Wikipedia: History Nueva Germania
Nueva Germania was founded in 1886 on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú River, about 250 kilometers from Asunción by five – later fourteen, largely impoverished families fromSaxony.[1]Led byBernhard Försterand his wife,Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the colonists emigrated to the Paraguayan rainforest to put to practice ideas about the superiority of the Aryan race. It was the declared dream of Förster to create an area of Germanic development, far from the influence of Jews, whom he reviled.
Förster, who had negotiated the town’s titles of property with GeneralBernardino Caballero, committed suicide in 1889 in the city of San Bernardino, a local center of German population. His wife returned to Germany in 1893.
The colony’s development was hampered by the harshness of the environment and those colonists that stayed soon abandoned the supremacist idea of its founders, and integrated into the Paraguayan culture.Josef Mengele, a major German war criminal, spent some time in Nueva Germania while a fugitive afterWorld War II.[2]
Nueva Germania is a now quiet community of San Pedro dedicated to agriculture, specializing in the cultivation ofyerba mate.
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