* 5 October 1879 Rüdenhausen, Bayern   † 26 March 1943 Genf

After studying to become a teacher, Ernst Hoffmann goes to Panama, where he works at a state school. In 1906 he is appointed director of the National Institute for Trade and Languages. When Hoffmann, who is Protestant, wants to reorganize Panama’s school system according to the German model, he fails because of resistance from the dominant Catholic Church.

Hoffmann marries the daughter of a wealthy Panamanian lawyer, who finances his medical-school studies in Germany beginning in 1910. During World War I, he works as a military doctor in Berlin, but returns to Panama in 1915, where his father-in-law finances his new medical office and pharmacy.

After the US enters the war, he is interned as an “enemy alien”; he returns briefly to Germany in 1919 in order to collect a large reparations sum related to this incarceration.

He then becomes a citizen of Panama, and his father-in-law uses his influence to gain him a position as honorary consul in Berlin. He is said to have used his new status to smuggle large quantities of Salvarsan (a drug used to treat syphilis and other ailments) into Panama in his diplomatic baggage.

He is protected from the criticism and intrigues of other Panamanian diplomats because his sister-in-law marries the sitting Panamanian foreign minister in 1929.

In 1930 Hoffmann is appointed consul general in Geneva and Panama’s permanent representative to the League of Nations. But he continues to spend much time in Berlin, where he is rumored to frequent nightclubs and amusement arcades.