GERMANS LEAVING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 September 1938, Page 7

GERMANS LEAVING

AN EXODUS FROM BRAZIL. Thousands of Germans will shortly be returning to the Fatherland from Brazil owing to the difficulty of continuing to live and work there under present conditions. In Rio Grande do Sul alone 7,000 passages to Germany have been booked up to the autumn of this year. Italians also are leaving in still greater numbers, 10,000 in Rio Grande do Sul having booked passages in ships leaving for Europe between now and the autumn. The exodus seems to be connected with the restrictions placed upon the activities of foreign communities by a decree of the Vargas Government, prompted by National-Socialist political activity. The “Berliner Tageblatt’s” explanation is that “United States propaganda has stirred up Brazilian nationalism against the German community in Brazil in order to speed up the enrolment of Brazil in Roosevelt’s antiFascist Pan-German front and to meet the competition of German trade. . . . The result is known ... a wave of arrests pursued alleged Nazi agents until finally the foreign organisation of the National-Socialist Party was prohibited. . . . Brazilian leaders were imposed on foreign associations, and in the settlement districts of South Brazil, particularly St Catharina and Parana, German, Italian, and Polish schools were destroyed.”