His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, and was frequently transferred to different countries in Eastern Europe; the family moved with him.

His application to join the Nazi Party was declined in 1939, because he was married to a Jewish physician, Dr. Lilly Weil, with whom he had two children and from whom he had been divorced in April 1935.

While the children survived the war in the UK, Lilly Pokorná as an internee in Ghetto Terezin led the first radiology station in the camp.

[3][4] Pokorny suggests the forced, covert sterilization of millions of prisoners, and wrote that he was "led by the idea that the enemy must not only be conquered but destroyed" (emphasis in original) and the immense importance of this drug "in the present fight of our people.

"[5] He continued: If, on the basis of this research, it were possible to produce a drug which after a relatively short time, effects an imperceptible sterilization on human beings, then we should have a new powerful weapon at our disposal.