Friday, February 22, 2008

Nueva Alemania

Here's an odd story about a hill town in Paraguay called New Germany, a failed Nazi colony where Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (the "Angel of Death") may have spent time after fleeing Germany. 

Excerpt:
New Germany would have been Mengele's kind of town. It was founded in the 1880s by Elisabeth Nietzsche (sister of Friedrich) and her husband, the noted anti-Semite Bernhard Förster. This couple had tried to whip their countrymen into a Jew-hating frenzy, but apparently not even 19th-century Germans were anti-Semitic enough for them. Disgusted, the couple packed off to Paraguay with a few other families and tried to establish a pure Aryan colony, a place to preserve the master race.

The colony failed utterly, ravaged within two years by parasites and the unfortunate realization that the Aryan volunteers' European farming experience hadn't prepared them to grow the local manioc and yerba mate any more than it had taught them to ranch llamas or stalk yaks. The anti-Semitic colonists came to hate the Försters, and began to wonder whether they had picked the wrong Jew-hating loons to follow into the jungle. Those who didn’t die of lockjaw or hunger left; a few stayed, and decades later, their children and grandchildren fought for the Third Reich. By now, anyone who had papers to return to Germany has already gone — unless, of course, they had reason to stay away.

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