Who Put the ‘Gau’ in Gaucho? A (Forged) Map of Nazi South America  

While I'm doing off-topic maps, there is a great maps site called "Strange Maps" I check out from time to time. I liked this fake Nazi map of South America, mostly because of the FDR quote mentioning the New World Order. I never realised he was a tinfoil fan (though clearly the conspiracy theories were flowing thick and fast back then).

“Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean. I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it,” revealed US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his Navy Day address to the nation, broadcast on 27 October 1941.

The map, however, was a fake. World War II revisionists (not to put too fine a point on it: those who would have preferred the Nazis to win) claim this proves that FDR was a war-mongerer, prepared to lie shamelessly in order to drag the US into war. But in this case, FDR might have been more mongered against than mongering – the map most probably was a British forgery, not an American one.

While FDR indeed was a steadfast advocate for a more active US role in the unfolding conflict, he was up against formidable internal resistance to entry into war. It was the British who had more to gain from American involvement, because they had everything to lose. In this phase of the conflict, Britain stood virtually alone, Nazi Germany controlling most of the European continent and kicking Soviet butt in the early months of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The US would only be dragged into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, later that same year, on December 7.

For Britain, desperate times called for desperate measures, one of which would have been the forgery of this map, the point of which was to instill in the Americans the notion that the Nazis, if victorious in Europe, would not leave the American continent alone, thus challenging the Monroe Doctrine. The story behind the map, as (probably, but not provably) produced by the British intelligence services, went like this ...