German Settlers and Nazism in the Americas Photograph Collection

German immigration to the Americas intensified from the beginning of the 19th century. Immigrants, often viewing themselves as settlers and colonizers, worked in agriculture, founded industrial enterprises, and, while contributing to their respective new country's economies and actively partaking in local development, they also established strong communal institutions and preserved German consciousness throughout generations. Such institutions were the so-called Haus des Deutschen in Chile, or the yearly celebration of the day of the colonist (Dia do colono) in Brazil. They founded German newspapers and established schools and churches. Germans in the Americas were also nature enthusiasts and keen observers of American life and institutions: some of the pictures in this collection provide a glimpse of what phenomena in both urban and rural American settings impressed German observers from the mid-19th century.

In 1917, an organization for the documentation of German presence outside of Germany and cultivation of German-ness in Germany and abroad was established in Stuttgart. The Deutsche Ausland-Institut (DAI), was a cultural institution and until the Nazi rise to power in 1933, it did not carry any political mission. The Nazi leadership, Adolf Hitler personally, recognized this institute as an important piece of the Nazi nationalist political machinery. Katia Geschke explains (on a webpage commemorating the centennial anniversary of the institute's founding), "The official goal, as described in the brochure 'New Tasks of the German Foreign Institute' issued in 1934, was the 'education of ethnic Germans living abroad in the spirit of a unified German world-view, into, as it were, soldiers of the Third Reich'." The verso of many of the photographs in the album carry the stamp of the DAI suggesting that the pictures were once included in the archives of the institute, which was reorganized in 1951 under the new name Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), Institute for Foreign Relations. In 2017, IFA celebrated its centennial anniversary and created a webpage, which provides not only a historical overview of the past hundred years of its operations, but also points out that only long after the reorganization of DAI was its contribution to spreading Nazi ideology among German communities outside of Germany fully understood. One of the photographs in the collection is mounted on cardboard that displays DAI's Nazi logo: a sailing ship with a swastika on its sail. Other photographs in this album attest that several of the German communities in the Americas embraced Nazism.

The identity of the person(s) who assembled this album and the circumstances in which these photographs were collected remain unknown. The photographs were originally housed in a binder with plastic sleeves. Next to some of the photographs there was numbering in red, but the photographs were not numbered in consecutive order. The original arrangement of the photographs, enclosed in the collection, appears to be arbitrary.