Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff's secret Nazi past

The recent revelation of the secret Nazi past of one of Colombia's best-known anthropologists, and a former visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has shaken academic circles to their core.

To many scholars, the late Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was a charismatic character, admired for his exploration of isolated Indian communities in the Andes, the jungles of the Panamanian isthmus and Colombia's Guajira Peninsula desert, places others had feared to tread.

The native Austrian, who immigrated to Colombia in 1939, was famed for his influential studies of indigenous communities and for his highly readable books on the unusual stone statues of Colombia's most important archaeological zone, San Agustin.

But Reichel-Dolmatoff, who died in 1994, apparently had a dark past to hide - as a member of the Austrian Nazi party and of Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer's private army and death squad, which killed scores of rival Nazis in a June 1934 purge known as the "night of the long knives'.

According to a diary fragment that historians have identified as Reichel-Dolmatoff's, he was also stationed at the Dachau concentration camp near Munich, which set the template for Hitler's murderous gulag.

"What this whole affair has shown us is that there were many things in his life we thought we knew but which now are not so clear," said Carlos Uribe, head of the anthropology department at Bogota's University of the Andes, a department that Reichel-Dolmatoff and his anthropologist wife, Alicia, founded in 1964.

"He was an expert at covering his steps, a chameleon," Uribe said, adding that Reichel-Dolmatoff, as an academic, was a champion of cultural diversity and indigenous philosophies, and in the 1970s was a visiting professor at UCLA's Latin American Institute.