Refugees under surveillance: Jewish Germans during the Second World War in Colombia

CARDONA GONZALEZ LORENA

St. Louis

Congreso; Lessons and Legacies Conference; 2018

Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University

This proposal aims to demonstrate is, through archival analysis, what was the specific treatment given to German Jews in the context of the Second World War in Colombia and how their national circumstances were negative for them, producing a second victimization inside and outside of the country. The Second World War was an event that not only mobilized huge troops but also produced significant consequences in the lives of migrants of German origin. Despite being the nationality with which the crimes of Nazism are linked, many of its victims shared this national origin, especially Jews. The progressive restrictive measures towards the Jews and later the radicalization of the Nazi violence produced the displacement of thousands of refugees to different countries, especially towards North America and Latin America. Among the modest receptors countries include Colombia, who from the beginning expressed a hostile and anti-Semitic attitude to Jewish migrants reception. However, according to different sources, the approximate arrival of some 3,000 refugees is documented, who once arrived in Colombia had to overcome not only the fact of being stateless but also be considered foreign ?enemies? by its German origin. With the intensification of the war and the United States entry into the war, the restrictive and persecutory measures towards citizens of German origin were becoming stronger, which included confiscation of assets, inclusion in blacklists, deportation, and confinement. The paradox in this is that many of the Jews who arrived as refugees were also victims of these persecutions, confusing and overlapping the ethnic, the national and the ideological. For this analysis, several types of documents (ministerial, police and economic) are used, which denote the progressive persecution of the German Jewish community in Colombia, the same ones that, although they have been taken up in other analyzes, have not yet been has made a revision on the surveillance towards Jewish refugees of German origin in the country.