The tin baron who saved thousands from the Nazis

Moritz Hochschild was constantly on the move. In the early 1930s, he could be found in the grand hotels of London, New York or Paris, or on the back of a mule, following rough mountain trails in search of mineral seams in the Bolivian Andes. It was on one of those trips to a remote mountain village, according to family legend, that the mining magnate came across a local man sketching. The artist was afraid to show Hochschild his drawing, which was an unflattering caricature of him. But the magnate found the parody so amusing that he decided to fund a scholarship for the artist to study draughtsmanship in Paris.

Hochschild could afford to laugh at his own expense. His shrewd risk-taking had made him one of the richest men in South America in the early 20th century, and earned him notoriety as one of Bolivia’s three “tin barons”. The trio – Hochschild, Simón Patiño and Oxford-educated Carlos Aramayo – had made fortunes trading Bolivian tin, which, during the first half of the 20th century, was much in demand for aeroplane parts and food cans, and accounted for more than half of the country’s export earnings.

The barons were seen as a cartel: “A circle of oligarchs who negotiated between themselves and had more power than the state,” the Bolivian historian Robert Brockmann said. Tin was Bolivia’s principal mineral export in the 1930s, and the tin barons controlled 72% of exports, while paying only 3% of their profits to the government. The three are chiefly remembered for their ostentatious wealth, their influence over Bolivian politics and their exploitation of mineworkers. “[Hochschild] was a cruel businessman; the toughest of the three,” Edgar Ramírez, a former union organiser and archivist, said. “The president of Bolivia wanted to have him shot.”

Hochschild, the youngest “baron” by decades, was the only one who was not a Bolivian citizen. A middle-class German Jew born in 1881 in Biblis, a small town south of Frankfurt, Hochschild sought his fortune in Australia and Chile before the first world war, returning to South America as soon as the war ended to build his metals and mining empire. During the 1930s and 40s, Bolivia was swept by waves of social upheaval. Amid mass demonstrations for state control of resources, Hochschild was twice thrown in jail and threatened with execution. He escaped but fled into exile. As the country hurtled towards the National Revolution of 1952, one of its chroniclers, Augusto Céspedes, described Hochschild as a “grand pirate of mining finances”.

But evidence has since come to light that has forced Bolivia to reappraise its view of Moritz, known