Moritz Hochschild: Ruthless Capitalist or Heroic Savior of Jews?

Genia Farkas is 102 years old and lives in a retirement home in Israel. Recalling how she survived the Nazi era, she said that in 1938, when she was 18, she left her hometown of Ulanów, Poland and joined her sister and her sister’s husband in Brussels, Belgium. Her brother-in-law had spent time in Germany and had seen evidence that alerted him to the coming tragedy. By 1939, World War II was already raging, and Genia’s brother-in-law pushed for the three to leave Europe. When they learned that Bolivia was virtually the only country open to Jewish immigration, they requested and received their life-saving visas to that landlocked, poor, politically-unstable country in the middle of South America.

The three of them boarded a ship, and the first few days at sea were terrifying. While still near Europe, the vessel, carrying many Jewish passengers, did not travel at night for fear of mines. Lights were turned off and everyone wore life jackets at all times, even in bed. Once the ship was well into the Atlantic, they could breathe more easily. Weeks after leaving Europe, the three disembarked in Arica, Chile, then boarded a train that became known as the Jewish Express. 

Visas in hand, they entered Bolivia, which was as alien to Genia as if she had landed on the moon. But at least they’d survived, and they were far away from the SS and concentration camps. After a year in Bolivia, Genia managed to cross the border into Argentina, where she lived for the next 35 years, raising a son and a daughter. (Full disclosure: Genia is this reporter’s mother-in-law, and the story of how she survived is an amalgam of many conversations.) 

Genia was one of at least 9,000 and perhaps as many as 22,000 Jews who found refuge in Bolivia. The man behind this effort was Moritz (Mauricio) Hochschild (1881-1965), a mining magnate whose mines accounted for a sizable percentage of Bolivia’s exports. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Hochschild, a non-observant German Jew, hobnobbed with Bolivia’s elite, including presidents, generals and business leaders. Because of his huge economic influence, Hochschild was able to convince Bolivian government officials that it was in their economic interest to offer visas to imperiled European Jews. As a result of Hochschild’s cajoling, the Bolivian government decreed, in June 1938, that its “doors are open to anyone … who is healthy in body and spirit, anyone who wants to come and work.”

Hochschild’s efforts have come to light relatively recently. After Bolivia nationalized the mining industry in 1952, Hochschild’s business in Bolivia was shut down. The company’s offices, in a suburb of La Paz, were left alone for many years and fell into ruin. In 1999, decades after Hochschild’s 1965 death, a search in the mining operation’s offices turned up a trove of important papers from the 1930s and 1940s. A team of masked and gloved investigators moved in and began to study and catalogue thousands of letters, receipts and other documents. In 2004 those investigators began releasing some of what they’d found, and they have continued to do so, posting the results in public archives. 

What they discovered was that besides saving thousands of Jewish lives during the war, Hochschild also shipped tin and other raw minerals to smelters in the U.S. at below market price, providing the U.S. with materials for making ammo boxes, weapons, medical equipment, airplane parts and tin cans that preserved food. 

In his lifetime Hochschild did not publicize his heroic role. In fact, he was called a “ruthless tin baron” who paid low wages to his employees. He was subjected to antisemitic slurs by Bolivian politicians and journalists who garnered support when they called him a “foreign exploiter” and “the worst kind of businessman.”

The letters and documents that have been made public decades after his death have led to a reassessment of Hochschild. Rather than labeling him “ruthless exploiter,” he’s now called “the Bolivian Schindler.” 

What’s been discovered in recent years has changed opinions about him, in Bolivia as well as in the rest of the world. The letters and documents that have been made public decades after his death have led to a reassessment of Hochschild. Rather than labeling him “ruthless exploiter,” he’s now called “the Bolivian Schindler.”  

But who was Moritz (Mauricio) Hochschild?

He was born in 1881 into a middle-class Jewish family in Biblis, Germany, a suburb of Frankfurt. He studied mining engineering in nearby Freiberg, then worked as a mining engineer in Spain. After that he spent five years in Australia’s mining areas. He then went to Chile, where he continued to work in different aspects of the mining industry: buying ore and selling it to smelters abroad. In 1919, one year after World War I ended, he returned to South America, this time to Bolivia, where he lived and worked for the next 25 years. 

In 1947, long before his actions as “The Bolivian Schindler” became known, the financial magazine Fortune described Hochschild this way: He is “a slightly mysterious South American mining overlord … [with] a great, bald boulder of a head, burning eyes under bushy brows, and a heroic nose leading down to a bristling moustache.” 

The article points out that “the most remarkable thing about the remarkable Hochschild head is that it has remained comfortably affixed to his shoulders … though so often in danger.” Hochschild was a mining mogul in a country where wealthy entrepreneurs were sometimes jailed or kidnapped and he was subjected to both of those indignities: jailed twice, kidnapped once. When he refused to go along with what he considered an unfair government demand, one Bolivian president even threatened the Jewish mining titan with execution, a threat that was not carried out, his advisers having talked the president out of having Hochschild killed.

His having been jailed, kidnapped and threatened may explain why Hochschild remained secretive about his role in bringing refugees to Bolivia. When writing to American Jews involved in bringing European Jews to Bolivia, however, Hochschild was open about his involvement. In the trove of documents that have been made public, there’s an April 1940 letter from Hochschild to James N. Rosenberg, Chairman of the Agro-Joint project—an agency that placed Jewish refugees in farms located in various countries. When writing to Rosenberg, Hochschild was clear about his role in how the visas came about: “I arranged with the [Bolivian] government that we could bring in a total of 30,000 Jews for colonization.”

Though this letter was a plea for more money to help settle Jewish refugees, it’s also clear from other documents that Hochschild used vast amounts of his own money in his efforts to save Jews and help the Allies win the war.

There’s no doubt that Hochschild exploited workers who made him wealthy. On the other hand, he saved tens of thousands of Jews and helped the Allies win the war. Saint or devil? This complex man was probably a bit of both, like most of us.

Roberto Loiederman has written more than 100 articles for The Jewish Journal. He is co-author of “The Eagle Mutiny,” a nonfiction account of the only mutiny on an American ship in modern times.