German Brazilians in the Whermacht?

sid guttridge · Post by **sid guttridge** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 11:42 am

In WWII the considerable community of British descent in Argentina provided enough volunteers to form an unofficial Argentine squadron of the RAF.

Did the even larger German-Brazilian community have a distinct presence in any German armed service or were they simply unable to get to Germany in any numbers while the country was still neutral?

Many thanks,

Sid.

Lorenz · Post by **Lorenz** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:30 pm

Luftwaffe. If you will post this question on the 12 O'Clock High Luftwaffe discussion forum, you should be able to get a response from a couple of Brazilian guys who are regulars there and know the names of every German-Brazilian who flew in the Luftwaffe. There were several very well-known pilots among them, including Wolfgang Falck, I think.

--Lorenz

P.S. and Sid, please don't forget the Italian-Labradoreans, the German-Tasmanians and the Japanese-Chilians.........we shouldn't leave anyone out!

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 3:36 pm

On the Allied side - what about the Patagonian WELSH?

Lorenz · Post by **Lorenz** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 4:00 pm

They were all in a special Fallschirmjäger unit together with the Icelandic-Paraguayans, I believe!

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 4:13 pm

LMAO not kidding about the Welsh, theres a very large and very Ethnic Welsh community living on the coast of Patagonia, clining on to a very barren area there. Remember a few documentaries about them when I was a kid. Like Happy Valley in Kenya still being VERY English, or around Durban.

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Wed Oct 25, 2006 4:22 pm

in fact, SO many that....

http://www.welsh-patagonia.com

Lorenz · Post by **Lorenz** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 4:27 am

phylo_roadking wrote:in fact, SO many that....

http://www.welsh-patagonia.com

From that web site it looks like they went to Patagonia first in the 1880's, failed to make it due to the harshness and the barren, treeless terrain, pulled stakes and moved to Australia shortly after the turn of the century. Makes sense. I've never visited Patagonia, but I do subscribe to the National Geographic!

--Lorenz

sid guttridge · Post by **sid guttridge** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:11 am

Hi Lorenz,

There is still some Welsh spoken there.

A few months ago a tea shop in North Wales placed an advert on the internet for a Welsh-speaking waitress. They got no applicants from Wales but they took on somebody from Patagonia. This made the national press in the UK.

Apparently because they haven't suffered a century of corruption by English loan words, Patagonian Welsh is still quite pure, if a little archaic.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sadly the small Italian-Labradorean, German-Tasmanian and Japanese Chilean-Japanese communities were all wiped in a freak three car head on car crash in 1938 while holidaying in Hawaii. This deprived the Italian Navy of its three finest Quebecois-speaking snow-shoe specialists, the Panzerwaffe of two elite Strine-speaking wallaby trackers and the Japanese catering corps of its only Mapuche-speaking sushi-bar manager. The strategic implications for the Axis were devastating. Without their local expertise no invasions of North America, Australia or Latin America could be mounted and global dominance was therefore beyond Axis reach even before war broke out. Oh, the futility of it all!

Cheers,

Sid.

Lorenz · Post by **Lorenz** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 8:54 am

Geez, Sid, I can't beat that! Old Phylo the Roadking can't even beat that! I think you've revealed the last great undisclosed secret of World War II, and for that we are deeply in your debt. The tankie fanatics out there will now know why the Panzerwaffe wasn't able to win, why the Italian Navy surrendered and why the Japanese officer corps all committed hara-kiri. And the state of Hawaii had better re-think the theme and location of their next World War II memorial!

BTW, here is a thread with some key access links to information on German-Brazilians:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=110218

I think I was wrong yesterday about Wolfgang Falck. I should have said Gordon Gollob. But there were a number of others, too.

Thanks for the interesting story about the Comanche-speaking Welch-Patagonian waitress needed to serve Ceylonese green tea in the Queen & Crown Whitebread pub in Trawsfynydd. That gal has her work cut out for her. Let's hope she gets to keep her tips!

Cheers,

--Lorenz

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Thu Oct 26, 2006 11:35 am

When it comes to the futility of war and how the mighty Nazi war machine suffered abroad from the lack of knowledge of the locals, I need only return to fact......

In 1941 two Abwehr agents were landed near Cobh from a submarine and made their way to the nearest railway station. Totally ignorant of the region as they were, totally without liaison even with the pro-German Southern Commands of the IRA, They stood in a closed railway station waiting for the next train in the morning. They were approached after a few hours by two irish Army Officers from G2 Intelligence branch, who had been alerted by worried locals who had spotted the two gentlemen and their suitcases....

The problem of course - as these two officers explained to their prisoners, was that the station was closed, which was a dead giveaway, all the locals knew it - and it had been closed for TWENTY YEARS. In the growing daylight it became obvious that there were neither rails nor sleepers in the grassy lane beneath the platform.....

There are tales of a couple of German citizens who'd been living in Ireland before the war returning to Germany in September 1939. Strangely enough, none of them volunteered to come back!

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Tue Nov 14, 2006 5:13 am

In Ireland? That's one I haven't heard of. The local Irish citizenry were more familiar with British uniforms and the British military than that, I'd have thought. Tens of thousands went to England to join up, and around 100,000 to work in various wartime industries. Unless the poor bugger was a Pole or Czech or something, there were Poles stationed at the airfield at my home village of Ballyhalbert for eight months (General Sikorsky visited them there) but wasn't aware of any over-the-border losses on their part. Could be un urban legend, that...or in this case rural legend LOL

shergar · Post by **shergar** » Thu Nov 16, 2006 5:19 pm

i would disagree with your assumption taylor , the ss man if in theory were walking down the street would just have be lifted by the garda and interned with any other german previously lifted ythe irish were not hostile to the germans and certainly were not hostile to the british during the great emergency