Nueva Germania
| Nueva Germania | |||
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| Coordinates: 23°54′0″S 56°42′12″W / 23.90000°S 56.70333°W | |||
| Country |
 Paraguay
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| Department | San Pedro | ||
| Founded | August 23, 1887 by Bernhard Förster | ||
| Government | |||
| • Intendente Municipal | Leonardo Saiz Arce | ||
| Area | |||
| • Total | 20.008 km2 (7.725 sq mi) | ||
| Elevation | 132 m (433 ft) | ||
| Population (2008) | |||
| • Total | 4,335 | ||
| • Density | 15.9/km2 (41/sq mi) | ||
| Time zone | -4 GMT | ||
| Postal code | 8470 | ||
| Area code(s) | (595) (44) | ||
Nueva Germania (New Germania) is a district of San Pedro Department in Paraguay. It was founded as a German settlement on August 23, 1887 by Bernhard Förster, who was married to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Förster's idea was to create a model community in the New World and to demonstrate the virtues of German culture and society.
In the town there are still many German remnants. There is a museum that exhibits memories of the town's origin.
It is located about 297 kilometres from Asunción, capital of the Republic of Paraguay.
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 German colonists emigrated to the Paraguayan rainforest to put to practice utopian 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 (which he calls, erroneously, Nueva Bavaria) while a fugitive after World War II; however, evidence that Mengele even passed through is shaky.
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Wikipedia