GERMANS IN BRAZIL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 December 1943, Page 4

GERMANS IN BRAZIL

COMPLETELY UNDER NAZI INFLUENCE SERIOUS PROBLEM RAISED Brazil’s German colonists must be taught Brazilian songs, folklore, dances, traditions and ideals, and only when these take the place of German ideas and customs will they cease to be a danger and threat to Brazil, says Professor Mario Pacheco, a high official in the Government of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The Brazilian Government has taken stringent measures to stop enemy agitation but the evil still persists, said Professor Pacheco. Teachers still carry it on clandestinely, the Germans refuse access to their homes and many families resist passively efforts to make them conform to Brazilian customs and laws, he said. Professor Pacheco, of the Directory of Statistics, has made a study of the problems involved in the “nationalisation” of the German, Italian, Polish, and Jewish colonists in this southernmost State of Brazil, where this question has challenged the authorities if the Brazilian Government. The results of his findings and his suggestions for transforming ardent Nazis into patriotic Brazilians appeared iin a newspaper of Passo Fundo, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, ancj was reproduced throughout all Brazil by the Agencia Nacional. “We do not exaggerate,” he said, “when we affirm that it is in these German nuclei, i.e., in' the Serra districts of Rio Grande do Sul, where a nationalist campaign is extremely urgent.” It is in these isolated districts, Professor Pacheco declared, that the Germans are most fanatically loyal to Germany, its customs and ideas. After three or four generations they still cling to them and are primarily Germans and live almost completely alien to Brazilian life. This devotion to the Fatherland was “intelligently exploited by Naziism,” declared Professor Pacheco. “Favoured by direct subventions from the German Government, first through the German school system and later with the aid of National Socialist agents, the colonists founded school clubs, sporting associations, and amusement centres, with ironclad organisations, and used these to draw the Germans away from contact with Brazilian life, with the clear intention’ of creating for the future German minorities within Brazil." “Integralism,” the Brazilian green shirt Fascist movement. Professor Pacheco asserts, "served them magnificently as a mark for their hidden aims. It was in this manner that Nazism reached truly alarming proportions in this municipality, not only in the City of Jose Bonifacio but in the interior as well.

“They still believe in Germany's victory, their faith in Hitler grows. The Berlin radio, to which they listen assiduously, bolsters their morale. None of this is visible. But these groups under German influence will be the last to become assimilated in the Brazilian nationality,” declared Professor Pacheco.