Heinz Brücher (14 January 1915, Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse – 17 December 1991, Mendoza Province, Argentina) was a botanist and plant breeder who served as a member of the special science unit in the SS Ahnenerbe in Nazi Germany. He was part of a SS Sammelkommando that raided the plant genome material and seed collections of the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, he moved to South America and worked as a professor of botany in Argentina and other countries in South America. He served as an advisor to UNESCO on biology. Biography Brücher was born in Darmstadt and studied Biology at Jena and Tübingen. By the time Brücher graduated in 1934 he was a member (number 3498152) of the National Socialist party. He obtained a doctorate at Tübingen where he studied the genetic differences in reciprocal crosses of Epilobium hirsutum under Ernst Lehmann and supported cytoplasmic inheritance which Lehmann did not believe in. Brücher turned against Lehmann later, and apart from scientific arguments, he also used Lehmann's supposed political views that were against the Nazi party to bolster his case. Brücher then joined to work as an assistant to the Nazi eugenicist Karl Astel at the Institute for Human Hereditary Research and Race Policy at the University of Jena. He also worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding Research and was keen on crop breeding which he saw as very important for national sustainability. When an expedition was mounted into the Soviet Union in 1941, Brücher then an Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) was interested in gathering crop seeds and plant material from the region including those held in Soviet research stations. The proposal was supported by SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr Ernst Schäfer and approved by Heinrich Himmler which led to the creation of the SS Sammelkommando or collection expedition which included Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Konrad von Rauch, and an interpreter Arnold Steinbrecher. The seeds and plant material collected by the expedition included large parts that had been deposited by Nikolai Vavilov who had already been imprisoned by Stalin. The seeds were maintained at Graz where the SS Institute for Plant Genetics were established at Lannach Castle. Brücher headed subsequent research and worked with a British prisoner of war, William Denton-Venables, a trained botanist who later served as a director of Taylor & Venables, a seed company in Norfolk. In February 1945 Brücher was ordered to destroy the