In 1939, the married couple Hugo Lifczis and Annie R. Shermant fled Vienna because of the rise of Nazism. After settling in Buenos Aires, they founded International Editors’ Co. (IECO), the first Spanish-language co-agency. Hugo, a lawyer, and Annie, a literary translator and member of a family of theatre publishers, began to defend the copyrights of their friends, prestigious writers such as Vicki Baum, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Alexander Lernet Holenia, Franz Werfel, among many others.