The article approaches the expedition of the researchers from the Hamburg Institute of Tropical Medicine, Gustav Giemsa and Ernst Nauck, in 1936, to a region settled by Germans in Espirito Santo, with the task to assess whether that population could be considered acclimatized to the tropical environment. The acclimatization debate intensified in the Third Reich, boosted by the Nazi's colonial ambitions and influenced by racial hygiene and by institutional and theoretical disputes within the tropical medicine's field. Despite the favorable portrait described by Nauck and Giemsa in Espirito Santo, they framed their observations according to the guidelines of the Nazi colonial politics at the end of 1930s.
racial acclimatization; tropical medicine; German colonization in Espirito Santo; colonial politics of the Third Reich