Werner Kollath: Life and Career

Werner Georg Kollath (June 11, 1892 – November 19, 1970) was a German physician, hygienist and bacteriologist who spent his working life on one question: what makes food truly nourishing? He coined the phrase Vollwert der Nahrung (“the full value of food”), set out a six-grade scale that ranks foods by how little they have been processed, and is counted among the founders of whole-food nutrition (Vollwerternährung). His best-known book, Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (“The Order of Our Food”, 1942), was still in print in its 17th edition more than sixty years later.

This page follows his life in plain language: a doctor’s son from Pomerania, a young bacteriologist in Breslau who tested vitamins on the growth of bacteria, the professor of hygiene in Rostock from 1935 to 1945, his dismissal after the war, the move west, the lectureship in Freiburg, the “Kollath breakfast”, the Munich animal experiments, his later books, and the foundation his widow set up in his name. It also sets out, from the University of Rostock’s own professor catalogue and from the foundation’s published statement, his documented record in the years 1933–1945. The dates come chiefly from the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium (the University of Rostock archive’s professor catalogue), the statement of the Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, and the German-language biographical literature it draws on.

Table of Contents

  1. Pomerania, Medical Studies and the First World War
  2. Breslau under Richard Pfeiffer
  3. The Rostock Chair of Hygiene and Bacteriology
  4. The Rostock Years and the Political Record
  5. Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (1942)
  6. Dismissal, Epidemic Duty and the Move to Hannover
  7. Stockholm, Freiburg and the Kollath Breakfast
  8. The Munich Experiments on Mesotrophy
  9. Later Books, Honours and Death
  10. Elisabeth Kollath and the Kollath Foundation
  11. Timeline
  12. Key Research Papers
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

1. Pomerania, Medical Studies and the First World War

Werner Georg Kollath was born on June 11, 1892, in Gollnow, in the district of Naugard in Pomerania — the town that is today Goleníów in Poland. His father, Dr. med. Georg Kollath, was a physician; his mother was Marie Kollath, née Riedel. The family was Lutheran. He went to school in Gollnow and in Stettin, where he passed the Abitur (the school-leaving examination) in 1911.

From 1911 to 1920 he studied medicine at the universities of Leipzig, Freiburg, Berlin, Kiel and Marburg. His studies were broken by the First World War: from 1914 to 1919 he served first as a gunner and later as an Unterarzt, a junior medical officer. After the war he finished in Marburg, where in 1920 he received his doctorate in medicine (Dr. med.) with a thesis on the origin of a glandular disorder, “Beiträge zur Pathogenese der Dystrophia adiposo-genitalis” (“Contributions to the pathogenesis of adiposogenital dystrophy”).

His first posts after qualifying were varied. From 1920 to 1922 he was an assistant at the Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic of the University of Marburg; from 1922 to 1923 an assistant at the Social Hygiene Academy (Sozialhygienische Akademie) in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 1923 he worked briefly on his own research in Leipzig and passed the Prussian district-physician examination, the qualification for a public-health officer.

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2. Breslau under Richard Pfeiffer

In 1923 Kollath became a scientific assistant to Richard Pfeiffer at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Breslau (today Wrocław). Pfeiffer was one of the great names of German bacteriology; the bacterium then called Bacillus influenzae, or “Pfeiffer’s bacillus”, bore his name.

It was on that very organism that Kollath built his first major work. In 1926 he qualified as a university lecturer (the Habilitation) in hygiene and bacteriology with a study titled “Vitaminsubstanz oder Vitaminwirkung?” (“Vitamin substance or vitamin action?”), subtitled a study of the links between mineral and oxygen metabolism, phosphatides and ultraviolet light, “tested on the growth conditions of the influenza bacillus (Bacillus Pfeiffer)”. It appeared in the Zentralblatt für Bakteriologie in 1926. In other words, his road into nutrition began with the question of what a living cell needs in order to grow — the same question that would run through all his later work on whole food.

From 1926 to 1935 he taught in Breslau as a Privatdozent (an unsalaried university lecturer). From 1929 he published in the Archiv für experimentelle Pathologie und Pharmakologie, beginning with a paper on the group of water-soluble vitamins and their relations to one another. In 1932 the university made him an extraordinary professor of hygiene and bacteriology, and in 1933–1934 he served as deputy director of the Breslau Hygiene Institute.

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3. The Rostock Chair of Hygiene and Bacteriology

In 1935 Kollath accepted a call to the University of Rostock, on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg, as full professor (ordentlicher Professor) of hygiene and bacteriology and director of its Institute of Hygiene. He held the chair from 1935 to 1945. At the same time, from 1935 to 1946, he directed the Mecklenburg State Health Office (Landesgesundheitsamt, later the Medizinaluntersuchungsamt, the state medical testing office) in Rostock. In 1937 he served a term as dean of the medical faculty. The university’s professor catalogue lists his teaching and research fields as “Rassenhygiene, Ernährungswissenschaft” — racial hygiene and nutrition science.

From 1939 to 1945 he also served in the Wehrmacht as a physician and hygienist. Throughout these years he painted: from 1940 he was a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) as a part-time painter and graphic artist, and in 1942 he published a portfolio of lithographs of the destruction caused by the air raids on Rostock in April 1942. Painting stayed with him for life; his widow later titled her biography of him Werner Kollath – Forscher, Arzt und Künstler (“Researcher, Physician and Artist”, 1973).

It was in Rostock that he wrote the two books that framed his career: a hygiene textbook, Grundlagen, Methoden und Ziele der Hygiene (“Foundations, Methods and Aims of Hygiene”, Leipzig 1937), and his nutrition book Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (Stuttgart 1942), together with the autobiographical Zur Einheit der Heilkunde (“On the Unity of Medicine”, Stuttgart 1942).

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4. The Rostock Years and the Political Record

Kollath’s record in the years 1933–1945 is documented in the University of Rostock’s professor catalogue, which draws on his personnel file in the university archive, and in the published statement of the foundation that bears his name. It became widely known through the dissertation of the historian of medicine Jörg Melzer, published as a book in 2003. The facts as these sources give them are as follows.

The Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung states that this history was unknown to the foundation and to the public until Melzer’s dissertation. Its board and the trustee that administers it “expressly distance themselves” from Kollath’s National Socialist and race-hygiene ideas and activity in the Third Reich, make Melzer’s 2002 document collection Werner Kollath 1933–1945 publicly available, separate his nutrition-science work from his National Socialist past, and limit the foundation’s remit to his nutrition-science legacy. In 2004 the foundation awarded Melzer the Werner-Kollath-Preis for his dissertation.

Sources: Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium, “Kollath, Werner”; Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, “Stellungnahme zur Person Werner Kollath”; Melzer J, Vollwerternährung. Diätetik, Naturheilkunde, Nationalsozialismus, sozialer Anspruch (Stuttgart 2003); Buddrus M, Fritzlar S, Die Professoren der Universität Rostock im Dritten Reich (Munich 2007), pp. 234–238.

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5. Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (1942)

In 1942 Kollath published the book on which his reputation rests: Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung. Grundlagen einer dauerhaften Ernährungslehre (“The Order of Our Food: Foundations of a Lasting Science of Nutrition”). In it he used the term Vollwertkost (“full-value diet”) for a diet that, in his words, contains everything the organism needs for its own maintenance and the maintenance of the species. For the dietary concept itself he drew mainly on the publications of the Swiss physician Max Bircher-Benner.

Kollath set the “freshness value” of food against its “calorie value”. Food energy, he wrote, was only a Teilwert (“partial value”); freshness was the Vollwert, the full value. He divided all food into two great groups. Lebensmittel (“living foods”) still contain their own enzymes, which he called Fermente; Nahrungsmittel (“nourishment”, dead food) are those in which these enzymes have been destroyed, mostly by heating. Each group he split into three grades — natural, mechanically altered and fermented on the living side; heated, preserved and prepared on the dead side — so that the less a food has been processed, the higher it stands. The scale runs from foods as nature produces them, such as fresh fruit and raw milk, down to isolated preparations such as refined sugar.

The book outlived its era. The foundation records a new edition in 1951; a Norwegian edition appeared in Oslo in 1953; and the 17th German edition was published in 2005. Its doctrines are set out in full on the companion page Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung: Kollath’s Order of Our Food.

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6. Dismissal, Epidemic Duty and the Move to Hannover

Rostock lay in the Soviet occupation zone. After his dismissal from the university in 1945, Kollath was put to work fighting the epidemics of the post-war months: first as epidemic commissioner (Seuchenkommissar), then as chief epidemic commissioner for the districts of Rostock, Wismar and Güstrow. From 1946 to 1947 he headed the hygiene and epidemiology station in Rostock. He later reported that in 1945–1946 he had seen a marked improvement in the course of infectious diseases among 350 patients of a town hospital in Mecklenburg whose diet followed his recommendations.

His hopes of regaining the Rostock chair came to nothing. In March 1947 he and his wife left the Soviet zone secretly and settled in Hannover, in the British zone. There he worked as a food chemist and consultant for a Hannover biscuit manufacturer.

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7. Stockholm, Freiburg and the Kollath Breakfast

From September 1948 to February 1949 Kollath held a research stay at the Pathological Institute of the University of Stockholm. From 1949 he had a teaching assignment (Lehrauftrag) at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau — a lectureship, not a chair — and worked as a consultant to the food industry.

These were productive years for his nutrition writing. In 1950 he published Der Vollwert der Nahrung und seine Bedeutung für Wachstum und Zellersatz (“The Full Value of Food and Its Importance for Growth and Cell Replacement”), the experimental foundation of what he called his doctrine of full value. A series of journal papers made the same case: that “the full value of food” was a question for hygiene as a whole (1949), and that the value of a food showed itself in how well it supported growth and the replacement of cells (1947).

In 1951 he retired on health grounds (in April 1952 the retirement was made retroactive to April 1951). The same year he declined an offer of a chair of hygiene in Santiago de Chile, whose medical faculty made him an honorary member. From 1951 his nutrition research was marketed as the “Kollath-Frühstück” (Kollath breakfast) through Reformhäuser, Germany’s health-food shops — essentially Frischkornbrei, a porridge of freshly ground grain. He also had animal feeds and probiotic products made on the basis of his research. The breakfast and the studies made of it are described on The Kollath Breakfast (Frischkornbrei).

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8. The Munich Experiments on Mesotrophy

From 1952 to 1956 Kollath carried out animal experiments at the University of Munich to support his hypothesis of Mesotrophie (“mesotrophy”, or semi-nutrition). By mesotrophy he meant a chronic, non-specific state of half-deficiency: food that is not “full-value”, he held, leads over time to chronic disease. He linked it to a class of growth substances he called Auxone (“auxones”), by analogy with the auxins of plants, whose lack he held to cause deficiency disease of varying form.

His papers of these years carry the story in their titles: “Mesotrophy, a clinical and physiological problem” (1952), “Mesotrophic complex as unspecific chronic deficiency condition” (1957), “Validity of the mesotrophy complex for humans” and “Experimental mesotrophy” (both 1959). In general terms the experiments compared animals fed diets built from isolated, refined nutrients with animals fed untreated whole foods such as whole grain. Other researchers published their own experimental and critical studies of the theory, and Kollath replied to them in print, including a 1957 paper titled “Was I mistaken?”. The theory is set out on Mesotrophy and Auxones: Kollath’s Theory of Semi-Nutrition.

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9. Later Books, Honours and Death

In his last fifteen years Kollath wrote mainly for doctors and the wider public. From 1956 to 1970 he sat on the scientific advisory board of the International Society for Food and Vital-Substance Research (IVG), and from 1964 on the advisory board of the Arbeitskreis Gesundheitskunde (Working Group for Health Education). His later books were:

His journal papers ran on into the same themes: the rise of the diseases of civilisation and their prevention (1953), the place of diseases of the teeth in the system of deficiency diseases (1948), and, in his last PubMed-indexed paper (1967), the phases of the nutritional process and the importance of chewing. These subjects are gathered on Kollath on Diseases of Civilisation, Teeth and Gut Flora.

Honours came from the natural-medicine and whole-food movement: the Golden Bircher-Benner Medal of the IVG in 1957, and the Hufeland Medal of the Central Association of Physicians for Natural Healing in 1966. In 1952 the journal Hippokrates marked his sixtieth birthday with a tribute, and in 1963 Herbert Warning edited a collected volume of his scientific papers. Werner Kollath died on November 19, 1970, in Porza, near Lugano in the Swiss canton of Ticino, aged 78.

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10. Elisabeth Kollath and the Kollath Foundation

His widow, Elisabeth Kollath, kept his work in view. In 1973 she published the biography Werner Kollath – Forscher, Arzt und Künstler. Biographie und Werk des Ernährungsforschers (Munich). In 1981, in memory of her husband, she founded the Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung, based in Bad Soden am Taunus. Its charter gives its purpose as “the promotion of scientific work in holistic nutrition and health research”, keeping and developing the scientific legacy of Professor Werner Kollath. The foundation awards the Werner-Kollath-Preis and holds Werner-Kollath conferences; it is administered in trust by the EDEN-Stiftung.

The foundation’s own summary of his teaching is that his central statement was “Laßt unsere Nahrung so natürlich wie möglich” (“Let our food be as natural as possible”), that he favoured plant foods, and that the substances he called auxones are known today as secondary plant compounds. His influence on later whole-food teachers, including Max Otto Bruker and the Giessen school of Claus Leitzmann, is traced on Werner Kollath’s Whole-Food Legacy.

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11. Timeline

YearEvent
1892Born June 11 in Gollnow, Pomerania (today Goleníów, Poland), son of the physician Georg Kollath.
1911Abitur in Stettin; begins medical studies (Leipzig, Freiburg, Berlin, Kiel, Marburg).
1914–1919First World War service, gunner and later junior medical officer.
1920Dr. med., University of Marburg; assistant at the Marburg psychiatric and neurological clinic (to 1922).
1922–1923Assistant, Social Hygiene Academy, Berlin-Charlottenburg; Prussian district-physician examination (1923).
1923Assistant to Richard Pfeiffer, Hygiene Institute, University of Breslau.
1926Habilitation in Breslau on vitamins and the growth of Pfeiffer’s influenza bacillus; Privatdozent (to 1935).
1932Extraordinary professor of hygiene and bacteriology, Breslau.
1933Joins the NSDAP (May 1); deputy director of the Breslau Hygiene Institute (1933–1934).
1934Supporting member of the SS.
1935Full professor of hygiene and bacteriology and institute director, University of Rostock (to 1945); director of the Mecklenburg State Health Office (to 1946).
1936–1937Deputy medical assessor, Rostock Hereditary Health Court; leads the joint lecture course on heredity and race.
1937Grundlagen, Methoden und Ziele der Hygiene; dean of the Rostock medical faculty.
1939–1945Wehrmacht physician and hygienist.
1942Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung and Zur Einheit der Heilkunde.
1945Dismissed from the university because of NSDAP membership; epidemic commissioner, then chief epidemic commissioner for Rostock, Wismar and Güstrow.
1946–1947Head of the hygiene and epidemiology station, Rostock.
1947Leaves the Soviet zone in March for Hannover; food chemist and consultant for a biscuit manufacturer.
1948Denazification ruling, category IV, on appeal category V; research stay in Stockholm (September 1948 – February 1949).
1949Teaching assignment at the University of Freiburg; consultant to the food industry.
1950Der Vollwert der Nahrung und seine Bedeutung für Wachstum und Zellersatz.
1951Retires on health grounds; declines a chair in Santiago de Chile; the Kollath breakfast is marketed through health-food shops.
1952–1956Animal experiments on mesotrophy at the University of Munich.
1956–1970Scientific advisory board of the IVG.
1957Golden Bircher-Benner Medal of the IVG.
1958Zivilisationsbedingte Krankheiten und Todesursachen.
1964Getreide und Mensch – eine Lebensgemeinschaft.
1966Hufeland Medal of the Central Association of Physicians for Natural Healing.
1967Die Ernährung als Naturwissenschaft; last PubMed-indexed paper.
1970Dies November 19 in Porza, Ticino, Switzerland.
1973Elisabeth Kollath publishes her biography of him.
1981Elisabeth Kollath founds the Werner-und-Elisabeth-Kollath-Stiftung.

Sources for these dates: the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium, the Deutsche Biographie index entry, the Kollath foundation’s statement, the German biographical literature listed under Further Reading below, and his papers.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Kollath W. [Imperfect life; discovery of a new physiological way of life]. Wendepunkt Leben Leiden. 1946;23(2):38-44. — PubMed PMID: 20277819
  2. Kollath W. [The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement]. Z Gesamte Inn Med. 1947;2(1-2):31-6. — PubMed PMID: 20254358
  3. Kollath W. [The importance of diseases of the teeth and the teeth holding system for the systematization of deficiency diseases]. Dtsch Zahnarztl Z. 1948;3(9-12):373-81. — PubMed PMID: 18884452
  4. Kollath W. [The importance of the full value of food for hygiene]. Zentralbl Bakteriol Orig. 1949;153(1-2):43-60. — PubMed PMID: 18114869
  5. Kollath W. [Chemical nature of the animal growth factor, and conditions prerequisite to the development of mesotrophy (semi-nutrition)]. Zentralbl Bakteriol Orig. 1950;155(8):383-91. — PubMed PMID: 14782660
  6. Kollath W. [Mesotrophy, a clinical and physiological problem]. Hippokrates. 1952;23(11):293-300. — PubMed PMID: 12989830
  7. Oelemann. [Prof. Werner Kollath 60 years old]. Hippokrates. 1952;23(11):291-2. — PubMed PMID: 12989829
  8. Kollath W. [The increase of the diseases of civilization and their prevention]. Munch Med Wochenschr. 1953;95(47):1260-2. — PubMed PMID: 13132859
  9. Warning H. [Effects of the Kollath breakfast; results of an inquiry]. Hippokrates. 1955;26(14):431-3. — PubMed PMID: 13251667
  10. Kolwel-Kirstein G, Bayerle H, Katzenberger V. [Experimental study of Kollath’s mesotrophy theory]. Arztl Forsch. 1956;10(5):II/51-4. — PubMed PMID: 13326707
  11. Kollath W. [Was I mistaken?]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(5):149-50. — PubMed PMID: 13428217
  12. Kollath W. [Experimental mesotrophy]. Hippokrates. 1959;30(7):265-73. — PubMed PMID: 13653605
  13. Kuehnau J. [Is there a mesotrophy in humans? Critical observations on W. Kollath’s theory of mesotrophy]. Hippokrates. 1960;31:213-23. — PubMed PMID: 14412508
  14. Kollath W. [The phases of the nutritional process; on the significance of mastication]. Int Z Vitaminforsch. 1967;37(2):212-25. — PubMed PMID: 5595593

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+W%5Bau%5D
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+W%5Bau%5D+mesotrophy
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+breakfast
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=wholesome+nutrition+Giessen

Further Reading

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Connections

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