Nazis are Everywhere

Film Posters

The Rua de Japão is home to a small fishing community on the edge of a lagoon. It boasts a small Japanese themed garden of manicured paths, bridges and ponds and was once a tranquil place to sit and idle the day away. I was lounging on a bench looking at vultures picking away at animal remains on the muddy beach, my younger daughter asleep in a pram. After a while an older man comes along and sits next to me.   Typically Brazilian he immediately engages in conversation and starts to tell me his family story. “Ah, so you’re from Scotland. I’ve never visited Europe. I’d like to, but never really had the opportunity. It’s strange because my father is German. He tried to teach me the language. It never stuck. After a few drinks  he would start to sing these weird songs. He never really said much about his past. All that I know was that he was in this organisation, the Sesese, I think that’s what it was called.” Taken aback, I have never stopped thinking about this unexpected encounter and how I missed the opportunity to quiz him further. The true extent of the intricate web of escape routes organised for fleeing Nazis and Fascists has yet to be told. An unknown number of war criminals escaped justice and found their way across the Atlantic.  Most were never tracked down and brought to trial. There are exceptions like the discovery of Adolf Eichmann who was famously kidnapped by Mossad in Argentina, a tale that is dramatically retold in Chris Wietz’s 2018 film Operation Finale. Then there is  Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death” who spent the last part of his life living incognito in São Paulo and drowned on a Bertioga beach down the road from my flat.  He was also the subject of a largely fictional film, The Boys from Brasil. Adapted from  Ira Levin’s novel of the same name, it boasts an illustrious cast that includes Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, and James Mason. In Levin’s version of events, Mengele is still working as a doctor and has somehow managed to extract Hitler’s DNA, with which he is building a  clone army of little Adolfs that will be despatched out into the world to create a Fourth Reich. This wild fantasy has its roots in a popular myth that suggests that Hitler survived the second world war and fled to the southern State of Santa Catarina where he is reputedly buried. This is one of the reasons why the state has become a mecca for Neo-Nazis. The May 2023 issue of the magazine Piaui, features an article titled El Dorado do Extremismo that looks at the disturbing proliferation across Brasil of almost 1200 active Neo-Nazi cells. A Bolsonaro stronghold with only three percent of the population, Santa Catarina boasts a disturbing 320. This resurgent movement of the extreme right, that mimics the wave of racist authoritarian intolerance sweeping the world, is no aberration and has deep roots in Brasilian history. It can be traced back through the dictatorship of the 1960s to the openly fascist Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB), that was founded by Plinio Salgado in 1932 , the same year that the dictator Salazar seized power in Portugal. Whilst it never matched the strength of its European counterparts, at its height the AIB could still boast a small army that in 1934, 40,000 strong goosestepped through Sao Paulo. One of the AIB’s strongholds was in Santa Catarina, where it managed to unite communities of German and Italian descent under the fascist slogan “Deus, Patria, Familia.” This also happens to be Bolsonaro’s rallying cry.