German botanist who spent many years residing in Uruguay, where he made sizeable plant collections and began the Flora del Uruguay. Wilhelm Herter's unsettled life was marked by economic troubles and war, and his reputation is sullied by a three-year period spent in annexed Poland during the Second World War, where he was posted by the German Reich. As an untiring collector and pioneer in the botany of Uruguay however, the importance of his work cannot be disputed. A systematist, he specialised in mycology and Lycopodiales.

Born in Berlin to a family from a French Huguenot background, Herter studied medicine in Fribourg-en-Brisgau, Berlin, Paris and Montpellier. He earned his doctorate in Berlin, submitting a thesis on the genus Lycopodium to Adolf Engler and Simon Schwendener in 1908. Prior to this he had worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Bromberg, then on the agronomy faculty at the University of Montevideo, Uruguay (1907). After returning to Berlin, where he was appointed to an assistant position at the Botanical Museum at Dahlem (1908-1908), he began a series of flits back and forth across the Atlantic, taking up posts when they became available. Thus he served stints at the Ministry of Agriculture in Montevideo (1909-1910), at the Agrononomic University in Berlin (1911-1912), and at the Agronomic University of Porto Alegre as a professor (1912-1913) before being named head of the grain processing laboratory at the Berlin Agricultural College, where he remained for the duration of the First World War. He had a burgeoning interest in mycology and phytopathology, as well as Uruguayan floristics, but now dedicated himself to food biology, driven by both scientific interest and the shortages and rationing afflicting his fellow countrymen. As well as investigating the preservation of cereals and bread he experimented with new foodstuffs from vegetable sources (for example he published on the uses of chestnuts) while continuing to further his knowledge of bacteriology.

Recognised as an expert in his field, in 1921 Herter founded the mycological society 'Bund zur Förderung der Pilzkunde', along with its official journal, Der Pilz. However, this was a time of severe political and economic troubles for the Weimar Republic, and Herter decided to repair to Uruguay, upping sticks in 1923. If he had stayed in Germany, he would have enjoyed the brief stability and innovation of the Weimar's golden era in the later 1920s. Instead, he would return home only to face the next period of extreme unrest in Europe, in 1939. In the meantime, however, he carved out a new life for himself in his beloved Uruguay, where he decided at that time to remain permanently, taking citizenship in 1925. He occupied various functions at some of his erstwhile employers in Montevideo such as the university and in the ministries of education and of public health, as well as taking on a role at the Montevideo Botanical Gardens and Museum. As well as teaching botany he lectured students on Greek antiquity and promoted the study of mycology, and was happily married to Meta Puchert, who sometimes collected plants with him. His scientific reputation was well established by the mid-1930s, with a host of publications under his belt including contributions to Ignatz Urban's Symbollae Antillanae (ferns), papers on palms and lilies, plus an inventory of the Uruguayan flora (co-authored with Cornelius Osten) as part of his series Estudios botánicos en la region uruguaya. In 1934 he founded the Revista Sudamericana de Botánica, which went through ten volumes.

The Uruguayan government, suitably impressed with its adopted son's work, agreed to fund Herter in the furtherance of a national flora. He planned to travel to European herbaria to study their Uruguayan specimens; however, when he reached Berlin once more, in May 1939, his hopes of touring the continent were scuppered by the outbreak of hostilities. Faced now with the impossibility of returning to Uruguay and deprived of resources, he accepted a position at the University of Berlin in 1940 (less than ideally in the mathematics department). A slightly better situation soon arose when Herter was appointed director of the Institute of Botany at the Jagiellonian University. The institute, however, was in Cracow, now part of the Polish area annexed to Germany under the 'General Government' region (where the final solution was brutally enacted in several camps). Although given his new position directly by the Nazi regime, Herter hoped, rather naively, that the Poles would accept him as one of their own, for one of his forebears was a well-known Polish painter, Daniel Chodowiecki. This was not to be the case. He was seen simply as another emissary of the cruel fascist invaders and was held directly responsible for the considerable losses suffered in the field of Polish botany, in terms of both men and materials. Indeed the Polish botanists Wladyslaw Szafer and Bogumit Pawlowski insisted that Herter was brought to account before the Polish courts in 1945, though this never occurred.

Instead, Herter escaped Cracow in 1944 as the regime crumbled, and took refuge in Greifswald before moving to Altbunzlau (Stara Boleslav, near Prague), where he was named head of the Reich Institute of Sylviculture and a professor in the natural sciences faculty of the German University in Prague. He left his manuscripts and collections in Greifswald with his wife, whom he never saw again. The woman who had once shared his life in Uruguay, Meta Herter, was sick, and could endure no more privations and torment; she died in a camp near Kavelaer in January 1946. Herter, meanwhile, as the Reich fell, planned his return to the safety of his second home, Montevideo, ignorant of the fate of his wife and their daughter. He found himself first in Paris, where colleagues helped him to muster his fare across the Atlantic. Reaching Uruguay in mid-1946, he was yet again set up for disappointment. In his absence, his former commissions had been withdrawn, and to support himself Herter sold plant collections. He published only three papers in 1945-1948. Aged 65 he was granted, however, a retirement of sorts by the Uruguayan government, which appointed him honorary consul at Bern, Switzerland. Thus he returned to Europe in 1950, living in Basel from 1951 until 1954, where he continued to publish works on fungi and fascicles of his Flora Ilustrada del Uruguay. He finally moved to Hamburg, the place he had always considered his first home. He died there four years later.

Despite the eventful times Herter experienced he managed to gather copious herbarium specimens, publish 380 works on a wide variety of subjects and name some 1,449 taxa. He deposited and sold to museums some 100,000 plants from South America and Europe. Zurich holds a set of 2,800 numbers collected by Herter in Uruguay, while Geneva has about 2,500. His personal herbarium of some 30,000 sheets was destroyed in 1943 when the Berlin Botanic Gardens and Museum were bombed. A further 50,000 collections were transferred from Montevideo to Basel. The first fascicle of his Flora Ilustrada del Uruguay appeared in 1939, although the text of the Flora of Uruguay, dealing with nomenclature and distribution of species, did not begin to be published until 1949 and was within a decade interrupted by his demise. Nearly 30 species of plant are named in his honour.

Sources:
H.M. Burdet, 1978, "L'oeuvre et les tribulations de botaniste herter; une etude biographique et bibliographique germano-uruguayenne", Candollea, 33: 107-134
H.P. Fuchs, 1958, American Fern Journal, 48(4): 168-169
D. Legrand, 1959, "Dr. Guillermo Herter 1844-1958", Boletin de la Sociedad Argentina de Botanica, 7: 273-276.