Heinz Brücher

Heinz Brücher (1915 to 1991) was a German botanist and plant breeder who was a member of the special science unit of the SS Ahnenerbe in Nazi Germany. Born in Darmstadt, he studied biology at Jena and Tübingen, was a Nazi Party member by the time he graduated in 1934 and took a doctorate at Tübingen on the genetic differences in reciprocal crosses of Epilobium hirsutum. He worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding Research and was part of an SS collection expedition in 1941 that took seeds and plant material from the Soviet Union, including large parts of what Nikolai Vavilov had deposited, and later headed research at the SS Institute for Plant Genetics at Lannach Castle near Graz. After the war he worked in Sweden, held a professorship of genetics and botany at the University of Tucumán in Argentina from 1948, worked in Venezuela, Paraguay and elsewhere in Argentina, and in 1972 was biology adviser to UNESCO. He wrote on the history of grain and on the origin, evolution and domestication of tropical plants, and was killed on his farm near Mendoza in 1991.