Dachau, Demeter, and Weleda
Historical Studies and Historical Reality.
“Eco-products for Nazis” was the headline of an article in the September 5, 2025, issue of the news magazine Der Spiegel.1 The subtitle read: “In the Dachau concentration camp, the SS experimented with anthroposophical methods and remedies using forced labor. The natural cosmetics company Weleda also played a role.” Included in the article were photographs of Rudolf Steiner, Margarete Himmler (the wife of the SS chief), Sigmund Rascher and another SS doctor conducting human experiments on concentration camp prisoners in Dachau, prisoners performing forced labor, buildings belonging to the Dachau SS operation of the German Research Institute for Nutrition and Food (DVA, Deutschen Versuchsanstalt für Ernährung und Verpflegung), along with images of the Weleda logo—and a photo of historian Anne Sudrow. The report served as an effective promotion for her book Heil Kräuter Kulturen. Die SS, die ökologische Landwirtschaft und die Naturheilkunde im KZ Dachau [Healing herb cultures: The SS, organic farming, and naturopathy in the Dachau concentration camp]. The book was published a few weeks later by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen and made available to the news magazine in advance.2
A “Network of Anthroposophists in the SS”?
In his article, Spiegel author Stefan Hunglingern quotes from the monograph but also walks with the historian across the grounds of the former DVA facility. He emphasizes that there was an active “network of anthroposophists” within the SS, consisting of biodynamic farmers, gardeners, and an SS doctor (Sigmund Rascher), who were not victims but perpetrators in the context of the Dachau concentration camp and pursued their own interests. According to Hunglingern, based on the supposed research of the “clairvoyant” Steiner, profitable anthroposophical enterprises had already emerged in the 1920s (including the pharmaceutical manufacturer Weleda). Biodynamic agriculture, in particular, then received special support from the SS during the time of National Socialism, specifically as an instrument for cultivating the new “living space” [Lebensraumes] after the conquests in Eastern Europe in the course of World War II.
At the SS’s DVA facility in Dachau, Weleda’s former head gardener, Franz Lippert, and another Weleda gardener, Erich Werner, conducted botanical studies on the huge area cultivated by prisoners. SS doctor Rascher, who carried out cruel human experiments (high-altitude/low-pressure and freezing) in experimental block 5 of the concentration camp, was also associated with Weleda. Reportedly, the anthroposophical “network” within the SS at that time has been deliberately “concealed” to this day. According to Hunglingern and Sudrow, consumers of Demeter or Weleda products should be conscious of the inhumane support their manufacturers received not so long ago and the collaboration with the Nazi and SS regime that underlies these morally tainted products. According to the implicit statement in Der Spiegel, anyone who buys Demeter or Weleda products becomes a belated beneficiary of the Nazi concentration camps and the labor, blood, and ashes of innocent people.
Not Dealt With and Obscured?
With few exceptions, the article describes facts that have been known for decades from historical studies and publications—albeit with deliberate exaggeration and biased interpretation. The delivery of Weleda frostbite cream to Sigmund Rascher in January 1943 was made public by Götz Aly in early 1983. From 1991 to 1993, Arfst Wagner published five volumes of “Documents and Letters on the History of the Anthroposophical Movement and Society during the Time of National Socialism” [Dokumente und Briefe zur Geschichte der Anthroposophischen Bewegung und Gesellschaft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus] from state and private archives (Volume III: “Biodynamic Farming. Materials on Sigmund Rascher” [Biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise. Materialien über Sigmund Rascher]). In 1999, Uwe Werner took into account all the material available to him at that time on the relationship between the Reich Association for Biodynamic Agriculture and Horticulture [Reichsverband für biologisch-dynamische Landwirtschaft und Gartenbau] and the SS and the DVA, as well as on Franz Lippert and Sigmund Rascher, in his comprehensive monograph Anthroposophists in the Time of National Socialism [Anthroposophen in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus].
Numerous other publications on Lippert and the DVA followed, including the work of Jens Ebert, Tanja Kinzel, Meggi Pieschel, and Kristin Witte in 2021. In the spring and early summer of 2024 and in the early summer of 2025 (two months before Sudrow’s monograph), three comprehensive volumes on the biodynamic movement during the time of National Socialism, as well as on anthroposophical doctors and anthroposophical drug manufacturers (1933–1945), were finally published—the result of several years of research projects and with the participation of scientific advisory boards with no connection to anthroposophy.3 The documentary material, insofar as it concerned persons or institutions close to anthroposophy, had thereby already been carefully and critically examined before Anne Sudrow’s work, and had not been deliberately “obscured.”
Merits and Shortcomings of a Publicly Funded Study
Of lasting value in Sudrow’s book publication—which bears the logos of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site [KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau], the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media [Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien], and the Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture [Bayrischen Staatsministeriums für Unterricht und Kultur] in the imprint—are the statements on the DVA facility in Dachau and the history and context of the extensive operation, in which edible and medicinal herbs were primarily cultivated, researched, and distributed on a large scale, using up to a thousand forced laborers (concentration camp prisoners). Sudrow’s vivid descriptions and testimonies of the harsh working conditions of the prisoners and the specific research programs carried out at the plant facility, which was mainly managed according to biodynamic methods from April 1940 onwards, including Franz Lippert’s botanical studies, are also of lasting value. Sudrow has reconstructed these programs in their entirety for the first time.
The author sees the DVA facility in Dachau both as a center of scientific teaching and research in the field of organic farming and horticulture during the time of National Socialism, and also as a center of “alternative medicine” and the Reich Labor Association’s project for a “New German Art of Healing” [Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für eine “Neue Deutsche Heilkunde”]. With this assessment of medical history, she most likely overshoots her target; what is undoubtedly correct, however, is that the SS under Himmler understood itself as an elite group, had a mandate for operational settlement policy in the territories conquered by Germany, and wanted to carry out fundamental work and practical tests along these lines on its DVA estates. Among Sudrow’s primary interests were employees from the biodynamic movement who had different relationships with anthroposophy but were connected to it.
Read full article in Das Goetheanum