Peru’s interim president José María Balcázar drew sharp diplomatic condemnation Wednesday after telling a Lima business audience that Jews had controlled German banking and commerce and bore partial responsibility for pushing Germany into World War II. The Israeli and German embassies responded with a rare joint statement calling the remarks “absurd” and “historically unsustainable,” and urged Balcázar to retract them.
Balcázar made the comments Tuesday evening at a ceremony marking the 138th anniversary of the Lima Chamber of Commerce. Speaking for more than twenty minutes on the role of commerce through history, he told attendees that the history of merchants had not “been easy” and recommended they read the trilogy “Los enemigos del comercio” (“The Enemies of Commerce”) by the late Spanish philosopher Antonio Escohotado.
According to Balcázar, Escohotado’s work explains “how bills of exchange were born, how international commerce moved, what role the Jews played in national and international commerce in Germany, how Germany was pushed into a war also through the fault, in part, of the Jews, in part because they controlled all the banks, all commerce, and practiced usury.”
The joint embassy response was direct and historically specific. “The assertion that the Jews controlled German commerce and the German banking system, and that therefore they pushed the Germans into the Second World War, is absurd, historically unsustainable, and violates the memory of millions of German Jewish citizens murdered by the Nazis,” the embassies said.
“It should be remembered,” they added, “that it was Adolf Hitler and the Nazis who initiated the Second World War by attacking Poland in 1939. Nazi ideology, racist and antisemitic, not only discriminated against its Jewish fellow citizens but resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews in concentration camps. The Holocaust cannot be trivialized under any circumstances.”
Hours later, Balcázar’s presidential office issued a statement saying the interim president “laments” that his remarks “generated a mistaken perception about the Jewish people.” The statement noted that Peru has maintained that “Nazi fanaticism” was the cause of the Second World War and the genocide against Jews.
Balcázar, a retired legislator and judge, assumed the interim presidency on February 18, replacing José Jerí, whom Congress removed from the post following a scandal over undisclosed meetings with Chinese businesspeople. The controversy over his remarks is not his first. In 2023, while serving as a legislator during a debate on the child marriage ban passed that year, Balcázar stated that “so long as there is no violence, early sexual relations actually help the future psychological development of women.”
The diplomatic clash echoes a 2022 incident in which the Israeli and German embassies criticized then-Prime Minister Aníbal Torres, chief of staff to President Pedro Castillo, after Torres praised the highway construction program of Nazi Germany. Torres apologized following the backlash.