ENVIRONMENTALISM

Environmentalism In Nazi Germany



Environmentalism In Nazi Germany

Introduction

The Nazis created nature preserves, contemplated sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature. How Green Were the Nazis? is the first paper to examine the ideology and practice of environmental protection in Nazi Germany. Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms, for the most part, and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention that they received from the regime did not always translate into action. By the late 1930s, nature and the environment became less pressing concerns as Nazi Germany prepared and executed its extensive war (Rogers, 1991, 64-79). The environmental ideas, policies, and consequences of the Nazi regime pose controversial questions that have long begged for authoritative answers. At last, a team of highly qualified scholars has tackled these questions, with dispassionate judgment and deep research. Their assessment will stand for years to come as the fundamental work on the subject and provides a new angle of vision on 20th-century Europe's most disruptive force.

The topic of the alleged "greenness" of the German Nazi regime has been widely debated over the last twenty years. This paper, edited jointly by Franz-Josef Brueggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, attempts to give an overview of the most recent research in the area, from environmental policymaking, to the life and deeds of some outstanding personalities in so-called Nazi environmentalism, to philosophical and ideological issues. How Green Were the Nazis? is a must for those who want to be introduced to the controversial relationship of Hitler's regime with the natural world.

The editors claim in the introduction that actually no linear relationship may be traced between "today's Greens" and "yesterday's environmentalists" (p. 2) within or outside the Nazi party. They stress how, in opposition to the current Green slogan, "think globally," before World War II the dimension of the nation-state represented the psychological limit of environmentalism. With the most powerful conservationist movement of the early twentieth century, the German case offers particularly fertile ground for exploring the links between modernity, its aberrations, and its links to the natural world. The editors rightfully call for a value-free analysis of Nazi environmental policies that considers both positive and negative aspects: "to miss the positive features of National Socialism is to miss why it appealed so many people" (p. 4). A most important aspect in understanding the links between the Nazi regime and the conservation movement is the history of German conservationism, briefly but effectively sketched by the editors in the introduction, as it may show us whether Nazism represented continuity or discontinuity with the history of German environmental policies. As the editors suggest, it is possible that even without Hitler's rise to power similar policies would have been drafted and the landscape subjected to similar changes. In my view this is a central point in the actual understanding of Nazism's tangential relationship ...