Order. On the 15th he appeared at the year-end ceremonies of the prestigious Goethe School. Oblivious to the fact that the majority of students were Argentine citizens, he ordered the hall decorated with Nazi banners and led the children in patriotic songs and the Hitler salute. On the 17th he turned up at the nsdap

Sonnenwendfeier in the suburb of Vicente Lopez: this was the torchlit

neo-pagan ceremony at which the Argentine Nazis were wont to greet the summer solstice. The local Nazis were ecstatis that a Parteigenosse and ss -Mann was at the head of the diplomatic mission; Thermann for his part was not shy about wearing his ss-Sturmfuhrer uniform and being photo- graphed in it. (When Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Buenos Aires in 1936 and was waited upon by the diplomatic corps, he immediately spotted Thermann who was wearing a black uniform with swastika armband, fdr asked his aides to find out what it was: the answer drifted back through channels that is was a little something that had become fashionable in the German Foreign Service). For her part, Wilma Freifrau von Thermann (nicknamed Tegine' by the community) declared on her arrival that the Nazi women's associations were the 'bearers of National Socialist Weltanschauung'. Socially ambitious, widely credited with being the motive force behind her husband's careerism, she set about winning over the

petite bourgeois womenfolk of the community by inviting them to teas and receptions at the minister's residence. Her style in cultural matters was earnest if a bit uncertain: in September 1936 Argentine winners of Olympic medals were honoured at the residence by a Greek Olympic dance of her devising; she also wrote a play on Franz Schubert's unre-

quited love which was performed by Argentine students at the embassy in November 1937.35

In theory the Landesgruppe Argentinien of the nsdap assumed responsi-

35 dlpz, 1 3, 16- 1 9, 2 1 Dec. 33. See Thermann interrogations and affadavit cited above. On Frau Thermann, see Bussemeyer, p. 138; Auslandsdeutsche xix ( 1 936), 953. She was also

interrogated on 10 Dec. 1 945. The encounter with fdr emerges from the legal attache's

1OO

The Patagonia Plot

bility for the 'moral custody [Betreuung] of the National Socialist world- outlook' of the German-Argentines, while the diplomatic mission was

charged with the conventional functions of diplomacy, including natural-

ly the representation of the interests of German businesses and indi- viduals resident in Argentina. Jurisdictional difficulties began almost

immediately, especially as both the Nazis and the diplomats had resolved

upon a vigorous campaign against opponents of the New Order. Kauf- mann and then Thermann lodged energetic complaints with the Argen- tine Foreign Ministry against the newspapers Critica and Das Argentinische Tageblatt for their treatment of German news (the Tageblatt was banned from Germany in April 1933 for denouncing the Reichstag fire as a Nazi

plot); eventually Thermann was able to initiate a criminal prosecution which meandered through the courts for three years and was dismissed in October 1937.36 Long before then the Nazis had taken matters into their own hands and thereby compromised the legation; not for the last time.

As early as March 1933 Nazi hoodlums had attempted to break up a

meeting organized by Jews at Luna Park in Buenos Aires to protest the excesses of Hitlerism; police stood by and did not intervene.37 In May 1934 the local Sturm-Abteilung invaded a meeting of the Pestalozzi School

Society, a coalition of anti-Nazi Jews and Gentiles then in the process of

organizing a German-language school free of Nazi influences. In Septem- ber incendiary bombs were set off on the premises of the Tageblatt and did a moderate amount of damage. Unexplained attacks on Radical and Socialist Party headquarters, left-wing newspapers, and synagogues fol- lowed in the last months of 1934. At the end of the year the Teatro Comico staged Ferdinand Bruckner's anti-Fascist farce Die Rassen (Las Razas). Thermann protested again to the foreign ministry and several offensive passages were censored. The Nazis found this insufficient, however, and threatened to firebomb the theatre; on 13 February 1935 one of them was taken by the police with bombs in his possession. The

group responsible for the recent acts of hoodlumism was thereby ex-

posed. Its members were Creoles but the leader was a German national and nsdap member named Hans Herrmann Wilke. Wilke was employed by the Banco Germanico, for which he performed no discernible service.

(fbi's) questions in the same interview. Concerning a banquet he hosted in Hamburg in 1936 for his friend and ss-patron, Werner Lorenz, Thermann said he only wanted to promote the sale of frozen beef.

36 Kaufmann, 1 1 57/33, 3 Oct. 1 933, an aa; Kulturabt A-via, file cited; Bussemeyer, pp. 1 35-6, 1 68. Two excellent monographs on the anti-Fascist Germans are Winifred Seelisch, Das Andere Deutschland: eine politische Vereinigung deutscher Emigranten in Siidamerika (W. Berlin, 1969); and Arnold Spitta, PaulZech imsudamerikanischenExil, 1933-1946 (W.Berlin, 1978).

37 La Vanguardia (Buenos Aires), 29 Mar. 1933.

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Ronald C. Newton

The bank, the Landesgruppe headquarters, and the chancellery of the legation were all lodged in the same German-owned building at Calle 25 de Mayo 145. Thermann informed the Argentines that Wilke had been expelled from the Pary three years before and was now employed by the Argentine fascist Legion Civica. He tried to dissociate the diplomatic mission from the affair, but got a lawyer for Wilke just in case - otherwise Wilke might say things 'as a result of the usual local police methods'.38

Early in 1936 the diplomatic mission was raised to the status of embassy and, in an unusual gesture, the German Foreign Office promoted Ther- mann to ambassador and kept him in place. Perhaps in consequence of his

promotion, perhaps also because of the risks he had run in the Wilke affair, Thermann and his wife began to keep away from the local Nazis. They were launched into High Society and cultivated their new acquaint- ances, who even included, according to Thermann's postwar statements, prominent Jews. Thermann spent much time at the German Riding Club, the acme of local snobbery and a locale for consolidating relations with the

Argentine haut monde. The embassy's work was concentrated upon ex- pansion of bilateral trade and the German industrial enclave; the German Foreign Office placed a high priority on a strong economic influence in

Argentina and disclaimed any other strategic objectives.39 Following Brandt's resignation, leadership of the Landesgruppe passed

to Fritz Kiister, another Chilean-German; thence, when Kiister returned to Europe in 1938, to Alfred Miiller; finally, on Muller's departure in the aftermath of the Patagonia affair, to Wilhelm Wieland, a failed Misiones settler who proved a capable if uninspired administrator of the semi-

underground party of the war years.40 For appearances' sake it was desirable to place Volksdeutsche in the leadership but, until he left, Muller was the most important figure in the Landesgruppe. He had come out from Germany in 1933 as the German Labour Front's trustee in the executive committee of the La Plata branch of the German National Business Employees' League, which, with its large white-collar membership, was the most important workers' organization in the urban German-speaking communities. He also became editor of Der Trommler, the organ of the

38 Ebel, p. g 1, accepts Thermann's denial of foreknowledge. Bussemeyer, pp. 126, 144-9; Thermann t 1 o, 30 Jan. 1 935, an aa; aa/pa hi Pol 29 Arg Bd 1 .

39 Pamperrien interrogation; Thermann interrogations 10 May 1945, June 1945 (reported in us Political Advisor Germany 490, 20 June 45, to Sec State: 862. 20235/5- 1845), Sept./Oct./Nov. 1945, and 10 Dec. 1945.

40 Wilhelm Wieland, interrogation, 22 Mar. 46, abb Box 26; Thermann interrogation in us Political Advisor Germany, 1 1 July 1 945, file illegible; Thermann interrogations of Sept./Oct./Nov. 1945. Kiister was an elderly man who had worked in Chile and Bolivia for 25 or 30 years without much success. Thermann complained to the a-o that he was a 'stiff burro' and took credit for his recall. Kuster told a VolkischerBeobachter reporter in 1936 that 2 million of the 1 2 million Argentines were Jews. Labougle, pp. 48-9.

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The Patagonia Plot

Landesgruppe Argentinien. Miiller worked as a salesman for his uncle's

tin-plating factory in Buenos Aires and showed little concern for making money. He dressed carelessly, occasionally got drunk, and affected ple- bian manners. Temperamentally he and Thermann were poles apart and detested each other. Annelore Miiller was as fanatical as her husband; she seems to have contested with Freifrau Thermann for control of the ns Women's Organization. On returning to Germany in 1940 Miiller laid

charges against Thermann, and Thermann was required to travel home, under wartime conditions, to answer them. The latter blamed his recall

early in 1942 on Party machinations. In any case, by that time the Argen- tine Congress had requested the Acting President, Castillo, to declare him non grata.41

Membership in the Landesgruppe was never large: 315 at the end of

1932, 835 at the end of September 1933, 2,1 10 (the maximum) at the end of 1936, 1,557 at the end of 1939.42 Non-Germans were of course inelig- ible, though it is likely that holders of dual nationality, German and

Argentine, were members.43 There was a full panoply of subordinate

organizations: ss and sa, Hitler Youth/Pathfinder Corps, sport and glider clubs, the National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps, National Socialist Wel- fare, the German Labour Front and its attached Strength Through Joy, National Socialist Women's Organization, and the League of German Maidens, and so on. Dues and the annual Winter Relief drive financed activities; later, after membership in the Party was restricted, the Ring of Sacrifice was established to permit aspirants to contribute.44

This ceaseless organizational activity (Vereinsmeierei to the ireverent)

4 1 Bohle and Thermann interrogations, esp. legal attache questioning of 1 o Dec. 1 945 ; also affadavit of 30 Oct. 1 947. Miiller joined the army in Germany in 1 94 1 ; in 1 944 he was

permitted to go to Portugal to visit the diplomats repatriated from Argentina. There he was reunited with Annelore and their 2 children. She took charge of the Nazi women's

organization in the internment camp at Curia with her customary fanaticism. The Mullers appear to have remained in Portugal. On Annelore see Hoover, fbi, to Lyon, State, 2 1 Aug. 1945 (reporting Meynen conversation); abb Box 28, fbi Misc File.

42 Jacobsen, pp. 66 1 -2 ; us War Dept., Nazi Party Membership Records (4 vols; Washington, 1946),!, 16,45,47-8.

43 'Basically, foreigners cannot be accepted into the overseas nsdap. [However,] many Reichsdeutsche possess a dual citizenship; this does not always stand in the way of accept- ance ... s/Bohle.' a-o Hamburg an aa, 1 June 1 934; Inland 11 a/b 82-03. Labougle, p. 9 1 , thought many of the Germans living in Argentina had double citizenship for business

purposes. See DerTrommler (Buenos Aires), 7, 133 (May 1938), pp. 31-2; and 7, 137 (June 1 938), p. 32, for instructions on registering for labour and military service.

44 In the 1930s the party was run on a shoestring. 50% of dues and 20% of Winterhilfe receipts were spent locally (the remainder was foreign exchange for the Reich). Both the

Winterhilfe under Volberg and the Presseamt under Sandstede squeezed businesses and

wealthy individuals unmercifully. Schmidt made his name by organizing the Ring of Sacrifice (Opferring) principally in the poorer but as yet unmilked rural regions. Ther- mann interrogations, 1 ljuly 1945, Sept., Oct., and Nov. 1945.

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gave ambitious young men the opportunity to make a career through the

Party, as Miiller had done. Felix Schmidt, for example, was a young bank clerk who did a National Socialist training course in Germany in

1935. Returning to Argentina he made himself indispensable to

Landesgruppenfuhrer Kiister and was named head of the Uruguay section; he was later the featured speaker on Argentina at the Fifth Congress of Overseas-Germans held in Stuttgart in 1937. His specialty was film prop- aganda: he was involved in the making of a film on the German Argen- tines titled Far From the Land of the Forefathers, which was shown at the

congress and again at a screening for diplomats in Berlin. After seeing it, the Argentine ambassador, Labougle, lodged a strong protest with the German Foreign Office at the portrayal of living conditions in Argentina and the implication that German immigrants could survive only with the aid of National Socialist organizations: he was told that the film's purpose was to prevent Germans from emigrating. Schmidt seems to have im-

pressed Bohle: he remained in Germany as head of the a-o's Propaganda Office, and later broadcast radio propaganda to South America.45

Heinrich Volberg made an equally spectacular career. Born in Cologne in 1905, he became a salesman for the German Chemical Trust and

migrated with his family to Argentina before 1933. He worked his way up to become head of the Landesgruppe's Economic Office. He took charge of

rooting out Jewish employees of local German firms and Jewish sales

representatives of concerns in the Fatherland and also had a hand in

finding replacements for them. In addition to the disruptions this caused, he made himself disliked in business circles for his pressure tactics in

extracting Winter Relief and other funds from companies and indi- viduals. Nevertheless Volberg had the backing of Bohle, and through Bohle's influence was taken onto the embassy staff as an economic advisor

following the nominal dissolution of the Landesgruppe after May 1939. His role in the events that led to the Argentine Congress's demand for Thermann's expulsion in 1941 would seem to warrant a closer examina- tion. He was repatriated with the diplomats in July 1944.46

45 Labougle, pp. 56-7, 75-6; Trommler, lxxxiii ( 1 936), 56; Bohle interrogation, Appendix 11; 'Kiinstliche Schaffung.' On the film; see Trommler, en (1937), 53-5; Auslandsdeutsche, xx ( 1 937), 390; Labougle, pp. 75-6, 89-9 1 . The Motion Picture Branch of usna owns a

copy of the film.

46 Thermann interrogation, 1 o May 45. In late 1 94 1 Thermann at Volberg's urging signed a receipt for 100,000 pesos in Winterhilfe funds which the Parliamentary Commission on

Anti-Argentine Activities found were actually used for propaganda purposes. This was the ostensible reason for the Chamber of Deputies' request that the president declare him non grata. Volberg held him in contempt as 'the opposition' and 'the fat Schwab'. Comisi6n Investigadora, InformeNo. 5 (Buenos Aires, Jan. 1945), pp. 38-48. See also Thermann interrogation of 10 May 1945. Trommler advertisements for 'sales representa-

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The Patagonia Plot

A third bright young man who made a career in Argentina was Gott- fried Sandstede, though it is still unclear as what. He was sent out, apparently by the Gestapo, in 1933 and was employed by the shipping firm of Antonio Delfino, which had been associated with German in- terests since the beginning of the century. His principal function seems to have been reporting on the anti-Nazi exiles, a large group of whom was active by the end of the decade. He was a foppish dresser and a brilliant

speaker, the antithesis of Miiller, yet he and Mixller were good friends and worked closely together. Bohle considered him second-in-command of the Landesgruppe. He was also head of the Hitler Youth for a time. After Christian Zinsser was posted to Guatemala, Sandstede was carried as civil attache (and at times as press attache) to the embassy. Thermann liked him despite the fact that he had been foisted on the embassy by Kohn. The Parliamentary Commission Investigating Anti-Argentine Activities summoned him for questioning in August 1941 and, while the matter of his diplomatic immunity was being discussed, he slipped quietly out of the

country. He was killed in Russia in 1944.47 Conflicting claims on loyalties were especially severe in the Volksbund,

the German Labour Front, and the school system. In July 1934 the Volksbund strengthened its ties to the semi-official VereinfurdasDeutschtum im Auslande. Its president, Dr. Martin Arndt, resigned under pressure from Willi Kohn and was replaced by a seemingly more pliant man, the

physician and non-party member Dr. Wilhelm Rohmer; a Parteigenosse, Dr. Wilhelm Liitge, was appointed full-time business manager. After the

'separation of superfluous ballast', the membership stood at just over 2,000, 80 per cent of them non- Reichsdeutsch. The Volksbund 's seventy-odd Ortsgruppen were once again reorganized; those in the interior were visited regularly by Party officials seeking to explain the New Order to the Volksdeutschen. In 1938, however, the organization was nearly destroyed by the flare-up of a long-standing feud between Rohmer and Dr. Ludwig Rauenbusch, one of the local party intellectuals. Rauenbusch, also a

physician, accused Rohmer of having performed an abortion and of

having, as physician to the embassy, performed unnecessary physical examinations of women called up for Labour Service in Germany; he was

supported by the Landesgruppe and its journal Der Trommler. However, Rohmer, an Argentine citizen, refused to accept the authority of a Party court (Uschla) - espeically as Rauenbusch was the local judge - and seems

tive sought': en (1937), 53; cxn (1937), 54; cxm (1937), 53; cxli (1938), 51. Hoover, fbi, to Lyon, State, 19N0V. 1943; 862.20235/1316; us Embassy ba 986, 4 Oct. i945,toss(on the contents of the German Consulate files); abb Box 1 , File 1 6b.

47 Bohle interrogation; Thermann interrogation 10 May 1945 and passim; Meynen, inter- view 4 Feb. 1946; abb Box 24; InformeNo. 5, pp. 5-7.

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Ronald C. Newton

to have made the matter known to Argentine officials. The embassy was concerned to manceuvre Rohmer aside with the least possible publicity. It had him replaced as Volksbund president in July 1939 by the prominent Volksdeutscher businessman Richard Staudt. However, at the last moment Staudt refused to be so used. Liitge got the job, by this time little but a

well-paid sinecure.48 The head of the German Labour Front was Erwin Schrieffer, a 'red-

hot' Nazi. At its height in the late 1930s it had about 12,000 members, most of them concentrated in the German enterprises of the Greater Buenos Aires area: Klockner, Mannesmann, Thyssen, Siemens, Merck, Bayer, Schering, the German banks and hospital, among others. Em-

ployees had no option but to join and were often compelled to attend

meetings and other functions on their own time. Their dues, as well as funds contributed by employers, were not accounted for. Their mem-

bership cards were signed by Dr. Robert Ley, Reichs Labour Minister, but for administration they came under the Landesgruppe Argentinien of the nsdap. The daf and its organ, Der Deutsche in Argentinien, carried on a virulent anti-Semitic campaign, one directed especially at exposing Jew- ish machinations in the fetid business world of Buenos Aires. The positive benefits were undoubtedly great, for in addition to arbitration proce- dures between employer and employee, the daf provided job-placement services, self-improvement classes, and (through Strength Through Joy) excellent recreational and vacation opportunities. For most white-collar

employees it provided representation and protection superior to what

they had known before, nor was it tainted by socialism. Among occupa- tional groups like the merchant seamen, who previously had had no

protection whatever, it commanded a powerful loyalty.49 Argentina in the 1930s could claim a long and intense dedication to free

secular public education as well as the highest literacy rate in Latin America. Schooling was thus a very delicate subject, one in which the Germans manoeuvred with even less than their wonted delicacy. In 1938 there were 203 German schools in the republic. Every city of any size had

48 Ebel, pp. 219-28. For the Volksbund's earlier history see Newton, pp. 56-9, 62-5, 75, 86-7, 112; Bohle interrogation; Deutscher Volksbund fur Argentinien, Jahrbuch 1935 (Buenos Aires, 1935), for quote; Thermann an aa, 31 May 1938; Meynen an Chef ao, 10

June 1938; Thermann an aa, 15 June 1938; Zeissig an Chef ao, 17 June 1938; Chef ao in aa an Thermann, 15 Sept. 1938; Meynen an aa, lojune 1939: all in Chef der ao, Akten betr. Argentinien, 1937-40; Thermann an aa, 2 Jan. 1942: Inland ng 278, Volks- deutsche Ubersee versch.: Thermann affadavit, 30 Oct. 1947.

49 Trommler, ci (1937), 5 1 ; Der Deutsche in Argentinien, 5:39 (June 1934); 5:42 (Oct. 1934); 8:70 (Feb. 1937); 8:79 (Nov. 1937); 9:86 (June 1938); 9:89 (Sept. 1938); 10:93 (Jan- 1939); Mendoza, pp. 93, 96-7; Hoover, fbi, to Lyon, State, 2 1 Aug. 1945 (on Schrieffer); abb Box 28, fbi Misc File.

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The Patagonia Plot

at least one; the greatest concentrations were in the capital city, Entre Rios Province and the federal territories of Misiones and La Pampa. Of the 1 5,000 students, 1 1 per cent were Reichsdeutsche, 1 5 per cent were of other nationalities, and 74 per cent, having been born in Argentina, were

Argentines. There were, in addition, seven Tree' German-language schools in 1937 - Tree' of Nazi influence - including the Pestalozzi School, the old-line Cangallo School, two others in Buenos Aires, and three in Misiones. The majority were small privately-supported Tamily' schools which taught only religion in German or the German language; they were ancillary to the public school system. A minority were 'incorpo- rated' with the public system: they followed the standard curricula and were subject to inspection by provincial or federal educational author- ities. Their school-leaving certificates gave access to the next higher level of public schooling. At the apex of the system the Abitur offered by the Goethe School in Buenos Aires was accepted by German, Austrian, and Dutch universities; the Burmeister School diploma gave admittance to the Argentine universities.

It happened that three of the four largest concentrations of German-

language schools (Entre Rios excepted) fell under federal jurisdiction. The first complaints against Nazi influences began to be voiced as early as

1935 by Governor Perez Virasoro of La Pampa and Governor Vanasco of Misiones, both federally-appointed officials. Their reports to the Nation- al Educational Council received little attention at first; it was only after Ortiz's election in September 1937 that the press began to publicize and sensationalize the matter. In May 1938 the first regulatory legislation appeared. Even then, provincial practice varied widely from federal: it was said that schools under investigation in the suburbs of the capital city merely moved several miles to the sanctuary of Buenos Aires Province, whose governor, Manuel Fresco, was at the same time the hope of Argen- tine fascists and a retainer of the German Embassy.

The reports indicated that in rural districts the children of immigrant parents were receiving neither opportunity nor encouragement to master more than a rudimentary Spanish; their knowledge of Argentine history, civics, or public men was weak to nonexistent. They were exposed to much German nationalist propaganda (the Volksbund had been distribut-

ing such material gratis since 1918). German spokesmen replied that the fault lay with the incompetent personnel and wretched facilities provided by public authority in the more remote areas; unquestionably private facilities were often superior to public. In the urban German-language schools the identification of German culture with National Socialism was well-advanced. These schools employed better-trained teachers who were hired directly from Germany (hence had no exposure to Argentina) and

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were obliged to belong to the National Socialist Teachers' League; most were party members. As of 1 April 1936 all were required to appear at the embassy to swear an oath of fealty to Adolf Hitler. In these schools also, Argentine civics were neglected and occasionally treated with contempt. The Hitler salute and a kind of National Socialist catechism were in daily use; Mein Kampfwas used as a text in some schools. Jews were systemati- cally excluded (hence part of the demand for Tree' schools), racism was

pervasive, militarism was glorified. A quasi-military physical training was standard at the larger schools (perhaps this complaint, too, reveals as much about Creole practice as about German). On various occasions

Argentine inspectors, federal and provincial, were hoodwinked, bribed, or muzzled from above.

In April 1938 the President of the National Council of Education, Dr. Pico, was forced to resign, and the Ministry of Justice and Public Instruc- tion, to which it was subordinate, voided the council's autonomy to con- duct its own investigation. As a result six schools in La Pampa were closed and the ministry brought in legislation in May which forbade the use of

foreign languages in private schools except for religious and language instruction (Argentine themes were to be used as subject matter in lan-

guage teaching). It forbade also any political indoctrination or racist

ideology or practice, required emphasis on Argentine national symbols and observance of national holidays, and prescribed that in the first six

grades Argentine civics, history, and geography be taught by Argentine citizens for a minimum of three hours and twenty minutes a day. Controls on foreign languages were later eased, but otherwise the legislation re- mained in force. No one doubted that the German schools were its

principal object.50 The Germans also took to staging public manifestations, and as the

tempo and number of participants increased, so did public unease.

Grotesque Sonnenwendfeier ceremonies were reported from locales as far

apart as Rosario and Comodoro Rivadavia in the far south. The German

50 Ebel, pp. 294-300, 313-4; Comisi6n Parlamentaria, InformeNo. 4 (Buenos Aires, Sept. 194 1 ), passim; Comit6 Contra el Racismo y el Antisemitismo, Informe confidential de las actividades nazis en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1941), pp. 18-21; W. Rohmeder, 'Das Deutschtum Argentiniens,' Deutschtum imAusland 2 1 :8 (1938), 500-4; Deutsche Lehrer-

zeitungfur Argentinien, passim, esp. 3:3 (1934) ('Die Lage der deutschen Schulen in

Argentinien') ; 4 : 1 o ( 1 935) ('Grundlinien ns. Erziehung in der deutschen Auslands- schule') ; 5 : 7 ( 1 936) (photos of H itler with schoolchildren) ; 5 : 8 ( 1 936) (gymnastic drill) ; 6:2(1 937) (Hitler's birthday); 6:4(1 937) (Bohle's exhortation to teachers overseas); 6:5 ( 1 937) (teaching the World War) ; 7 : 1 ( 1 938) (letters from fallen soldiers, also 'Einrich-

tung und Lehrbetrieb der Adolf-Hitler-Schulen'); dlpz, 2 Apr. 38; ba Herald, 3 1 Mar; 3, 5 Apr; 28 May 1 938; 'Kiinstliche Schaffung'; us Embassy ba 1988, 8 Apr. 38, to ss; 800.20210/60.

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Labour Front's May Day observances drew 12,000 under the tent of the Sarrasani Circus in Buenos Aires in 1935, 15,000 to Luna Park the following year, and 16,000 in 1937. Just two weeks later the Nazis observed, for the first time, the 'Day of German Volksturri. In October the 'German Youth Festival 1937' caused uneasy press comment: it was observed that the assembled youth, 80 per cent of them Argentine nation- als, sang the anthems of the Third Reich lustily but did not seem to know the words of corresponding Argentine hymns at all. On 3 1 October the nsdap Sport Section put on the largest yet of the annual Langemarck Marches. Half a dozen columns of marchers moved by different routes from assembly points within Buenos Aires to the new Landheim in sub- urban Burzaco. The columns included units of the German Riding Club tricked out in pith helmets and fashionable self-designed uniforms, youths identified as Pathfinders (Boy Scouts) who attempted the goose- step, lines of cars and trucks identified as the National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps, and the menacing ranks of the German Shepherd Club. It

appeared that some elements of the Sport-abteilung (sa) were not sports- men at all: they wore uniforms indistinguishable from those of the Sturm-

abteilung (sa), the storm-troopers in eclipse in Germany since the blood-

purge of 1934 (Ambassador Thermann had not known about the uni- forms in advance; he was very upset).51

There were plenty of straws in the wind from mid- 1937 onward. In July the press reported extensively on the visit of the reactionary politician Matias Sanchez Sorondo to Germany and the warm welcome given him

by the Nazi hierarchy. In October a police raid on the newly-opened 'Wilhelm GustlofP nsdap headquarters in Eldorado, Misiones, was a sensation. In November La Prensa delivered a sharp editorial on 'Argen- tine Nationalism or Foreign Nationalism?' and Critica began to run a series by Ernesto Giudici on Nazi subversion in Uruguay and elsewhere in the Americas. The press's increasing boldness reflected the election of Ortiz in September; he was not inaugurated until February, however, at the end of the summer vacation. Thereafter, with the revelations con-

cerning the German schools and the Austrian plebiscite/Luna Park affair, a storm broke over the Germans.

The Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938 caused

jubilation in Nazi circles in Argentina. The Austrian Nazis threw a celebration at the German Club in Buenos Aires attended by 3,500 people, including Dr. Heinz Ott, a speaker (Reichsredner) sent out from Germany who in appearance and speaking style was the double of Hitler.

51 Ebel,pp.292-3,303;rrowm/^r,5:83(i936);6:ii3(i937),57;6:i23(i937), i5-g;7:i27 (!938), 54-5; Anslandsdeutsche, xvm (1935), 361-2; Informe confidential, pp. 6-7; 'Kiinstliche Schaffung' (for German businesses sending delegations).

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Germans and Austrians living overseas were to vote in the plebiscite meant to ratify the Anschluss, and as elsewhere in Latin America the German Embassy made arrangements to charter ships on which the

balloting would be held; it maintained that by anchoring in international waters the shipboard polling places would not violate local sovereignty. When the new Ortiz administration refused to permit this fiction, the Germans and Austrians 'invited' their nationals to sign the lists main- tained at clubs, schools, and other ethnic institutions all over the republic. Pressure was exerted by German employers upon their employees to vote; it was said that the Volk would not be considered to have done their full duty unless they also had a special card punched at the great 'Day of

Unity' rally to be held at Luna Park on 10 April. United States Vice-Consul W.F. Busser, who spoke German, attended

the affair along with 18,000 others. He reported that it had all the

trappings of the Berlin Sportpalast rallies: an elevated rostrum with an enormous red backdrop, Ein Volk, ein Reich, einFuhrer emblazoned on it in Gothic letters, the panoply of Nazi organizations - Hitler Youth, Storm

Troops, Frontline Veterans - with their tossing standards, massed sing- ing; Argentine fascist youth, the Alianza de Juventud Nacionalista, were much in evidence in their grey shirts and Sam Browne belts. Storm-

troopers ringed the entire auditorium. They were generally one of two kinds: 'thick-necked and square-headed with well-filled paunches or thin, pasty-faced, but terribly earnest ... They must have been mostly waiters or

poorly-paid clerks.' The Austrian delegation was 'the saddest-looking group I have ever seen. Their seedy Tyrolean hats and tin medals only heightened the pathos.' Charge d'Affaires Meynen orated (Thermann was on leave in Germany), as did Richard Staudt, a wealthy German-

Argentine businessman who had been Austrian Consul, and the ubi-

quitous Dr. Ott, who, according to Busser, gave an almost perfect imita- tion of Hitler. The speeches were exercises in mass hypnosis. Busser observed the faces, 'alternatively vapid and terribly earnest ... not a single flicker of intelligence.' The whole thing, he wrote, was 'a profitable study for a psychiatrist.'52

The greater tragedy occurred outside Luna Park, however. The Marx- ist-influenced Federation Universitaria Argentina held a counter- demonstration in Plaza San Martin in downtown Buenos Aires. It was broken up violently by the municipal riot police, and two elderly bystand- ers uninvolved in the manifestation were trampled to death by police horses. Despite petitioning by prominent Argentines, municipal author- ities had permitted the Germans to decorate their businesses and club

52 Ebel, pp. 285,302-3,305-1 1; Trommler, 7: 133 (1938), 56-7; 7: 135 (1938), 57-8; dlpz, 16 Mar; 2- 10 Apr. iq$8;ba Herald, 3,6, 8, 10-2, 14, 15 Apr. 1938; us Embassy ba 1993, 14 Apr. 1938, to ss, 863.00/1738.

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premises with German flags and swastikas; predictably these were torn down by student demonstrators. The German Embassy protested and, to much general disgust, received an apology from Dr. Alvarado of the

Foreign Ministry. Disgust was compounded a few days later when police cancelled a rally commemorating the founding in 1931 of the Second

Republic in Spain. Seven thousand Spaniards, unaware of the cancella- tion, were roughly dispersed by police. In lieu of a strong response from President Ortiz, who was still gaining his footing in office (and learning about personnel inherited from Justo), the authoritative word was spoken by La Prensa: 'Foreign residents do not discern, as they should, the difference between patriotic and political aspects of ceremonies ... [They thus] keep alive political questions that have no place among us ... Diplo- mats must counsel their countrymen to discontinue this, for the national

government must exact respect for the law without any concessions whatever.'53

Ambassador Thermann returned to Buenos Aires shortly thereafter, just as the school question was succeeding the Luna Park affair in the

public eye. Argentine resistance was hardening, and in May the situation was made much worse by news of the bloody, unsuccessful Integralista Putsch in Brazil. On 18 May Thermann recommended to Berlin that the Volksdeutsch and Reichsdeutsch organizations in Argentina be split im-

mediately (Dr. Labougle made a similar recommendation simultaneously in Berlin). For once the Auslands-organisation agreed: it ordered persons of foreign or dual nationality dropped from nsdap rolls; in Argentina the

Party prepared to go underground. Against the background of unfriend-

ly speeches in the Argentine Congress by Radical and Socialist deputies, Thermann convoked a meeting in Montevideo of the chiefs-of-mission in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. The diplomats discussed means of demon-

strating that Germany had no colonial designs on Latin America and reaffirmed the need to separate Reichsdeutsch from Volksdeutsch organiza- tions so as to avoid any impression of tampering with non-German nationals. In Buenos Aires Thermann and Miiller conferred on ways to lessen friction between embassy and Landesgruppe and avoid provocation of the Creoles, but the fundamental hostility between the two could not so

easily be bridged.54 The drift toward world war accelerated. The Sudeten crisis and

Munich, the Kristallnacht, the German occupation of Memel, and the

rump of Czechoslovakia, dominated the consciousness of men of affairs. Ortiz's Foreign Minister, Jose Cantilo, moved toward friendlier relations

53 La Prensa, 12 Apr. 1938; also 14 Apr. 1938. 54 Ebel, pp. 311,31 8-9, 330-8; Jacobsen, pp. 1 54, 562-5. Thermann (affidavit, 9 Oct.

1947) claims the Landesgruppe remained unco-operative and was so careless in concealing its operations that the Argentines were bound to be alarmed.

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with the Roosevelt administration in the United States whose concern about the consequences of unchecked German aggression, like that in Ortiz's circle, was far in advance of isolationist sentiment in the country at

large. In February Thermann returned again to Berlin; Meynen - who was surely the more skilled diplomat but did not have full ambassadorial authority - was left to cope with the Patagonia Affair. Meynen contained the superficial imbroglio very well; the fundamental damage, however, had already been done.

Some of the most sensible words on the Patagonia Affair were pro- nounced by Dr. Paolucci in the legal opinion of May 1939 in which he

enlarged upon his decision not to prosecute Alfred Muller.55 He began by citing the results of the government's investigation. Muller had admitted under questioning that the heads of the Landesgruppe Argentinien were

appointed from Germany; statutes and directives were supplied by the Fatherland. Argentine citizens were excluded from the Party. The Party had undertaken to monitor the ideological content of teaching in the

German-language schools, and to enforce its views by meddling with disbursal of funds (most of which were raised locally). It had exerted

pressure on young men and women of dual citizenship to return to

Germany for labour or military service. Similarly, the questioning of the head of the daf had revealed that the organization was locally under Party inspection authority and was otherwise subordinated to the German Labour Front in matters of officers, statutes, policy, and funding. Mem-

bership in the daf was not obligatory for all members of German con- cerns, however, since Jews and non-Germans were ineligible.

Dr. Paolucci dismissed the daf's claim to 'protect' German workers. Both as immigrants and as workers they enjoyed the protection of Argen- tine law. Should disputes arise it was the duty of consulates to aid their nationals; such work was a function of diplomacy, and only of diplomacy. The nsdap had shown even less respect for Argentine culture, intelli-

gence, and respectability. This was evident in the exclusion of Argentines from membership in many German-language associations and from Ger- man businesses in other than menial or token positions. Social and legal sanctions against racially-unacceptable marriages {Mischehe) were not

only insulting but unconstitutional, as were disabilities on Jews. It was known that German parents went to great lengths to register births at the consulates in order to claim German citizenship for their children; in- deed, some expectant mothers had even made the voyage to Europe in order to give birth on German soil (echoes of the Spanish vice-royalty!). The Fatherland also asserted claims against the Argentine property-

55 Seefn.29.

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holdings of its nationals. Flagrant examples had come to light the pre- vious November when German Jews, in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, had been forced to contribute levies based on their Argentine holdings to the general fine imposed on German Jewry. Dr. Paolucci pointed out that

jus soli was the law of the land for all persons born in Argentina and that

Argentine citizenship was freely granted to those who had fled Europe. Thus the Germans, in persisting in the contrary principle of jus sanguinis, were defying the fundamental principle of Argentine nationality.

In an immigrant country like Argentina newcomers, of course, enjoyed the right to form national associations, 'so long as they obey the law and so

long as this union arises from a free decision on the part of each, by a natural gravitation of his affinities.' Miiller had insisted the German associations were no different from any others; Paolucci rejected this.

They had used various forms of intimidation such as boycotts and economic sanctions, social ostracism, and threats against relatives in the Fatherland. They had wrung large amounts of money from their mem- bers in the guise of 'winter relief and had given evasive accounting of the

money's disbursal. Many organizations had acted in secrecy, itself an admission of illegality. They had, in sum, attempted to enclose all the civic, political, religious, and social life of the collectivity within a German National Socialist bubble. This represented the creation of a covert polity, a 'colony' with pretensions to extra- territoriality, which was intolerable. It could lead to conflicts with other immigrant collectivities, to the prejudice of good order and possibly of good international relations. Worse, it violated the constitution, for in requiring the government to encourage European immigration the framers had surely intended that the immi-

grants contribute to the formation of a 'homogeneous national race', not that they be permitted to create privileged extraterritorial enclaves. The latter was an unthinkable subversion of sovereignty.

Again, was the Decree of 15 March 1939 warranted} It must be remem- bered that the decree was admonitory and anticipatory; it would be invoked to the full only if necessary. In the end it was invoked to the full:

virtually all German schools and social and charitable institutions were closed, and much of their property was seized. Some of the organizations destroyed represented nearly a century of work and sacrifice on the part of immigrants; understandably, this has caused much bitterness. But these closures occurred only in 1945 and 1946, at the end of a long war and a long sequence of exposes, spy scandals, and assorted imbroglios involving Nazi agents-on-mission. In other words, the Decree of 15 May 1939 was a warning. It is arguable that had the leaders of German

Argentina heeded it, and in particular had they resisted more forcefully the schemes and pretensions of Nazis-on-the-make sent out from the

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Fatherland, the debacles of the war's end might have been avoided. No inexorable logic determined the outcome.

But perhaps that is asking too much. The leaders of German Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s were upholding an archaic ideal or a mythicized past, that of the privileged merchant enclaves - the 'colonies' - whose heyday had ended in 1914. That the world was changing they sensed but would not acknowledge. They thus fell victim to the seductions of revolu- tionary National Socialism, which set no limit to ambition, nor any bound- ary to fantasy.

Simon Fraser University

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