Nazism in Brazil

In the 1920s and 1930s another major wave of German immigrants began arriving in Brazil due to socioeconomic problems faced by the Weimar Republic after World War I.

Not all affiliates of the Nazi Party in Brazil engaged in ideology; many joined only to pursue the economic benefits such membership could provide.

[1] In 1939, 87,024 German immigrants lived in Brazil, of which 33,397 were in São Paulo, 15,279 in Rio Grande do Sul, 12,343 in Paraná and 11,293 in Santa Catarina.

It was not in the interest of the Nazis to participate in the elections in Brazil, and the party was never registered in the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court.

In the last year, 1938, after the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship, the Nazi Party and all other foreign political associations were declared illegal.

[4][5] As it was a foreign organization, only those born in Germany could be affiliated; and the Brazilian descendants of Germans, could act only as enthusiastic sympathizers.

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.

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.

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.

(...) Porém, ser brasileiro, não é somente respeitar as leis do Brasil e acatar as autoridades.

É possuir o sentimento que permite dizer: o Brasil nos deu pão; nós lhe daremos o sangue".

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.

In 2003 for example, a group of neo-Nazi skinheads forced two young men to jump off a moving train in Mogi das Cruzes.

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.

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.

The Social Christian Party raised controversy by fielding an openly neo-Nazi candidate in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro legislative elections.

[10] The Liberal Party also provoked controversy in 2020 by nominating an openly neo-Nazi activist as a municipal candidate in the town of Pomerode.