GERMANY: A Berlin academic has rejected accusations he manipulated quotations from the doctoral thesis of Chilean president Salvador Allende to make him appear anti-Semitic and racist.
Dr Victor Farias, Chilean-born professor at Berlin's Free University, published sensational claims last month that Allende, in his 1933 doctoral thesis, suggested that race determined behaviour and that Jews had "general criminal tendencies".
Salvador Allende's family and friends hit back yesterday saying Dr Farias attributed views to Allende which were in fact his summary of the views of Cesare Lombroso, the Italian university professor who popularised the notion of the "born criminal" and criminal physical attributes.
Allende was deposed as president and killed during Gen Augusto Pinochet's CIA-backed coup in 1973. Four decades earlier, aged 26, he wrote in his thesis: "Lombroso tells us that gypsies are also a usually criminal grouping."
Arabs had a tendency to "laziness and theft", he continued, southern Italians and Spaniards were prone to "barbaric and primitive crimes of passion . . . the Hebrews are characterised by certain crimes: fraud, deceit, slander and, above all, usury. "These facts suggest that race plays a role in crime," Allende added.
At the end of this passage, 15 lines in a 150-page thesis, Allende concluded: "This data makes us suspect that race is a factor in delinquency. However, we lack precise data to demonstrate this influence in the civilised world."
He later added that such ideas "should be taken with a certain level-headedness".
Dr Joan Garcés, president at the Allende Foundation and former Allende aide said Dr Farias deliberately omitted this final sentence and put Lombroso's views in Allende's mouth.
Dr Farias said he made clear in his book that Allende was summarising the views of Lombroso.
However he argued that in his summary, Allende added his own anti-Semitic views.
"Lombroso was without doubt a racist, he wrote terrible things about gypsies and blacks, but he wasn't anti-Semitic. He was Jewish, his father was a Rabbi," the professor said.
Dr Farias said he stood by further allegations in his book, that Allende tried to introduce mandatory sterilisation for Chile's mentally ill as health minister and that the German embassy in Santiago paid 300,000 Reichsmarks to Allende and to two other government ministers.