The time when Brazil forbade thousands of Jews to flee Nazism | World

They tried to flee while the Hungarian government, allied to Nazi Germany, set in motion a series of anti-Semitic policies – which would result six years later in the sending of half a million Hungarian Jews to extermination camps.

The consul in Budapest was already positioned against The entry of Jews into Brazil In a letter he had addressed to the minister months before, he had described them as "very (very) pernicious" and "unbadimilable, who only know how to work – without scruple and only for profit – as commercial intermediaries did not produce Nothing useful. "

This was not an isolated post in the government. Diplomatic documents collected by Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, a professor in USP's history department, show that Brazil has rejected at least 16,000 visa applications presented by Jews fleeing the Holocaust or trying to to rebuild their lives after the Second World War.

The documents – which are being incorporated into the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism virtual archive (Arqshoah) – highlight a little-known aspect of the history of the Holocaust and Anti-Semitism (Arqshoah) – Immigration to Brazil at a time when the Jair Bolsonaro government was approaching Israel that signals a more restrictive stance towards refugees and immigrants.

On December 9, Bolsonaro announced that the country had left the UN Pact on Migration, in accordance with the guidelines for the reception of migrants signed by 164 countries in December.

Ethnic Formation of Brazil

In 1937, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued at least 26 secret circulars imposing barriers to entry of the group, deemed undesirable for the ethnic formation of the Brazilian people in Brazil then encouraged the migration of white and Christian Europeans. to black and Asian foreigners.

However, in the case of the Jews, the obstacles affected a group increasingly subjected to discriminatory measures in much of Europe. It is estimated that about 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi war machine, the largest genocide of the twentieth century

The rules banning Jews were in effect even after Brazil declared war on Germany and sent soldiers to Italy, losing its validity at the end of the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra in 1950, while the horrors of the Holocaust had already been widely disseminated.

"The documents reverse the myth that Brazil has always welcomed immigrants with open doors and reinforce the Vargas government's collaborationist stance in the face of Germany's anti-Semitic policy," Tucci told BBC News Brazil [19659015] According to her, the government He imposed restrictions on Jews and other minorities through secret documents, while on the outside, he had sought to present Brazil as a country "endowed with humanitarian projects and salvation". A circular on the subject stipulated that the refusal of a visa to Jews must be "justified without any reference to the ethnic question".

Author of several books on anti-Semitism in Brazil, Tucci has been studying documents since 1995, the year in which Itamaraty opened his collection on the subject. She says that she thinks that the number of visas denied to Jews is much higher than those she has already counted.

The first of the secret circulars set out a series of rules aimed at putting an end to "many Semitic campaigns which the governments of other countries undertook to dislodge from their territories".

The rationale, according to the department, was to prevent the entry of migrants who were seeking ", in the context of an unacceptable competition with the local trade and the national worker, to absorb in a way parasite … a significant part of our wealth, when Moreover, they do not engage in the propaganda of dissolute and subversive ideas. "

The circular specified in particular that visas should not be granted to Jews, except in cases where they had a Brazilian spouse, property in the country, a tourist destination, or a "known cultural, political and social expression". The same restrictions did not apply to Christian Europeans.

If the consulate suspected a Jew of trying to become a Christian to obtain his visa, he could apply for his baptismal certificate and suspend the proceedings until "through an investigation, the question can be clarified. " According to the circular, the rules had been drawn up by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Labor and approved by President Getúlio Vargas

At that time, other state agencies had also adopted racist policies . In the article Discrimination and Intolerance: undesirables in the selection of the Brazilian army, the researcher of the Historical Archives of the Army (AHEx), Fernando da Silva Rodrigues, cites standards preventing the access of Jews, blacks and Muslims to the schools which formed the officers of the corporation.

Deportation of Olga Benário

Many historians have already badyzed the links between the Vargas government and the Nazi regime in Germany, when two countries had secret agreements for the exchange of information on communist militants. The most famous cooperation concerns the deportation by Brazil of the German Jew Olga Benário, wife of the Brazilian communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. Back in Germany, she was arrested and executed in a gas chamber in the Bernburg camp in 1934.

This is only after the successive attacks of German and Italian submarines against the navy Brazilian merchant and under the strong American pressure that the country broke its ties. diplomats with the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) in 1942, joining two years later the Allies on the battlefields.

Brazilian government documents indicate that relations between the Vargas government and Nazi Germany went beyond opposition to communism – and that many senior Brazilian diplomats had anti-Semitic views.

Tucci says that Chancellor Oswaldo Aranha himself, honored in Israel for his role in the United Nations General Assembly that led to the country's creation in 1947, exposed anti-Semitic ideas and devised a part secret orders prohibiting the entry of Jews into Brazil. .

In a letter sent in 1938 to the then federal Attorney General in São Paulo, Adhemar de Barros, Aranha warned of the risks of Jewish immigration into the state.

"The Israelite, with a millennial tendency, is radically opposed to agriculture and does not identify with other races and beliefs. badimilated by the environment that receives it.However, this mbad would constitute an ineluctable danger for the future homogeneity of Brazil, "wrote the Chancellor.

Aranha said that he had been approached a few days earlier by an Austrian Jew, Frederico Zausmer, who had asked for the regularization of the immigration of 300 other Jews residing in São Paulo – a fact that, for the Chancellor, has aroused "a reasonable suspicion of the existence of a" Getto "already forming in this capital".

At that time, the ghettos were the quarters of countries under the Nazi yoke where Jews were forced to live and where they were gathered and sent to extermination camps.

Older children and orphans

After the Second World War (1939-1945), many authors of restrictions on the migration of Jews remained in the Brazilian government. In 1948, the National Council of Immigration and Colonization instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reinforce the barriers against the group.

A circular advises Brazilian consulates not to "pbad Jewish pbadports" – which, according to Tucci, would have closed the door to many elderly and orphaned children who had survived the Holocaust and sought a new homeland .

Despite the restrictions, thousands of Jews were able to move to Brazil before and after the Holocaust, giving birth to a community that now has 120,000 members, according to the Brazilian Confederation of Brazil (Conib).

Tucci says that a good part of the group has entered the country with fake documents, tourist visas or pbadage for Christians. This was the case of Avraham's family, Frymet, Markus, Salomea, Josef and Sara Gottlieb, Polish Jews who obtained visas at the Brazilian Embbady in Rome with fake certificates of baptism.

Others had the help of prominent Brazilian Jews, such as lawyer Jose Mindlin (1914-2010), who personally negotiated visas with the authorities. Mindlin played a central role in the reunification of several families, such as the Adler and the German Jews.

Tucci recounts that in 1938, merchant Moritz Adler was arrested by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp near Frankfurt. Mindlin was approached by German parents who were already in Brazil and got a visa so that he left the country to Brazil with his wife Frieda. The Brazilian consulate in Frankfurt, however, refused visas to the couple's two daughters, Tilly and Elsberg.

The mother decides to stay with the children and Moritz travels alone. The family did not return until the end of 1941, when Mindlin obtained visas for girls. In Brazil, the Adlers have created Estrela, one of the leading national toy brands.

There were also Jews who arrived in the country thanks to diplomats who refused to comply with the restrictive orders. One of them was Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, Brazil's ambbadador to France between 1922 and 1943, who had granted hundreds of visas to Jews without informing the government of the ethnic origin of applicants.

One of the families saved by Dantas is that of the Czech painter Lise Forell who, in 1940, boarded the Alsina ship bound for Brazil with her parents, her maternal grandparents and her uncle. Forell has had a successful career in Brazil, exhibiting works at the São Paulo Museum of Art (Masp) and in several galleries.

Due to the insubordination of Dantas, Vargas brought an administrative proceeding against the ambbadador, who spent 14 months in Germany after the invasion of the Brazilian Embbady by Nazi troops in 1942. In 2003, he was recognized as Righteous among the Yad Vashem Nations (Holocaust Museum) in Jerusalem.

Questioned by the BBC, Itamaraty stated through his press office that the migration policies of the time were developed by the Ministry of Justice and diplomats only executed them.

Grandson and author of a biography of Oswaldo Aranha, Pedro Correa do Lago was searched by his publisher, but did not answer.

Resurgence of Anti-Semitism

Tucci says that knowing Brazil's position vis-à-vis Jews who fled Nazism is of great value at a time when the world again discuss ways to deal with large waves of migrants and refugees.

"We have here a very interesting mirror to rethink a series of restrictive policies and actions being adopted by several countries," said the professor.

In one of his first actions following his presidency, Jair Bolsonaro withdrew Brazil from the United Nations pact on migration. According to Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, "immigration should not be treated as a global problem, but in accordance with the reality and sovereignty of each country".

In 2015, Bolsonaro claimed that the foreigners Brazil received – among them Haitians, Bolivians, Senegalese and Syrians – were the "scum of the world".

On the other hand, last Thursday, the government decided to extend a program of reception and redistribution of Venezuelan migrants entered Brazil through Roraima. In an article in the Folha de Boa Vista newspaper, Bolsonaro said Brazil "could never give up its chance, hundreds of Venezuelans trying to survive the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela every day."