CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Strange New Creatures of Our Own Making”

IN SOME RESPECTS, Warburg’s postwar life represented a profound shift from his prewar experience. Without Rockefeller funding, he had fewer resources than he had been accustomed to. In an effort to help, Eric Warburg set up a fund in England so that Warburg could purchase scientific books. Warburg used at least some of the money to support his riding habit. “One can’t get decent riding breeches and boots in Germany any longer,” he explained to his cousin.

There were other changes for Warburg now as well. Upon its reestablishment in 1948, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society had been renamed the Max Planck Society. In 1953, Warburg’s institute was formally rebranded the Max Planck Institute for Cell Physiology. Warburg, having witnessed Planck’s less than stellar resistance to the Nazis, continued to wear his old badge, depicting the kaiser, at official events. Still furious at his former employees for denouncing him, Warburg also needed an entirely new staff after the war. Later on, when Hans Krebs asked Warburg why he had fired all of his employees, Warburg told him that, in addition to being disloyal, they had grown senile. Krebs pointed out that the employees in question were 15 to 20 years younger than Warburg himself. “Different people age at different rates,” Warburg said.¹

But the most remarkable aspect of Warburg’s postwar life was not how much it had changed, but how little. Five years after the Holocaust, Warburg might as well have been in 1933. He was working on cancer and photosynthesis again and engaged in bitter feuds with everyone who disagreed with him again. He and Heiss mounted their horses every morning and rode through Dahlem as they always had. They took winter walks through the lakes and woods on the outskirts of Berlin and vacationed at a spa resort. Warburg even took up a new hobby, becoming an avid sailor.

Warburg’s readiness to move forward wasn’t unusual in the 1950s. While many of the most notorious Nazis were captured and tried, the vast majority, including those who had played leading roles in the extermination programs, moved seamlessly back into German life. At least 25 cabinet officials in the new West German Republic had once been members of Nazi organizations. As late as 1957, almost 80 percent of the officials in the justice ministry were former Nazi Party members. In the words of Ralph Giordano, a first-degree Mischling whose family spent the last months of the war hiding in a friend’s basement, Germany’s willingness to let so many Nazis reenter society amounted to a “great peace with the perpetrators.” The guilt of the Germans under Hitler was only Germany’s “first guilt.” “The second guilt” was “the repression and denial of the first.”²

THE GERMAN PUBLIC’S FEAR of cancer was also largely unchanged after the war. Germans were still deeply concerned about the harm of chemicals in the food and air, and these fears would help give rise to a robust postwar environmental movement. Most postwar German environmentalists were certainly not Nazis. But given the Nazi obsession with environmental pollutants, it’s hardly surprising that a number of individuals with troubling pasts ended up at the forefront of the movement.

Among the most famous postwar German environmentalists was Alwin Seifert. His 1971 book, Gardening and Ploughing without Poison, sold a quarter of a million copies in Germany and inspired the younger generation to choose organically grown foods. Seifert’s many fans presumably didn’t know that under the Nazis he had been known as the Reich Landscape Advocate or that his arguments in favor of organic agriculture had influenced the thinking of Hitler, Himmler, and Hess, among others.

The Nazi leadership had been drawn to Seifert for a reason. He sometimes spoke of the threat of nonindigenous plants colonizing German soil in language that echoed Nazi rhetoric about the Jews. Until relatively recently, historians were still debating whether Seifert was a committed Nazi or had merely turned to Nazi terminology to market his ideas. Whatever the answer, in 2009 the German historian Daniella Seidl made a troubling discovery: Seifert’s hands were dirty with more than naturally fertilized soil. He had been a regular visitor to the Dachau gardens, Himmler’s concentration camp–cum–organic paradise. Seifert, who advised Himmler on various aspects of the Dachau gardens, even brought several prisoners from Dachau to work at his home.

The slogan of the German environmental movement in the 1950s was “Leave our food as natural as possible!” It was coined by Werner Kollath, a former Nazi who had written a textbook on racial hygiene in which he lamented that legislation had failed to keep inferior people from reproducing. Like Hitler, Kollath believed that all humans had once been vegetarians and that Germans should give up meat for plants. Kollath’s prescription for making the German diet more natural “had deep roots in the Third Reich,” the historian Corinna Trei­tel wrote.³

Kollath, who is also known for popularizing the concept of “whole foods,” published a book on “diseases of civilization” in 1958 that recounted much of the evidence that Erwin Liek had presented 30 years earlier. He was far from the only person making the argument at the time. The notion that cancer was a “disease of civilization” went through a broad revival in the first decades after World War II, thanks to an emerging body of research on cancer rates in migrant populations. Native Japanese women, it was found, were far less likely to have cancer than women of Japanese descent living in the United States. Black Americans of West African heritage had cancer rates far above the rates of West Africans. Cancer, these studies suggested, couldn’t be entirely explained away by aging or genes or bad luck. Living in the wrong country appeared to be the greatest risk factor of all.

These findings would lead postwar cancer authorities in Europe and the United States to conclude that 70 percent or more of cancers were caused by environmental factors, a category that includes diet. At the time, at least, this wasn’t considered bad news. If most cancers could be traced to modern lifestyles, then in theory, as Oxford epidemiologist Richard Peto once put it, “there are ways in which human beings can live whereby those cancers would not arise.” This was the hesitant conclusion of a 1964 World Health Organization report, which noted that “the majority of human cancer” seemed “potentially preventable.”⁴

But if the evidence that cancer was a disease of “civilization” had grown more compelling, there was still little progress on the question of which particular aspects of “civilization” caused the disease. After the war, more attention was devoted to the threat of artificial chemicals, both in the air and in our foods and drinks. The Germans had obsessed over the dangers of artificial chemicals for decades. America now began to catch up, and the man sounding the alarm was a German immigrant.

Wilhelm C. Hueper was a physician and researcher. Before leaving Germany as a young man in 1923, he had studied the dangers of paraffin breast implants. Like so many German doctors of his generation, Hueper was fixated on rising cancer rates, and he was intimately familiar with the power of toxic chemicals. He had fought for Germany during the First World War, delivering Fritz Haber’s ­­gas weapons to the front lines.

Hueper was particularly interested in the hazards of chemicals in dye factories, which had been linked to bladder cancer in 1895 by another German researcher. The same aniline dyes that had inspired Paul Ehrlich to dream up magic bullets later inspired in Hueper visions of a global catastrophe: what if the dyes, and, for that matter, all of the other chemicals studied by German scientists, were only the beginning? The cancer rate had “markedly increased in all civilized countries,” Hueper maintained, because “new synthetic substances” were entering modern life “in never-ending number.”

In 1934, Hueper was hired by a DuPont laboratory in Delaware to study the threat not only of aniline dyes but also of pesticides, Freon, Teflon, and a long list of other chemicals that had made their way into the lives of ordinary Americans. He soon discovered that he could induce bladder cancer in dogs by feeding them a compound found in chemical dyes. But though the discovery was widely recognized, Hueper was forced out of his job after only three years. He claimed that he was repeatedly blocked from carrying out the type of experiments that might draw tighter links between DuPont’s chemicals and cancer and that he was prevented from publishing many of his results. It likely didn’t help that Hueper, known for his “abrasiveness” and “Teutonic” manner, tended to alienate colleagues as easily as Warburg.⁵

Hueper also resembled Warburg in his inability to stop working. He knew there was already a large body of scientific literature linking specific industrial chemicals to cancer, but no one had created a comprehensive review of all of the possible threats workers faced. In early 1938, Hueper decided to take on the project. Still between jobs, he worked at his dining room table, filling out file card after file card—marking each with information about a distinct carcinogen—and stacking them into towers of doom. The result, published in 1942, was Occupational Tumors and Allied Diseases, an 896-page catalog of cancer-causing poisons.

Though Hueper’s book was initially ignored, the concern that artificial chemicals were responsible for many cancers was nevertheless growing more pervasive in America—Hueper’s own unsigned editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association helped generate the fears. His list of enemies, both in industry and in government, continued to grow, and yet the possibility that he was right about cancer was impossible to dismiss. Due, in large part, to an increase in lung cancer, the overall cancer death rate in Western countries was still on the rise. In 1948, Hueper became the first director of the Environmental Cancer Section at the National Cancer Institute, solidifying his status as the “father of American occupational carcinogenesis.”

Though his book was written in a measured, scientific style, Hueper was capable of rhetorical flourishes. He once referred to the carcinogens as “biological death bombs” that might prove “as dangerous to the existence of mankind as the arsenal of atom bombs prepared for future action.” He had a talent for “shock and alarm,” a friend once recalled.⁶

Hueper achieved a certain amount of fame in 1962, the year the marine biologist and science writer Rachel Carson wrote about him in Silent Spring. The book, which documented how industrial chemicals were destroying the earth and the health of humans and other species, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and inspired an entire generation to think more seriously about the environment. President Kennedy was among Carson’s admirers and cited her work in opening an investigation into the links between chemical pollutants and human illnesses. One year after the book’s publication, Congress passed the Clean Air Act. Next came the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Carson’s book changed America in a way that few others ever have.

By her own account, Hueper was her inspiration for Silent Spring, and he served as one of her primary sources for the book. “Dr. H. says he thinks the time now is right for the book for people are beginning to want the facts,” Carson wrote to a friend as she embarked on the project.

Though Silent Spring is in no way anti-Semitic or racist, it can read as though it was written in Germany in the 1930s. Carson described “sinister” and “devious” chemicals that lurk around us at all times. They “lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death.” Sometimes the chemicals “pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells.” Even the title of Carson’s chapter on cancer, “One in Every Four,” was an unwitting echo of a Nazi-era cancer propaganda film known as “One in Eight.”⁷

Silent Spring cites Hueper comparing the fight against cancer to the fight against infectious diseases at the end of the nineteenth century, when “the brilliant work of Pasteur and Koch” had established the “causative relation” between germs and many diseases. Cancer could be traced to hidden chemicals, Hueper noted, just as tuberculosis and cholera had been traced to hidden organisms. Hueper, like Hitler and Warburg, had looked into the mirror and found Robert Koch gazing back at him.

Hueper was familiar with Warburg’s thinking on cancer. In his 1942 tome on environmental carcinogens, Hueper reviewed Warburg’s cancer research along with other theories. The two men likely crossed paths in 1949, when Warburg was a visiting scientist at the National Cancer Institute. And so Hueper’s influence on Silent Spring might account for Otto Warburg’s prominent place in the book—Warburg is the first scientist introduced in Carson’s chapter on cancer, and his theories are discussed at length.

As Carson explained, artificial chemicals could be causing cancer by damaging how cells breathe, thus driving the transition from respiration to fermentation. Carson also reviewed Warburg’s terrifying hypothesis that multiple small doses of a chemical poison might be even more dangerous than a single large dose. A large dose would kill a cell, but the small doses from pesticides or food preservatives could slowly poison cellular breathing—and put a cell on the path to cancer—without eliminating it.

By the same logic, Carson argued, Warburg’s explanation of cancer’s origins could explain why various treatments, such as radiation, could both treat and cause cancer. Such therapies might destroy weakened cells that already struggled to breathe, but at the same time, they would damage the respiration of previously healthy cells. “Measured by the standards established by Warburg,” Carson wrote, “most pesticides meet the criterion of the perfect carcinogen too well for comfort.”⁸

IF WARBURG AND HUEPER crossed paths in 1949, Hueper might have influenced Warburg more than Warburg influenced Hueper. On the surface, at least, Warburg could hardly have been more different from Germany’s environmental gurus. He was the very archetype of the experimental scientist that the Romantic “back to nature” movement had long despised for reducing life to a chain of biological mechanisms. But while he remained as devoted as ever to experimental science, Warburg also had a Romantic streak, and he, too, would come to see carcinogens everywhere he looked.

Warburg’s anxieties predated Hueper. Lotte noted Warburg’s intense fear of death in her diary in 1926. In the early 1930s, not long after his new house was built, he became concerned about the tar used to set his parquet floor. “He constantly talks about the tar smell because the tar workers get cancer,” Lotte wrote in her diary in 1930. Though Heiss was against ripping up their new home—“He fights for his parquet,” Lotte noted—Warburg prevailed and had the tar removed.

After the war, though, Warburg’s paranoia grew considerably more pronounced. He is thought to have been shaken by the loss of two of his sisters, Lotte and Käthe, both of whom died at the end of the 1940s. Though he had been a regular cigar smoker, Warburg, who turned 67 in 1950, now quit. He refused X-rays from a doctor and became neurotic about exhaust from cars.

Warburg also began sending off petitions to the health minister of West Germany. He called for West Berlin to be surrounded by trees, which would form a protective “green belt” around the city, and urged the government to ban dangerous substances, including food colorings and chemicals used in flavoring and preservatives. In the early 1950s, he helped push through a new law requiring that labels on canned foods list all chemical additives. He said that previous laws designed to keep food safe had failed because exceptions would be made “for every poison that was profitable.”⁹

At some point after the war, Warburg bought a field near his house so that his garden could be expanded. Rather than use pesticides, Krebs wrote, Warburg “encouraged the nesting of tits,” and he would keep an eye out for caterpillars and other pests. In addition to an assortment of vegetables, he grew raspberries, pears, apples, apricots, strawberries, and red currants. Warburg’s animals—rabbits, turkeys, hens, ducks, geese, and others—supplied all the manure.

“Altogether his whims, fancies, and anxieties about food were at times rather exasperating to Heiss, who did all the cooking,” Krebs, who maintained his friendship with Warburg after the war, wrote. It appears to have been an understatement. Though Warburg hired a gardener to tend to the grounds, it was Heiss who carried the burden of his paranoia. Warburg only drank water from a well in his new field, and Heiss would have to retrieve water and inspect it for impurities. Heiss reserved one night a week for baking—his bread coupled with his homemade goat butter was said to be especially delicious—and Warburg forbade him from buying the flour in a store for fear that the bleach was a carcinogen.

Jacob Heiss, date unknown.

According to neighbors, Warburg’s institute itself was coming to resemble a “farm” in this period. Warburg was even using one of his centrifuges to make cream and butter from the milk he would procure from a special herd of cows. Eating out, meanwhile, was nearly impossible. Warburg would arrive at restaurants with a tin containing his own Heiss-baked bread and a tea bag. (He was sometimes scolded by the staff for bringing in outside food.) A colleague remembered Warburg ordering a piece of cake one evening. He chewed a forkful for a moment, paused, and then spat it out. He had detected a flavor linked to cancer, he explained.

Even Warburg’s allies began to find him insufferable. The biochemist David Nachmansohn, one of Warburg’s great admirers, recalled that when he saw Warburg in the late 1950s, he “took pains to avoid discussing cancer or photosynthesis.” Nachmansohn added that he was not alone in this strategy.¹⁰

SILENT SPRING HAS A sad epilogue. Carson was undergoing treatments for breast cancer while writing the book. She died two years after its publication, before she could witness the tremendous influence of her work.

Hueper lived until 1979 and continued to warn of environmental carcinogens until the very end. Shortly before his death, he received a prestigious award from the National Institutes of Health. At the time, it seemed an overdue celebration of a man who had dedicated his life to trying to save people from cancer. But as Stanford historian Robert Proctor documents in The Nazi War on Cancer, Hueper, “the man who, more than any other, brought the cancer hazards of pollutants in our food, air, and water to scientific attention,” had a “secret.”

After World War I, Hueper had briefly joined a proto-Nazi militia, and his Nazi sympathies appear to have remained undiminished after he moved to America. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Hueper began searching for positions in Nazi Germany and sent a query letter to Bernhard Rust, the head of the Reich Education Ministry. Rust was the right choice. He had personally overseen the firing of Germany’s Jewish scientists. (His deputy, Rudolf Mentzel, later tormented Warburg.) In his letter to Rust, Hueper cited his brother, a Nazi functionary, as a reference and signed off with “Heil Hitler!”¹¹

Hueper wasn’t simply daydreaming about a new life under Hitler’s rule. In the summer of 1934, he returned to Germany with his wife, hoping to fill a position once held by a Jewish scientist. “[O]penings had become available because of the Hitler turmoil,” as Hueper put it in the unapologetic memoir that he left unpublished.

Yet Hueper could not find a satisfactory position and returned to the United States. In 1936, he gave a speech on race and disease in which he noted the risks of healthy races mixing with races that carried more genetic defects. It was translated into German and published in a racist journal. Twenty years later, Hueper suggested that dark-skinned people were more resistant to carcinogens and so better suited to working with hazardous chemicals.

Hueper’s Nazi sympathies can come as a shock to those who remember him as a crusader for public health. As Proctor puts it, “How could the hero of Silent Spring have found hope in the Nazi movement?” But Hueper’s past does not, by itself, invalidate Carson’s book. Nor is it entirely fair to judge Carson for where the book fell short. Hueper had long denied the role of smoking in cancer, and following his lead, Carson overlooked the most potent carcinogen of her era. Her detractors have also pointed out that the fears she raised about the pesticide DDT were exaggerated and that the ban on DDT that her work helped promote would lead to vastly more deaths from malaria in less developed countries. But in the first decades after the war, at least, that artificial chemicals were responsible for most preventable cancer was as good a hypothesis as any for the rising cancer rates in the industrialized world.¹²

Not everyone thought that artificial chemicals were the best explanation for the rise of cancer in postindustrial societies. In the 1960s, the notion that yet-to-be identified viruses were responsible for most cancers was revived as well. But chemicals in our foods and products, unlike cancer-causing viruses, were easy to find. By the mid-1970s, the fear of chemical carcinogens was driving many Americans into a Warburg-esque state of paranoia. “Strange new creatures of our own making are all around us, in our air, our water, our food and in the things we touch,” said Russell Train, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Americans, he warned, were playing “a grim game of chemical roulette whose result they would not know until many years later.”¹³

Other than Hueper, no one person in America likely did more to instill the belief that chemicals cause cancer than Bruce Ames, a highly regarded Berkeley biochemist and geneticist. Ames began investigating the question in 1964 after reading the ingredients on a bag of potato chips that his son had asked him to open. He came up with an ingenious test. Ames first engineered a strain of bacteria that couldn’t grow without consuming a particular amino acid. He then placed the bacteria in a medium without that amino acid and subjected the cells to whatever chemical he wanted to test. Since the bacteria lacked the genes to grow in such an environment, whenever a new colony arose, it was evidence that a mutation had formed. The more new colonies that formed, the greater the mutation rate. A greater mutation rate, in turn, meant a greater chance that the given chemical could cause cancer.

When it was shown that the same chemicals that made it possible for the bacteria to form new colonies would typically also cause cancers in lab animals—at least at extremely high doses—the Ames test, as it was soon called, was widely adopted. Americans were “already exposed to an estimated total of 25,000 synthetic chemicals,” and “hundreds of new ones” were being “introduced each year,” the New York Times reported in 1975. In another article, headlined “The Parade of Chemicals That Cause Cancer Seems Endless,” the Times bemoaned that once a given chemical was regulated or banned, it “disappeared from public debate, to be replaced shortly by the next ‘carcinogen of the month.’ ”¹⁴

A coherent and genuinely terrifying picture of how “civilization” caused cancer was coming into focus after a century-long search for answers.

It took only a few more years for that picture to fall apart.