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

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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 In each chapter, they also note how much Nazi environmental law was NOT automatically rescinded, but continued in force for, in places, decades!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".

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

In truth, representatives of the Third Reich, clad in fashionable, assless lederhosen, separated out those who littered 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 inferiors 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.