William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 3-21-15
Frederich Nietzsche’s sister founded a utopian colony in Paraguay called Nueva Germania. The German flag still flies there. Nazi war criminals hung out there.
Paraguay was a fan of the Axis in World War II. The national police director named his son Adolfo Hirohito.
I question the note that “the German flag still flies there”. According to the articles I’ve found on the history of the colony, it’s correct, it was founded by Nietzsche’s sister and brother-in-law as an experiment to create a society based on the theories which Nietzsche expounded. But the colony failed, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche committed suicide 1896, three years after the colony’s founding. That Mengele might even have passed through the area is contested, and as far as I can tell, the Paraguayan flag flies there. If a German flag does indeed fly there, is the black-white-red of the Hohenzollern Empire, which was Germany, when the colony was founded; the swastika banner of the Third Reich, or the black-gold-red of both the first German republic and today’s Federal Republic?
I ask, because the factoid might tend to suggest that even today, there is a colony of tall, long-skulled, blond, blue-eyed Aryans living apart from their Paraguayan neighbors, which doesn’t appear to be the case.
Brad, it is good that you keep me on my toes but here:
Sexual violence during the war itself poisoned attitudes to race. In its own way, Paraguay is a melting pot: the countryside is full of blond-haired, blue-eyed peasants who speak fluent Guaraní and halting Spanish. Yet López’s propagandists tried to drum up prejudice against the Brazilian army, which was mostly black, since Pedro promised to free slaves who fought. They called the emperor the “chief of the monkey tribe”. The resentment lingers. “The kambá raped our women,” says Miguel Ángel of the Piribebuy museum, using the Guaraní word for blacks. Legend has it that the resulting black babies were killed.
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas/21568594-how-terrible-little-known-conflict-continues-shape-and-blight-nation
Thanks for the link to that article, Bill! Very interesting. I agree with the author–this history is not too well-known, outside Paraguay.