How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Ecology & History) [Paperback]

Franz-Josef Bruggemeier (Editor), Mark Cioc (Editor), Thomas Zeller (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2005 | Series: Ecology & History

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 book 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. Based on prodigious archival research, and written by some of the most important scholars in the field of twentieth-century German history, How Green Were the Nazis? illuminates the ideological overlap between Nazi ideas and conservationist agendas. Moreover, this landmark book underscores that the “green” policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history.((BLURB))---"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."—John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World---EDITORS---Franz-Josef Brueggemeier is a professor of history at the university of Freiburg, Germany. He has published extensively in the field of environmental history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.Mark Cioc is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and editor of the journal Environmental History. He is the author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000. Thomas Zeller is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Straße, Bahn, Panorama, translated as Driving Germany.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An invaluable English introduction to the history of conservation in the Third Reich.”

Journal of Contemporary History

“Instead of courting controversy, How Green Were the Nazis? both draws on, and contributes to, recent trends in the historiography of the Third Reich. It treats the regime not as a ‘historical aberration’ but as a barbaric mutation of modernity that displayed ‘a mixture of atavistic and avante-garde ideas’ in environmental as in other policy areas.”

Environment & History

“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.”

John McNeill — author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World

About the Author

Franz-Josef Brueggemeier is a professor of history at the university of Freiburg, Germany. He has published extensively in the field of environmental history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.Mark Cioc is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and editor of the journal Environmental History. He is the author of The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000. Thomas Zeller is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Straße, Bahn, Panorama, translated as Driving Germany.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Ohio University Press; First Edition edition (December 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821416472
• ISBN-13: 978-0821416471
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #286,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #92 in Books > Science & Math > Environment > Environmentalism

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Suprisingly interesting and informative for an academic social history book September 29, 2008

By Edith Swanek

Format:Paperback

This book was suprisingly interesting and informative for an academic social history work. The approach is to look at various professions related to environmentalism and examine the extent to which academics in each "tailored" their messages to fit with Nazism, and to take advantage of the authoritarian nature of the regime to see at least some of their long-cherished dreams come to "fruition" (no pun intended!). In each chapter, they also note how much Nazi environmental law was NOT automatically rescinded, but continued in force for, in places, decades!

Chapter 1 covers environmental law.
Chapter 2 is forestry (including the discovery that the Nazis did the world's first traditional environmental impact statement, i.e., a plan distributed widely for agency and public comment, the comments themselves, and the "response to comments"!).
Chapter 3 covers Nazi efforts to have a "total nature protection act", kind of like a clean water act combined with a regional natural monuments act, as a first cut at "comprehensive habitat conservation".
Chapter 4 covers air pollution.
Chapter 5 agriculture.
Chpater 6 landscape architecture.
Chapter 7 Heidegger and environmental philosophizing. Although never actually saying it, the author of that chapter seems to imply Heidegger might have favored the Gaia "living earth" and sociobiology metaphors as the authentic "new gods" needed to transcend the shallow decadence of techno-life. [For myself, I hardly find "techno-life" to be shallow and decadent when it allows me to hear more of Handel's operas than anyone on earth who died more than 15 years ago, for example!]
Chapter 8 Geopolitics and "environmental determinism".
Chapter 9 Regional planning and extermination of "people who cannot plan their own environment properly". Can you imagine that Auschwitz was going to be a "model city" after the war?
A very good companion work to "the Nazi War on Cancer".

3.0 out of 5 stars Green woods and brown shirts January 27, 2013

By Art Shapiro

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It comes as something of a shock to most people to learn that Nazism grew out of the German Romantic Movement and that, at least initially, it embraced a wide variety of positions considered progressive and environmentally-conscious today. Many people know that Hitler was a vegetarian, but how many know that the Nazis mounted the most effective anti-smoking propaganda campaign ever before the 1980s? How many know that the nature protection and conservation laws enacted in the early days of the regime were, from an environmentalist perspective, the best in the world, and that -- stripped of racist and nationalistic language -- they largely remained on the books after World War II until redrawn quite recently? The Nazis effectively outlawed clearcutting and mandated mixed-species, mixed-age forestry to assure "forests forever;" in the name of landscape protection they outlawed roadside billboards and imposed stringent esthetic standards on new construction; exercising their dictatorial powers, they simply rode roughshod over private property rights in the name of "the greater good." For those familiar with this history, there is an inescapable contradiction between what to many of us are these laudable goals and the horrific behavior of the regime in almost every other sphere. How could a regime that perpetrated genocide on an unprecedented industrial scale and waged unlimited and unprovoked wars of aggression and conquest be so concerned with the welfare of animals and plants and the harmony of the landscape? And what, if anything, does this have to tell us about the purity of contemporary environmentalism?
This book is NOT an introduction to its subject and assumes a prior working knowledge of both National Socialism and its ancestor, German Romanticism. What it does accomplish quite well is to demonstrate that while some elements of early Nazism were authentically "green," as Germany slid inexorably into terror and war those elements were expediently shunted aside. One major factor in this was the exigencies of the war effort, but perhaps even more important was the constant pressure to justify everything in racialist terms. The classic work "Behemoth" by Franz Neumann, first published in 1942, first documented the "polycentric" character of the Nazi regime--a polycentrism that at times verged on internecine warfare (e.g., the "Night of the Long Knives" when the SA was liquidated) but more often took the form of poisonous personal rivalries in the upper echelons of the Party, reflected in the proliferation of bureaucratic apparatuses with overlapping functions, vying with one another for power and the approbation of the Fuhrer. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the practice of Nazi "environmentalism." The book is not an easy read, but if you already know a fair bit, you will emerge from it understanding much better the green/brown paradox of National Socialism and how it bears on environmentalism today.

10 of 25 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars Because It's Hard to Tell That's a Swastika on the Cover September 23, 2011

By Marka Twaina

Format:Paperback

This book does a wonderful job of dispelling the myths currently surrounding the Nazi Party, especially the accusations of racism and antisemitism that were spread post-WWII as part of the largest-ever SMEAR CAMPAIGN to justify a senseless war against a master people.

In truth, representatives of the Third Reich, clad in fashionable, assless lederhosen, only separated people who were caught littering (not because of their faith or race) to establish a new order of trash-free wienerhavens.

As the book explains, conservation areas were separated from concentration parks, for the sole benefit of the litterbugs who could finally be shown the difference between the accumulation of filth in their ghettos and the immaculate landscapes maintained by those of the Master Race. By setting an example, the Nazis' ultimate plan was to permanently exterminate litter and human waste.

Despite the very many horrendous accusations made toward Nazis, the virtuous ideal behind The Movement was for a superior civilization achieved through the protection of natural purity and a hope to take over the world with their handsome Volkswagens, which produce virtually no toxic gas emissions.