German organic gardening guru Alwin Seifert took tips from Dachau experiments
Harvest time is here again on Germany’s 1.2 million allotments: potatoes have to be hoisted out of the soil and the last of the peas must be plucked.
In the shed, next to the trowel and gloves, there will almost certainly be a well-thumbed copy of the gardeners’ bible written by Alwin Seifert, the country’s organic guru.
Now it emerges that at least some of Seifert’s useful tips in his bestselling book Gärtnern, Ackern-ohne Gift, (Gardening, Working the Soil without Poison) may have been gleaned from his observation of the experimental gardens set up on the grounds around Dachau concentration camp.
Tended by half-starved slave labourers, at least 400 of whom were killed, drowned in the carp pond or trampled into the mud of the latrine trenches, the Dachau gardens were established at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s security chief, and stretched to 211 blossoming hectares.
Seifert, who after the war became a founder of the Green movement, was one of the top landscape gardeners of the Nazi era. He even had the title Reichslandschaftsanwalt — advocate of the Reich’s Landscape. It was Seifert who managed to persuade the Nazi autobahn planners to make the motorway curve, following the natural contours of the German countryside. The well-connected gardener was also opposed to artificial fertilisers poisoning German soil and went to Dachau, apparently oblivious to the emaciated prisoners, to see what could be done in the gardens and arable fields of the Fatherland.
“The question has to be how much of the information that flowed into his book derived from the research being done in Dachau,” says the Munich-based cultural historian Daniella Seidl, who has been digging in the Bavarian and federal archives. “He was a regular visitor, maintained a correspondence with the head gardener Franz Lippert, and even arranged for a couple from the camp to work in his own household.” Some of the ideas being tried out in the Dachau gardens were certainly adopted by Seifert for use in his own garden in the Tyrol.
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In the shed, next to the trowel and gloves, there will almost certainly be a well-thumbed copy of the gardeners’ bible written by Alwin Seifert, the country’s organic guru.
Now it emerges that at least some of Seifert’s useful tips in his bestselling book Gärtnern, Ackern-ohne Gift, (Gardening, Working the Soil without Poison) may have been gleaned from his observation of the experimental gardens set up on the grounds around Dachau concentration camp.
Tended by half-starved slave labourers, at least 400 of whom were killed, drowned in the carp pond or trampled into the mud of the latrine trenches, the Dachau gardens were established at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s security chief, and stretched to 211 blossoming hectares.
Seifert, who after the war became a founder of the Green movement, was one of the top landscape gardeners of the Nazi era. He even had the title Reichslandschaftsanwalt — advocate of the Reich’s Landscape. It was Seifert who managed to persuade the Nazi autobahn planners to make the motorway curve, following the natural contours of the German countryside. The well-connected gardener was also opposed to artificial fertilisers poisoning German soil and went to Dachau, apparently oblivious to the emaciated prisoners, to see what could be done in the gardens and arable fields of the Fatherland.
“The question has to be how much of the information that flowed into his book derived from the research being done in Dachau,” says the Munich-based cultural historian Daniella Seidl, who has been digging in the Bavarian and federal archives. “He was a regular visitor, maintained a correspondence with the head gardener Franz Lippert, and even arranged for a couple from the camp to work in his own household.” Some of the ideas being tried out in the Dachau gardens were certainly adopted by Seifert for use in his own garden in the Tyrol.