This book covers much the same ground as "How Green Were the Nazis?" (edited by Brueggemeier, Cloc and Zeller; Ohio University Press, 2005), which I have reviewed on this Web site. Like it, it underscores the polycentric character of the Nazi regime and how decision-making was often hamstrung by rivalries among Nazi bigwigs and their pet bureaucracies. It also highlights the internal divisions within the conservation movement. A large part of that movement strove to remain apolitical in an increasingly poisonous atmosphere. Some conservationists--sometimes in their desire to fulfill their "green" goals, sometimes in a more blatant thirst for power and authority--recognized the desirability of "sucking up" to the regime and came on board. Only relatively few became enthusiastic boosters of racism, let alone genocide. The book details how and why the extraordinarily progressive "green" environmental law of 1935, purged of racism, was allowed to stand after the War, and what befell the surviving wartime conservationists. (One SS man who had published an avifauna of Auschwitz, with a thank-you to Kommandant Hoess for his patronage, was "deNazified" after the war and went on to become President of the German Ornithological Society.)
It has become fairly common for those opposed to the "native plant movement" -- particularly in California -- to refer to their opponents as "native-plant Nazis" because their rhetoric about introduced species is often strikingly similar to racist and xenophobic rhetoric in the political sphere. A mythology has grown up that the Nazis insisted on the use of only plants native to the Reich in gardening and landscaping. Although there are a few (regularly-quoted) egregious examples of such thinking, both books demonstrate clearly that there was plenty of disagreement on the appropriateness of using exotic plants in German horticulture and landscaping. The disagreement extended to the topmost ranks of the bureaucracies concerned and was focused in part on the landscaping of the Autobahn. Himmler sent expeditions to the Himalaya for various reasons; one was to gather alpine plants suitable for naturalizing in the Reich. Our "native-plant Nazis" thus out-Nazi the real Nazis. Nuff said.
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