History
Nueva Germania was founded in 1886 on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú River, about 250 kilometers from Asunción by five - later fourteen, largely impoverished families from Saxony. Led by Bernhard Förster and his wife, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the colonists emigrated to the Paraguayan rainforest to put to practice ideas about the superiority of the Aryan race. It was the declared dream of Förster to create an area of Germanic development, far from the influence of Jews, whom he reviled.
Förster, who had negotiated the town's titles of property with General Bernardino Caballero, committed suicide in 1889 in the city of San Bernardino, a local center of German population. His wife returned to Germany in 1893.
According to Gerard L. Posner, writing in Mengele: The Complete Story, Josef Mengele, a major German war criminal, spent some time in Nueva Germania while a fugitive after World War II; however, evidence that Mengele even passed through is shaky.
The colony's development was hampered by the harshness of the environment and those colonists that stayed soon abandoned the supremacist idea of its founders, and integrated into the Paraguayan culture. Nueva Germania became a quiet community of San Pedro dedicated to agriculture, specializing in the cultivation of yerba mate. As of 2013 there had been extensive intermarriage with Paraguayans, but pockets of German culture remained.
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