Cosmetics firm 'supplied cream used in experiments at Dachau'

The natural cosmetics company Weleda supplied a skin cream to the Dachau concentration camp that was later used as part of experiments on prisoners, a historian specialising in Nazi Germany has claimed.

- Kate Connolly

Weleda, founded 104 years ago and known 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 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 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 hypothermia experiments were carried out on up to 300 prisoners and that between 80 and 90 died as a result of being 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 concentration camp where more than 41,000 Jewish people and other prisoners were slaughtered before US troops liberated it on 29 April 1945.