Paul Kirchhoff (17 August 1900, Halle, Province of Westphalia – 9 December 1972) was a German-Mexican anthropologist, most noted for his seminal work in defining and elaborating the culture area of Mesoamerica, a term he coined.
In the mid-1920s he undertook further studies at the University of Leipzig in ethnology and psychology, where he first developed his abiding interest in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
[3] In the early 1930s he was a member of a left-wing faction within the KPD that later split to form the Internationalen Kommunisten Deutschlands (IKD), part of the International Left Opposition.
[3] While in the United States, Kirchhoff (who often used the pseudonym Eiffel) joined the Political Bureau of the Revolutionary Workers League that had rejected the French Turn and split from official Trotskyism.
Because the GMT called for revolutionary defeatism in Spain, the Mexican Trotskyists alleged that they were witting or unwitting agents of the Gestapo.