Nazis and Good Neighbors - The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Hardcover, New)

In Nazis and Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman exposes a secret World War II American operation involving the seizure of 4,000 Germans from fifteen Latin American countries and their internment in the Texas desert. The detainees were represented a broad range of German immigrants, including Jewish refugees, most of whom posed no danger to national security. Research in seven countries (U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala) reveals the diplomatic intrigues and impact of a misguided policy on U.S. relations with Latin America. Friedman examines the evolution of governmental policy, its impact on individuals and emigrant communities, and the ideological assumptions that blinded officials in both Washington and Berlin to Latin American realities. President Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" policy was a victim of this effort to force reluctant Latin American governments to hand over their German residents, while the operation ruined an opportunity to rescue victims of the Holocaust. Although the findings in Nazis and Good Neighbors are historical, its argument has contemporary relevance: security measures based on group affiliation rather than individual actions are as unjust and ineffective in foreign policy as they are in law enforcement. Before joining the history faculty at Florida State University, Max Paul Friedman was a Wodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was also an assistant producer at NPR's "All Things Considered" and a freelance writer for the Washington Post, New York Newsday, Atlanta Consitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and other publications. Friedman has received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and other organizations.