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Dieffenbachia: The SS wanted to sterilize Russians with this houseplant

2021-10-25T17:37:39.344Z


With their patterned leaves, Dieffenbachia are one of the most popular plants in Germany. What almost nobody knows: The plant has a dark past as a torture and sterilization agent.


In October 1941 the Wehrmacht was close to Moscow, and after their attack on the Soviet Union ("Operation Barbarossa"), the National Socialists believed that victory would be imminent.

The SS worked on plans to settle so-called ethnic Germans in the conquered areas.

About 30 million Eastern Europeans were to be murdered or driven out.

It was precisely in this phase that the dermatologist Adolf Pokorny wrote a letter to the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler.

He reported about a "new effective weapon" for the "struggle of our people" - not a gun or poison gas, but a plant.

Originally it comes from the rainforests of South and Central America, today you can buy it in many hardware stores.

It thrives in a shady environment and forms large, often light and dark green patterned leaves.

Its scientific name is

Dieffenbachia seguine

, in German it is mostly called Dieffenbachia.

Enlarge image

Dermatologist Pokorny: "Immediate experiments on people (criminals!)"

Pokorny believed that a drug for sterilization could be obtained from the plant extract.

As the anthropologist Michael G. Kenny has reconstructed, he referred to studies according to which Dieffenbachia made male and female mice incapable of reproduction.

"Carried by the thought that the enemy must not only be conquered, but destroyed," he suggested mass propagation of the plant - it is "easy to grow" in glass houses.

At the same time he called for "immediate tests on people (criminals!) To determine the dose and duration of the treatment."

Himmler was obviously impressed: In this way he could exploit Eastern Europeans in the war industry and then simply let them die out - a delayed genocide with maximum efficiency.

Soon the SS ordered extracts of the plant from a natural medicine company.

Arrow poison, remedy, aphrodisiac

Dieffenbachia seguine, today one of the 20 most popular houseplants in Germany, has a dark past.

Their juice was used for hunting, contraception and torture.

Indigenous people in Central and South America knew about the toxic effects long before the Spaniards landed in the Caribbean.

In the upper Amazon, the Tucano sprinkled their arrows with sap; on the Antilles island of Dominica, the Taíno mixed small pieces into the food of their enemies.

Enlarge image

Silent pipe: The extract was used as an arrow poison, medicine and sexual enhancer

Photo: Florilegius / akg-images

Some residents of the Caribbean also used the Dieffenbachia as a kind of contraceptive - supposedly consuming it for up to 48 hours makes it impossible to procreate.

Elsewhere, people believe that small amounts increase sexual pleasure.

The plant is also used for more innocent purposes: when crushed and used as a wrap, it is said to help against the tropical skin and bone disease frambosity.

The European conquerors apparently learned of the plant's potential with a delay.

In 1707 the Scottish-Irish botanist Hans Sloane described the effect in more detail for the first time: “If you prick the pipe with a knife and put your tongue on it, it hurts a lot.

The salivary ducts swell so that the person can no longer speak. ”Hence the name of the plant“ dumb cane ”, German: Schweigrohr.

Soon plantation owners used the Dieffenbachia to torture their slaves.

A garden dictionary from 1807 says: "In Jamaica they sometimes use it to rub the [N-word] into their mouths as a punishment."

The plant had long since arrived in Europe.

In the middle of the 18th century, a few specimens that an Austrian botanist had brought on behalf of the Crown grew in the Imperial Gardens of Vienna-Schönbrunn.

In Great Britain, florists were already cultivating Dieffenbachia for sale - they gradually spread as a houseplant.

Of interest to homeopaths

In 1829, the Austrian botanist Heinrich Wilhelm Schott finally described the genus and honored the head gardener of Vienna-Schönbrunn, Joseph Dieffenbach, with the name.

The pipe was now officially called Dieffenbachia seguine.

In the same year Constantin Hering toured the Dutch colony of Surinam in northeastern South America, where thousands of slaves were cutting sugar cane on plantations.

The Saxon doctor was to look for remedies in fauna and flora on behalf of the crown.

In addition to the venom of the Shushupe snake, he was interested in the medicinal benefits of Dieffenbachia.

Preliminary work has already been done: The Frankfurt researcher and artist Maria Sibylla Merian had heard from female slaves that they used plant extracts for abortions.

Other botanists, doctors and ethnologists had already reported about its use by the indigenous peoples.

Hering was an early follower of homeopathy, which is based on the simile principle: cure like with like;

a disease should be treated with tiny amounts of a remedy that causes the same symptoms.

To date, no scientific study has been able to prove an effect beyond the placebo effect.

Painful erections

In Surinam, Hering researched the effects of Dieffenbachia on himself, rubbing leaves and sap on his skin.

When he swallowed plant extracts, a heaviness spreads under his chest, he wrote.

He found the effect on the sexual organs particularly remarkable - painful erections in men, but no desire for sex and no semen in the effusion.

His report concluded: "No pregnancy follows".

If large amounts of Dieffenbachia made you unable to reproduce, small amounts would have to increase manhood, Hering concluded in the sense of homeopathy from these experiments and recommended the plant juice as a sexual enhancer.

After his time in Suriname, he moved to the USA and spread homeopathy there.

At that time, medical professionals at Europe's universities hardly dealt with herbal remedies.

Doctors like Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch studied germs with the microscope, and vaccinations against cholera and typhus became widespread at the end of the 19th century.

But counter-currents to academic teaching developed, especially in the German Reich.

The Catholic priest Sebastian Kneipp sent his patients into cold streams, the health entrepreneur Friedrich Eduard Bilz built a naturopathic empire, homeopathy became popular, some naturopaths proclaimed the return to Germanic "folk medicine".

"Herbal women" know more

One of the skeptics was Gerhard Madaus, born in 1890 in what is now Lower Saxony. His mother sold natural medicines, and he himself later wrote that "herbal women" had much more knowledge than certified doctors. Nonetheless, he studied medicine at Bonn University and, as a field doctor, experienced the effects of the British naval blockade on health care as a field doctor: Because the Germans were unable to import medicines, injuries and illnesses that were actually harmless often had fatal consequences.

In 1920 he founded a company for natural healing products, which later moved to Dresden, and placed a bust of homeopathic pioneer Samuel Hahnemann in front of the office door.

Madaus believed in an intensive relationship between primitive peoples and the healing powers of the plants in their environment.

In his studies he was just as interested in "herbal women" from Central Europe as in traditional medicine from Africa, Asia and America.

Madaus, however, did not completely turn away from empirical science: he wanted to use clinical tests to prove that the herbal remedies were effective, and he also examined Dieffenbachia seguine.

Shortly after they came to power in 1933, the National Socialists enacted a "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring".

People with hereditary blindness, deafness, deformities, epilepsy, Huntington's disease, intellectual disabilities and alcoholism could now be forcibly sterilized.

The law provided for procedures to remove testicles or ovaries.

Surgical castration, however, was quite time-consuming.

In order to make their so-called eugenics more efficient, the National Socialists promoted research on other, extremely inhuman methods - such as experiments in which doctors irradiated male concentration camp inmates' testicles with X-rays and female prisoners injected caustic liquids into the cervix.

Rats soon became sterile

Although Madaus never publicly confessed to National Socialism and "eugenics", he must have known the demand for an effective sterilization agent when he began experiments with Dieffenbachia in 1936.

He was referring to reports of indigenous people from Brazil who used the plant to impregnate their enemies.

Together with his colleague Friedrich Koch, Madaus mixed plant sap into the feed of laboratory rats and applied the extract to the animals' skin.

Male rats became sterile after 40 to 90 days, the female even after 30 to 50 days.

The two researchers published this in a specialist journal in 1941, and one of the readers was the dermatologist Adolf Pokorny.

Pokorny, born in Vienna in 1895, grew up as part of the German-speaking minority in what is now the Czech Republic.

He fought for Austria-Hungary in World War I, then studied medicine in Prague and established himself as a dermatologist in Komotau.

In 1923 he married his Jewish colleague Lilly Weil, and the two separated twelve years later.

Weil emigrated to England with the two children.

Pokorny now met with German nationalists who wanted to join Czechoslovakia to the Reich.

When the Wehrmacht marched in in 1938 and Hitler proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Pokorny was enthusiastic.

He was not accepted into the NSDAP because of his divorced marriage to a Jewish woman.

During the Second World War he served as a medical officer, but wanted to support the National Socialists in other ways as well.

This is how he wrote to Heinrich Himmler in autumn 1941.

"The very thought that the 3 million Bolsheviks currently in German captivity could be sterilized so that they would be available as workers but would be excluded from reproduction, opens up the greatest possible prospects," wrote Pokorny in it.

Evidence in the Nuremberg medical trial

In the spring of 1942 the SS contacted Madaus AG.

The boss had died shortly before, and his successor pledged not to disclose the effects of the Dieffenbachia.

A chemist from the industrial conglomerate IG Farben thought that sterilization could be possible with it, but that was not a utopia.

In October 1942 the SS ordered plant extracts for human experiments.

But the war ruined the plans.

The Red Army gradually closed its cauldron around the 6th Army of the Wehrmacht near Stalingrad, and Allied aircraft more frequently dropped bombs on German industrial cities.

The National Socialists put all their resources into the war industry - and plant breeding is not one of the top priorities.

Dieffenbachia are easy to care for, but only thrive in a greenhouse in the Central European climate.

Apparently Madaus AG lacked heated systems to raise larger quantities.

In anticipation of the defeat in the war, the SS destroyed many files on human experiments.

It is no longer possible to reconstruct whether Madaus AG ever supplied plant extracts.

After the German surrender in 1945, Allied investigators seized some documents that point to the possible Dieffenbachie experiments - including the letter to Himmler.

They found Pokorny, who is now a senior physician in the Munich health department.

Acquittal for lack of evidence

On December 9, 1946, the trial of Pokorny and 22 other doctors and officials accused of medical crimes began before the US Military Court in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

The so-called medical trial followed the trial against the main war criminals and opened a series of further trials against those suspected of being responsible for Nazi crimes.

Pokorny's defense lawyers tried to portray their client as a resister: Allegedly, he knew that the Dieffenbachia was not suitable for sterilization.

He wrote his letter to Himmler to lure the SS on the wrong track and wanted to sabotage the sterilization program from the start.

The court did not follow this daring defense.

"We find it difficult to believe that he was guided by noble motives," says the verdict.

But in the absence of evidence of actual human experiments, Pokorny could not be convicted: "We therefore declare that the accused must be acquitted, not because of, but in spite of the defense he has put forward." After the acquittal, Pokorny's trail is lost.

The Dieffenbachia initially hardly seemed to interest anyone in the post-war period.

It was not until the 1960s that reports began to increase.

In February 1962, the "Ammerländer Nachrichten" reported on a blooming specimen in a pharmacy - a unique opportunity for "potted flower lovers".

Soon, advertisements for flower shops and care tips appeared.

But compared to the rubber tree, for example, the Dieffenbachia was a straggler.

Today the patterned leaves are a common sight in offices and homes.

Homeopathy has also rediscovered Dieffenbachia seguine: Although there is no medical proof of its effectiveness, online shops sell globules with tiny amounts of plant extract.

They are supposed to act like a kind of herbal Viagra.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-10-25

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