The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  Some of those taken by force were shipped out as “repatriates” to Germany and Japan. Others became pawns in a game of exchange, traded by Washington for U.S. civilians held by the enemy. Still others, including entire families, existed in a limbo surrounded by barbed wire for years. Some of the U.S. camps that held the captives from Latin America did not close until December 1947, more than two years after the war ended.

  The hidden snatch-and-imprison program foreshadowed the extraordinary rendition practices employed by the United States, with cooperating allies, in the “war on terror” after 9/11. Justified on the premise of rooting out the enemy wherever he may be, the shadowy World War II operation was aimed, its protagonists said, at ensuring national security at home. In fact, unreasoned fear drove the captures, combined with darker purposes: obtaining the pawns for prisoner exchanges, stifling commercial competition, and, in the case of ethnic Japanese captives, outright racism.

  The kidnapping operation was kept from public view at the time and remains largely unknown even today. Yet it changed lives forever in the countries that agreed to cooperate by delivering their residents, even citizens, into U.S. hands. More than four thousand ethnic Germans like Helmut Sapper were taken by force from fifteen Latin countries and brought to camps at remote locations in the United States. The secretive program would tear Maya Sapper’s father away and thrust her mother, her older brother Horst, and the rest of the family into years of uncertainty and loss.

  Authorities also targeted more than two thousand ethnic Japanese, many of them women and children. Ethnic Italians were caught up, too, although to a lesser degree. The war against Italy ended in September 1943, and while two thousand Italian immigrants who lived in the United States were briefly interned in U.S. camps, President Roosevelt did not seem to regard Italians as a serious threat in North or South America. “I don’t care about the Italians,” he told Attorney General Francis Biddle in a discussion about interning aliens. “They are a lot of opera singers.”

  Allowing the “enemy aliens” to be taken away also caused losses to the Latin countries where they lived. It disrupted long-standing networks of commerce, social ties, and contributions to national cultures. The old ethnic communities would not be replicated in the same way after the war, when they were replicated at all. Maya Sapper’s family in Guatemala was at the center of the storm.

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  By the time World War II started, the extended Sapper family was part of the German Guatemalan community of some thirteen thousand persons. The “Germans” had been contributing out of proportion to their numbers to the national economy, and to the country’s store of knowledge about itself, for more than half a century. “The trajectory of the Sappers in Alta Verapaz is a living example of what some German immigrants achieved with their own efforts,” wrote historian Regina Wagner. They started from the bottom, “without capital, but with dedication and an immense desire to create something solid to assure their existence.”

  Maya’s grandfather Richard Sapper first came in 1884 to the green and humid region of Guatemala called Alta Verapaz, “True Peace.” The name came from the sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and social reformer who convinced Spanish authorities that the province’s Indians were best conquered by the cross, not the sword. Because Spanish soldiers did not enter as they did in the rest of the country, claiming land and upsetting traditions, settlers who arrived in the late nineteenth century found a pristine land peopled by Q’eqchi’ Maya Indians, whose ways had changed little in five hundred years.

  Like many other immigrants, Maya Sapper’s grandfather had been drawn to Guatemala by glowing descriptions of the beauty of the land, and its potential for providing a living. Despite his youth, just twenty-two, Richard Sapper had already worked for German export businesses in Italy and Greece. Also like the hardiest of the planter pioneers—mostly German but a few French, English, and North Americans—Sapper spent months at a time traveling by horse and donkey or walking on the heels of native guides who hacked paths through virgin jungle, looking for suitable land for growing coffee. They measured tracts, slept rough, hunted and ate what they killed, cooked on open fires.

  When Sapper discovered that his brother Karl, a recent graduate of Munich University in natural sciences, was suffering from a lung disorder, he invited him to cross the ocean and recuperate in the clear mountain air. Soon after Karl Sapper’s arrival in 1888, the young naturalist employed his expertise in soils and geology as he, too, explored the region on foot, advising Richard on where to situate new plantations, or fincas. For the next twelve years, often accompanied by Q’eqchi’ companions, sometimes funded by his brother Richard, Karl Sapper trod from Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Panama, a “militant pedestrian” as one modern geographer called him, inveterately walking mountains and valleys to know them best, even when he might ride a mule or a horse. He recorded the lay of the land and its wildlife, and the agricultural customs of the native peoples he met. Much more intensely focused on Middle America than his famous forerunner of a century before, the Prussian naturalist and explorer of Latin America Alexander von Humboldt, Karl Sapper laid the foundations for Central America’s modern mapmaking, and especially in Guatemala, for its physical and cultural geography to the present day.

  By the time young Maya saw her unforgettable white butterfly on the plantation, her grandfather Richard had died, and the rest of the Sappers were living in alpine-style houses in command of hundreds of square miles of shiny-leafed trees. They were part of a family that had made cultural contributions to the country that would resound for decades. They produced some of the best coffee in the world.

  Immigrant German coffee growers like the Sappers benefited from high world prices, but they also held tough when markets fluctuated. And they benefited from the late nineteenth-century policies of a Guatemalan government hungry for investment in agriculture and exports. New laws declared indigenous land virtually “without use,” rendering it available for development by the newcomers. Even though Q’eqchi’ Maya Indians had farmed corn and beans on their plots for subsistence living from time immemorial, they did not hold paper titles to the land; with the new policies many picked up their few belongings and walked through the jungle to new frontiers, but others stayed to continue farming their small traditional plots in exchange for employment with incoming European owners like the Sappers. The Germans, mindful of the benefits of a faithful labor force, generally treated the Q’eqchi’ well and learned their language. Sometimes they married native women. When they had relationships with Q’eqchi’ servants or mistresses, they might recognize the children of their unions.

  Unlike absentee landowners who lived more comfortably in the capital while operating their holdings through majordomos, German coffee growers typically worked hard in place, hands-on. By 1890, two-thirds of the coffee production in the verdant north-central region came from land owned by Germans or German Guatemalans, most of it destined for the global coffee entrepôt, Hamburg. By the 1930s, their plantations in Alta Verapaz and on the Pacific coast provided some 80 percent of Guatemala’s coffee, the principal export of Central America’s largest country and biggest source of its foreign exchange. The Sappers expanded into processing locations, coffee exportation, a bank, and a string of plantations managed by Germans recruited from among friends and relatives in Europe. The names of the Sapper fincas resonated like a litany of prosperity: Cimama, Campur, Chirixquiche, Chajmayaic, Samox, Chajchucub …

  * * *

  The idea that a war being fought far away could mean catastrophe for her own sheltered existence never entered Maya Sapper’s mind. More than seventy years later, sitting over tea in the room filled with coastal California light, she strained to put the pieces of that time in order. Her first hint of trouble on the horizon, she remembered, came in her mother’s garden, blooming not only with roses but also with exotic specimens gathered from the nearby rainforest. “My mother must have had an inkling,” sh
e said. “One day she took her English friend around the garden and I heard her say, ‘If something happens, please take care of my orchids.’”

  As war loomed overseas, the Sapper children in Guatemala enjoyed riding their ponies or splashing in a square concrete pool on the plantation on the hottest days. At the same time they shared with their cousins in Europe aspects of a typical German upbringing. In the provincial capital, Coban, they attended the Colegio Aleman, one of hundreds of German schools in Latin America. From Mexico to Argentina, such a local German school might provide the best available education in town or city, adhering to the strictest German standards, with German teachers brought over to give classes in German to prepare youngsters for commerce or for the higher education they were meant to pursue in Europe. At Maya’s Colegio Aleman, students also had to pass nationally required exams in Spanish, showing they were truly bilingual, with a grasp of national history and geography.

  The colony that the Sappers called home was wealthy and productive, but it was only one marker of the influential German presence in Guatemala. To get products to port, planters built roads, which anyone might use. German companies built a railroad, an electrical grid, and a telephone network, which also served the general population. The Germans presented a contrast to Americans in Guatemala, for instance, who often came to take administrative positions in U.S.-controlled enterprises like the United Fruit Company and seldom ventured outside American-style compounds. Germans might love getting together in their Vereine, or societies, a seemingly infinite number of German sports clubs, beer-drinking clubs, volunteer fire brigades, mutual aid associations, and women’s groups, but they also put down roots and threw themselves into the country’s wider development because they saw its future as their own.

  Germans in towns and cities ran a gamut of businesses whose signs hung proudly on shops. “Bornholt: Arrow Shirts, Stetson Hats, Fine Cashmeres”; “Topke: Ironmongery”; “Sommerkamp German Bakery: First Quality Pumpernickel, Pastries, Deliveries to Fincas.” There were sausage makers, tea factories, breweries, tailors; purveyors of electrical appliances, camera equipment, and gramophones. Of thirteen businesses that sold farm and small-industry machinery in the capital, Guatemala City, in 1940, eight were German; most general merchandise and clothing stores were German as well. The capital’s German Club, founded in 1890, was a social outpost for all of Central America, with annual Carnaval events and a calendar of galas including celebrations of “Octoberfest in Munich,” “Fiesta of Sailors of San Pauli-Hamburg,” “Winterfest in Garmisch Partenkirchen,” and festivals named for wine harvests from the Danube to the Rhine.

  German Guatemalans were an industrious, rooted immigrant community, with nostalgic ties to the past of their fathers. As the 1930s rolled forward, however, anyone who read Deutsche Zeitung, the Central American German-language newspaper, would sense a growing reflection of support for the ultranationalism of the Reich. Articles increasingly aimed to explain the development of Hitler’s worldview and encouraged strict ties with the “fatherland.” Columns lashed out at propaganda from U.S. news services that defamed the democratically elected Fuehrer. By mid-decade, Deutsche Zeitung was firmly in the hands of Nazi editors. As of 1936, all Guatemalans could tune their radios to news, chamber music, opera, and military band concerts direct from Deutscher Rundfunk, the German government station. Even the Guatemalan national radio presented a “German Hour” with music and language classes.

  The wave of pro-Nazi information and propaganda was partly a reflection of the global efforts of Reich minister of public enlightenment and propaganda Joseph Goebbels; but it also mirrored the views of the newest German immigrants. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, more than one hundred thousand mostly young men came to Latin America searching for work, many carrying grievances at harsh treatment by the victorious Allies and admiration for the strong fist of Hitler. They were a world apart in their backgrounds from those whom historian Regina Wagner calls the antiguos—the older ones, men and women who arrived in Richard Sapper’s earlier generation—and their children born in Guatemala like Maya Sapper’s father, who never knew the defeated Germany. The antiguos had long practiced the tolerance for various points of view required in a new land. Friction rose between the antiguos and pro-Nazi newcomers, who were smaller in number but carried the force of attachment to a powerful movement.

  Like many German Guatemalans who considered themselves Guatemalan, other Latin American communities with roots in Axis countries also had individuals who were perfectly assimilated, who might honor their forbears but considered themselves Brazilians, Bolivians, or Nicaraguans. And the communities had other persons who thought of themselves most as Germans, Italians, or Japanese abroad. The Axis “mother countries” encouraged loyalty even to the second and third generations, even outside their borders. German law considered ethnic Germans to be citizens of the Reich, period. Benito Mussolini (his parents named him after the Mexican reformer Benito Juarez) activated propaganda and cultural programs to maintain Italian identity abroad and spread Fascist beliefs. He aimed especially at the significant Italian population in Argentina. In Brazil, home to more Japanese than any place outside Japan, some of the emperor’s “subjects” remained so fanatically loyal that when the war was over they refused to believe Tokyo had lost. Shindo Remei, an organization in São Paulo to which the most radical among them belonged, intimidated Japanese Brazilians who said the Allies won the war and attempted to sway ethnic Japanese in Peru. Members murdered at least twenty-three Japanese Brazilians.

  Differences within such communities with roots in Axis countries were exemplified among the Germans in Guatemala City. In 1933, at the German Legation, members of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) celebrated the Nazi National Work Day, extolling unity with the “homeland”; the popular German ambassador, an old-school imperial diplomat, gave a neutral-sounding address, but other speakers demanded allegiance to the party. Lutheran ministers newly arrived from Europe wove messages about the need to support the New Germany into their religious discourse. A fight ensued over the capital’s Club Aleman, the German Club, with the Nazis attempting to take control of it from the antiguos in order to use the social heart of the once-unified community as a base for political organization. They took control of the Colegio Aleman, the German school, too, hanging photos of Hitler, and squeezed out Jewish children. The NSDAP opened its own “Association of Germans” that included Swiss, Dutch, and Austrian members—not just Germans but “racially” Germanic peoples—who greeted each other with a “Heil Hitler” salute. The party campaigned to collect money, clothing, and sacks of coffee for the Nazi Winterhilfwerk campaign to help poor Germans. Party associations hosted visiting German celebrities and lecturers, projected films and slide shows, and celebrated holidays such as the anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power and the Fuehrer’s birthday, creating a kind of cultural and gala calendar parallel to that of the antiguos.

  Young Maya Sapper, enclosed by her family, was unaware of splits in the wider community, and only decades later when she found a trove of her mother’s letters to an aunt in Europe would she realize what the family was going through in Germany. At that time in the late 1930s, she said, she thought her grandfather’s vacation with them was “just a visit,” a physician’s long break to see his family. “In fact, he had troubles with Hitler, so he came to escape something—I don’t know what,” she said. Letters stopped arriving from Germany when the war began. Maya’s mother, who “was not religious, but spiritual,” stood under the moon and prayed in her way that those she loved would be kept safe from Allied bombs.

  Maya Sapper was eleven when she began to feel the war directly. The family had moved from the countryside into Coban, the clean and pretty highland town that still bears vestiges of German touches in its architectural details, the names on its shops. “An American guy came checking out the school,” she said, and soon after it closed. One morning Maya’s mother woke the children saying, “We h
ave to go to the penitentiary. They came with guns in the night and took your father.”

  The Guatemalan government, under the pro-fascist but expedience-minded dictator Jorge Ubico, who had benefited from U.S. support when he came into office, went along with Washington’s program to physically remove key members of the German community, along with some who were not prominent at all. In many cases the United States did not recognize the difference between pro-Nazis and those who honored their ties to Germany but didn’t like the Reich.

  Washington’s blanket suspicion of “aliens” in Latin America started early, and by 1938 officials were convinced of the threat of German and Japanese espionage, sabotage, and military operations throughout the region. U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull called Axis penetration in Latin America a “real and imminent” danger that was “not limited to the possibility of military invasion.” In Europe, Hitler had just taken possession of Austria and the German-speaking Sudetenland. The run-up to those events, Hull suggested, looked too much like what he believed was happening in the American hemisphere, where the Nazi threat was “acute in its indirect form of propaganda, penetration, organizing political parties, buying some adherents, and black-mailing others.” At the Eighth International Conference of American States in Lima, Peru, the United States, Mexico, and Central and South America agreed to joint action to defend the states of the region from outside attack.

  Guatemala declared war on the Axis on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In January 1942, ninety-six businesses, shops, newspapers, a local railroad, and sixty-seven fincas belonging to ethnic Germans were placed on the U.S. State Department’s Declared List of Blocked Nationals, a unilateral blacklist made up without consultation with the countries where the businesses operated, aiming at blocking “Axis funds” in Latin America. In July, 117 men from Guatemala joined hundreds of men, women, and children from other Latin countries who would be deported to Germany in the next years, sometimes on miserable voyages with buckets for toilets and limited permission to leave quarters for air.