Toppled Chilean leader branded an anti-Semite

GERMANY: Chile's deposed socialist president Salvador Allende authored a doctoral thesis in 1933 claiming that race determined…

GERMANY: Chile's deposed socialist president Salvador Allende authored a doctoral thesis in 1933 claiming that race determined behaviour and that Jews had "general criminal tendencies".

The thesis, Mental Hygiene and Delinquency, called for mandatory medical measures to sterilise alcoholics and the mentally ill. Allende also suggested homosexuals could be "cured" and transformed into "moral beings" by having pieces of human testicles inserted into the stomach wall.

His thesis was considered lost but for 18 pages until Berlin historian Victor Farias discovered it in a dusty University of Chile archive in Santiago. He published his findings in a book that has already caused uproar in Chile, three decades after Allende was deposed and killed during Gen Augusto Pinochet's CIA-backed coup in 1973.

"Allende's texts can in no way be written off as youthful error," said Mr Farias, an academic at the Latin American Institute of Berlin's Free University, pointing out that the future president was 26 when he wrote it.

READ MORE

"The Hebrews are characterised by certain crimes: fraud, deceit, slander and, above all, usury. These facts suggest that race plays a role in crime," wrote Allende.

Mr Farias says that "in 1933 such statements weren't even coming out of the mouths of Chile's 'Nazis'".

Allende wrote: "Gypsies are also a usually criminal grouping, where laziness, rage and vanity rule. Among them it often ends in murder." Arabs had a tendency to "laziness and theft", southern Italians and Spaniards were prone to "barbaric and primitive crimes of passion and are emotionally irresponsible" and "consider theft a praiseworthy, heroic act", he continued.

As health minister from 1939 to 1941 Allende tried to introduce mandatory sterilisation for Chile's mentally ill, a measure which only failed after resistance from doctors' groups.

"Reading [ the thesis] one can determine without doubt that Salvador Allende hadn't just taken on board the anti-Semitic statements of German political parties ... but had radicalised them," writes Mr Farias.

The German historian also discovered files showing that the German embassy in Santiago paid 300,000 Reichsmarks each to Allende, fellow minister Pedro Aguirre Cerdas and Socialist Party founder Marmaduke Grove. A memo by the German ambassador back to Berlin said the money was helping spread Nazi ideas in Chile.

Mr Farias's book also quotes from Allende's letter to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1972, rejecting an extradition request for SS general Walter Rauff, saying crimes he was accused of lay beyond Chile's statute of limitations.

Novelist Isabel Allende, the former president's niece and a member of the Chilean parliament, has condemned Mr Farias's book, saying it "manipulates documents and takes things out of context".

The future Marxist leader wrote in 1933 that revolution was a "pathological mass offence".