Swiss aid helped at least 16 former Waffen-SS members reach Brazil

At least 16 former members of the Waffen-SS reached Brazil through a Swiss-backed humanitarian resettlement project after the Second World War, according to research reported by SRF. Around 2,500 members of the Danube Swabians, a German minority, were relocated to Brazil.

The Waffen-SS was the Nazi combat force whose units were involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Danube Swabians had lived for generations in what was then Yugoslavia. After the war, they faced repression, expropriation and expulsion because some members of the minority had collaborated with the Nazis.

The resettlement was organised as part of a Swiss humanitarian initiative. The Catholic Church and the Swiss state provided funding to establish a new settlement in Entre Rios, in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná.

Historian Peter Hug, who specialises in Switzerland’s relations with the Nazi regime, said it had been obvious that some of the men were Nazis and SS members. His book, published in May, examines the project.

“For Switzerland and the Vatican, this group offered an opportunity to present themselves as protectors of refugees,” Hug said. Switzerland had maintained close relations with the German regime, he said, while the Church had never formally protested against Nazi crimes. “The fact that there were also criminals among them was considered less important.”

The project began in the years immediately after the war through cooperation between Austria’s Catholic Church, the Vatican and a group of Danube Swabians linked to the former fascist Croatian Ustasha state. It gained momentum when Caritas Switzerland in Lucerne joined the effort and used its international Catholic network to open doors.

From 1950, the project was taken over by Swiss European Aid, the predecessor of today’s Swissaid. The organisation was close to Switzerland’s Federal Council. Swiss authorities provided diplomatic support and state funding.

“Ultimately, the Federal Council took over the project together with the NGOs close to it,” Hug said. In Brazil, the Swabians were presented as refugees and skilled farmers, a profile that suited the country’s colonisation policy at the time.

The creation of Entre Rios also affected people already living on the land. They were marginalised while the settlement’s leadership sought to preserve what it regarded as German cultural superiority.

The Swiss organisations involved now acknowledge failures and omissions. Swissaid said the perspective of the local population had largely remained unexplored and that it was trying to learn more by contacting descendants of the communities affected.

Caritas Switzerland said it “deeply regrets” that funds intended for humanitarian purposes benefited people who had been members of the Waffen-SS. The organisation said the project now served as an example of how humanitarian aid could have the opposite effect to the one intended.