The German-Jewish businessman Moritz Hochschild (middle). Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
“Despot”, “cruel”, “enemy of Bolivia”, practically “a villain”. In the imagination of the Andean country there are many adjectives that commemorate the Jewish-German citizen Moritz Hochschild, one of the most famous mining entrepreneurs of the first half of the 20th century. Along with Simón I Patiño and Carlos Aramayo, they were known as the “Tin Barons”, the most powerful men in this country and perhaps even in South America. However, little is known about Hochschild’s philanthropic side and his role during World War II. Thanks to his efforts, an estimated nearly 20,000 Jews were able to reach the South American nation and were saved from the Nazi Holocaust, earning him the name of the Bolivian Schindler.
So tell Bolivian writers and journalists Raúl Peñaranda and Robert Brockmann in Escape to the Andes (Aguilar-Penguin Random House, 2023), a work in which they attempt to undo the character’s one-dimensionality and “all his greyness.” Of how he mobilized his resources and political influence to enable Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Italy to make the crossing from the old continent to America, and the criticism he faced, the accusations he was an exploitation, the mortal danger he had to endure due to the volatile and revolutionary times in Bolivia, and last but not least his complex love and family life.
The book’s authors, Raúl Peñaranda and Robert Brockmann, with kind permission
“Our challenge was to show Hochschild with more facets, not so black and white. We don’t want to say that he was always a villain and is now a hero. The book aims to contextualize an era and qualify that character, but with all this new information, we see that someone who was viewed so negatively had this other face,” Peñaranda explained to EL PAÍS via video call.
Brockmann says that when the Nazis put Hochschild on the other side because he was Jewish, he tried to save as many people as possible but also made Bolivia’s tin production available to the Allies. During the war, the co-author explains, this strategic element for the war was manufactured in Malaysia under the power of Japan – part of the Axis powers – and in South America. “Planes, cases, oil barrels were made of tin. What Hochschild is doing is making Bolivia’s tin available to his allies, which would have consequences for him decades later. The book also shows plans by spies, by countries, by embassies, which were quite complicated,” he adds.
The idea for this book on investigative journalism, written by four hands, came about five years ago without either of the authors thinking of a joint publication. At the time, Brockmann had published Two Shots at Dawn: Life and Death of German Busch, a biography of the former Bolivian president that contains fragments of the complicated relationship between the former president and the mining entrepreneur. As a result of this publication, the fellow journalist was contacted via Twitter by Patrick de Koenigswarter, a Franco-British man who identified himself as a member of a “large group” of former Hochschild executives. It offered him information he and three other former members had gathered about his workplace.
The cover of the book “Escape to the Andes”. Ediciones Aguilar
“If you’re in New York, bring a hard drive,” Robert Kauders, another former manager, told Brockmann, implying the information wouldn’t fit via email. The repository contained all of the information gathered by the four former members detailing Hochschild’s journey through various countries around the world, as well as testimonies from war survivors included in the company report entitled Dr. Moritz (Don Mauricio) Hochschild, 1881 -1965, written by Helmut Waszkis, and other unpublished ones given to the Leo Baeck Institute, an organization dedicated to preserving the history of German-speaking Jews.
More or less in the same years, between 2016 and 2017, Peñaranda had his first contact with the tycoon through his journalistic work as an editor for a local media outlet. His interest and curiosity was piqued by reporting on the discovery of an important and large archive belonging to the Bolivian Mining Corporation (Comibol), testifying to the philanthropic work of the German magnate during the rise of Nazism in Europe. As a result of the discovery of the Comibol and the work of then archives director Edgar Ramírez, the documentation was declared a World Document Heritage by Unesco in 2017.
Thanks to a grant he received in Washington DC, Peñaranda contacted the archives of the Holocaust Museum in the US capital, and they gave him access to transcripts, memoranda, cables, interviews, photos and other documents relating to Hochschild and refugees relate who were staying in Bolivia.
A record of one of the Jews who arrived in Bolivia.COMIBOL
It didn’t take long for colleagues and friends to find out what they were working on. A joint book was necessary. Aside from juggling the day-to-day work of writing, the biggest challenge was summarizing the information gathered. “We could have written a 1,000-page book. We started editing with Robert because we really had a lot of information. It’s not an academic book, we wanted it to be read like a novel,” explains Peñaranda, to whom Brockmann adds: “Our story is written in the form of a journalistic chronicle, which I think is the most interesting and appropriate formula for a character with these to approach properties”.
The work is available in Chile, in February in Argentina and Uruguay; in Bolivia and Paraguay in March. It will be released in April in Colombia and in June in Mexico for later marketing in Central America and other Spanish-speaking capitals.
Both Brockmann and Peñaranda see the work with a “great international calling” as it represents this moment for the Jewish community of different countries, for when the rest of the nations closed their borders during World War II, Bolivia kept its doors fully open while in Germany unfortunate events took place. “I love rediscovering characters drawn from the documents and testimonies of a certain time and looking at them with fresh, almost virgin eyes. We could say that’s the purpose of the exercise we did with this character in Escape to the Andes,” concludes Brockmann.
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