By 1900, Germany was among the greatest commercial powers in Latin America, in some cases beating the US and Britain. German firms were fiercely competitive in industries like mining, coffee, and engineering. This was encouraged by Berlin but happened largely organically.

Unnerved, US commercial barons exploited burgeoning imperialist sentiment in US to generate support for intervention against German interests in Latin America all through the early 20th c. Sensationalist press depicted German activity there as subversive, a threat to US security.

These efforts triggered a panic among both the US public and gov't officials that German immigrants in Latin America were plotting to form a breakaway state or otherwise to help the Reich in dethroning the US in the region. Commercial interests dovetailed with imperial anxieties.

This culminated in a US scheme, hatched during World War II, to coerce Latin American gov'ts into seizing commercial assets from German firms and businesses and deporting prominent German merchant families to the United States.

Consider Guatemala. German families controlled >2/3 of their coffee industry prior to WWII, when, largely due to pressure from the US gov’t., many said families had their property confiscated by the Guatemalan state and were deported to and interned in the US. This played out

Beyond that, across Latin America, but especially in Brazil, home to the largest German community in the region, German immigrants were stripped of their rights and subjected to both popular violence and state-sanctioned assimilation campaigns, effectively reducing them to

Though this stemmed largely from long-simmering social and political tensions at the local level, the US tacitly encouraged such measures inasmuch as they reduced the perceived security risk of the German “5th column” in the region and eliminated competition with foreign powers.

Thus, when news broke in the late 1940s that Nazis had resettled in South America--at most a few thousand, compared to 100,000s of Germans already living there--it fit into broader theme of anxiety over German influence in the area that'd plagued the US psyche for over 50 years.

Though I'd attribute the trope's survival mainly to America's morbid fascination with Nazism, I'm sure these older anxieties gave it oxygen in the 1950s and '60s, and it explains why Germans in Lat. Am. are still ipso facto "suspect" in US eyes: it's a holdover from older psy-op.

Reading recs: On tensions btw. US and Imperial Germany prior to WWI: "The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America," by Nancy Mitchell On deportation of Lat. Am. Germans to US during WWII: "Nazis and Good Neighbors," by Max Paul Friedman. Other recs

There’s way more but those are the two must-reads. DM if you want more.

@BohunkSupremacy German Nazis in Argentina is a particularly weird trope when you consider that in no other LA countries settled more German jews after 1933

@chribreuer The funny thing is that German Jews actually got wrapped up in many of the reprisals I’m talking about. US and Latin American governments didn’t necessarily treat them any differently.

@BohunkSupremacy @Lady_Astor If your response to this cute girl’s photo is “muh Nazism!” your gae and probably a Yank liberal

@BohunkSupremacy My wife's Puerto Rican, through marriage she has some German family, who arrived in Latin Am broke over 100 yrs ago. They're very aristocratic & successful. It's strange to see them w/ ghettoricans. The trashy sorts look down on them & call them sellouts.

@BohunkSupremacy Americans have always deeply feared and distrusted "Continental" Europeans.

@BohunkSupremacy @bronzeagemantis Maybe me it makes me a bad American, but the more I see what go through the minds of other Americans, the happier I am that the US is starting to decline.

@BohunkSupremacy How can she be responsible for what any forebearer did prior to her birth? It's just an attempt to shame her into silence.

@BohunkSupremacy I don't need to ask, he was obviously making babies with her gorgeous grandmother.

@BohunkSupremacy @alpotheosis

@BohunkSupremacy Thank you for examining this. The comment by @DaFiretruck in the OP screenshot is outright disgusting.