Note: While continuing my longstanding search for Heinz Ludiwg Berliner, one of my father’s first cousins who is reported to have wound up in Bolivia, I learned that he was merely one of about 20,000 Jews who escaped there from Nazi Europe. I discuss Bolivia’s motivation for allowing so many European Jews into the country when the doors to them in most other countries had been closed.
Related Posts:
POST 62: THE FAR-FLUNG SEARCH FOR MY FATHER’S FIRST COUSIN, HEINZ LUDWIG BERLINER
POST 129: THE UNSUCCESSFUL QUEST TO TRACK DOWN DR. ERICH BRUCK IN ARGENTINA
The Circulo Israelita de Bolivia ( Jews of Bolivia (haruth.com ) is the highest synagogue on earth, located at an altitude of more than 12,000 feet in La Paz, Bolivia. The synagogue serves the 500 to 700 Jews in a country where the citizens are predominantly Catholic. It retains copies of various documents and newspaper clippings related to the immigration of Jewish people to Bolivia and the creation of the Jewish communities in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz. I first contacted the Circulo Israelita de Bolivia in 2019 after learning that my father’s first cousin, Heinz Ludwig Berliner, survived the Holocaust by somehow making his way there. (Figure 1) I had hoped they might have evidence of Heinz’s presence in the country, but regrettably not.
After my last contact with the synagogue in January 2020, shortly before the Covid pandemic burst upon the global scene, I set aside my pursuit to track down my father’s first cousin. Thus, it came as a big surprise when the Circulo reached out to me recently with new information. I’d clearly planted a seed during our earlier exchanges. Synagogue staff explained that an anthropologist named Dr. Sandra Gruner-Domić is currently in Bolivia doing research on the history of Jews there, and the topic of Heinz Berliner came up.
It turns out, Dr. Gruner-Domić had found a so-called “Censo De Extranjeros,” a foreigner census form (Figure 2), for a gentleman named Erich Blumenthal Berliner. This document is a mandatory declaration that Bolivia’s Minister of Immigration required be filled out by all foreign immigrants. Obviously, given the identical surname to my ancestor Heinz Berliner caused synagogue staff and Dr. Gruner-Domić to wonder whether there might be any connection between these two Berliners. After briefly getting my hopes up, I quickly realized they are not related in any way I can easily discern.
Still, as I had done and discussed in Post 129 for my unrelated but similarly surnamed individual named Dr. Henrik Brück, interred in “El Cementerio Judio” in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña in Chaco Province, Argentina, I searched in ancestry for any evidence of Erich Berliner’s life in Germany. Intriguingly, I found his marriage certificate showing he married a woman a widow or divorcee named Edith Charlotte Rotenstein née Totschek in Berlin in 1934 (Figures 3a-c); this matches the maiden name of Erich Berliner’s wife on his foreigner census form. So, just as I had tracked Dr. Henrik Brück to his place of birth in Alba Iulia, Romania from Argentina, I was similarly able to backtrack from Bolivia Erich Berliner to his place and date of marriage in Berlin. Relevantly, however, neither is related to me.
I exchanged a few emails with Dr. Gruner-Domić incidentally sharing Erich Berliner’s Berlin marriage certificate ruefully remarking this Berliner is unrelated to Heinz. Sandra then sent me a page from the database of individuals buried in the Jewish cemetery in Cochabamba with the names of two other Berliners, Frida and Lothar Berliner, with their specific birth and death dates. (Figure 4) This also allowed me to check their names in ancestry. I was very precisely able to find a birth certificate for an Adolf Lothar Berliner who was born in Berlin on the 11th of October 1883 matching the date of birth from the Cochabamba database. (Figures 5a-b) I also found Lothar’s marriage certificate showing he got married on the 11th of July 1921 in Berlin to a woman named Frieda Anna Pauline Dammann born the 24th of November 1887. (Figures 6a-c) While her forename matches the Berliner buried in Cochabamba and I believe her to be Lothar’s wife, her date of birth is different. What to make of this is unclear.
In trying to find a photo of Sandra to include in this post (Figure 7), I learned much more about how Jews found refuge in Bolivia during the Nazi era. I’ll briefly review the historical context for this based on a Webinar Sandra delivered at the JDC Archives in May 2022: “Sandra Gruner-Domić Lectures on Bolivia, a Forgotten Refuge During the Holocaust: Jewish Immigration 1937-1941 | JDC Archives” This is a topic of potentially much greater interest to readers than my search for Heinz Berliner, although it fits well into trying to better understand how he wound up in Bolivia.
Dr. Gruner-Domić is a migration scholar and is on a Fulbright Scholarship to Bolivia for the 2022-2023 academic year. Recently, she has been examining the immigration of Jewish refugees in Bolivia during the Holocaust, including the role played by a Moritz Hochschild, a Jewish entrepreneur, and the second-wealthiest man in Bolivia at the time.
The immigration of Jewish refugees to Bolivia is a lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust. Amazingly, approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe arrived in Bolivia between 1937 and 1941, at a time when other Latin American countries had closed their doors. Bolivia was among the 32 nations who attended the Évian Conference in July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. The conference was deemed a failure because aside from the Dominican Republic, delegations from the participating nations failed to come to any agreement about accepting the Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. At the Évian Conference Bolivia also refused to accept any Jewish refugees.
However, a month after the conference Bolivia notified the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees of their willingness to begin accepting Jewish refugees. So, along with Shanghai and the Dominican Republic, Bolivia was the last country in the world in the lead up to WWII still issuing visas to Jews trying to flee Nazi persecution. Regular readers will recall that in Post 122, I talked about how another one of my relatives, Herta Brauer, escaped to the Dominican Republic.
As just mentioned, Bolivia issued 20,000 visas to Jewish refugees between 1937 and 1941. Let’s briefly examine Bolivia’s motivation for deciding to do so.
Between 1932 and 1935, Bolivia and Paraguay fought the Chaco War over control of the northern part of the Gran Chaco region, known in Spanish as Chaco Boreal, which was thought to be rich in oil. (Figure 8) The Chaco War was the bloodiest interstate military conflict fought in South America during the 20th century and was fought between two of the continent’s poorest countries, both of whom had lost territory to neighbors during 19th century wars. Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile during the 1879 War of the Pacific, while Paraguay lost almost half of its territory to Brazil and Argentina in the Paraguayan War of 1864 to 1870. As a result both countries wound up landlocked. Although the 600,000 km2 of the Gran Chaco region was sparsely populated, control of the Paraguay River running through it was especially important to Bolivia because it would have provided access to the Atlantic Ocean.
In any case, because of the war, Bolivia lost almost 60,000 people, or roughly 2 percent of its population; in addition, Paraguay captured around 10,000 Bolivian civilians, many of whom decided to stay in Paraguay after the war. Clearly, Bolivia was hemorrhaging people. Following the war, Bolivia was trying to counter its population loss as well as stem further losses by people seeking better economic opportunities in surrounding countries.
After the Chaco War, Bolivia was at an important historical crossroad amidst a nationalist resurgence. Immigration was one step in the country’s transformation, the goals of which were to modernize and repopulate the country, as well as colonize the eastern region of the country with the aim of expanding agricultural development there. Beginning in January 1937, President José David Toro Ruilova once again allowed the free entry of foreigners into the country that had been suspended during the Chaco War. Shortly thereafter Jews began to arrive in Bolivia.
The year 1937 was a turning point for Jews in Europe, with a massive exodus beginning in 1938, and the years 1938 and 1939 being characterized as the “Panic Migration Years.” The involvement of Moritz (Mauricio) Hochschild, a Jew who’d emigrated to Bolivia during the 1920’s, played a part in allowing Jews from Nazi Europe to enter the country. As Bolivia’s second wealthiest man and a leading mining industry businessman, he became an economic advisor to President Toro; the two of them found commonality and their personal relationship played a role in convincing Bolivia to allow Jewish migration. According to Dr. Gruner-Domić, the refugees arriving from Europe were viewed primarily as Europeans and secondly as Jews.
The first concrete measure taken by the Bolivian government was an agreement it signed in January 1937 with the Polish government to allow the resettlement of 250 Jewish families; an agreement was also signed with then-Czechoslovakia. In a few instances, even Jews who’d been incarcerated in concentration camps were released if they’d been lucky enough to obtain a Bolivian visa.
Prior to the mass migration of Jews into Bolivia, which peaked in 1939, there were only about 200 Jews in the entire country. It’s reported that on the 22nd of February 1939 alone, more than 800 Jews arrived. The arrival of this many Jews at once strained the country’s infrastructure, so a decision was made to limit the number of refugees to 250 a month, though it’s unclear this limit was ever implemented.
The path by which most European Jews who’d secured a Bolivian visa came was via boat leaving from Hamburg, Germany or Milano, Italy, traveling through the Panama Canal, landing in Arica, Chile (Figure 9), then taking the train to La Paz; others came via train from Argentina or Brazil. Most Jews who found refuge in Bolivia in the late 1930’s and 1940’s did not stay, so today’s Jewish population is estimated at between 500 and 700. Following the war, those who had families elsewhere left. Judging from the relatively small number of Jews in Bolivia today, I reckon that Heinz Berliner was among those who decamped to a yet unknown country.
