The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  In both Latin America and the United States, immigration practice that discriminated against Jews was also shaped by a way of thinking that originated in England in the early twentieth century—eugenics. By the time of the war, belief in eugenics had spread throughout the world.

  It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies … sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals …

  —G. K. CHESTERTON, Eugenics and Other Evils

  Eugenics—the word comes from the Greek for “well born”—was a scientific and social movement that aimed to use laws of heredity as they were understood at the time to improve the human race. Widespread belief in eugenics contributed to the way that Jews fleeing fascism were shut out of Latin America, and to the way those already present were considered incapable of being assimilated into the greater society.

  Today eugenics is considered a discredited pseudoscience, remembered mostly because of its association with racism and the ghastly Nazi drive to create a “pure” Aryan race. Originally, however, eugenics was considered an objective path to public health and social progress, and it influenced immigration practices in countries from the United States to Argentina. Its premise and sequel were widely accepted: human beings and the groups they belonged to varied “in their hereditary value,” and social policies were best based on the perceived differences. Eugenics was forward-looking, respectable.

  Brazilian eugenics, for one, was connected early to hygiene and sanitation. Medical professionals who embraced eugenics became public-health experts, advising against marriage between close relatives, advocating “constructive eugenics” such as prenatal care, sex education, and premarital exams for debilitating conditions, and encouraging only healthy couples to have children. Social reformers championed the movement—healthier and fitter individuals eventually would overcome social ills like poverty and “overpopulation,” raising the quality of life on earth.

  Soon enough, eugenics was also invoked to support prejudice and preconceptions, such as the imagined superiority of white people over those with darker skin. In Latin America, an extreme interpretation of “well born” led to hopes that eugenics would lead to the “whitening” of mixed populations. In Hitler’s Europe, eugenics showed its darkest side of all, invoked to rid the Reich of all but healthy so-called Aryans. In 1940, the SS officer Walter Rauff, who would settle in Chile after the war, oversaw a fleet of air-sealed vans into which tubes delivered carbon monoxide to poison Polish children deemed mentally ill. Eventually the vans were used to eliminate 1.5 million Jews.

  Nazi Germany took eugenics to extremes, but the United States was the first country to undertake eugenics-based sterilizations, and by the 1930s it had the most extensive such legislation outside the Reich. Under the Model Eugenic Sterilization Law, thirty-three U.S. states sterilized tens of thousands of individuals regarded as “socially inadequate,” often mentally disabled, or deaf, blind, epileptic, or pregnant out of wedlock, regarding them as incapable of regulating their own reproduction. African American and Native American women were especially vulnerable.

  In the rest of the continent, U.S. policy affected Latin Americans directly, and by example. Eugenic sterilizations began in Puerto Rico in 1936, and by 1960, when the program ended, a third of the territory’s women had been sterilized. Eugenics-inspired sentiment that argued against “social inadequates” shaped the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act, restricting the entry of many who were desperate to flee Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, especially Jews and Italians. The act, which remained in force until 1964, did not recognize refugees fleeing for their lives, and completely excluded Asians. “America must remain American,” said President Calvin Coolidge when he signed it.

  Latin Americans were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and many still blamed Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a belief the Church did not disavow until the 1960s. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Jews were also suspected of being sympathetic to communism, of being “Bolsheviks.” Eugenics provided a socially acceptable way of defining Jews as undesirables.

  In Argentina, then as now home to most Latin American Jews, eugenists suggested that immigration take racial selection into account lest “non-Latin” newcomers damage the national identity. Such thinking was amenable to the powerful anti-Semitic political right, and the result was wartime laws that limited Jewish immigration. One of the most prominent and well-respected Brazilian eugenists, Renato Kehl, visited Germany in the early 1920s and returned as medical director of the Bayer pharmaceutical company with ideas about more radical “negative eugenics”: undesirable individuals should be prevented from reproducing, “degenerates and criminals” sterilized. Influenced by work on heredity compiled by the U.S. Eugenics Record Office, Kehl constructed proposals for racial segregation and prohibiting immigrants considered inferior. As in other Latin countries, in Brazil the Catholic Church and contesting medical and social views stood as a brake against such extremes, but there were few brakes on views of Jews as the “other,” a group of people resistant to assimilation.

  The world seems to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews cannot live and those where they cannot enter.

  —CHAIM WEIZMANN, Manchester Guardian, MAY 23, 1936

  Concerned with growing danger to displaced Eastern European Jews in Germany, Albert Einstein in 1930 supported a colonization project in Peru. The plan envisioned initially settling twenty thousand Jews, and eventually up to a million, on Peruvian land concessions.

  “Maybe there truly is a possibility here to help a great part of the Jewish people find a healthy existence,” wrote Einstein. To the scientist’s dismay, influential Zionists bent upon a homeland in Palestine discouraged the project lest it split their movement. Whether such an ambitious Peruvian enterprise would have been successful or not is an open question, and any chance of such an escape valve would soon become moot.

  In 1935, Germany’s National Socialist government instituted the Nuremberg Statutes, a set of anti-Jewish laws that laid down a legal framework for the still-unimaginable mass killings to come, beginning with depriving Jews of citizenship. Most Jews who could did whatever possible to flee.

  But they found no welcome in Latin America. In June 1937, for instance, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry issued a secret circular to its global consulates ordering diplomats to deny visas to persons of “Semitic origin.” Publicly, President Vargas positioned himself as a champion of Brazil’s special brasilidade, a shared identity composed of indigenous, African, and European roots that must bring all colors and classes together, forging a modern society. But discourse and immigration policy were two different things.

  The secret circular and a new constitution with further restrictions amounted to a Jewish ban. Leaving brasilidade behind, regulations instead underscored a commitment to eugenics and whitening, the long-standing ideology that encouraged immigration of Western Europeans to “improve” the Brazilian “race.” Eventually, the reasoning went, dark-skinned Brazilians would want to choose whiter mates, and darker-skinned Brazilians would disappear. Jews—Semites—were not considered white. Without fear of reprisals, officials turned Jews away.

  Despite similar attitudes in other Latin American capitals, brave individuals who held positions in their countries’ diplomatic posts worked to save lives. In 1942, José Arturo Castellanos, an El Salvadoran army colonel, was serving in Geneva as consul general when a Transylvanian Jewish businessman, George Mandel, approached him and pleaded for identity papers for himself and his family. The Salvadoran diplomat appointed Mandel as “first secretary” to the consulate, a post that did not exist, and the two men began grinding out false Salvadoran passports, which they issued without charge to refugees. Castellanos is credited with saving from Nazi death camps some forty thousand Jews from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland.

  In Marseilles, Mexico’s consul general Gilberto Bosques Sald�
�var rented a castle and a summer vacation camp and declared the properties Mexican territory under international law. There Bosques sheltered European Jews who reached the Mediterranean port city as well as Spanish Republican leaders fleeing Francisco Franco’s fascist forces. Later referred to as “the Mexican Schindler,” Bosques issued tens of thousands of visas, chartering ships to take refugees to African countries from which they sailed on to Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. (Bosques and his family and forty members of the consular staff were arrested in 1943 and held by the Germans for a year near Bonn. Mexico City negotiated their release in a prisoner exchange.) Brazilian consulates in Europe generally rejected Jews based on the secret circular, but individual officers gave visas to petitioners on their own initiatives.

  A few conscientious, risk-taking diplomats acting alone, however, could not solve the problem of resettling hundreds of thousands of Jews being forced out of the Reich. President Roosevelt may have had a personal desire to accept refugees, and Eleanor Roosevelt advocated strongly for them, but anti-Semitism among the U.S. political class, especially in Congress, argued against it. Isolationism—such as in the “America First” movement—was popular among a majority of Americans who believed in leaving Europe’s problems to Europe. Yet American Jews and others pressured the president. In 1938, escape from the Reich, even though families must flee penniless, was still a possibility—if places could be found to receive them. Something must be done.

  Ten days after Hitler’s occupation of Austria in March 1938, Roosevelt called for an international meeting to consider solutions. For five beautiful days in July, representatives of thirty-two countries, nineteen of them from Latin America, and numerous nongovernmental organizations met at the splendid Hotel Royal at Évian-les-Bains on the blue and sparkling Lake Geneva.

  From Berlin, Hitler sent a cynical message. “We … are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries,” he said. “For all I care, even on luxury ships.”

  In the end, the heralded Évian Conference served as mere window dressing for expressions of global concern. Only a single country, the Dominican Republic, whose dictator Rafael Trujillo wanted to curry favor with Roosevelt and whiten his country’s population, invited one hundred thousand Jews. Previously, Trujillo had accepted two thousand Spanish Republicans for the same reason. One of the Spanish refugees, with no false illusions, told an interviewer that “we are white and we can breed.” However, by January 1940, when the program to bring in Jews began, submarine warfare and a shortage of space on Allied transport ships hampered emigration to the Dominican Republic. A few hundred Jews did arrive and set up an agricultural colony that continues to provide dairy products for much of the country.

  Bolivia’s delegation to Évian was led by the “the Andean Rockefeller,” tin king Simón Iturri Patiño, La Paz’s minister in France and one of the world’s richest men. Patiño made no public commitment, but quietly over the next three years several thousand Jews entered Bolivia legally with the help of another hugely wealthy tin baron, Moritz Hochschild, born a German Jew. Other than the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, however, no government leader at Évian stepped up to the plate.

  “NOBODY WANTS THEM,” gloated a headline in the German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Speaking to the Reichstag the following January, Hitler said, “It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.” Scholars have called Évian “Hitler’s green light for genocide.”

  * * *

  Despite restrictions, some eighty-four thousand Jewish immigrants managed to plea, cajole, or bribe their way into refuge in Latin America between 1933 and 1945, less than half the number admitted during the previous fifteen years. In Brazil, the elites who mandated immigration policy held two contradictory attitudes, both based on stereotypes. On one hand, feelings of anti-Semitism and eugenics-inspired prejudice worked against admitting Jews. On the other hand, a preconception existed that Jews were smart financial managers with capital who might develop the Brazilian economy. The belief that certain Jews could help Brazil moved authorities to grant some two thousand visas to German Jews in 1939.

  In the New World, however, Jews fleeing fascism often became targets of the same suspicion that hounded them in Europe: a belief that they were ideologues of fascism’s enemy, “Bolshevists,” or communists.

  In 1937 in Brazil, with his elective term of office about to expire, Getúlio Vargas hatched a communist conspiracy out of thin air and called it “Plan Cohen.” He announced on the radio that perpetrators were about to take over the government. Two years before, in 1935, Vargas had launched a campaign of state terror against the leftist opposition, including Communists, which drove activists into an armed resistance that was quickly squelched. The Communist Party leader, Luís Carlos Prestes, had been tortured and jailed. Prestes’s pregnant wife, Olga Benário Prestes, a Jew born in Munich, was identified by Brazilian diplomats working with the Gestapo and sent to Germany, where she was held at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was removed to a state sanatorium and gassed in a euthanasia chamber in April 1942.

  In 1937 Brazil, however, there was no communist plot, no “Plan Cohen.” Yet Vargas manipulated the fiction to gain autocratic powers in what he called the Estado Novo, a “New State” with new legal tools against dissenters. To help maintain the regime, he stoked the always-present embers of anti-Semitism, casting Jews as a subversive fifth column in service of the Soviet Union.

  Jews became widely and often irrationally targeted for surveillance, and even arrest. “The fact of an individual being Jewish or simply of Jewish origin would weigh negatively in the criteria of judgment of the Brazilian Political Police,” historian Taciana Wiazovski has written. For Jews, it seemed simply that labor union membership, or knowing someone under investigation, or belonging to a Jewish organization, could justify the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for suspected criminals.

  By the 1990s, authorities had dismantled the domestic spying organization of the São Paulo region, the Department of Political and Social Order (DEOPS); its archives, made public, revealed investigators’ personal rancor against Jews and the kind of “evidence” they collected in the hunt for subversives. Documenting a request for a travel pass by Hildegard Boskovics, a secretary followed for nine years, an investigator’s note said that she should be sent “to Hitler,” since she is “an Israelite.” In the case of Ernest Joske, an accountant followed for twelve years, incriminating evidence included stamps for donations to a relief society, International Red Aid—a kind of Red Cross established by the Communist International to provide assistance to political prisoners—and anti-Nazi, antifascist, and communist literature. Joske said he was anti-Nazi because he was Jewish, declaring he was Marxist in thought, which, of course, was not against the law.

  After a 1932 raid on a center of Jewish organizations on Amazonas Street in São Paulo, a DEOPS file concluded that the clubs registered at the address, such as the Jewish Sport and Gymnastic Society and the Israelite Workers’ Culture Center, were fronts for subversive activities. “The true character of these ‘sport’ and ‘benevolent’ organizations is but in truth only a well organized center of communist propaganda,” said the file. Confiscated literature included periodicals from Buenos Aires and New York, in English, Yiddish, German, and Spanish, including The Nation, The Soviet Russian Pictorial, and The Workers’ Monthly.

  The infamous anti-Semitic screed published in Russia in 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, about an apocryphal Jewish plot to take over the world, circulated widely in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s and influenced DEOPS operatives. The first step in the global takeover plot, according to the protocols, was the subversive education of youth. The children’s monthly found on the Amazonas Avenue raid, Pioner, drew special attention—investigators reported it was meant “to pervert juveniles.”

  * * *

 
; About three thousand miles north of Brazil, in the much smaller country of Guatemala, the stories of two refugees fleeing Hitler show how complex the journey to freedom could be for those who sought safety in Latin America. Even under Latin skies, Jews who escaped Hitler remained inexorably connected to the great tragedy of the Holocaust.

  Ludwig Unger was thirty-five years old when he left his home in Hamburg in 1933. Tall, fit, with light hair and even, handsome features, Unger did not experience anti-Semitism while growing up in the cosmopolitan port city, nor had he felt it in his family’s comfortable, upper-class circles or when he went to the Belgian front as a volunteer in the Kaiser’s army. Fighting for Germany in World War I, Unger was wounded three times, captured, and interned for a while as a prisoner of war in England.

  When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he stood before massive crowds and delivered speeches charged with anti-Semitism and anticommunism. Nazi thugs beat Jews on the streets. Unger lost his job. Urged by his family, he crossed the sea to that exotic-sounding country, Guatemala, where an uncle ran an import business.

  Ludwig Unger disembarked with a light suitcase at the Caribbean port of Puerto Barrios and boarded a train for the two-hundred-mile journey southwest to the busy capital, Guatemala City. There Ludwig became Luis, found work taking tickets at a movie palace, and soon managed a department store. Quietly affable, Unger easily made German and Guatemalan friends, and in 1936, he met and married a beautiful young Guatemalan Sephardic Jewish woman with the compelling name of Fortuna. He read the news of growing tension in Europe in local Spanish- and German-language newspapers. But Luis Unger lived thousands of miles away from Hitler now, and if fighting broke out in Europe, he would not be nearby. How could war reach him in the country called “The Land of Eternal Spring”?

  The answers came one after another, each worse than the last.

  In 1938, the Auslandorganisation, the foreign branch of the Nazi party, staged ships around the world so Germans abroad could vote to approve the Anschluss. A good friend of Luis Unger’s made an excursion to Puerto Barrios, where he boarded a ship to cast his ballot. Using offshore polling places allowed the Germans to circumvent national laws prohibiting foreign elections. In Guatemala, families who went on the excursions to vote enjoyed a break from routines subsidized by Berlin, train rides, swimming off the ships (a second ship moored off Puerto San Jose on the Pacific), and picnics.