German Hindu Kush expedition

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The German Hindu Kush Expedition was a botanical-agricultural expedition in east Afghanistan and north-west India carried out in 1935 with the support of the German Research Foundation .

According to the theory of the Russian botanist Nikolai Iwanowitsch Wawilow , this inner-Asian region was considered to be a gene and development center for our cultivated plants. The main purpose of the expedition, initiated by the plant cultivation scientist Theodor Roemer and the botanist Wilhelm Troll , was to collect seeds from wild and cultivated forms of the plants that live there in order to make genetic material with new or lost hereditary factors available for plant breeding in Germany.

The leader of the expedition was Arnold Scheibe , at the time a lecturer in plant cultivation and plant breeding at the University of Giessen . The participants included: the plant breeder Dr. Klaus von Rosenstiel ( Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research in Müncheberg ), the certified farmer Dr. Werner Roemer ( University of Halle ), the botanist Dr. Gerhard Kerstan (University of Halle), the linguist Dr. Wolfgang Lentz (Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin) and the doctor and anthropologist Dr. Albert Herrlich (University of Munich).

The expedition, well prepared and generously supported by donations in kind from leading German companies, lasted from February 26th to December 21st, 1935. The base was the Afghan capital Kabul . The first three months were filled with preliminary talks with the authorities, technical preparations and exploratory trips into the Afghan mountains. The actual expedition began on May 28th and ended on October 15th. Research and collection areas were the eastern Afghan province of Nuristan on the south side of the Hindu Kush and the Chitral region in north-western India . The expedition luggage was mainly transported by mules , at times also by local porters. To protect the expedition, the Afghan government had 16 soldiers and two officers as permanent escorts.

The expedition members brought 4,500 seed samples and cuttings from wild and cultivated plants and more than 10,000 photographs with them to Germany. There is also a collection of minerals and insects, as well as - documented on 40 phonograph cylinders - songs, sayings and poems of the population from the regions visited. Arnold Scheibe and the other participants described the course and results of the expedition in detail in the book Germans in the Hindu Kush, published in 1937 .

The material collected during the expedition was passed on to university institutes and research institutes for scientific processing. Lively experimentation began, especially at the institutes for plant cultivation and plant breeding. However, numerous research projects remained unfinished. A considerable part of the seeds brought with them was lost as a result of the war. The remains are archived in the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben and are still available today as a living gene reservoir and scientific reference material for research.

literature

  • Arnold Scheibe: The German Hindu Kush Expedition 1935 of the German Research Foundation . In: Der Diplomlandwirt Vol. 17, 1936, pp. 109–112.
  • Albert Herrlich: In search of the ancient wheat. The German Hindu Kush expedition in 1935 . In: Die Umschau vol. 40, 1936, pp. 623-632.
  • Germans in the Hindu Kush. Report of the German Hindu Kush Expedition 1935 of the German Research Foundation . Published by Arnold Scheibe. Karl Siegismund Verlag Berlin 1937 = German research. Writings of the German Research Foundation, New Series Vol. 1 (with 120 illustrations and 12 maps).
  • A large number of articles have been published in agricultural and botanical journals on the results of the cultivation and breeding experiments carried out with the groupage of the Hindu Kush expedition in Germany. Noteworthy reports on the results: Hilde Pieper: Comparative investigations on varieties of cultivated poppy (Papaver somniferum) (Agricultural Yearbooks, Vol. 89, 1939, pp. 333–392) and Arnold Scheibe: Die Hirsen im Hindukusch (Journal of Plant Breeding Vol. 25, 1943, p 392-436).
  • Peter Mierau: National Socialist Expedition Policy. German Asia Expeditions 1933-1945 , Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag 2006, ISBN 3831604096 . ( http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensions/2006-4-200.pdf Review of the book at hsozkult)