Protectors or Predators?
Were the Nazis actually defenders and protectors of nature? In this paper, Chapoutot shows that it was more a question of using nature as a metaphor. In the phrase “Blut und Boden,” it is definitely “blood,” and hence race, that takes precedence over the “soil,” which as a result is manipulated, exploited, and ruined. Thus the despoliation, exploitation, predation, and destruction of nature prevail, a far cry indeed from any culture of environmental conservation.
What is the significance of Chernobyl compared with Auschwitz? Faced with increased awareness and the rise in environmental movements in the West, one political and ideological response has made use of the radicalism of “green” philosophy as an argument to reveal a tinge of “brown,” reflecting the infamous Nazi brownshirts (Sturmabteilung). But for the past twenty years, green politics has been on trial in France for its own totalitarian ideas (what vegetarian is unaware that s/he shares this practice with Hitler?), both half-jokingly and in the form of a more reasoned incrimination.
Self-proclaimed modernist and humanist Luc Ferry in 1992 published an essay entitled Le Nouvel ordre écologique, echoing the “new European order” of the period following the Second World War. Ferry is concerned about the “intellectual romanticism” expressed by environmental thinking, with opponents of Enlightenment philosophy having made a comeback. Today they are the bearded, non-violent French activists of 1971-81 Larzac; earlier, they were the less affable Sturmabteilung (SA), lovers of nature, soil, and blood. Faced with this return to a barbarity that is just as misanthropic as it is plant- and animal-loving, Ferry writes, we must put mankind back at the center of the world and have confidence in his capacity and willingness to improve, if not in his goodness. We should not be so quick to dismiss scientific and technological progress on the grounds of the regrettable abuses and accidents generated by certain excesses in the past. Spurred on by the success of environmentalist arguments, we must once again raise the banner of the Enlightenment philosophers and bring their renewed optimism to bear against the enduring Rousseauians, with their cultural pessimism [1].
The reductio ad hitlerum indictment (a discrediting argument that always works) has thus been disseminated, in situations of environmental sensitivity, with all the ironic force of a paradox that could, in fact, prove extremely serious. For if friends of animals are openly castigated during dinners in the city, with the nullifying reminder that the Führer adored his dog, protectors of nature find themselves opposing the 1935 Reichsnaturgesetz by the use of insinuations such as, “Odd, don’t you think?” Such allusions pave the way for displays that are all the more implacable for appearing to be plain common sense. The Nazis were the first to promulgate leading-edge legislation directed at protecting nature, and there is nothing surprising about that, given their hatred of man. This is consistent with their sanctification of the non-human world, their inordinate love of picturesque landscapes, rivers, and hamsters. While the most insistent critics put forward a genetic analysis of the environmental discourse (green comes from “brown”), the more insidious merely suggest an analogical critique, highlighting the fact that correspondences between green and “brown” give rise to thought. There seem to be many arguments in support of this critical approach. The Nazis indeed seem to have been nature-loving, nostalgic anti-moderns who were forerunners as much by their actions (laws protecting nature) as by their culture (exaltation of the soil, the rural entity, and peasant identity).
What is there that is green, however, within the “brown” culture? And how were the Nazis able to show sensitivity toward the environment when there were no words available with which even to conceive of it, let alone give expression to it? The word Umwelt (environment) took on its current meaning in Germany in the 1970s. In the 1938 edition of Der neue Brockhaus, the word is confined to its technical usage in the natural sciences, meaning the same as “biotope,” and remains totally absent from Nazi discourse. As for the composite noun Umweltschutz (protection of the environment), there is no trace of it in Brockhaus’s lexicon. The word Natur exists, of course, as does Naturschutz (protection of nature), but Natur is defined as “the countryside, composed of forests and fields” [2], with no suggestion of its being virginal, primal, or preserved from all human occupation or activity. As for the “protection of nature,” while the dictionary mentions “measures to protect flora and fauna” and “natural monuments,” it specifies that this protection also extends to “landscapes,” including those shaped by man [3]. The fact is that, in 1930s Germany, Naturschutz was no different from Heimatschutz, which related to the preservation of territories and their culture. Heimat means the region in which “you feel at home,” the little homeland that constitutes the natural, inherited surroundings in which an individual grows up. Hence, Heimatschutz is “a movement that is concerned with the preservation of the inherent characteristics, natural as well as cultural, of a region [. . .] insofar as they are the foundation and expression of human beings. Heimatschutz protects local culture in its habits, language, and songs” [4]. Our conception of the environment as a system in which man intervenes as a modifying or disruptive factor is thus absent from the concerns of the Nazis as well as of those who preceded them. Activists from Natur- und Heimatschutz organizations, the number of which increased considerably in Germany during the last quarter of the nineteenth century [5], did not differentiate between nature per se and man-shaped nature. This was the same for German geographers of the period, who were so attached to the notion of Landschaft (landscape). Focusing more on Kulturlandschaft (the Bavarian pastureland, the northern bocage, etc.) than on Naturlandschaft (the steppe, the moorland, etc.), they studied the landscapes on which people had left their mark and through which they had expressed their existence, rather than the untouched wilderness. Moreover, the use of the two terms Heimat and Natur shows that the determination for preservation is local, not global—it is of little consequence to them if the Landschaften in the United States or the Basque Country disappear. There is a complete absence of any notion of a universal imperative to preservation, or to a solidarity with and independence of natural phenomena and their disruption on a worldwide scale.
Race and Nature
The fact remains that Nazism upheld a notion of the Germanic race as close to, or linked to, nature (naturgebunden, naturnah). Ideas about Nazi indigenousness (race implies indigenousness, in the proper sense of the word) are compatible, to a degree, with an autochthonous affirmation [6]. Descended from German soil and never having left, except to go and civilize other lands, the Germanic race can only, despite successive cultural and biological alienations, return to itself by rediscovering the earliest purity of its origins or, in other words, of its natural environment. The Germanic race comes from a natural environment in which it participated and with which it shared a practical proximity (working the soil) as well as an aesthetic and ethical experience (the free development of the body, exposed, in its nakedness, to the elements and the sun). The promotion of ruralism and (more in discourse than in practice) naturism provide keys to this rediscovered authenticity. Naturism and love of the body had to break with centuries of Christian alienation. Ruralism was to allow (against a century-long rural exodus) the blood to be returned to its land. The phrase Blut und Boden is repeated so often under the Third Reich that the two terms become inseparable, as if they were synonyms—blood is soil and vice-versa. The motto was used as a slogan and political manifesto by the agricultural minister, Richard Walther Darré. This agronomist, who met Hitler in 1930, became Reichsbauernführer in 1933, after founding the RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt), the SS’s central office for race and colonization, in 1931. A eulogist of those who worked the land (the eternal source of virtue and biological renewal), Darré considered agricultural workers to be “the source of life for the Nordic race” and wrote a striking slogan: “the blood of the Germanic people flows from its farms” [7]. Anxious, in an increasingly mobile world (rural exodus, circulation of goods and value), to fix the Germans to their land, Darré instituted the 1933 law that created an Erbhof (patrimonial smallholding), which was indivisible on inheritance, inalienable, and non-mortgageable (all tendencies that had provoked criticism from the agricultural sector). While the expression “blood and soil” seemed to provide a case in point to those who wanted to view Darré as a green Nazi [8], a more detailed examination shows that he was no such thing, neither in discursive nor in practical terms. In “Blut und Boden,” it is “blood” that comes first, both in the phrase and in terms of priority. It is the blood that must be encouraged, protected, and nurtured by the soil or rather, the land as it is cultivated and exploited to serve the race. “Land” is never an absolute: it is always considered relative to the people it must serve and feed. This is what becomes clear in many speeches in which Hitler bemoans the harsh poverty of “nature” that the German people have inherited, in a topos of his constantly repeated portrayal of a Volk ohne Raum (people without land), who are insufficiently equipped and deprived of the means to exercise their Lebensrecht, their right to life. Hence this interpellation for the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, during a speech at the Reichstag on April 23, 1939:
“You are lucky to only have to feed fifteen men per square kilometer in your country. You have the largest natural resources in the world at your disposal. With the space you have and the fertility of your soil, you can offer each American ten times more food than it is possible to do in Germany. Nature, at least, has allowed you to do this.” [9]
The mood of the Führer in relation to an insufficiently generous nature in Germany was an international political argument, but it was not feigned. In private, Hitler did not hesitate to say that the Germanic race had been meagerly equipped: “The whole area turns into a swamp from the constant rain [. . .]. This country was cold, damp, and foggy.” In short, it was “a country fit only for a dog” prior to some fortunate changes in the climate and, in particular, to some considerable development work [10].
There is, therefore, no mysticism attached to the land or to nature per se. Soil is linked to blood only insofar as it is able to feed it. This soil, moreover, is nothing on its own. Worked by generations of German farmers, fed and fertilized by the dead who have been buried in it, it has so been shaped by man that it is only by the hands of the race itself that it has, in fact, become essentially German. The film Heimkehr (1941) is a striking illustration of this when the heroine, Marie, sings about the farmers’ happiness at returning to their country from Soviet-occupied Poland:
“It is not just the village that will be German, but everything around it, all will be German [. . .]. It will feel very strange to us, that the soil in the fields, the bit of clay, the stone, the grass, the hay, the hazelnuts, the trees, all that will be German like us, because it will have grown from millions of German hearts, all who have gone into the ground and become German soil. Because we will not be happy just with living a German life; we will die a German death and, once dead, we will remain German, we will become a piece of Germany.”
For the Nazis, then, the earth was thick with the dead. It was subjugated to a veritable transubstantiation by the living who cultivated it and by the dead who fertilized it.
On Race as a Tree, a Forest, and a Field
The fact that blood takes precedence over soil, and race over nature, is evident in the many metaphors referring to nature in Nazi discourse. It is true that the Nazis do not conceive of people (Volk, Rasse) as an artifact, a cultural construction (they repudiate this vision, which, according to them, came from the French Revolution), but as a natural entity, like a living organism equipped with its coherence, defined by its integrity and internal solidarity, and governed by the necessity of nature. In order to convey this vision of the “community of people,” the Nazis used numerous metaphors, including the human body, the tree, the field, and the forest. These metaphors allowed them to promote simple ideas: you do not remove a limb, you do not transplant a foreign limb, you prune a tree, you eradicate weeds in a field, and so on. The closing of the community, as well as the eugenics it was subjected to, were promoted by this metaphorical register, which intended to make a human group submit to the laws of natural necessity. Should we see here a further indication of the Nazis’ supposed love for nature? Is it not significant that race is likened to a tree or a forest? A film produced in 1936 by Rosenberg’s cultural organization, the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur/KfdK, identifies the German people with the forests from which they came. Der ewige Wald (The Eternal Forest) links the eternity of the forest to that of the nation and ties their destinies together. A mixture of epic film and folk documentary, it shows Roman legions captured in the trap of a German forest, where they struggle against the trees themselves as they come crashing down on them [11]. The assimilation is total, but what does the use of the metaphor—organicist, forest, or arborist—tell us? Here is an extract from one of a thousand similar SS publications:
“It goes against the will of nature for man, blinded by the illusion of his own importance, to seek to steer his existence according to his goodwill [. . .]. Observation of nature teaches us that the leaf only exists through the branch on which it grows; that the branch receives its life from the trunk, the trunk depends on its roots, and they receive their strength from the soil. The tree, in turn, is only one of many in the forest.” [12]
Another extremely didactic version of the Nazi slogan, in arboricultural or sylvicultural terms, is: “You are nothing, your people are everything.” Holistic pedagogy uses the assimilation of natural organisms to explain the relationship between the whole (tree = people) and a part (individual = leaf). However, when race is compared with a tree, it has more to do with the race than with the tree—the referent is always race, the only biological entity that matters.
It is noteworthy, moreover, that “nature” appears in Nazi discourse above all as a law-making authority that imposes its “natural laws” without having even enacted them (the differences between and hierarchy of races, the degeneration caused by mixed blood, survival of the fittest—provided they can protect the excellence of their blood—and so on). Far from appearing in a pleasant or friendly light, nature is coercive in Nazi discourse. Its laws are unavoidable, and any failure to respect them leads to degeneration and death. Furthermore, nature is more agonistic than bucolic. It is nature that distinguishes between the races and that has thrust them into a ruthless war with one another.
Man must conform his actions to nature’s designs in order to avoid being hindered in his work. Those who are incapable of living and fighting cannot benefit from the counter-selective effects of modern societies that allow the sick and disabled to live. If measures that run against several centuries of Christian heritage and moral acculturation are to be accepted, the horticultural metaphor is essential: “Those who leave garden plants to their own devices,” writes Darré, “will see, to their great dismay, that it will not be long before all the plants are overrun by weeds.” It is therefore necessary to have the intervention of “the creative and deliberate action of the gardener who encourages [. . .] that which should be encouraged and roots out that which should be rooted out [. . .]. That is the meaning, transposed onto race, of our old Germanic laws, which [. . .] created the conditions for the existence of Germanness” [13]. Eugenics is, therefore, as simple and logical as gardening. Arboricultural, sylvicultural, and agricultural metaphors serve the same educational purpose. The “-cultural” in these adjectives indicates more to do with culture/cultivating (of trees, forests, fields, and gardens) than with nature pure and simple. Man is an actor who imposes his “gestaltender Wille” [14] (his formative will) on natural material to give it the desired Gestalt (form).
Thus, whenever it is a question of nature, it is a question of race. The naturalist metaphors that saturate Nazi discourse are designed to teach effective ways of looking after and toughening up the people, and the soil is only valued as long as it produces food for the German people.
The Law of 1935 and the Four Year Plan of 1936
In practical terms, recent studies show that this relationship the Nazis had with nature did not go unheeded, unlike the conservation legislation passed in 1935. It appeared, at first, that there was nothing specifically Nazi about the 1935 law, since it took up the main provisions of a bill that had been debated but not passed in the Reichstag in 1927 under the Weimar [15]. Disappointed by the recantations of a parliamentary government that was too complex to be proactive, the German Naturschutz activists welcomed the Nazi movement with its exaltation of the farmer and the countryside as a godsend. They did their utmost to achieve the success of their plan within the framework of the new regime. In practice, however, the law did not provide for the appointment of a single civil servant to implement it—the protection of nature and the countryside was left to the activists on a voluntary and unofficial basis. Moreover, the unprecedented centralization of government by the Nazis moved land-related decisions from the locations affected, making the tight regulation and rigorous, efficient management of local cases impossible [16]. This law, passed in 1935, seems to have been a (very premature) swansong. In fact, the following year, 1936, marked the beginning of the Four Year Plan, which was to make Germany completely self-sufficient and equipped to lead a long military campaign. From that point on, sylvicultural and agricultural quotas soared. Hermann Goering, who was in charge of coordinating and implementing the plan, ordered that the planting of forests be increased 150 percent by 1937 [17]. He thus contradicted himself in his capacity as Reichsforstmeister (Reich Chief of Forestry), eulogist of the German Waldvolk (forest people), and promoter of the Dauerwald (sustainable forest) notion to which his friend Walter von Keudell had converted him [18].
While the forest was cut down, arable land was increased and exploited to the point of exhaustion. The self-sufficiency project demanded such an escalation in production (even though it meant subjecting the population and the land to tensions that would, it was hoped, be alleviated by future conquests) that Goering asked Darré, the agricultural minister, for money to cultivate two million additional hectares [19], with no skimping on the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to increase yields. Darré raised no objection—this Erzeugungsschlacht (production battle), which he popularized among the ranks of German farmers, was as important to him as it was to Goering. Richard Darré was not an environmentalist but a racist agronomist for whom “the soil is [. . .] only one term in the equation of the rural economy” [20]. The only things that mattered to him were the battle against rural depopulation, the preservation of German rural identity, and food production for the race. He was not put off by the exhaustion of the soils and depletion of the water table, as evidenced in his violent reaction to the appearance of articles condemning the Versteppung (“steppification”) of Germany on account of excessive water extraction [21].
At the local level, many case studies show the importance that the protection of regions and rural areas had assumed under the Third Reich. Once again, despite the proclamations of principle that were applauded by activists, the Reich’s actions showed that its main concern was with managing and regulating land in such a way as to allow the highest possible agricultural yield. In Westphalia, the plan to regulate the course of the River Ems, which had met with longstanding opposition from the Westphälischer Heimatbund, was carried out in 1934. In the presence of the Gauleiter (second-highest Nazi paramilitary ranking officer), the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich labor service), wearing their uniforms and with spades over shoulders [22], took charge of the site, military style, and transformed a picturesque landscape into a geometric canal with leveled-off, angular, deforested banks. Done in the interest of flood prevention and ensuring a regular water supply to the region’s farms, this was an aesthetic desolation and a crushing defeat for supporters of the region [23].
Let us now consider three types of space that were generally valued in the pre-1933 discourse of the protectors of nature and the Heimat, and examine the treatment that the Third Reich reserved for them, namely wetlands, coastlines, and mountains.
Cultivation and Colonization: The Aryan, the “Prometheus of Mankind”
First of all, there was no mention in Nazi discourse of declaring wetlands as being part of the national heritage. They were to be improved and cultivated. David Blackbourn shows convincingly in The Conquest of Nature that the issue of the marshlands pertained to cultivation and colonization [24]. The presence of wetlands to the east, for instance, was evidence that Poland had been neglected by a negligent and incompetent population. Only the Teutonic knights of old had known, and the Germans of the future would know, how to develop the land and cultivate it in every sense of the word—drain marshes to plant crops, and construct buildings that reflected a level of culture to which the peoples to the east could obviously not lay claim. It is an old topos of colonialist discourse, which contrasts the controlled, ordered landscapes of the colonizer with the desolate expanses of the colonized. On one side, a people that subjects nature to the hand of man (by cultivating it), and on the other an abandoned land whose wildness is only equaled by the barbarism of its occupants. Following this contrast to its logical conclusion, the abandoned land has to be considered as empty, unoccupied by people worthy of being considered human. The uncultivated land of the savages calls for cultivation by the colonizers, for even though there may be bipeds resembling humans scattered about the land, it is, strictly speaking, a terra nullius, according to the expression coined by modern European lawyers. This is how the Nazis viewed the territories to the east.
Once again, it is clear that culture was more valued in Nazi discourse than nature. Nordic man is always presented as being hard-working, creative, an achiever. The participles schaffend, schöpfend, and leistend—from the verbs schaffen (to produce), schöpfen (to create), and leisten (to do, make, be successful)—and the nouns Arbeit or Werk are constantly associated with him. Nordic man imposes his engineering and his will on the material he is working. A man of spirit and endeavor, dedicated to ideas and devoted to his community, he shapes the world. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf, he is the single creator of culture, the “Prometheus of mankind” [25]. Nazism affects a crude Hegelianism, which sees in cultural creations the phenomenologization of a creative spirit. This spirit, this Geist, is an emanation from blood, Blut. The contrast with the Jew is repeated ad nauseam. In Franz Hippler’s 1941 film, Le Juif éternel, the Aryan is portrayed as an artist (sculptor and musician, Greek and medieval, Myron, Bach, or Michelangelo) and artisan (at his workbench or anvil), while the Jew is a shopkeeper, and nothing more. Whereas the Aryan is sedentary and shapes his world, the Jew is nomadic and creates no works of art, no value, he just speculates and trades. In their relationship with the natural world, the Nazis value neither contemplation nor meditation but action; action that consists in giving form. The plans to develop the eastern territories, drawn up by SS geographers and technocrats, were in response to a direct letter of engagement from the Reichsführer-SS and, from 1939, the Reich commander for the strengthening of the German race. Since “German cultural landscapes” are the “signs of our Germanic essence,” the “[conquered] spaces will have to have a form corresponding to the essence of our race” [26], in other words a form that is the expression of the Nordic spirit.
Coastlines and Mountains
Coastlines, unstable and fragile spaces, are presented in Nazi discourse not as sensitive biotopes harboring treasures of flora and fauna (and particularly birdlife), but as spaces of relaxation or for defense. The North Sea coastline was the most popular place for German workers to go to recharge their batteries, thanks to an organization that depicted itself as the grand works council of the Third Reich and the purveyor of leisure activities, Kraft durch Freude (KdF – “strength through joy”). According to its head, Robert Ley, KdF did not organize vacations for their own sake, but in order for the German worker to recover his strength. This was the source of energy from which he would draw to do battle with the production goals imposed by the self-sufficient economy and the Four Year Plan. To this end, KdF built vacation centers, the most impressive of which was constructed on Rügen Island in 1936. This island in the North Sea, all dunes and lagoons, is a national treasure. A decree of April 27, 1935, placed the most fragile area, the Schmale Heide lido, under protection. It is in this listed area that, for the purposes of a leisure policy geared toward increased production, a gigantic building site was opened, which was to result in the construction of the Prora-Rügen colossus [27], an award-winning project at the universal exhibition in Paris in 1937. This residence, which hugged the curve of the lido, offered twenty thousand spaces for KdF vacationers in a 4.5-square-kilometer arc of concrete. Unfinished, but still very visible today, the building has forever blighted the area while, over the years, the sand and gravel of the listed area have been used in concrete mixtures. KdF’s flagship project, Prora-Rügen, became its metonymy, as did the KdF-Schiffe boats that the organization chartered to offer cruises for German workers. Prora is depicted on many posters showing bronzed and rested Germans against a backdrop of natural landscapes that have been domesticated or covered with concrete.
Apart from relaxation, the coastline was also a defense zone. Again, concrete and steel covered the sand and gravel. By way of comparison, a walk along the coastline in France suffices to illustrate the Nazi treatment of natural spaces. The Todt organization, which built bunkers, batteries, and various fortifications over thousands of kilometers, played a more decisive role in that respect than organizations for the protection of birds [28].
The last of the three archetypally Nazi natural spaces is the mountain. It enjoyed a special status in German culture and was almost as prestigious, albeit late-developing, as the forest [29]. Ever since nineteenth-century romanticism, the mountain has been where man encounters the sublime. This is where, facing infinity, he becomes aware of his own finiteness while at the same time traversing the heights and depths of his psyche. In his portrayal of man looking out over mountain tops and mist, the artist Caspar David Friedrich created an icon of this confrontation of the self with nature. Moreover, just as the lowland forest has been cultivated for centuries, the mountain offers the image of immaculate nature, the last treasure chest of a primal virginity, the last place close to the beginning of time and the origins of soil and blood. In this respect, the mountain could logically only be valued by a Nazi discourse that exalted proximity to origins. Yet it is noteworthy that the mountain itself is not really understood in a contemplative or reflexive sense, but is rather considered from an architectonic or teratological perspective—the mountain is gewaltig (mighty) in every sense of the word. It is gigantic, grand, and powerful, just like the structures built by the Führer; it is also terrifying and monstrous, because it misleads, buries, and kills. The Bergfilme of the 1920s and 30s, in which a young Leni Riefenstahl won fame first as an actress and then as a director, show a voracious and destructive mountain, whose crevices, precipices, and avalanches swallow the heroes who confront it. A cold, exhausting, blinding place, the mountain mesmerizes and loses the men who die there. The 1929 film Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palu), directed by Arnold Fanck and Georg Wilhelm Pabst and starring Leni Riefenstahl, and 1932’s Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), directed by and starring Riefenstahl, show a place that is only disturbing and that is, along with the high seas, the space par excellence in which nature’s hostility toward man is manifested. It is this Gewalt (might) of nature that must be mastered (bewältigt). The mountain is the measure of the ambitions for mastery and possession displayed by the Nazi Prometheus.
The mountain thus appears as a space to be developed, with man imposing his law of geometry. The infrastructure works carried out in preparation for the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen [30] were thus the focus of generous media coverage, which saw them as a reason to exalt the engineers and engineering of the German public works sector.
A space where man battles against nature, the mountain was also a space for war. A 1931 film, Berge in Flammen, from the Nazi director Alois Trenker, celebrates Alpine troops during the First World War, showing mountains “in flames” (after the title) and as a place of fierce combat, not virginal, white, snowy peace. German and Austrian Alpine hunters, at war against the enemy and against nature, dig, build, fortify, bomb, mine, and blow up.
During the Second World War, reality would catch up with the images from Berge in Flammen, which appeared if not programmatic, at least forward-looking. From the summer of 1943, on account of increasing control of the air by the Allies, senior Nazi officials decided to systematically move the Reich’s weapons-production activities underground. Machines and workers would now have to gather in giant anti-aircraft shelters. These would not be built ex nihilo, however; in the same way as cellars and subway tunnels were used to protect the population, mountains would now be used to harbor the production of planes and missiles, sheltered from bombings by the RAF and US Air Force. Under the authority of Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, private industries along with military and SS engineers would dig, disembowel, and excavate millions of cubic meters of mountain. The best-known example, because of the sheer (murderous) scope of the project and the number of eyewitnesses, is that of the Mittelbau-Dora underground factory in the forests and mountains of the Harz. In order to set up assembly-line production of V2 rockets, sixty thousand prisoners from the Dora camp were forced by the SS to dig two hundred and fifty thousand square meters of tunnels and vaults. In under two years, twenty thousand prisoners died there providing the Reich with its Wunderwaffen, miracle weapons that were to reverse the course of the war [31]. In Franconia, near Nuremberg, there was a plan to excavate one hundred thousand square meters of tunnels and caves, so that BMW plane engines could be built undisturbed in the Houbirg Mountain. Ten thousand prisoners were mobilized from camp Flossenbürg, four thousand of which died there [32]. Sometimes the Nazis converted areas that had already been excavated, such as the Ebensee mines in Austria. To construct the V2s, however, chambers 30 meters high were gouged out of the mountain, costing nine thousand lives [33].
Damage was not limited to the bowels of mountains; the exterior contours were also affected. The most striking example of this is the Wapelsburg mountain (or Walpurgisberg), near Kahla in Thuringia [34]. Fifteen thousand prisoners had to construct a total of one hundred and fifty square meters of subterranean spaces for the production of the Messerschmidt 262, another Third Reich Wunderwaffe. To allow the takeoff and trials of the first jet-propelled plane in history, the crest of the Wapelsberg was deforested and leveled. The Wapelsberg, jewel in the crown of the Thuringia Mountains, was blighted. With this site, venerated by Germans and celebrated by Goethe in “Walpurgis Night” (Faust), the Nazis destroyed both a cultural and a natural landscape of prime importance.
It might seem indecent to express regret at these mutilations of mountain landscapes when we know from prisoners’ accounts that they were enslaved and assigned to work at Mittelbau-Dora, for example, until they died of exhaustion. The images from this camp are unforgettable, like those from everywhere where the SS reduced its prisoners to slavery: emaciated bodies, men reduced to flesh and bone, consumed by an industrial system in which they were no more than a production factor, an energy source allocated, until it ran dry, to exhaustive biological exploitation.
What can be read into these images of nature destroyed and men emaciated, if not that they were treated identically and shared a common destiny? The distinction constructed by some between a “nature” pampered by the Nazis and the humanity they destroyed evaporates when one reads more attentively about what the Nazis said about and did to both. Both were commodified, reduced to objects, pure matter to be shaped and exploited by the Nazi Prometheus. While eugenics perfects and racism eliminates, agriculture, sylviculture, industry, and land development bring nature to heel and ready it for battle. 32
The Nazis’ relationship with nature placed it on the same of level debasement as non-native populations; likewise, their relationship with occupied populations and with their economic and cultural products was one of spoliation, just as their relationship with nature was one of exploitation. In both cases it is a matter of predation, pure and simple, with hardly a thought for the sustainability of the relationship and with no obvious concern for conservation, whether of the people they exploited or of the places they destroyed. At an even lower level, nature had a similar status to that of the populations that the Nazis made no secret of using and wearing out (Slavs, prisoners from the camps) for their own ends. This utilization, depletion, and wearing down pertained in both cases to exploiting a resource in order to exhaust it, to use it up and consume it and destroy it after having extracted all its energy and all possible resources from it. Nazism, a culture and practice that fundamentally commodified and destroyed beings and things, would make the final decision that Hitler took on March 19, 1945 possible, the impact of which was felt wherever it could be relayed and implemented, namely the destruction of all the Reich’s infrastructure and the devastation of German territory so that it would be rendered unworkable, uninhabitable, and unusable by the Soviet victors, who were to find, on their arrival, only a verbrannte Erde (scorched earth), a land of desolation, like a desert. One can hardly say that the protection of nature featured in this.
Johann Chapoutot holds the “agrégation” (highest teaching diploma in France) in history and a doctorate from the Université Paris-I and the Technische Universität of Berlin. He is assistant professor at the Université Grenoble-II and member of the Institut universitaire de France.
A specialist in the history of contemporary Germany, his publications include Le National-socialisme et l’Antiquité (PUF, 2008), Le Meurtre de Weimar (PUF, 2010), and L’Âge des dictatures (PUF, 2008).
Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, Volume 113, Issue 1, 2012.
[1] More recently, the Claude Allègre case showed that, faced with “unique” environmentalist thinking, the Socratic technophile claimed his status as a martyr of dogma, in the same way that others present themselves as victims of antiracism.
[2] Der neue Brockhaus, 1938, vol. 3, 346.
[3] Der neue Brockhaus, 1938, vol. 3, 347.
[4] Der neue Brockhaus, 1938, vol. 2, 378.
[5] The number and power of the Natur- und Heimatschutz organizations is a German specificity at the turn of the twentieth century. With this already-ripe sensitivity, the Nazis had to form more groups than they would otherwise have created or been a catalyst for. See Frank Uekotter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 83.
[6] See Johann Chapoutot, Le National-socialisme et l’Antiquité (Paris: PUF, 2008), chap. 1.
[7] Richard Walther Darré, Blut und Boden: Ein Grundgedanke des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1936), 8.
[8] See, most notably, Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s “Green Party” (Bourne End, UK: Kensal Press, 1985). Her conclusions are strongly challenged by recent historiography (see infra).
[9] Adolf Hitler, speech at Reichstag, April 23, 1939, quoted in Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932-1945, vol. 1 (Würzburg: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962), 1178–9.
[10] Adolf Hitler, private conversations between January 18 and February 4, 1942, Wolfschanze, quoted in Henry Picker, ed., Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier: 1941-1942 (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976).
[11] Johannes Zechner, “‘Die grünen Wurzeln unseres Volkes’: Zur ideologischen Karriere des deutschen Waldes,” in Völkisch und national: zur Aktualität alter Denkmuster im 21. Jahrhundert, Uwe Puschner and Ulrich Grossmann, eds. (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 179–94.
[12] “Der Sinn unseres Lebens,” in SS-Leitheft, 1939, Series 4, 27–30 (28).
[13] Richard Walther Darré, Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (Munich: Lehmann, 1930), 133–34.
[14] Darré, Neuadel, 134.
[15] From 1919, moreover, the protection of nature was a consitutional provision, as evidenced by Article 150 of the Weimar Constitution. See Charles Closmann, “Legalizing a Volksgemeinschaft: Nazi Germany’s Reich Nature Protection Law of 1935,” in How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich, ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 29.
[16] Thomas Lekan, “The Reich Nature Protection Law and Regional Planning in the Third Reich,” in How Green Were the Nazis? ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 94.
[17] Michael Imort, “The Rhetoric and Reality of National Socialist Forest Policy,” in How Green Were the Nazis?, ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 57.
[18] Prussian aristocrat Walter von Keudell was discharged from Prussian public office after his participation in the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Member of the DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei) and Reichstag member, he was Minister of the Interior (1927–1928). A specialist in forestry affairs, he joined the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in 1933 before being appointed Generalforstmeister for Prussia. Imort, “The Rhetoric and Reality,” in How Green Were the Nazis? ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 58.
[19] Lekan, “The Reich Nature Protection Law and Regional Planning in the Third Reich,” in How Green Were the Nazis?, ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 92.
[20] Gesine Gerhard, “Richard Walther Darré’s Agrarian Ideology,” in How Green Were the Nazis? ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 139.
[21] Thomas Zeller, “Alwin Seifert and the Third Reich,” in How Green Were the Nazis? ed. Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 156.
[22] Kirian Klaus Patel, Soldaten der Arbeit: Arbeitsdienste in Deutschland und in den USA, 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht), 2003.
[23] Uekotter, The Green and the Brown, 109-24.
[24] David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Pimlico, 2007).
[25] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Bottom of the Hill, 2010), 249.
[26] Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, 323. This passage was back-translated from the French.
[27] See Bernfried Lichtnau, Prora auf Rügen: Das unvollendete Projekt des 1. KDF-Seebades in Deutschland (Peenemünde, Germany: Dietrich, 1995).
[28] See Andreas Heusler, Rüstung, Kriegswirtschaft und Zwangsarbeit im “Dritten Reich” (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010).
[29] See Albrecht Lehmann, “Der deutsche Wald ,” in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 3, ed. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Munich: Beck, 2003), 187–200.
[30] David C. Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (London: W. W. Norton, 2007).
[31] See Jens-Christian Wagner, Produktion des Todes: Das Konzentrationslager Mittelbau-Dora (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001).
[32] See Wolfgang Benz, Flossenbürg: Fas Konzentrationslager und seine Aussenlager (Munich: Beck, 2007).
[33] See Florian Freund, Arbeistlager Zement: Das Konzentrationslager Ebensee und die Rakentenrüstung (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1989).
[34] See Markus Gleichmann, Düsenjäger über dem Walpersberg: Die Geschichte des unterirdischen Flugzeugwerkes Reimagh bei Kahla (Zella-Mehlis: Heinrich Jung, 2004).
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