This solid monograph represents the assiduous mining of German Foreign Office documents to tell one aspect of the story of German-Brazilian relations in the early Nazi era. Harms-Baltzer’s focus is on the Brazilian government’s campaign to “nationalize” her foreign minorities. Since that campaign had German emigrants and their descendants as prime targets, diplomatic relations with Germany were bound to be affected. President Getúlio Vargas’s government began the pressure soon after coming to power in 1930, but real compulsion toward linguistic and cultural integration came only after the advent of the authoritarian Estado Nôvo in November 1937. Although the Japanese had been an early and continuing target of nationalist agitation (especially in proposals to restrict their immigration) and the Italians also faced restrictions, it was the German-speaking population concentrated in the three southern states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Bio Grande do Sul that eventually bore the brunt of the campaign.
Harms-Baltzer shows convincingly that the German immigrants and their descendants were well advanced toward assimilation and that the decrees controlling non-Portuguese language institutions were merely reinforcing a natural trend. This confirms the picture presented in the recent volume on an earlier period by Gerhard Brunn, Deutschland und Brasilien, 1889-1914 (Cologne, 1971).
Much space and documentation is spent in describing the recall of the respective ambassadors in September-October 1938, with which the “nationalization” campaign does not appear to have been closely linked. Far more interesting is the tangled question of the extent of German involvement in the abortive putsch attempted by the neofascist Integralista movement in March 1938. Instead of seeking to research the question definitively (perhaps because archival collections in the German Democratic Bepublic were inaccessible?), the author attempts a minute review of the evidence previously cited for such involvement, most of it in publications researched and written in the GDR. She brands the evidence as inadequate to prove the charge, but concedes the need for further research.
Most interesting for students of Nazi foreign policy in Latin America is the discussion of the constant rivalry between the Auswärtiges Amt and the Auslandsorganisation of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in deciding policy priorities, especially the extent to which Deutschtumspolitik should be permitted to endanger German state relations with nations having German-speaking minorities. Although the party’s activities furnished U.S. and English propagandists with welcome ammunition and thereby reinforced the hand of the pro-Allied faction within the Brazilian government, Vargas’s “nationalization” measures had deeper roots, and it was the authoritarian turn of 1937 which gave the opportunity to accelerate cultural assimilation, not the sporadic actions of Nazi party agents or Brazilian suspicion of German involvement in the Integralista putsch.
This narrowly focussed monograph fails even to suggest an adequate overall picture of German-Brazilian relations for the era. In large part this can be traced to the exclusive reliance on archives available in West Germany. No Brazilian sources were consulted and analysis of the Brazilian context is limited to very few secondary works. Most lacking is a clear explanation of Brazil’s economic and security concerns thus leaving the author unable to explain such important pressures on Brazilian policy-makers as the need for arms and expanded markets. Nor is much light thrown on the intense U.S.-German rivalry with all its economic and military implications.
Harms-Baltzer’s useful work should serve to remind English-speaking Latin Americanists of the steady flow of research from Germany, of which the series publishing this dissertation (volume fourteen in the Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana of Berlin) is a leading example.
