Hola todos! The last blog for Bariloche is a bit of a history lesson. You see while in between doing those trips I had a day where I needed to do laundry and move accommodation and on this day I managed to get myself booked last minute onto a history tour, specifically a walking tour looking at the German migration history of Bariloche and the German buildings here. It was quite pricey for a 1.5 hour walking tour but it was good and you wouldn’t have found this without knowing where to look. Because of this I do recommend you do this tour if you ever visit Bariloche. I Will go over what it was and the overall history but won’t spoil the whole thing here. So without further ado read on.
The German migration came mainly in 3 waves to Bariloche between 1895 and the early 1950s. Bariloche first started before the city was founded by a Chilean-German entrepreneur called Carlos Wiederhold – this guy got given a charter by the Chilean government to start an import/export company in the mountains past the lakes which now define Chile’s modern day border – at the time Patagonia was largely unclaimed land and they hadn’t defined the border at the andes yet. Wiederhold sets up a little trading post in what would develop into Bariloche city.
From there the first migration comes as the trading company needs workers for exporting wood, wool and leather. They had a route which took the export back to Chile via different lakes in the mountains by taking it all on horseback then putting it on a boat then horseback to the next lake until they took it back to Puerto Montt where it would get shipped off to Europe and the US. In fact there is an organised tour that you can go on to travel from Puerto Varas to Bariloche or the other way hopping between those lakes but it was a bit spenny (around £300 pp online didn’t check if it was any cheaper at an agent) so didn’t do it but you can travel that same route if you got some money to burn on your visit here!
From this came the first wave of Migration mainly from Germany/Austria and some Swiss as well. It was easy for them as they already had an established community in and around Puerto Montt/Varas. This migration went on until 1914 when Germany found itself cut off from the outside world by blockade when WW1 started.
The second wave of Migration came from 1919 to about 1933/4 after the Nazis take power back in Germany. The second wave was the biggest one and probably the most beneficial to Bariloche since unlike the labourers which most of the first lot were this were educated and fairly well off middle class people fleeing the aftermath of the war which helped develop Bariloche from a trading post township into a proper city and the land around it being worked by new arrivals.
While the second wave stops sometime in the early 30’s after the Nazis take over Germany Bariloche was able to benefit from early tourism as in the mid 30’s national parks began being founded with Nahuel Huapi being the 3rd in the world to be given that designation.
As WW2 Starts initially things aren’t bad for those in Bariloche as while tourism stops they have plenty of work as Argentina was low key aligned with the axis continuing to trade with Germany all the way through the war until they are eventually strong armed by the US into declaring war on Nazi Germany 3 months before they surrendered. This created an economic boom in Argentina but only a small elite benefitted from this and it’s part of why it became a mess later into the 50’s – 80’s.
The final wave of immigration came in the later 1940s and ending by 1953, where for a brief time you had Germans who still had the means to get out left Germany when it was a smouldering ruin after the war some of which but not all of them were Nazi fugitives on the run though some high profile Nazi criminals passed through or even lived here at some point in time after the war. The third Migration stopped in the 50’s as in Germany or at least West Germany after the Marshall plan reconstruction life was becoming a lot better there as the economy recovered while Argentina on the other hand became unstable which put many off who would have otherwise made the journey had life in Germany not improved as quickly as it had.
When it comes to the Nazis who fled here the historic goodwill Argentina had to Germany before the regime and it’s low key alignment to the axis those in charge still saw the Germans as bringers of money and expertise the nation needed and so offered a so called ‘agreement of silence’ – in exchange for paying a large sum of money you can be given a new identity and protection if you were a known fleeing Nazi but you absolutely could not have any role in any government institution and definitely not the military and get in any trouble with the law you can will be outed in an instance. In short anyone who took this deal had to keep their head down and be on their best behaviour at all times. Not a bad deal when your alternative is the death penalty or worse a slow death somewhere east of the Iron Curtain.
One thing to note on this Argentina was not the only country who took in Nazi fugitives like this, pretty much every country they went to in South America such as Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Brazil etc had some variation of this and how strict the no politics part was varied as well as in some cases like in Bolivia the dictatorships hired them as military or government advisors.
This is the summary. I will leave it here to not completely spoil the whole story but you can look this up yourself if you want to dive deeper into this topic.
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