Black Triangle

I’ve had to do a great deal of reading about herbs and other complementary therapies in the past few weeks. What I don’t know about the evidence base for homeopathy, isn’t worth knowing. In fact, what I do know about the evidence-base for homeopathy isn’t worth knowing either!

In Germany complementary therapies have always been more popular and have been integrated into the healthcare system for years. I went on a tour of a Weleda factory near Stuttgart in 1993, and was subjected to a hundreds of pleasant aromas, and lots of poorly translated pseudo-science. Since then the Germans have developed a certain amount of scepticism about complementary therapies and have restricted funding for it on the basis of a lack of evidence – just as we move the other way…

So why are the Germans so keen on the stuff? Some of it may be to do with the anti-science anthroposophical movement, but another cause is the Nazi party.

Apparently several high ranking officials (including Rudolph Hess) were fanatical believers in natural therapies. Natural therapies were also used in experiments on inmates in concentration camps – I’d always assumed that the experiments had been undertaken with conventional medicines. In fact, Dauchau concentration camp had the largest plantation of medicinal herbs in Europe.

Since we are talking about fanaticism and health, Nazi’s were also fanatical anti-smoking lobbyists.

The antismoking activities in Nazi Germany were tied, institutionally and ideologically, to the racial hygiene movement, which was deeply implicated in the murder campaigns against Jews, homosexuals, travellers, and those deemed to be mentally and physically defective. Tobacco was considered to be a “genetic poison,” decreasing fertility and increasing the incidence of chromosomal damage.

The Jena Institute carried out both clinical and animal research into these topics. For the anti-Nazi youth movements–the working class Edelweiss Pirates and the bourgeois Hamburg Swing Youth alike–the constant cigarette seems to have been almost a badge of resistance and was referred to as a sure indicator of their degeneracy in the surveillance reports produced by the Hitler Youth. Indeed, one of the reasons for the relative failure of activities to prevent smoking in Germany since the war may be that the association of authoritarian antismoking efforts with the Nazi regime remained in popular memory for a long period.