In the first half of the 20th century, the most powerful men in Bolivia -and perhaps in South America- were miners: Simón Patiño, Carlos Aramayo and Moritz Hochschild.
For years, due to their controversial methods of accumulating wealth, the historical archives branded these three men, called the “Tin Barons,” as the “enemies of Bolivia.”
Among them, the figure of Hochschild stood out, the only one of the three who did not have Bolivian citizenship. Of German origin and with close ties to Europe, the descriptions of “exploiter” abounded around his name.
But the story proved to be more complex. Towards the end of 1999, when the Bolivian Mining Corporation (Comibol) archive was being organized, the people in charge came across documents that revealed that Hochschild, thanks to those European contacts, had managed to save the lives of thousands of Jews from the Nazi regime. .
“It was what we can say about a mining businessman, who cared about profitability and who exploited his employees,” historian Robert Brockman tells BBC Mundo.
“But the papers found in the Comibol revealed another side of this man: that of a kind of Schindler who did everything possible to save the Jews from the Nazi Holocaust,” he adds.
The German Oskar Schindler, an industrialist member of the Nazi Party, is recognized for having saved the lives of more than 1,000 people, employing them in his factories to save them from persecution.
In Bolivia, Hochschild did the same and, according to documents, saved even many more than Schindler himself: between 9,000 and 20,000.
Robert Brockman wrote a biography about the miner in which he highlights his efforts to rescue as many Jews as possible living under the Nazi regime shortly before the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
“Hochschild managed to convince the Bolivian government at the time that it was a good idea to open the border to Jews, completely contrary to what most countries in the region were doing,” Brockman says.
Hochschild, the miner
Mortiz Hochschild was born in February 1881 in the town of Biblis, in southwestern Germany, and came from a family of Jews dedicated to the mining business.
“Those two aspects, mining and the fact that most of his relatives and neighbors were of the Ashkenazi ethnic group (Jews who settled in Central and Eastern Europe), would define what he was going to do for the rest of his life,” says the historian. .
At the beginning of the 20th century, it left Germany for the first time and began to do business independently, first in Australia and then in Chile, which would be the country where it would have the hub of its operations for many years.
“It is in Chile where he organizes his extraction company, and in an almost relentless way he begins to develop the mining business, which would take him to Bolivia where he would revolutionize mining extraction,” Brockmann notes.
According not only to the historian’s account but also to other historical documents, Hochschild sought to appropriate mines that were disused or abandoned and make them profitable with new extractive methods.
“It turns out that those mines that previously produced silver were abandoned when this element ran out. However, they had other metals such as tin or zinc, which Hochschild knew could be exploited,” he says.
But it was not only his occurrence. Patiño and Aramayo would also enter this mining system in Bolivia.
The three would soon become known as the “Tin Barons.”
“With the outbreak of World War I, these men began to sell tin to the great powers. They made a lot of money, but at the cost of exploiting the workers,” says the historian.
Everything was going smoothly for these powerful miners during the 1920s and 1930s, until changes in government in the early 1940s spelled the end of their empire.
“Hochschild lost all his privileges. He was sent to jail twice and his mining companies began to be taken over by the state,” recalls Brockmann.
Over time, especially during the so-called Revolution of 52 in the South American country, details of the methods of exploitation of the miners and the appropriation of the mining companies around Bolivia were revealed.
According to the story that was established at that time, the so-called Tin Barons came to be considered “the villains of Bolivia.”
“In those documents it is mentioned that he was about to be executed, but he was finally released,” notes the historian.
In 1944, once his freedom had been recovered, he left the country and never returned. In Chile he managed to get his fortune back on track, focusing again on mining.
He died in 1965, in a hotel in Paris.
However, one of the main actions behind his business during those years in Bolivia was going to be revealed almost 60 years later, in the middle of files that no one had ordered.
a special relationship
In 1999, the Bolivian government entrusted Edgar Ramírez, a man who had been linked to the mining camp for more than 20 years, with the task of organizing the documents that had been seized from the three Barons in the 1950s.
Ramírez set about the task and, when he was reviewing the boxes that had belonged to the Hochschild mining company, he found several surprises, among them that that businessman, described as a “villain” and who had been about to be shot, also he had saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.
“This aspect of the man was unknown until we discovered these papers,” Ramírez told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2020.
“He was known in Bolivia as the worst type of businessman. The worst!” said the miner, who died earlier this year.
The file in question, which is now part of Comibol and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2016, revealed thousands of details about how these Jews had reached the Andean peaks of Bolivia from Germany.
“What the documents show us is that, due to Hochschild’s management, many Jews from Germany, France, Poland and even Yugoslavia were able to obtain a visa and a job to start over,” Max Raúl Murillo told BBC Mundo. , current director of the Comibol archive.
“There are proofs of work, salaries, visas, letters not only in Spanish but also in German and Hebrew, which we had to translate to find out how everything had happened,” says Murillo.
According to the documents, it was thanks to the special relationship that Hochschild had with then Bolivian President Germán Busch Becerra (1937-1939) that he was able to bring in between 9,000 and 20,000 Jews, mostly Ashkenazis.
From Germany to Bolivia
In the biographies that have been written around the figure of Hochschild there is an aspect that is repeatedly mentioned: in 1933, when the Nazi government declared that all Jewish Germans who did not reside in the country would lose their nationality, the mining businessman realized that something serious is going to happen.
“He was a man who traveled all the time and this situation alerts him to what is happening in his country, especially with his community. So he feels he has to do something,” says Brockman.
According to the historians’ account, the first thing he tries is to manage entry into countries where there is already a well-established Jewish community, such as the United States or Argentina, but his results are meager.
Then he turns to Busch, who was not very in agreement with the idea because he did not see how to ensure that the Jews who arrived in Bolivia did not simply use the country as a stepping stone to reach other territories.
“But Hochschild convinces him that these Jews can work in the fields and help develop this sector of the Bolivian economy,” Brockman says.
Thus, the Society for the Protection of Immigrants and Israelites (SOPRO) and the Bolivian Colonization Society (SOCOBO) were created with the aim of legalizing the entry of these immigrants.
“These entities manage the documentation based on national regulations, such as the promulgation of Supreme Decrees of 1938, the Supreme Resolution of March 14, 1938, on the entry of Jews into the country, and the Circular of April 24, 1938, which are requirements demanded of immigrants who want to populate uncultivated lands,” explains Murillo.
But Hochschild’s management was not limited to convincing the Bolivian government.
“The records show that he directed immigration work until the end of World War II. He created nurseries, children’s centers, recreation places for orphaned children of Jewish origin, hired Jewish immigrant workers in his mining companies,” Murillo said.
And he added: “In addition, he acquired the Santa Rosa, Chorobamba and Polo Polo farms in the Yungas, where he developed agricultural activities with the immigrants themselves to generate food, work and economic stability.”
What President Busch did not know, however, is that most of the Jews who had been granted visas by the Bolivian government to enter the country – and thus flee Germany – had never worked in the field.
“For different historical and religious reasons, the Jews did not have much influence on agricultural production in Europe,” notes the academic.
“It is for this reason that very few stayed in Bolivia. Many went to Argentina or other countries in the region,” he adds.
In any case, with the help of Busch, Hochschild manages the departure from Germany and the arrival in Bolivia – they left from different ports in Europe, crossed the Atlantic and arrived at the port of Arica, in Chile, with a final instance of traveling through of the so-called “Jewish Express”, which departed from the Chilean port and arrived in La Paz – of thousands of people.
In documents obtained for his research, the historian reveals that most of the people who stayed in Germany who belonged to the same community as the mining entrepreneur did not survive the Holocaust.
“Beyond their business behaviors, this Hochschild move really saved these people’s lives,” Brockman says.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-63204717, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-08 13:20:06
ALEJANDRO MILLAN VALENCIA
BBC NEWS WORLD
#Hochschild #villain #Bolivia #saved #thousands #Jews #Nazis