I knew a Rommel from Mexico. Cool guy. He explained that Rommel was evil, just a General at war. He attempted an assassination plot that failed and he had to choose if he wanted his family to die, or if he should only die. Guess what he chose…
If you meant “wasn’t” like the rest of your comment implies, incorrect. Rommel is someone Wehrmacht apologists (or people with his last name) like to make excuses for, but he was a bad, bad dude, if nothing else for being a huge Hitler fanboy well into the Holocaust, of which he was very aware. Hell, supporting the annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the invasion of Poland by themselves makes you a piece of shit fascist.
He also didn’t try to assassinate Hitler, or at least we have no proof for and much against.
If you want some light reading…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rommel_myth
Wikipedia tries to stay unbiased on the topic but the simple reality is the only way a Wehrmacht officer didn’t participate in genocide was by being dead in 1938, and if you think a field marshal could have clean hands I have a bridge to sell you.
The Rommel myth has better basis that most but it’s still a legacy of Cold War realpolitik as the Allies scrambled to politically justify leaving the monstrous establishments of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan relatively intact to use against the Comintern.
They wanted idiots to say “Well, look at Rommel, the Wehrmacht officer class wasn’t ALL bad, we can’t execute them all!”
And the plan worked, and to this day Rommel is still remembered as “One of the good Nazis.”
His parents came over pre-war, but it blew my mind when I found out the former dictator of Peru (Alberto Fujimori) was of Japanese ancestry.
I mean there’s no reason why an ethnically Japanese man can’t rule Peru, but it still was not something I expected at all.
Maybe it’s just personal prejudice?
Wasn’t there already a German population before WW2 because there is a small patch in Argentina with similar climate to Germany?
Argentina during that time is like the US now - such a promising country. People migrated there in flock.
I dated an “Argentinian” girl in college called Julia Göring. She told me that unlike most families with Nazi related last names, hers decided to keep theirs per her grandmother’s insistence.
One of my relatives was named Adolf. He died in the 1970s.
Everybody in my family is Jewish.
When Hitler was born, Adolf was one of the 50 most popular first names in Germany, even though he wasn’t born in Germany.
That’s what they want you to think so they can appear more “Aryan”
“Mexicans came from the indian people, Brazilians came from the jungle, but we, the Argentinians came from the boats, and were boats that came from there, Europe. And that’s how we built our society.”
- Alberto Fernandez, former president of Argentina
For more context, he said that quoting a singer (i think an argentinian one) 💀
I didn’t say it didn’t happen, just that it’s a lot more uncommon than what Argentinians want you to think
A little weird that they’d look at Nazis and their descendants as something to aspire to. People are a mystery.
