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.
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