The Nazi War on Cancer

"How many of us know that Dachau prisoners produced organic honey? Or Nazi health activists launched the world's most powerful anti-smoking campaign? How many of us know the Nazi war on cancer was the most aggressive in the world?"

These claims are made by Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Pennsylvania State University in his book The Nazi War on Cancer.

"Nazi nutritionists stressed the importance of a diet free of petrochemical dyes and preservatives; Nazi health activists stressed the virtues of whole-grain bread (Vollkornbrot) and foods high in vitamins and fiber. Many Nazis were environmentalists; many were vegetarians. Species protection was a going concern, as was animal welfare."

They also informed women about the importance of self-breast examination (Selbstbrustuntersuchung) and introduced radiation examinations to reduce the rate of breast cancer in the German population.

And it was in Germany in the last part of the decade of the 1930s where the addictive nature of tobacco was first described.

German physicians, like some today, even dared take on the national tobacco industry, an important economic entity both before and during the war. For example, as early as 1929 Fritz Lickint published data linking lung cancer and cigarettes. In 1939 he published Tabak und Organismus (Tobacco and the Organism), an 1,100-page treatise produced in collaboration with the Reich Committee for a Struggle against Addictive Drugs and the German Anti-tobacco League.

Lickint pointed out not only that tobacco was to blame for cancers along the rauchstrasse ("smoke alley," or lips, tongue, mouth, esophagus, trachea and lungs) but a cause of atherosclerosis as well. He even labelled passivrauchen ("passive smoking") a serious danger to non-smokers.

Germany's first concentration camp, Dachau, "eventually boasted the largest medico-botanical research station in the world, with 1,000 prisoners cultivating, drying and packaging herbal medicines and spices from 200 tediously tilled acres which produced almost all of the army's seasonings for the duration of the war."

"Jews were not just said to be either more or less prone to cancer; Jews were also said to be the purveyors of cancer, in various and sundry ways. The 1941 conference celebrating the founding of the anti-tobacco institute (in the city of Jena) . . . blamed Jews for introducing tobacco into Germany, and Jews were charged with dominating the tobacco import centers of Amsterdam. Jews were also said to trade in other dangerous products. Hugo Kleine, in a popular book on nutrition, blamed 'capitalist special interests' and 'masculinized Jewish half-women' for the deterioration of German foods one consequence of which was cancer."

"You have the duty to be in good health."

The Nazi party prohibited the use of the cigarette in many public places.

To smoke was though of as a vice of degenerated Africans, exploiting racism so that the Germans ceased smoking.

The Nazi policy was "Du hast die Pflicht gesund zu sein fuer Volk und Staat" - You have a duty to have good health for People and Nation. This was also the "motto for the year" for 1942 of the Hitler Youth (HJ).

Sources:

Medical Post

Ökoweb Museum, Austria

Nazi Medicine and Public Health Policy

The History of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society During National Socialism

Read a chapter of Proctor's book, The Nazi War on Cancer

Back to the Articles page

Home