Is Doramad still hot? I tested Nazi radioactive toothpaste recovered from a WW2 battlefield
A tube of Nazi-era radioactive toothpaste, abandoned on a collapsing front in 1945 and buried for eighty years, recently arrived on my desk. So I decided to test if it was still radioactive.
Your teeth need the magificently named Doramad Radioaktive Zahncreme, “Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste.” Made in Berlin by a company callled Auergesellschaft, radioactivity was the unique selling point.
Why radioactive toothpaste? Well, you have to remember that for a few decades after radioactivity was discovered, people thought it was good for you. It was new, invisible and powerful, and the public imagination filed it under “health” rather than “danger.” It was a strange time in radioactive history as it was possible to buy radioactive water, face cream, and so on…
Auergesellschaft’s real business was gas lamp mantles, the little fabric hoods in old gas lamps that glow when heated. To make them shine, they used a faintly radioactive metal called thorium. But processing thorium leaves you with a lot of slightly radioactive leftover material. Some genius looked at that waste material and asked themselves the unconventional question: why not put it in toothpaste and sell it as a health product to the Nazi war machine?
So they did. The radiation, the tube cheerfully claimed, would strengthen your teeth and gums, kill bacteria, and fill your cells with “new life energy.” None of which is true, in fact the beautifully opposite of true - but it sold.
As the Allies advanced, Auergesellschaft seized a French firm's entire thorium supply and shipped it to Germany just before Paris was liberated. For the Allies, they feared the worst. Could the Germans be stockpiling thorium for a bomb? When they finally tracked it down and interrogated the company's men, an absurd truth was revealed… the thorium wasn't for a weapon at all. The company, seeing its wartime contracts about to vanish, had decided its future lay in cosmetics, and was hoarding thorium to corner the postwar market in radioactive toothpaste. And so this amusingly became known as "Operation Toothpaste"!
What it actually says on the tube
The back of a Doramad tube carries the full sales pitch. In the original German, it reads:
Was leistet Doramad? Durch ihre radioaktive Strahlung steigert sie die Abwehrkräfte von Zahn u. Zahnfleisch. Die Zellen werden mit neuer Lebensenergie geladen, die Bakterien in ihrer zerstörenden Wirksamkeit gehemmt. Daher die vorzügliche Vorbeugungs- und Heilwirkung bei Zahnfleischerkrankungen. Poliert den Schmelz aufs Schonendste weiß und glänzend. Hindert Zahnsteinansatz.
Which translates, more or less, as:
What does Doramad do? Through its radioactive radiation it strengthens the defences of the teeth and gums. The cells are charged with fresh life-energy; bacteria are checked in their destructive work. Hence its excellent preventive and healing action against gum disease. It polishes the enamel white and gleaming in the gentlest possible way. And it stops the build-up of tartar.
The only claim that carries truth is preventing tartar, totally unrelated to radioactivity. Everything else is wishful thinking unique to the era of radioactive quackery.
My tube of Dormad toothpaste
Sitting on my desk is a battered aluminium tube of toothpaste. Its last owner, one of several hundred thousand German soldiers, had run out of road.
The Red Army had punched through to the Baltic coast, and what had been Army Group North found itself pinned against the sea in a corner of western Latvia known to history as the Courland Pocket. They were cut off - no retreat, no relief, the war visibly lost - and yet they did not surrender. For seven months, through six grinding battles and a Baltic winter, close to 200,000 men held a shrinking scrap of coastline while the rest of the Reich collapsed. They were among the very last German forces anywhere to lay down their arms, finally capitulating in May 1945, after the war in Europe was officially over.
The army surrendered and left Baltic relic hunters 80 years later a rich hunting ground of personal army kits, abandoned in foxholes and dugouts, and field hospitals. Mess tins. Razors. Buttons. And, tucked into a great many wash kits, a small aluminium tube of toothpaste.
And that is how an object that once sat in a doomed soldier’s wash kit on the Eastern Front came to be sitting, today, on a desk in Surrey, sitting next to a radiation detector. A man squeezed the last usable smear out of this tube, probably sometime in 1944, in dire circumstances. The toothpaste tube outlasted him, the army, the Nazis, and the century, only to end up as the subject of a Substack article in 2026. Bizarre.
This tube is still radioactive
If you read about Doramad toothpaste elsewhere online, you’ll spot people saying that: it contained thorium, so it was radioactive. A couple of the more careful websites go one step further and say a laboratory once confirmed trace thorium by analysis. I went looking and could not find a single person who had actually pointed a detector at one of these tubes and published what came back.
That’s a small, oddly persistent, perhaps niche gap on the internet. So I decided to close it.
First, a fair warning about why this is harder than it sounds. If you wave a basic Geiger counter - the clicking kind everyone pictures - over an empty Doramad tube, you get nothing. The seller of mine told me as much. The amount of radioactive material left clinging inside an empty tube is so tiny that, by sheer loudness, it doesn’t rise above the natural background radiation that’s around all of us, all the time.
So I needed to use a more capable instrument that does something cleverer. Rather than just counting how much radiation arrives, it sorts it by type - detecting the actual isotopes. Every radioactive element gives off radiation at its own specific set of energies; together they form a kind of barcode, unique to that element and its decay products.
The method is simple. I recorded an hour of my standard background radiation using my Radiacode 102 to get a picture of natural radioactive hum of the room with no tube present. Then I recorded an hour of the tube sitting next to the detector. You can then subtract the room from the tube and whatever was left could only have come from the tube itself.
For the first half hour, it looked like the Geiger counter had been right - the tube’s signal was so faint it was almost lost in the noise. But as the minutes piled up, something emerged from the static: a clean, repeating pattern of peaks, each one landing exactly where thorium’s particular barcode says it should. A specific, identifiable signature and not just one line but several, from more than one stage of thorium’s slow radioactive decay, all sitting in their correct places.
The spectrum for the trained eye shows that the radioactivity of thorium is still ticking away inside the empty tube, likely dried to the walls of the aluminium, somehow having survived 80 years in the mud.
Is it dangerous?
No. I’ll tell my mates that I have “Nazi radioactive toothpaste recovered from a battlefield”, but the tube itself gives off no more radiation than the room it’s in. You can hold it, handle it, photograph it, and you’ll receive nothing. Thorium’s radiation is the easily-stopped kind: your skin blocks it, and so does the aluminium wall of the tube itself.
The only real rule - the same one that governs everything in this unique hobby - is the boring, sensible one: don’t eat it. Don’t scrape the residue out and breathe the dust. Wash your hands after handling it. Do that, and an empty Doramad tube is one of the safest radioactive curiosities you could own.
“Doramad was radioactive” has been repeated for decades as received internet wisdom. A cheap Geiger counter says there’s nothing here, but two hours of patience says this tube does still emit something, quietly decaying, exactly as it has for 80 years.
If you’d like the technical detail - the actual spectra, the specific peaks I identified, drop a comment or message.
This is such a cool hobby Michael,if that's what you call it.