nazi biopirates

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| NewScientist | 5 January 2008 www.newscientist.co

The great seed



had 250,000 samples. Vavilov also assembled

back-up collections in research stations across

the Soviet Union.

After Lenin’s death, however, Vavilov fell

out of favour, usurped by a former pupil

whose ideas appealed more to the new leader,

Joseph Stalin. Trofim Lysenko argued that

plant genetics, and with it Vavilov’s collection,

was unnecessary, as plants simply acquired

new characteristics according to their

environment. This struck an ideological chord

with Stalin. He liked the idea that plants could

be transformed in the same way he believed

the workers should – by an act of political will.In 1940 Vavilov was imprisoned for

defending the “bourgeois pseudoscience” of

genetics. He died in prison in 1943, his

collections all but forgotten. When Hitler

invaded Russia in 1941, Stalin moved key

infrastructure such as power stations and

steel mills east of the Urals. But he left some of

the most valuable economic treasures

behind – Vavilov’s seeds.

If Stalin could not see their value, the

Germans could. Nazi Germany was obsessed

with self-sufficiency and regarded Vavilov’s

collection as highly desirable war loot. Beforethe invasion, scientists from the Kaiser

Wilhelm Institutes (forerunners of today’s

Max Planck Institutes) drew up plans to take

over Russian research institutes, and as troops

advanced across the Soviet Union, botanists

were not far behind. They never got their

hands on Vavilov’s main collection, which

stayed secure behind the walls of his institute

throughout the siege of Leningrad. But by

early 1943, German scientists had taken

control of around 200 field stations across

Russia and Ukraine.

Afterwards, many German scientists

claimed they were merely protecting the seedheritage of humankind. But records

uncovered by German historians show that

there was, in fact, a scramble to grab the spoils.

One of the most zealous was the Ahnenerbe,

the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching

Society, set up in 1935 by SS commander

Heinrich Himmler to provide evidence of

Aryan racial superiority.

Enter Brücher. In 1943 he was 27 years old

and already an SS second lieutenant and a

prominent member of the Ahnenerbe. After

the German defeat at Stalingrad (now

lA SHOT rang out across the foothills of

the Andes. Heinz Brücher, 75, Adolf

Hitler’s top botanist, lay dead in his

vineyard on the outskirts of Mendoza in

Argentina. It was December 1991. Nobody was

ever charged with the murder, but plenty of

people had a motive, including drug cartels,

the KGB and Mossad. In an eventful life full of

unanswered questions, Brücher had made

many enemies.

Half a century before Brücher was a young

and pushy geneticist at the University of Jena,

a hotbed of Nazi ideology. During the second

world war he became one of Hitler’s bio-pirates – scientists who rushed into the Soviet

Union behind the advancing German troops,

occupying agricultural research stations and

commandeering their plants and seeds. These

were part of the Soviet Union’s collection of

plant genetic material, at that time the largest

in the world. The fate of this plunder after the

war is shrouded in mystery. Following a trail

that leads from Germany to Sweden, the UK,

South America and even back to Russia, New

Scientist has gone in search of Brücher’s loot.

The story begins in the Soviet Union with

the legendary geneticist Nikolai Vavilov,whose life’s work was collecting wild and

cultivated seeds from across the world. His

intention was to breed new varieties of crops

with attributes that would allow them to grow

anywhere in the expanding Soviet empire.

Vavilov’s seeds would literally be the seeds of a

new imperial expansion.

Under Lenin’s patronage, in 1924 Vavilov

took charge of his own institute, the All-Union

Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops in

Leningrad (now St Petersburg). The institute

was soon renowned internationally for

housing the largest collection of crop seeds

anywhere in the world. By the early 1930s, it

www.newscientist.com 5 January 2008 | NewScientist |

blitzkrieg

In a massive act of bio-piracy during the secondworld war, Nazi botanists stole large parts ofthe Soviet Union’s seed collection.Fred Pearce goes in search of their ultimate destination



to leave Germany. As a former SS officer he di

not have the right to free movement in Allied

occupied Germany or Austria, but it seems he

somehow made his way back to Lannach,

which was then in British hands. Soon

afterwards, he chartered a fishing boat fromGermany to Stockholm.

Why Sweden? Brücher knew scientists

there who had been Nazi sympathisers during

the war. They included the explorer and plant

collector Sven Hedin, then 82, who had given

the opening address at the 1936 Berlin

Olympics. Brücher worked briefly with Hedin

but in November 1948 he set sail for Argentin

with nearly half a tonne of baggage. There he

began a new career as a plant geneticist at the

National University of Tucumán, which

employed a large number of exiled German

and Italian scientists.His new circumstances had little effect on

his political opinions. “When I knew him [in

the 1970s] his repertoire of value judgements

mirrored those in force or in vogue during th

Nazi period,” says Daniel Gade, a scientific

acquaintance from the University of Vermon

Brücher also spent a year in South Africa

during the apartheid era, where he professed

to see evidence supporting his theories on th

superiority of white races.

Brücher was also an outspoken opponent

of all drugs, including tobacco and alcohol.

According to Gade, he boasted a few years

before his death that he was working on avirus that could destroy the coca plant. True o

not, this is a plausible motive for his murder.

Brücher is, however, only one part of the

story of the stolen seeds. A Soviet state

commission set up after the war concluded

that, in all, 40,000 plant samples had been

lost during the war, having either been

destroyed or stolen.

Where did they all go? According to Olga

Elina of the Institute for the History of Scienc

and Technology in Moscow, German

documents show that, Lannach aside, the

Other prisoners proved more useful. One

in particular, a British trooper named William

Denton-Venables, was a trained botanist.

Brücher later described him as “my British

collaborator during the years of 1943-45”. It is

not clear exactly how Denton-Venables helpedBrücher with his plans for botanical world

domination. But Steinbrecher remembers

that the two had a good rapport and worked

together almost as colleagues.

The breeding programme never got off the

ground. Within months, the Red Army was

advancing rapidly. In February 1945, the SS

ordered Brücher to blow up the castle. Perhaps

seeing the seeds as his passport to a post-war

career, Brücher ignored the command.

Denton-Venables seems to have had

divided loyalties too. Indeed, the two men’s

loyalties seem to have been mostly to each

other. Steinbrecher says that the Lannach

PoWs had a short-wave radio and often knew

more than their captors about events on the

outside. “From time to time, William shared

information about military operations with

Heinz. At the critical moment, he informed

him that the Red Army was expected in one

hour.” Brücher and Steinbrecher fled,eventually finding sanctuary with Brücher’s

parents near Heidelberg.

Hossfeld says it is not entirely clear what

Brücher did for the next two years. He

apparently wrote some reports on edible seed

oils for US occupiers, who were talent-

scouting for useful scientists. But botanists

were low priority compared with rocket

scientists and nuclear engineers, and if

Brücher had hoped for an invitation to the US

he was disappointed.

In 1947, he apparently decided it was time

Volgograd) in early 1943 it was clear that the

Nazis would lose most of their territorial gains

in the Soviet Union – and with them the field

stations and their seeds. Brücher suggested

that the Ahnenerbe should send out a

“collecting commando” to bring back the loot

and build a new institute to house it. Himmler

agreed – and put Brücher in charge.

In June 1943, Brücher began a botanical

blitzkrieg. He and his henchmen raided at

least 18 institutes across Ukraine and Crimea.

(see map, right) All of the commando are now

dead except their translator, Arnold

Steinbrecher. He is 93 and lives in Canada,where New Scientist tracked him down with

the help of science historian Uwe Hossfeld

from the University of Jena in Germany.

Steinbrecher remembers Brücher as

“meticulous and highly intelligent, but very

ambitious, demanding, forceful and

autocratic,” but remains loyal to a man who,

he says, saved his life. He insists that the

commando was not a military operation.

Brücher “introduced himself as a botanist and

not as a military officer. There was never any

attempt to gain access by force.”

Brücher brought the seeds back to the new

SS Institute of Plant Genetics at Lannach, a

remote castle in Austria, where they were

amalgamated with an Ahnenerbe collection

from an expedition to Tibet five years earlier.

“The intention was to grow seedlings from

both the Ukraine and Tibet stock and to cross-

breed them with European strains… to

develop hybrids that would grow at higherelevations and in colder climates,” says

Steinbrecher. Brücher, he says, “had grandiose

plans, such as to grow plants in the Arctic.”

Lannach was staffed by prisoners,

including Allied prisoners of war and 15

women Jehovah’s Witnesses from a nearby

concentration camp. The institute seems to fit

many stereotypes of SS operations: sinister

and brutal, but also farcical. According to

Steinbrecher, the Jehovah’s Witness gardeners

refused to kill weeds because this was against

their religion.

| NewScientist | 5 January 2008 www.newscientist.co

“At the critical moment, William warned us that

the Red Army was expected in one hour “

(From left to right) Soviet

geneticist Nikoia Vavilov;

Lannach Castle in Austria;

William Denton-Venables



seeds mostly went to the plant-breeding

centres of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in

Vienna and Müncheberg.

Did they stay there after the war? Hossfeld

says he has been unable to find any post-war

records of the stolen collections or their use in

plant breeding in Germany. Henry Shands,

director of the main US national seed bank in

Fort Collins, Colorado, also reached a dead end

searching archives in Washington DC. Elina

says that this probably means that the seeds

were simply absorbed into Germany’s own

collections.

The Lannach seeds, however, might have

had a more colourful post-war existence. The

castle was abandoned at the end of the war

and Steinbrecher insists that he and Brücher

fled at short notice, without any seeds. But

Hossfeld has uncovered a letter Brücher sent

to a German colleague, Theodor Herzog, in

November 1947, in which he claimed to have

recently “re-collected” the Lannach seeds,

most of which were not at the castle, he said,but had been secretly planted out in villages.

Hossfeld believes that Brücher took these

seeds with him to Sweden. Carl-Gustaf

Thornstrom of the Swedish University of

Agricultural Science in Uppsala, does too. He

interviewed five Swedish geneticists who met

Brücher during his time in the country. All, he

said, became “stiff” when the question of the

Lannach seeds was raised.

Arne Hagberg, head of the Swedish Seed

Association in the 1970s, told New Scientist he

met Brücher in Sweden before he left for

Argentina. He said that Brücher had with him

material from Lannach, and he believes

Brücher used this as the basis for a new gene

bank he assembled in Argentina. “It was

probably quite simple for him to bring some

paper bags with the desired seeds in his

luggage to Argentina. That would certainly not

have been the main problem for him.”

British connection

There is also intriguing evidence that

Brücher returned some of the material to the

Soviet Union. Thornstrom visited Vavilov’s

old institute, now called the N. I. Vavilov

Research Institute of Plant Industry, in 2001

and was shown notebooks detailing deliveries

by Brücher to the institute in 1960 and later.

He speculates that Brücher was pressured to

hand back the material and points out that thethen director of the institute, Pjotr Zhukowski,

visited Tucumán in 1958.

There may also be a British connection. In

his letter to Herzog, Brücher made it clear that

he was still in touch with Denton-Venables. He

wrote that his erstwhile “collaborator” had

begun a career as director of a company called

“Taylor and Venables Ltd Agricultural Seed

Merchants”. The Englishman, he added,

showed “excellent correctness and loyal

assistance during the re-collection of the seed

material.” What could he mean?

New Scientist has reconstructed some of

Denton-Venables’ movements after the war

and spoken to surviving members of his

family. In 1945, he was awarded the Military

Medal. The citation includes an account of

events at Lannach, describing how Denton-

Venables stayed behind as the Russians

invaded in order to prevent the Germans from

destroying “valuable agricultural material”.

The citation concludes: “Denton-Venables

brought back with him samples of wheat

seeds, which agricultural experts believe may

prove of inestimable value.”

From this version of events it seems that

Denton-Venables may have outwitted his

chum, hustling him out of the back door while

he filled his boots with seeds and slipped out

the front. His daughter says that after he was

demobbed, he was called to a mysterious

meeting in London to discuss some seeds. Butafter that the trail goes cold.

We contacted the Royal Botanic Gardens at

Kew, Rothamsted agricultural research centre

in Hertfordshire and the Plant Breeding

Institute in Norwich, which would have been

the most likely repositories for such seeds and

the information about them. But their

archivists all drew a blank. Nobody could say

what might have happened to the seeds, or

even who the “experts” might have been who

regarded them as being of potentially

“inestimable value”.

Perhaps Denton-Venables used the seedsto set up his company. His family say he came

back from the war with no money but soon

built up a successful business in Chester. But

if he was living off ill-gotten gains he soon got

his come-uppance. By the late 1950s his

company was on the rocks and in May 1959,

plain old William Venables (the Denton turns

out to have been a piece of personal

aggrandisement) died of a stroke aged 44.

It is also possible that Venables and

Brücher saw each other after leaving Lannach.

Venables’ family are sure that shortly after

the war, he made a secret journey to visit his

old captor and friend. Venables apparentlygot himself a passport at around this time.

Perhaps Venables joined Brücher on his

trip to Lannach to re-collect the seeds. That

would account for Brücher’s description of

his friend’s “excellent correctness and loyal

assistance.” Or maybe Venables simply

handed over seeds he had kept since their

escape. Nobody knows how or why they

arranged to meet, exactly when or where they

met, or what transpired. It is an intriguing

final mystery, but the answer seems to have

gone with them to their graves. l

www.newscientist.com 5 January 2008 | NewScientist |



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| NewScientist | 00 Month 2007 www.newscientist.co



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nazi biopirates

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