Career
Foreign more than twenty years, he worked as a curator at the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. Here he specialized in studies of Orchidaceae (orchids) and Euphorbiaceae (spurges). Following World World War II, by way of a request from agriculturalist Hans Stubbe (1902-1989), he accepted a position as a laboratory technician at the Gatersleben Institute.
In 1949 he succeeded Werner Rothmaler (1908-1962) as departmental director
During his last ten years at Gatersleben, he was in charge of the department of systematics.