Biography

German-Argentine botanist and plant geneticist who spent the second part of his career in South America specialising in Andean crops. His earlier life in Germany had seen him appointed an officer in the SS, for whom he carried out plant breeding experiments and raided Soviet agricultural research stations.

Born in Darmstadt and raised in the wooded hills of the Hessian Odenwald, Brücher studied botany, anthropology and genetics at the universities of Jena and Tübingen. Jena was a hotbed of Nazi ideology and the year after Brücher graduated, he too joined the National Socialist party. In 1938 he defended a PhD thesis on the genetics of the great willowherb, Epilobium hirsutum L. at Tübingen and continued his research at Jena, where he was appointed an associate professor and branched out into work on human heredity. He was particularly fascinated with the work of Ernst Haeckel, whose Darwinist ideas formed the basis of Nazi eugenics.

Recognised for his identification with Nazi philosophy, Brücher was appointed to the Ahnenerbe, a research branch of the SS (literally translating as 'Ancestral Heritage'), in which he quickly rose to the rank of Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant). He also worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Müncheberg, near Berlin. Breeding crops that would contribute to the Reich's self-sufficiency was of prime concern to the Nazis, so in 1941 when Brücher suggested gathering valuable seeds and plant material from Soviet agricultural research stations in territory then occupied by German forces, the SS commander Himmler immediately agreed. In particular, some of the 200-odd field stations east of the Urals held duplicates of samples collected from around the world by crop researcher Nikolai Vavilov. His main collection languished at the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR, later named in honour of Nikolai Vavilov) in Leningrad, which although besieged, never fell to German forces.

The 'Sammelkommando' (collecting commando), with Brücher in charge, wasted no time as it was clear that the Ukraine and Crimean territory could soon be lost to Soviet forces. Dr. Ernst Schäfer, Captain Konrad von Rauch and an interpreter named Steinbrecher joined Brücher, setting off in the summer of 1943 with two trucks. They returned with plundered loads from 18 research stations. Many of the Soviet field stations were still in operation and their staff must have put up some resistance to the raiding of their collections, but Brücher reported back to the SS leaders that the 'transfer' of material had gone smoothly. In the same year, the geneticist and agronomist Nikolai Vavilov died in Stalin's prison at Saratov, the Soviet regime having rejected his 'bourgeois' theories. Stalin instead favoured the more Bolshevik science of Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that plant characters were simply a response to the environment; Stalin believed that workers could also be thus magically transformed. Brücher also refuted some of Vavilov's ideas, including the theory of gene centres, but this probably had more to do with the Nazis' dogmatic disapproval of any scientific ideas originating in Communist or Jewish communities.

The stolen seeds were taken to Lannach Castle near Graz in Austria, where the SS Institute for Plant Genetics was established at Brücher's request. Assuming charge of the institute, he began conducting breeding experiments with cereal crops, aided by Allied prisoners of war and a group of Jehovah's Witnesses from a concentration camp (who would not kill weeds, claiming it was against their religion). One of the most intriguing turn of events at Lannach was the close relationship Brücher' formed with a British PoW William Denton-Venables. Denton-Venables was a trained botanist and later set up the seed merchant Taylor and Venables in Norwich, England. Looking forward to the results of his crop plantings in 1945, Brücher was unprepared for orders in February that year to destroy the Lannach facilities, to prevent advancing U.S. and Soviet forces from capturing the Russian loot. He refused, thus saving important Vavilov collections. It has also been mooted that Brücher hid seeds among farms and villages around Lannach, possibly helped by Denton-Venables, which he recovered following the war and took with him to South America. It seems Venables may also have appropriated some of the collection, for the citation given on his award of the Military Medal in 1945 states that he brought back valuable samples of wheat seeds.

Prior to taking up a professorship in genetics and botany at the University of Tucumán, Argentina, in 1948, Brücher visited Sweden on the invitation of the explorer and Nazi sympathiser Sven Hedin. This allowed him to escape a less than comfortable life in his homeland following the collapse of the Third Reich and with it, the SS. (While many elite staff of the SS were executed after their defeat, Brücher survived by agreeing to work for the American occupation forces, continuing research on alternative plant sources of edible oils. However his career prospects in post-war Germany were not good because of his loyal following of the Nazi ideology, thus the ambitious 30-year-old decided to emigrate.) Hedin was a friend of the former director of Svalöf Plant Breeding Station, Professor Herman Nilsson-Ehle, whom Brücher also met. He then began work at Svalöf, giving rise to the strong possibility that some of his stolen Russian material also ended up in Swedish plant breeding. He met one more important person in Sweden, the plant scientist Ollie Berglund, whom he married.

Brücher thence emigrated to Argentina, a safe haven for many Nazi exiles, living at first in Tucumán and then on the outskirts of Mendoza where he bought a farm and vineyard and was appointed head of the Plant Biology Institute in 1976. His scientific reputation outside Germany did not seemingly suffer, perhaps because no-one knew of the former life that 'Don Enrique' (as he became known) had led, including his lead role in the theft of material from Russian research institutions. He spent periods in Asunción, Paraguay, as a UNESCO advisor at the National University in the 1970s; at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, working on seed trials; and at the University of Caracas, Venezuela. While living in Venezuela in the 1960s, his wife and one of their two sons were killed by a guard at a roadside checkpoint, apparently by mistake. He spent 1964-1965 in Pretoria, South Africa, and even visited the Vavilov Research Institute in St. Petersburg (the former All-Union Institute of Plant Industry), to which he sent some seeds.

In South America Brücher focused his work on studies of wild potatoes and beans (Solanum and Phaseolus), as well as continuing his studies of cereals, particularly looking at their origins, and those of useful tropical plants. He keenly searched in the wild for relatives of domesticated crops and claimed to have found four new tuberous Solanum species, but his eponymous S. brucheri Correll was shown in fact to be a hybrid of S. acaule Bitt. And S. infundibuliforme Philippi (Hawkes and Hjerting, 1969). His works Useful Plants of Neotropical Origin and Their Wild Relatives (1989) and its predecessor, Tropische Nutzpflanzen (1977), received critical reviews for their poor editing and the inclusion of Brücher's personal opinions alongside their scientific content (permitted by the publisher, Konrad Springer).

Two years after the English publication, Brücher was murdered at his farm in Mendoza. Though apparently the victim of a burglary, suspicions of a political motive for the killing have been fuelled by the fact that Brücher was at the time working on a virus to target the coca crop. Again, this work probably had much to do with his ideological leanings; alcohol, tobacco, stimulants and psychoactive drugs were severely frowned upon in Nazi philosophy. Brücher imbibed none, nor ate meat. However, it appears that his passion for plant science came above his belief in fascism. His one-time co-collector Daniel Gade commented: "The personal decisions that Brücher made in the course of his life suggest that though he was once one of the true believers in Hitler's project, he primarily was a career-minded opportunist." Indeed, when offered a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Centre in Vienna, Brücher instead used his influence within the SS to have a separate Ahnenerbe centre established at Lannach, unnecessarily duplicating the efforts at Vienna, but allowing him to be director. He then disobeyed his Nazi superiors by not destroying his work at Lannach in 1945, and later obtained his positions at Tucumán (despite his lamentable Spanish at this point) and at Mendoza thanks to the Perón government's favourable attitude towards German academics. The mystery remains, however, as to exactly what material Brücher took with him from Lannach and where it ended up. So, too, does the identity of his killer; no-one was ever convicted of the murder.

Sources:
U. Deichmann (translated by T. Dunlap), 1996, Biologists under Hitler
D.W. Gade, 2006, "Converging Ethnobiology and Ethnobiography: Cultivated Plants, Heinz Brücher, and Nazi Ideology", Journal of Ethnobiology, 26(1): 82-106
J.G. Hawkes and J.P. Hjerting, 1969, The potatoes of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay: 6
F. Pearce, 2008, "The great seed blitzkrieg", New Scientist, 2638: 39-41
C-G. Thornstrom and U. Hossfeld, 2001, "Instant appropriation - Heinz Brücher and the SS botanical collecting commando to Russia", Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter, 129: 54-57.