Instant Genius - The truth about the Nazi fascination with alternative medicine

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

It’s widely documented that during the time of the Third Reich, the Nazi Party employed a legion of scientists to aid them in their goals of military superiority and ethnic cleansing – particularly in their pursuit of eugenics and development of cruel nerve agents and chemical weapons. It’s far less known that Heinrich Himmler, one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, considered himself to be a talented scientist and harboured a long-held, and frequently bizarre, fascination with quackery and alternative medicine. In this episode, we’re joined by physician, researcher, and author Edzard Ernst to talk about his latest book, The Leopard Lily Project – A Story of Nazi Pseudoscience. He recounts the story of a sinister plot to sterilise large swathes of the population using a herbal folk remedy, how this project arose from the wider ideology of the Nazi Party, and explains why, ultimately, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from its inception. Take your curiosity further with a subscription to BBC Science Focus magazine. Every issue is packed with fascinating insights into the science behind everyday life, the latest breakthroughs and expert analysis, delivered straight to your door. Receive an extra £5 when you subscribe using the code SF5OFF, (minimum spend £20, see full terms and conditions on our website). https://www.ourmediashop.com/bbc-science-focus-magazine-pod30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level. This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bi-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor,

BBC science focus. It's widely documented that during the time of the Third Reich, the Nazi party employed a legion of scientists to aid them in their goals of military superiority and ethnic cleansing, particularly in their pursuit of eugenics and development of cruel nerve agents and chemical weapons. It's far less known that Heinrich Himmler, one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, considered himself to be a talented scientist and harboured a long-held and frequently bizarre, with quackery and alternative medicine. In this episode, we're joined by physician, researcher and author, Edzard Ernst, to talk about his latest book, The Leopard Lili Project, a story of Nazi pseudoscience.

He recounts the story of a sinister plot to sterilise large swathes of the population using a herbal folk remedy, how this project arose from the wider ideology of the Nazi party and explains why ultimately the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from it. inception. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, The Leopard Lily Project, a story of Nazi pseudo-science. So I think the best place to start then is with the obvious question. What was briefly the Leopard Lily project? It was a nasty project designed by the Nazi, towards the end of the Second World War

to basically infertileize millions of Bolsheviks, as they called it. The problem the Nazis faced from their perspective was that they had conquered very vast areas of territory populated by millions of Bolsheviks, and they needed these people, on the one hand, to work the land and rehabilitate the countries, which the Nazis had devastated, but they wanted to Germanize these territories, meaning they eventually wanted the Bolsheviks to disappear

and the German population to take over. So sterilization was an obvious solution. They had experimented with sterilization in many ways already. The methods were tedious, time-consuming, needed medical expertise were expensive and therefore not suitable for sterilizing millions. And then came along this idea of sterilizing people with a herbal remedy called Leopard Lily. And they jumped on that idea,

and that constitutes the Leopard Lily project. Yeah, absolutely. So as you sort of touched on there, initially the Nazis forced men to have vasectomies and the women to have their Philippian tubes tied. And this was surprisingly widespread. Yeah. Early on, even before the war, the Nazis decided that there were lots of people handicapped people mainly who they considered unworthy of reproduction. So they basically

sterilized them. And the idea was that they wanted to purify the German people. So anybody suspected of genetic disease was a candidate for sterilization. And that obviously had existed in other countries as well, but the Germans forced sterilization, involuntary sterilization. People had to go and had to undergo these procedures against their will. Yeah, so the sort of the big question that's looming over all of this is it all stems from the sort of Nazi ideology that certain races or groups of people were somehow inferior to others. Obviously, that's a huge question. But briefly, before we get into some of the details in the book,

you know, what can we say about that idea? You know, where on earth did that come from? Actually, Charles Darwin was partly the father of this idea. The survival of the fittest, and that was translated not to individuals or to animals, but to the survival of the fittest people. And clearly the fittest had to be the Germans. They wanted to rule the world, and every other people was considered inferior to the master race. That was their rather primitive and brutal concept.

So as you talk about it in the book, I'm sure some people will be aware, lots of these sorts of experiments were carried out on prisoners held in, unfortunately, in concentration camps. So, you know, what are some examples of that that you discovered? Yeah, the Heinrich Himmler was the last, leading light, so to speak, who was pushing these experiments and he was largely in charge of the concentration camps, of which there were many. He decided that the conventional means that you have mentioned of sterilization surgically are not good enough because they were too cumbersome,

to work intensive. So they experimented with other very cruel methods of sterilization, for instance, x-rays, exposing human genitals to x-rays, very powerful doses of x-rays, which then created all sorts of problems, inflammation and things. To just explain the cruelty of this experiment, lots of people, prisoners who, involuntary had to undergo these treatments were then basically killed in order to identify the organ changes that the x-rays or other methods had caused to their genitals.

So this was unspeakably cruel. And by comparison, a herbal remedy that you could discreetly put in the drinking water, for instance, would have seemed rather less cruel and much more feasible, of course. Yeah, so let's go into that, like the pseudoscience bit in the title of the book. And you mentioned Himmler there. So where did this sort of fascination with these alternative herbal therapies stem from? Well, Himmler was a particular nutcase in that regard. But he favoured all sorts of mystical projects, and he considered himself a rather brilliant scientist. He was the opposite.

He was a prime example of a pseudo-scientist who had really no idea, but jumped on the bandwagon of every wacky idea. So that was one line. And the second line was that, of course, natural medicine, alternative medicine, was extremely popular with the Nazis altogether. They had created a profession, non-medically trained practitioners who were practicing alternative medicine of all types, and they wanted a shotgun marriage of alternative medicine with conventional medicine, and they called it Neu-Deutsche-Hei,

the new German healing art, and that was forced upon the population and also upon doctors, physicians. So a project, a research project, in line with these concepts, would have seemed to fit the ideology quite nicely. So was that idea sort of prevalent in Germany, sort of pre-Nazi, and in wider Europe as well, this idea of this belief in herbal or as we now call alternative medicines? Yes. At the time in 1920s, alternative medicine was really quite popular, not just in Germany, throughout Europe.

And in Germany, the situation was extreme. In the early 30s, Germany had more practitioners, non-medically trained practitioners of alternative medicine than doctors. And the Nazis felt they needed to put these professions under control. This is why they created the profession that I already mentioned called Heil Practica and the idea was that this would merge into new German medicine eventually and that the profession of the Heil Practica would become redundant. It didn't become redundant because it still exists today in Germany. We have plenty of non-medically trained practitioners in

in Germany as we speak. I think that's the same elsewhere in Europe as well. And I think it's worth pointing out that, as you say, we're talking about 100 years ago, pretty much. And if we're like somebody younger, like my generation might be looking back at this and thinking, well, that's a, like as you called it, you know, a sort of crazy idea.

But our own NHS wasn't actually founded until 1948. And before that period, lots of this sort of practice was going on elsewhere, right? Yeah, it was out of control. It was out of control, certainly of the medical profession and the medical profession did have concern about these developments. The unique thing that happened in Germany that the government took control. control of it and try to regulate it and force upon conventional medicine the ideas of alternative medicine. So let's move on to the title of the book, The Leopard Lily.

So that was something I have never heard of before. And I'd venture most people listening haven't either. So what exactly is that? And how does that fit into this picture? Leopard Lily, Dumbain is another name for it. It's actually quite a popular decorative plant. You may have seen it without noticing it in homes. It's pretty and it's poisonous.

It comes from South America, which turned out to be a problem because the Germans tried to grow it and it wouldn't grow in the German climate. It's known to be poisonous. And a German researcher called Madaos, who also was proprietor of a firm producing herbal remedies, took an interest in it, did some research, made an extract of the plant, and gave it to rats. And it turned out the rats weren't reproducing anymore.

He published that quite innocently. He was not involved in any sort of Nazi research at all. He probably never thought of sterilizing humans with that plant. But somebody unrelated to all of this, a dermatologist found that publication and thought, that's interesting. And he wrote to Himmler and suggested to sterilize millions of Bolsheviks with that plant. Himmler had toyed with the idea of sterilising or getting rid of millions of Bolsheviks and so that's a brilliant idea, let's pursue it. So once Himmler had that publication, that knowledge in his hands,

what happened next? How did they go about trying to implement this plan, I should perhaps say? He basically told his underlings to pursue this as a priority. So they went back to the Mothers factory, and the first thing they found that Mothers had died. He wasn't there anymore. So his second in command took over, and he was charged with pursuing that research,

keeping quiet about it because it was declared top secret. And what they actually wanted was to go straight into human experiments. That's where the pseudomedicine comes in, because what you would normally do, if it had been at all an ethical project, you would confirm the results in animals, you would go into animals that are more akin to human beings,

and you would take step by step. The Nazis didn't have the time to do. do that. So they didn't even consider doing that. They wanted to produce large amounts of extracts and then go into a concentration camp and give it to prisoners. Now, as I already mentioned, large amounts of extracts, that was the problem. Germany at the time was isolated in terms of international trade. So they had to grow the plant themselves. They built greenhouses to do that, but even in greenhouses it wouldn't grow properly. And eventually that stopped the entire project. That and of course the war turning

very much against the Germans and the the Germans beginning to lose the war and therefore other things took over as priority. Yeah, so this whole, like, really fascinating historical story is an example of people's continuing at times belief in pseudoscience, which I know is one of your primary areas of research and thought. So this sort of still persists today. And after seeing all of these sort of failed examples, failed experiments, why does certain people still find this idea so appealing in the face of all the evidence to the contrary?

Yes, you're referring to alternative medicine in general as it exists today. Why do people think that homeopathic remedies can cure disease? I think because people are ill-informed about what homeopathic remedies are, to mention that just one alternative treatments, because there are so many. Somebody counted 400 different alternative treatments that we are presently struggling with. Others would like us to have as much as possible on the NHS. Never mind that these treatments might not work. that these treatments might have adverse effects, and never mind that they actually dilute evidence-based medicine

into something far less favorable than it is today. But why is the idea still appealing? Is it there's a sort of opposition to, perhaps, you know, like sadly, like some people may argue, well, my mother died of cancer and there was nothing that traditional medicine could do. So maybe they're putting alternative medicine onto sort of parity with that idea and thinking, well, isn't that worth a shot? Parity or even superiority. Your sad story, which is a common story, could be phrased even more aggressively. Your mother died of cancer and all conventional doctors were bloody useless.

And there were hundreds of alternative treatments that might have cured her. That sort of narrative you hear non-stop. It's a complete bullshit, of course, but it is very compelling. People believe that if a treatment like acupuncture has existed for thousands of years, it must be good. People believe that alternative treatment are gentle and harmless. So, you know, what would you like to see going forward? How can we stop this way of thinking?

In my view, there's only one way forward, and I have pursued that way in the last 30 years. Do proper research, not like the Nazis jumping from an experiment on 30 rats to experiments on prisoners, but by proper research, testing whether the claims that alternative practitioners make, i.e., my treatment works for this and that condition, whether that claim is true, whether that treatment works, whether the treatment is safe. I've spent the best part of my life doing that, and it's nowhere near. enough because there are so many unanswered questions and there's so many alternative treatments

and there's so many concerns. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Edsard Ernst. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out this book, The Leopard Lili Project, A Story of Nazi Sudo-Science. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider. subscribe to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

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