The natural cosmetics company Weleda supplied a skin cream to the Dachau concentration camp that went on to be used for human testing, resulting in the agonising deaths of prisoners, a historian specialising in Nazi Germany has claimed.
Weleda, founded 104 years ago and known worldwide for its holistic remedies, sourced large quantities of medicinal herbs during the Nazi era from an agricultural plantation overseen by the SS in Dachau, southern Germany, according to a major report by Anne Sudrow commissioned by the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.
In return, the company provided the camp with a supposedly "anti-frost" cream it had developed as a protection against hypothermia, Sudrow's 700-page, two-volume study says.
The cream was intended for the use of soldiers on the frontline, but Sigmund Rascher, an SS doctor, used the product on prisoners at Dachau between August 1942 and May 1943, the report alleges. The report claims that between 80 and 90 prisoners out of the 280 to 300 to whom the cream was applied are believed to have died as a result of the experiments, in which they were kept in freezing conditions - baths of water containing blocks of ice - for hours on end.
The Dachau camp, just a few miles from Munich, opened in 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. It was first used to incarcerate political prisoners, but during the second world war it became a death camp where more than 41,000 Jews were slaughtered before US troops liberated it on 29 April 1945.
Swiss-based Weleda, known for its bestseller Skin Food range of moisturisers, and other products including salt toothpaste and citrus deodorant, responded to Sudrow's report this week by promising a "complete clarification" of its history.
Founded in 1921 by a group including the Austrian "spiritual scientist" and self-proclaimed clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner, Weleda says its products are still based on the principles of anthroposophy, a combination of holistic spiritual and scientific philosophy established through Steiner's teachings. On its website Weleda explains anthroposophy and its commitment to it as "a worldwide research method that explores spirituality with science". As a company it says it views "humans, society and nature as a holistic whole".
During her five-year research project, Sudrow, who has published extensively on issues related to the Nazis, says she found close ties between Weleda and the SS-controlled German Research Institute for Nutrition and Food (DVA) from at least 1941 until the end of the second world war.
It was allegedly in return for herb and other plant products from the DVA that Weleda gave Rascher the cream that it had promoted to the Nazi leadership from 1940 as a product which would be useful for the German military, especially on the eastern front, claiming that its use would make amputations from frostbite unnecessary.
Sudrow says her work also shows close personal connections between Weleda and the SS at Dachau. The SS was home to a strong network of anthroposophists, despite some Nazi officials viewing the movement as an ideological threat to the party.
The former head of Weleda's medicinal plant garden, Frank Lippert, worked for the SS from 1941 and joined it in 1942, Sudrow found. After the war he had a contract with Weleda to work as a consultant, her research showed. It claims he tried to continue his research on the plantation at Dachau, but was forbidden from doing so by US military authorities, and continued until his death in 1949 to draw on his research findings based on the experiments he had worked on at the camp.
Sudrow said that her findings had shaken her own belief in biodynamic products, which remain popular in the German speaking world and beyond. "How should we as consumers behave in relation to biodynamic products when we know what happened here in the Dachau concentration camp? I believe that it's necessary to throw light on this," she told Der Spiegel.
In a statement published on its German-language site, Weleda said: "As Weleda we condemn the atrocities of the Nazi regime in the strongest possible terms. Fascism, antisemitism, racism, or rightwing extremist ideology have no place in our midst."
It added that as a company it was "committed to transparently reviewing our history", and said it had "already actively provided several renowned historians with full access to our archives over several years".
It pointed to the 2024 publication on its website of a report into its past which it had commissioned from the Society for Corporate History (GUG) in 2023.
In this, the cream delivered to the SS by Weleda is mentioned. However, it says it is unclear whether or not Rascher used it for human experiments or whether it had ever been his intention to do so.
It said Lippert's work at Dachau had "in no way been connected to his earlier work at Weleda".
The statement concluded: "We want a complete clarification of our history. Weleda is a cosmopolitan company operating in 50 countries in the world and we stand for tolerance, diversity and humanity."