Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
MEXICAN NAZI
NAMED
JOSE
VASCONCELOS
English translation of the article:
Ese olvidado nazi mexicano de nombre
José Vasconcelos
by Hector Orestes Aguilar
Coincidencias y Divergencias
http://www.istor.cide.edu/archivos/num_30/coincidencias.pdf
On Saturday, October 18, 1941, the readers of the Mexican newspaper El popular
woke up to eight column headlines that awaited them, furtive and disturbing, in the
second section of the newspaper: "The Nazi Party in our country". Such was the title
of an extensive note about the speech that Vicente Lombardo Toledano, President
of the Confederation of Workers of Latin America, had delivered the previous day
in the Arena Mexico. The editors of El Popular highlighted the "colossal
proportions of the fascist conspiracy in Mexico" and promised those who followed
the rich reportage a “complete list with names, addresses and activities of members
of the German Hitler party throughout the Republic.”
The legend of a network of National Socialist organizations in Mexico World War
II, long exploited by sensationalist press
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and popularly known as the "Fifth Column", was thus dismantled to assume an
unpredictable reality. Although Lombardo's discourse and his journalistic version
in El popular made reference to all possible links established by the Nazis in our
country, including those to synarchist groups as well as to "Christian" organizations,
to citizens of countries occupied by Germany and to the Spanish, Italian, French and
Japanese fascists. Over the course of years, it has been documented that identifiable
German citizens in Mexico qualified as National Socialists went from being only
seven in 1930 to constitute, at the end of 1939, a considerable community of 366
members of different organizations scattered throughout the republic and in various
social fields.1 In cities such as Mexico City, Monterrey and Puebla; in ports like
Tampico, Veracruz, Mazatlan, La Paz, Guaymas, Acapulco, Manzanillo, Puerto
Angel and Salina Cruz; and in borders such as Nogales, Juarez, Piedras Negras and
Matamoros, those conspirators would have deployed clandestine movements of all
kinds, especially actions of proselytism and propaganda.
Although the blacklist of Lombardo and El Popular was the most exhaustive that
was publicly known and widely distributed in times of war, he omitted one of the
axial episodes of the infiltration of National Socialism into our country: the
publication of Timon magazine, directed by José Vasconcelos in 1940. From then,
either as an involuntary omission in the biographies of the Mexican writer or as a
parenthesis in the histories of national ideas, the strange moment in which a
heterogeneous group of writers, politicians, translators and admirers of Hitler meet
to give birth to the greatest propaganda medium favorable to the III Reich in Latin
America, largely ignoring the reality of Germany and the Germans of that time, it
seems to have been erased from all literary memory and historical record.
CRIME OF AN ESSAY
In the mid-1960s, the American critic and researcher of Jewish origins, Itzhak Bar-
Lewaw Mulstock, gave the Intercontinental Editor the originals
1
Cfr. Jürgen Müller, “El NSDAP en México: historia y percepciones, 1931-1940". On
the website of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Latin America and the
Caribbean, www-tau.ac.il/eial/VI_2/muller.htm
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recreation and light reading. A little later, in 1924, he founded his first political
magazine as a showcase for his personal opposition to the regime, La Antorcha,
an ephemeral publication in which the raw discrepancies between the author of
La Raza Cosmica and the national government became more apparent. All
these editorial tasks already showed a way of conceiving the production of
books and periodicals as if it were the massive dissemination of “readings",
works that were distributed as "catechisms", concentrated teaching collections
or instruments of a propaganda campaign that had as its pretension to reform
or, if possible, transform the public awareness of a country.
It can be assumed that, towards the end of the 1960s, Bar-Lewaw must have
found - perhaps in a newspaper, library or Canadian depository, by then he was
teaching at the University of York, in Toronto - some Timon issues. The
humiliation, the shame and the rancor that his find no doubt produced in him,
they motivated him to conceive a volume edited in extremely precarious
conditions, today unattainable, a fetish of a few private libraries and marked as
if it were a cursed book: La revista Timon y José Vasconcelos.
If I ever see someone burning in the fire and begging me to save him, I
will extinguish your flames with fish and oil; and if the river,
overflowing from a storm, sweeps away some man and he holds out his
hands and begs me to pull him out, I will push him and I will sink his
head under the waters, so that he cannot float anymore. Thus, they will
receive what they deserve. This law was proposed by Timon, son of
Echecratides of the village of Colito, and the Timon himself has
presented it to the approval of the assembly. All right. Accept that law
and stick to it firmly.
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and, by the 1940s, the news agencies of the countries that took part in the
Second World War. Timon, it was evident, was destined to circulate in an
environment of readers as wide as possible. In perspective, it can be said that its
projected niche market was the same as that of fashion magazines and sports
magazines. Their presentation was very similar to those of the weekly
publications in vogue for those years in the United States: tabloid format, color
cover, 48 pages printed in offset that used at least three different typographic
families and eight entire advertising plans; as soon as to the distribution of
contents, the fluency of reading was favored with an order based on the balance
between length and density of written materials: an editorial, six fixed sections,
ten guest columnists on average, one series of "cartons of war", political
cartoons, irregular columns of fashion, sports, health, tips for family life, a
literary section and a variable miscellany about cinema, religion, science,
opera, stamp collecting, bull fighting, sculpture and painting. Since the
newspapers of the time cost on average 3 cents. We can say that Timon, by
content, price (50 cents) and periodicity (weekly), was a luxury destined for the
upper middle class.
The American academic was stunned when he noticed that the director of that
"continental magazine", as the subtitle reads placed in the frontispiece of the
editorial page, it was Jose Vasconcelos. The name of the publication was
strange for a magazine of that profile, since others of that kind carried more
explicit, combative or messianic titles, like newspapers of the right, Omega, La
Reacción y El Hombre Libre, or the bulletins Noticias de Guerra and Diario de
la Guerra. The word "Timon" could be associated with the conductor, the
commander, the leadership, or the leader, who is at the command post of a ship.
The editorial of the first issue tried to account for it:
Between the rocks and whirlpools of the present moment, more than any
other time, it is necessary, for the ship of our collective destinies, to have
at the helm one who steers it on the course. But the handling of the
rudder requires knowledge of the route, firmness of the hand and
audacity of the Will. Drive is never enough. No nation is saved, if
intelligence has not illuminated its drive. Where instinct governs,
barbarism rules and the nation becomes a pariah [...]. In all times the
people who prevail are those,
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who rely on a superior doctrine of life [...] The important thing for us
about the international situation, is that the powers are weakening under
whose hegemony we have been suffering for a century and a half. Nor
England will return to what it was; nor will France become the fiefdom
of Popular Fronts and have a fate divided between East or West; nor will
the United States escape from universal change [...] at the moment our
interest lies in the weakening of the Anglo-Saxon world hegemony. Our
requirement for nations in formation is that all the barriers that have
hindered our progress be toppled [...] Behind our failures smiling
poinsettism has risen, more powerful every day. For that reason our
combative effort will no longer be limited to the present and the local
situation, but rather it will rather seek out the root of our evils to light the
purifying fire in it.2
The first issue of Timon began to circulate on February 22, 1940 to disappear
16 issues later, censored by the Mexican government. Knowing this, Bar-
Lewaw took on the task of locating the entire collection of the journal, to
determine the conditions of its short existence and to compile a selection of
writings and illustrations contained in that series to give form to a book that
would serve, simultaneously, to repair his enormous negligence and to reveal
the seriousness of an episode over which enough dirt has been shoveled with
the intention of never exhuming it again.
2
"Timon” is defined, in the magazine Timon, volume I, number 1, February, 22, 1940,
page 5.
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Through that material, especially in the articles with reference to war events; in
the chronicles and war offices; in essays and articles in depth that try to analyze
the development of military actions in Europe, a body of speeches having as a
goal, before the public opinion of this country, to confer acceptability to the
political program and ideology advocating the triumph of Nazi Germany as the
inexorable result of the Second World War. A triumph that would mean, over
any other factor, the only option for Mexico to get rid of the traditional
economic and political domination of the United States.
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Where did the resources come from to finance the costs of a publication of this
magnitudes, with such a broad group of collaborators and with a supposed
continental scope? The prices of the subscriptions, of the advertising insertions
and of the color ads were expensive for the time, without a doubt. A
subscription for six months cost 12 pesos; one eighth of a page, 50; a page in
color with two inks 500 and one in four inks, 800. The back issues cost a peso.
Even if three quarters of the magazine had been devoted to advertising, the
income obtained would not have sufficed to pay the administrative staff, the
offices, the paper, the printing, and the group of regular collaborators, without
discounting the salaries that Vasconcelos had paid himself and his
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manager, the Cuban, Cesar Calvo, accrued respectively for the management
editorial and administrative coordination of its publication. Unless I have noted
that various German businessmen and merchants identified as notorious
National Socialist militants in the capital, such as Alfred Auer (domiciled in the
Roma neighborhood and a dealer of the Blaupunkt Company), subsidized the
weekly with the purchase of advertising space, Bar-Lewaw could not find clear
evidence that Jose Vasconcelos was a paid agent by the Nazis. However, he
had no doubt that the writer and his magazine were instruments of the
propaganda machinery of the Third Reich in Mexico.
The academic could not penetrate the intermingled spider's web his case study
for only one reason: he did not have access to the file that establishes the
irrefutable link between Vasconcelos, Timon and the funds that the German
Embassy destined to the war of propaganda against the allied countries. The
Today famous confidential report “El nazismo in Mexico”, which is deposited
in the General Archive of the Nation,3 provides evidence that the National
Socialist propaganda apparatus had deployed direct actions on several fronts. In
the section dedicated to "Propaganda intended for Mexicans", subsection 'Own
Publications', the hasty and hesitant editors noted that
3
"Nazismo en México", file 704.1 / 174-1, report of inspectors PS-10 and PS-24 dated of
May 23, 1940. Documentary group: Administrative File Lázaro Cárdenas. AGN.
4
It refers to number 12 of Timón, of May 11, 1940, p. 2. "Dietrich" is Arthur Dietrich,
former Ortsgruppenleiter of the National German Socialist Workers Party in Mexico,
press attaché of the German Embassy and the most important agent in everything
concerning propaganda, espionage and sabotage in the country (note by Hector Orestes
Aguilar).
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That illusory track would soon be derailed. Three days after the entrance of the
Wehrmacht in Paris, on June 15, 1940, Calvo was arrested and Timon
confiscated forever by the Ministry of the Interior. With the exception of Itzhak
Bar-Lewaw, nobody has rigorously explored the incendiary and disturbing
pages of that magazine. You have to go back to them with the conviction that
they guard the secret of the enigmatic, transitory conversion to National
Socialism of that great writer who was Jose Vasconcelos.
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