Skip to main content

Canadian Mennonites and Paraguay: 1922

The first attached photo vividly depicts a meeting of conservative Mennonite elders in Saskatchewan and Manitoba in 1922 who intended to lead their communities to Paraguay. This was happening as hundreds of “Old Colony” Mennonites were leaving for Mexico.


The “Old Colonists” from Manitoba’s West Reserve were in fact the first conservative Canadian Mennonites to scout out Paraguay for settlement land. In 1920 they were assisted in their search by New York financier and lawyer, General Samuel McRoberts, who had extensive holdings as well as political and business connections in Paraguay. The delegation travelled 90 km into the Chaco interior, west of the Paraguay River. They were however unimpressed with the land and ultimately recommended Mexico to their community (note 1).

Other conservative groups in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were however interested in sending their own scouts to assess the Chaco and the political climate in Paraguay vis-à-vis the list of privileges they were seeking.

Leaders representing the Saskatchewan Bergthaler, the Manitoba West Reserve Sommerfelder and the Manitoba East Reserve Chortitzer left Canada on February 17, 1921 and arrived in New York City in the next days to meet with McRoberts. The group sailed on February 21 for Rio de Janeiro, and then on to Buenos Aires where they arrived on March 17. When they finally reached the Paraguayan capital they met with officials and purchased gear for the expedition (note 2).


Already in Buenos Aires they were assisted by General McRoberts’ land agent Fred Engen. Engen--a Norwegian—was fascinated by the beauty of the Chaco and was uniquely committed to engage Indigenous peoples “without guns”—like the Quaker William Penn whom he admired (note 3). Here they started negotiations with the Carlos Casado Company, which owned 2.5 million hectares (5.25 million acres) of land in the Chaco. One of the Casado brothers spoke fluent German. The Casado family acquired this land from the government in 1885 at 8.5 cents per hectare and were now offering it for $3 to $5 per hectare.

The delegation travelled up the Paraguay River and disembarked at Puerto Casado. The Casados had built a small railway that extended 60 km into the interior from the river for extracting and transporting quebracho wood for the production of tannin. From the end station they entered the interior of Paraguay’s Chaco on April 30, 1921—completely dependent on ox carts (see pic) and their Indigenous guides. “Indians under the direction of several white men preceded the company and cut a passage through the forest,” as recorded in one account (note 4). The group penetrated a distance of 255 km (about 160 miles) into the jungle west of the Paraguay River before they were finally convinced to have found land suitable for settlement.

Upon their return to the capital, the Mennonite group leader telegraphed to Canada: “Everyone returned here healthy. Found promising conditions for settlement in every respect. Freedoms (privileges) are now being decided. Mexico and other options are now unattractive when compared with advantages here” (note 5).


The Mennonite delegation requested special privileges in exchange for colonizing the land. These included:

  • Freedom of religion and exemption from military service and the oath;
  • Right to conduct their own schools in the German language;
  • Right to administer the property of their widows and orphans;
  • Right to have their own mutual fire insurance organization;
  • Limitation of the sale of alcoholic beverages in the colony for a 5 km radius;
  • Exemption from import and export duties and taxes for ten years;
  • Permission for the old and disabled to immigrate. (Note 6)

The request of special privileges for one group was hotly debated in the Paraguayan press and by the Senate in July 1921. But Paraguay was in search of prospective colonists to stimulate their economy and agricultural production, and also sought to anchor their claim over the Chaco. The Mennonite requests were strongly supported by President Manuel Gondra and especially his foreign minister, Eusebio Ayala. Ayala expressed the opinion that Prussian King Fredrick the Great had “followed the same policy. His army fought the wars while the Mennonites made sure the economy continued to function.” He and the President knew that the Mennonites would not come unless the law was passed. Another Senator defended the military exemption by arguing that in a time of war not all citizens fight: “First of all we need economic progress to be able to raise an army which will be able to defend our sovereignty. We expect that the Mennonites will be able to help us to achieve this progress” (note 7). Not all agreed.

After heated debate, Bill No. 514 was enacted as law, which safeguarded the above privileges and guaranteed that they would pass automatically from one generation of Mennonites to the next. (See pic 3--news articles; note 8).

The Mennonite land scouts from Canada came with a typical “colonial mindset”—the land was “empty” and the “Indians” were a “problem.” One of the key questions the scouts asked the president after their return from the Chaco was about the Indigenous peoples. “In Canada, they reminded President Gondra, the government had removed the Indians before the Mennonites arrived,” implying that Paraguay might want to do the same. “The president did not think this was necessary as the Indians were nomadic. ‘If necessary,’ he volunteered, ‘placing the Indians on reservations could always be undertaken later’” (note 9).

The President assured the Mennonites, moreover, “that laws and national authorities would protect Mennonite properties and give ‘maximum guaranty for your persons, possessions, and work” (note 10).


A first group migration to Paraguay however did not occur as soon as expected. Because of an economic crisis in 1921, plans were temporarily suspended. McRoberts withdrew from the project, and the Mennonites ...

“were not able in their own strength to finance the emigration, particularly since it was for the group a matter to be taken for granted that the poorer families would be taken along at the expense of the entire group. The cost of the trip to Paraguay was reckoned at $100 per family on the average so that for the poorer families alone $60,000 had to be provided. … [Also] the price of land and grain in Canada had fallen more than 100% [?] as a consequence of the economic crisis and that therefore so much land could not be disposed of in a short time without extraordinary loss.” (Note 11)

Ultimately McRoberts was reengaged, and his land corporation netted a clear profit of almost half a million dollars from the settlement agreement (note 12).

The first group of 309 Mennonite settlers for Paraguay left from Altona, Manitoba by train on November 28, 1926, and then with the steamship “Vasari.” In Paraguay the group was greeted by the president, and on December 30 they finally disembarked at Puerto Casada. A hard start lay ahead. By 1930, 1,785 Mennonites from Canada settled in the Chaco—fewer than initially expected (note 13).

The events of 100 years ago by conservative Canadian “cousins” seeking a place to live “undisturbed” paved the way for later Mennonite migrations from the Soviet Union and war-torn western Europe.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Photo 1: Mennonite Elders from “Manitoba and Saskatchewan intending to move Paraguay,” September 21, 1922, Mennonite Library and Archives-Bethel College, A.A. Friesen Paper, MS 60, folder 24: General Correspondence, October 1922, https://mla.bethelks.edu/metadata/pholist11.php?num=2022-0100.

Photo 2: Chaco, Paraguay, Kilometer 60: “On our departure for the interior on April 30, 1921,” from MCC-Akron, IX 13-2.1, Box 1, Folder 6, Photo 1, Front.

Newspaper clippings: (Search: “Mennonites,” pre-1945) Lethbridge Herald, https://digitallibrary.uleth.ca/digital/search/searchterm/mennonites!00000000-1944/field/all!date/mode/all!exact/conn/and!and.

Note 1: Cf. Peter P. Klassen, The Mennonites in Paraguay, vol. 1, trans. G. H. Schmitt (Hillsboro, KS: Self-published, 2004), 24.

Note 2: Cf. Walter Quiring, Rußlanddeutsche suchen eine Heimat. Die deutsche Einwanderung in den paraguayischen Chaco (Karlsruhe: Schneider, 1938), 41, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Quiring,%20Russlanddeutsche%20suchen%20eine%20Heimat/.

Note 3: Edgar Stoesz and Muriel T. Stackley, Garden in the Wilderness: Mennonite Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco, 1927–1997 (Winnipeg, MB: CMBC, 1999), 17f.

Note 4: Walter Quiring, “The Canadian Mennonite Immigration into the Paraguayan Chaco, 1926-27,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 8, no. 1 (January 1934), 32-42; 34.

Note 5: In Klassen, Mennonites in Paraguay I, 26; also Quiring, Rußlanddeutsche suchen eine Heimat, 50.

Note 6: Cf. Klassen, Mennonites in Paraguay I, 45f.

Note 7: In Klassen, Mennonites in Paraguay I, 49.

Note 8: “Mennonites after Land in Paraguay,” Lethbridge Herald (July 16, 1921), 14, https://digitallibrary.uleth.ca/digital/search/searchterm/mennonites!00000000-1944/field/all!date/mode/all!exact/conn/and!and.

Note 9: Stoesz and Stackley, Garden in the Wilderness, 20.

Note 10: Frank H. Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940: A People’s Struggle for Survival (Toronto: MacMillan, 1982), 127, https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/sites/ca.grebel/files/uploads/files/mic_iir_0.pdf.

Note 11: Quiring, “Canadian Mennonite Immigration into the Paraguayan Chaco,” 36.

Note 12: Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940, 123.

Note 13: Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940, 122; Quiring, “Canadian Mennonite Immigration into the Paraguayan Chaco,” 37.

Print Friendly and PDF
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...
Post a Comment
Read more

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...
1 comment
Read more

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws.  It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Danzig and Poland?

In the late 16th century, Poland became a haven for a variety of non-conformists which included Jews, Anti-Trinitarians from Italy and Bohemia, Quakers and Calvinists from Great Britain, south German Schwenkfelders, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Greek Catholic Christians, some Muslim Tatars, as well as other peaceful sectarians like the Dutch and Flemish Anabaptists. Unlike the Low Countries and most of western Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a “state without stakes,” and as such fittingly described as “God’s playground” ( note 1 ). In the view of 17th-century Dutch dramatist Joost van den Vondel, it was “the ‘Promised Land,’ where the refugee could forget all his sorrow and enjoy the richness of the land” ( note 2 ). Over the next two centuries an important strand of Mennonite life and spirituality evolved into a mature tradition in this relatively hospitable context ( note 3 ). Anabaptists from the Low Countries began to arrive in Danzig and region as early as 15...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mennonites in Danzig's Suburbs: Maps and Illustrations

Mennonites first settled in the Danzig suburb of Schottland (lit: "Scotland"; “Stare-Szkoty”; also “Alt-Schottland”) in the mid-1500s. “Danzig” is the oldest and most important Mennonite congregation in Prussia. Menno Simons visited Schottland and Dirk Phillips was its first elder and lived here for a time. Two centuries later the number of families from the suburbs of Danzig that immigrated to Russia was not large: Stolzenberg 5, Schidlitz 3, Alt-Schottland 2, Ohra 1, Langfuhr 1, Emaus 1, Nobel 1, and Krampetz 2 ( map 1 ). However most Russian Mennonites had at least some connection to the Danzig church—whether Frisian or Flemish—if not in the 1700s, then in 1600s. Map 2  is from 1615; a larger number of Mennonites had been in Schottland at this point for more than four decades. Its buildings are not rural but look very Dutch urban/suburban in style. These were weavers, merchants and craftsmen, and since the 17th century they lived side-by-side with a larger number of Jews a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fraktur (or Gothic) font and Kurrent- (or Sütterlin) handwriting: Nazi ban, 1941

In the middle of the war on January 1, 1942, the Winnipeg-based Mennonitische Rundschau published a new issue without the familiar Fraktur script masthead ( note 1 ). One might speculate on the reasons, but a year earlier Hitler banned the use of the font in the Reich . The Rundschau did not exactly follow all orders from Berlin—the rest of the paper was in Fraktur (sometimes referred to as "Gothic"); when the war ended in 1945, the Rundschau reintroduced the Fraktur font for its masthead. It wasn’t until the 1960s that an issue might have a page or title here or there with the “normal” or Latin font, even though post-war Germany was no longer using Fraktur . By 1973 only the Rundschau masthead is left in Fraktur , and that is only removed in December 1992. Attached is a copy of Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann's official letter dated January 3, 1941, which prohibited the use of Fraktur fonts "by order of the Führer. " Why? It was a Jewish invention, apparent...
1 comment
Read more

1871: "Mennonite Tough Luck"

In 1868, a delegation of Prussian Mennonite elders met with Prussian Crown Prince Frederick in Berlin. The topic was universal conscription--now also for Mennonites. They were informed that “what has happened here is coming soon to Russia as well” ( note 1 ). In Berlin the secret was already out. Three years later this political cartoon appeared in a satirical Berlin newspaper. It captures the predicament of Russian Mennonites (some enticed in recent decades from Prussia), with the announcement of a new policy of compulsory, universal military service. “‘Out of the frying pan and into the fire—or: Mennonite tough luck.’ The Mennonites, who immigrated to Russia in order to avoid becoming soldiers in Prussia, are now subject to newly introduced compulsory military service.” ( Note 2 ) The man caught in between looks more like a Prussian than Russian Mennonite—but that’s beside the point. With the “Great Reforms” of the 1860s (including emancipation of serfs) the fundamentals were c...
Post a Comment
Read more

“Removal of Old Testament Names” after the Trek, 1944

Or: How my Aunt Sara became an “Else” I remember as a young adult hearing for the first time that my Aunt Sara’s name was officially “Else”. I was stunned to hear that story. No one had ever told us that! After the “trek” out of Ukraine and upon naturalization as a German citizen in 1944, my 13-year-old Aunt Sara’s name was changed to “Else.” There are many similar examples. Another Mennonite Sara changed her “Jewish-sounding” name to “Agatha;” one Mennonite boy with the name David was given “the sturdy German” name “Albert;” an “Isaak” took the name “Georg;” and an “Abraham” the name “Gerhard” ( note 1 ). Hundreds of Mennonites (minimally) had their “Old Testament names” changed upon naturalization. With the annexation of western Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany began to remove Poles and Jews and to settle the new territory of Warthegau with "Germans". Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had said: “I want to create a blond province here” ( note 2 ). In 1943-44 most of the 35,0...
Post a Comment
Read more

Invitation to the Russian Consulate, Danzig, January 19, 1788

B elow is one of the most important original Mennonite artifacts I have seen. It concerns January 19. The two land scouts Jacob Höppner and Johann Bartsch had returned to Danzig from Russia on November 10, 1787 with the Russian Immigration Agent, Georg von Trappe. Soon thereafter, Trappe had copies of the royal decree and agreement (Gnadenbrief) printed for distribution in the Flemish and Frisian Mennonite congregations in Danzig and other locations, dated December 29, 1787 ( see pic ; note 1 ). After the flyer was handed out to congregants in Danzig after worship on January 13, 1788, city councilors made the most bitter accusations against church elders for allowing Trappe and the Russian Consulate to do this; something similar had happened before ( note 2 ). In the flyer Trappe boasted that land scouts Höppner and Bartsch met not only with Gregory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s vice-regent and administrator of New Russia, but also with “the Most Gracious Russian Monarch” herse...
Post a Comment
Read more

Russian Mennonites and German troop withdrawal, Advent 1918

First Advent, 1918: The last page of the final issue of the German military newspaper Deutsche Zeitung für Ost-Taurien ( DZOT ), informed readers of a German Catholic mass at the Mennonite Church in Melitopol (near the large Mennonite settlement of Molotschna) for 8 am, followed by a Protestant (Lutheran) Military Advent worship service at 9 am ( pic ), with the Mennonite worship service beginning at 11 am. A week earlier they had done the same to honour their fallen comrades on Eternity Sunday ( Totensonntag )—in the Mennonite worship space. The Mennonite colonists—“especially Molotschna”—became “trusted friends,” whose assistance, hospitality and German manner created a “second home” for the troops, who now understood that “they belong inseparably together as members of one people ( Stamm ),” according to the editor ( note 1; pic ). Not only did troops give away German books, refrigerators, phonographs, recordings, movie projectors, distillery equipment, typewriters, linens, fo...
Post a Comment
Read more