Nazis and Good Neighbors
The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II

An exposé of an American operation that seized 4000 German expatriates from Latin America in WWII.

Max Paul Friedman (Author)

9780521822466, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 August 2003

372 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.67 kg

'Nazis and Good Neighbors is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the wartime involvement of the smaller Latin American republics. Friedman has written a meticulous study about a long-forgotten aspect of transatlantic history, which has gained new relevance lately … It adds a fascinating perspective … this book is brilliantly written and offers many vivid examples, well chosen illustrations and personal recollections …' Iberoamericana

This international history uncovers an American security program in which Washington reached into fifteen Latin American countries to seize more than 4,000 German expatriates and intern them in the Texas desert. The crowd of Nazi Party members, antifascist exiles, and even Jewish refugees were lumped together in camps riven by strife. The book, first published in 2003, examines the evolution of governmental policy, its impact on individuals and emigrant communities, and the ideological assumptions that blinded officials in both Washington and Berlin to Latin American realities. Franklin Roosevelt's vaunted Good Neighbor policy was a victim of this effort to force reluctant Latin American governments to hand over their German residents, while the operation ruined an opportunity to rescue victims of the Holocaust. This study makes a very contemporary argument: that security measures based on group affiliation rather than individual actions are as unjust and ineffective in foreign policy as they are in law enforcement.

1. Contamination
2. Assessment
3. Blacklisting
4. Deportation
5. Internment
6. Justice
7. Expropriation
8. Repatriation
9. The new menace
10. There went the neighborhood.

Subject Areas: Second World War [HBWQ], History of the Americas [HBJK]