A darker shade of green: medical botany, homeopathy, and cultural politics in interwar Germany

Abstract

In 1941 a proposal was made to Nazi SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, that extracts of a South American plant, Dieffenbachia seguine, might be used for the mass sterilization of racially undesirable war prisoners. The proposal was based on published animal fertility research conducted by Dr Gerhard Madaus, co-founder of a firm that produced and marketed natural medicinals. His fertility experiments were part of a broader series aimed at evaluating the scientific validity of ethnobotanical folk-knowledge. This article traces the historical background to the Madaus research: first, the role of homeopathy in the introduction of Dieffenbachias to western medicine; secondly, the social context of German 'alternative' medicine in the interwar period; and finally, the role of Madaus himself, whose homeopathically-oriented research on botanical medicinals inadvertently initiated the chain of events described here.