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Lively German post-card map of South America, showing a portrait of what appears to be Brazilian strongman President Getulio Vargas.
The postcard in German suggests that the map was created during Vargas's flirtations with Germany prior to World War II.
The title translates as follows:
Are you looking for happiness here? Peace may move to America's south-with your families perhaps to Brazil, or set your goals in Peru and beyond. Chile, in Para-u. Uruguay - s' is no match!
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas (1882 –1954) was a Brazilian lawyer and politician, who served as President during two periods: the first was from 1930–1945, when he served as interim president from 1930–1934, constitutional president from 1934–1937, and dictator from 1937–1945. After being overthrown in a 1945 coup, Vargas returned to power as the democratically elected president in 1951, serving until his suicide in 1954.
Prior to WWII, Vargas employed ambiguous policies towards Axis and Allied orbits. At first, Brazil seemed to be entering the Axis orbit — even before the 1937 declaration of the Estado Novo. Between 1933 and 1938, Germany became the main market for Brazilian cotton, and its second largest importer of Brazilian coffee and cacao. The German Bank for South America even established three hundred branches in Vargas' Brazil.
The rapid increase in civilian and military trade between Brazil and Nazi Germany gave US officials reason to begin wondering about Vargas' international alignment.
The repressions that followed the communist's coup d'état attempt in Brazil in November 1935 increased the cooperation between Brazil and Germany. After Brazil deported the revolutionary Jewish German Olga Benário Prestes, wife of Luís Carlos Prestes to Germany in 1937, Brazil was invited to be part of the Axis Powers at the side of Japan, Italy and Germany. However, when Brazil refused this invitation at the advent of the "Estado Novo" at the end of that same year, the relations between Brazil and the countries of the Axis started to chill.
This estrangement also occurred in part due to the German-Italian-Japanese powers becoming frustrated in regards to what they believed the Estado Novo should represent. The policy of forced assimilation and nationalization imposed by Vargas and the military over every immigrant community, including the German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese ones, as well as the prohibition of any political activities that were not directly endorsed by the central power in Rio de Janeiro, which included the Nazi Party in Brazil and its allies, the Brazilian Integralists, motivated Italian-Spanish-German support of the Integralists' coup d'état attempt in May 1938. The failure of that action and the British naval blockade on the trade of Germany, Italy and Spain on the Atlantic, especially from 1940 onwards, led to a sharp deterioration of relations between Brazil and the Axis powers.
