Nazism in Brazil

German community in Brazil

Before 1930, there were two periods of German immigration into Brazil. The first occurred in the nineteenth century, which gave rise to several colonies scattered throughout Brazil but concentrated in the South. At the time of the rise of Nazism in Germany, this community was already largely made up of second and third generation Brazilians. This community maintained diverse German cultural habits, however, the geographic distance and the passage of time brought about perceptible cultural changes. The second migration occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. During the Weimar Republic, and due to the consequences of World War I, Germany experienced several economic crises. At the same time, Brazil was experiencing industrial development, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Due to the demand for skilled and technical labor, many Germans immigrated to Brazil during this period. These new immigrants had stronger and more recent bonds with Germany than the German-Brazilians who arrived in the 19th century and their descendants.

The newly arrived immigrants from Germany differed from the existing German-Brazilians. The earlier immigrants were called Reichsdeutsche (Germans of the Empire), while the second were the Volksdeutsche (German people). The largest number of Nazis in Brazil lived in São Paulo, since the state was the preferred destination of the second wave of German immigration.

By the mid-1930s, there were more than one million Germans and their descendants in Brazil, mostly in Rio Grande do Sul (600,000) and Santa Catarina (220,000). In 1940, Germans and descendants made up 22.34% of the population of Santa Catarina and 19.3% in Rio Grande do Sul. The German community outside the cities preserved its culture and language, understood as a manifestation of Germanism, which was possible through societies, a German-language press, and schools. The 1940 census showed that 640,000 people spoke German as their primary language at home in Brazil. Based on the high proportion of members of the German community who used German at home (more than 70%), it was concluded that there was a low level of cultural assimilation in this community.

Adherence to Nazism

Consequences of Estado Novo nationalism

The government of the Estado Novo promoted the forced integration of the Germans and their descendants who lived in isolated communities in the south of Brazil. On several occasions, the government acted brutally against ordinary immigrants who had no relationship with Nazi Germany.

In 1940, on a visit to Blumenau, a city of German colonists in the state of Santa Catarina, Vargas declared: "O Brasil não é inglês nem alemão. É um país soberano, que faz respeitar as suas leis e defende os seus interesses. O Brasil é brasileiro. (...) Porém, ser brasileiro, não é somente respeitar as leis do Brasil e acatar as autoridades. Ser brasileiro é amar o Brasil. É possuir o sentimento que permite dizer: o Brasil nos deu pão; nós lhe daremos o sangue". (Brazil is not English nor German. It is a sovereign country, that ensures respect to its laws and defends its interests. Brazil is Brazilian. (...) However, being Brazilian isn't just to respect the laws of Brazil and to respect the authorities. To be Brazilian is to love Brazil. It is to possess the feeling that allows one to say: Brazil gave us bread; we will give it our blood".)

The Japanese immigrants and Italians were also persecuted and forced to "Braziliate". The case of the Teutonic-Brazilians is unique because they formed isolated communities that maintained the traditions and used the German language exclusively.

Nazis in Brazil after the war

After Germany's defeat in World War II, some Nazis sought by the Allies as suspected war criminals fled to Brazil and hid among the German-Brazilian communities. The most famous of these was Josef Mengele, a doctor who became known as the "Angel of Death" at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mengele performed medical experiments with living humans, always without anaesthesia, to research the perfection of the Aryan race. A good part of the victims of their "scientific experiments" were dwarfs and twins. Mengele lived hidden in the interior of São Paulo state from 1970 to 1979, when he drowned following a stroke in Bertioga, on the coast of São Paulo state, without ever being recognized.

Another infamous case was Franz Strangl, a commander at the extermination camps of Treblinka and Sobibor. Strangl lived in Brazil for 16 years, where he worked for Volkswagen until his arrest and extradition to West Germany in 1967. He stood trial and was found guilty in 1970 for the mass murder of 1 million people, being sentenced to life in prison, Strangl died of heart failure six months after.

Neo-Nazism in Brazil

Currently in Brazil there are some active neo-Nazi groups. These groups are often associated with the descendants of southern Germans. However historian Rafael Athaides asserts there is no justification for making such a connection. Athaides finds it unlikely that there is any connection since a survey of the profiles of the individuals arrested for neo-Nazism shows that none of them are descendants of historical Nazis. These are typically young misfits who are "devoid of referential identity and who manipulate the signs of Nazism in the world." To hold the descendants of southern Germans for the support of separatist and neo-Nazi groups happens even when practices described as "neo-Nazi" are practised by caboclos from the interior of Pará. This type of stereotype is criticized in the work of the historian René Gertz.

Some crimes committed by neo-Nazis have caught the attention of the Brazilian press. In 2003 for example, a group of neo-Nazi skinheads forced two young men to jump off a moving train in Mogi das Cruzes. One of them died and the other lost an arm. In São Paulo, the resurgence of the Nazi movement had its origins in the 1980s, when the Carecas do ABC emerged. This was an extreme right-wing group opposed to the trade union movement led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who emerged in the same region. Since then, communication over the internet has broadened the boundaries of the movement. The website Valhala88, deactivated in 2007, received 200 thousand visits daily by users in the country.

According to the anthropologist Adriana Dias, from Unicamp, a scholar of the question of neo-Nazism in Brazil, the heated debate in the 2010 presidential election breathed life into the movement. For her, "the issue of prejudice against the Northeastern Brazilians [...] comes from the elections of Lula. In Dilma's election. This group was radicalized because of the issue of abortion and same-sex marriage." According to Adriana, there are two large age groups of neo-Nazis in Brazil. The first one is between 18 and 25 years old and the second is between 35 and 45 years old and are the leaders of the first group. According to her, the propaganda of the neo-Nazis comprises the writings of William Patch, Thomas Haden and Miguel Serrano. Currently, the region with the largest number of neo-Nazi sympathizers is the South, with over 105,000; Internet users who download over 100 files from neo-Nazi websites are considered sympathizers.

The Social Christian Party raised controversy by fielding an openly neo-Nazi candidate in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro legislative elections. The Liberal Party also provoked controversy in 2020 by nominating an openly neo-Nazi activist as a municipal candidate in the town of Pomerode.

From 2015 to 2021, the number of Nazi cells in Brazil grew from 75 to 530. The number of Federal Police inquiries on apology for Nazism jumped to 110 in 2020, after remaining below 22 each year from 2010 to 2018. In November 2022, the Prosecutor General of the Republic expressed concern over the increase in the number of these groups in Santa Catarina.

In 2024, the National Human Rights Council of Brazil sent a document to the United Nations expressing its concern over the growth of neo-Nazi cells in the country.