Brazilian Army Honors German Major Decorated by Hitler

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian Army honored, on Monday, July 1st, a German Major who fought for the Wehrmacht (Army) during the Second World War (1939-1945).

According to the text published on the Brazilian Army website, Eduard Ernest Thilo Otto Maximilian von Westernhagen (1923-1968) was honored as a student at the Brazilian Army Command and Staff School.

On July 1st, 1968, while attending school under an exchange system, Otto was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro in an action by the left-wing armed group Colina (Comando de Libertação Nacional).

The guerrillas, however, intended to kill Bolivian captain Gary Prado who, in 1967, had been involved in the capture of communist leader Che Guevara (1928-1967) in Bolivia.

Prado, who greatly resembled Otto, was attending the same course as the German at the Command and Staff School of the Brazilian Army.

When reporting Otto’s assassination in the July 2nd, 1968 issue, Folha wrote: “The victim had been decorated by Hitler during the French occupation and had sustained severe injuries during the Soviet Army’s attack on Berlin. After the war, he remained in the German Army, due to his artillery expert skills.”

A further text published on Monday on the Brazilian Army’s website describes Otto as a “brilliant officer” and states that the Major “was the commander of an armored platoon on the Eastern front in World War II, having been promoted to the rank of 1st lieutenant, for bravery, in 1943.”

It is reported that after the end of the conflict, Otto was reinstated as captain in 1955, when the German Armed Forces were reactivated.

According to the Brazilian Army, Otto was “a survivor of World War II and of Soviet totalitarian prisons, whose life was shortened by an insane and cowardly terrorist act.”

In 1942, after successive attacks by German submarines on Brazilian ships in the Atlantic, Brazil declared war on Nazi Germany, which together with Italy and Japan formed the Axis.

The Brazilian presence in the Second World War was more pronounced from July 1944, when just over 25,000 FEB (Brazilian Expeditionary Force) soldiers landed in Italy. The balance in the conflict for Brazil was 443 dead and about 3,000 wounded.

In all, 70 million people, including civilians and the military, died during the Second World War. Some 6 million, mostly Jews, were murdered in Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

Contacted through its communications advisory service, the Army said it “helped defeat the Axis forces in World War II and faced the terrorist threat during the Cold War” and “understands that to honor these figures is to reaffirm the commitment to freedom and democracy.”

“To offend the memory of a German Army officer who was studying in Brazil by labeling him as a Nazi is to ignore the historical background that occurred in that friendly country in the post-war period. This intellectual distortion is wrong!”

Conib (Israeli Confederation of Brazil) lamented the Brazilian Army’s initiative, in a statement.

“We are amazed that, on the pretext of condemning armed actions in Brazil in the 1960s, our respected Brazilian Army decided to honor a German officer who, during World War II, participated in the occupation of France and the Soviet Union, places where Nazi troops were known to have committed crimes against humanity, including and in particular against local Jewish communities,” said the president of Conib, Fernando Lottenberg.