Search

This paper studies a shelter network for Jewish scientists displaced by nazism from the archive of Alexander Lipschütz, a physiologist who lived in Chile since 1926. From the context of the anti-Semitic persecution and the way in which it affected German science and their universities, we have analyzed letters sent to and from Lipschütz between 1935 and 1936, with special attention to people who contacted him to flee Germany and considered Latin America as a possibility to live. We suggest this was a network of personal agencies, charged with subjectivities and intimacy, which had to take into account local anti-Semitism and academic xenophobia.

The Chilean physician Hans Betzhold published the book Eugenesia (Eugenics) in 1939, which was a work that received multiple awards and ran to a second edition in 1942. Both editions and the participation of Betzhold at the Second Peruvian Conference on Eugenics in 1943 attest to the fact that he was an important actor in the field of Chilean eugenics. This paper analyzes his transition from the publication of Eugenesia, in which he proposes a National Eugenics Department combining existing projects and laws to make the eugenic ideal a reality until its intervention, in the year 1943, when his optimism yields to disillusion regarding the task of creating a "Chilean superman."