How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich

Series in Ecology and History

by Franz-Josef Brüggemeier (Editor), Mark Cioc (Editor), Thomas Zeller (Editor)

The Nazis created nature preserves, championed 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?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.

Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention they received from the regime did not always translate into action. By the late 1930s, nature and the environment had become less pressing concerns as Nazi Germany prepared for and executed a global conflagration.

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? examines the overlap between Nazi ideology and conservationist agendas. This landmark book underscores the fact that the “green” policies of the Nazis were more than a mere episode or aberration in environmental history.

Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, Thomas Zeller, Charles Closmann, Michael Imort, Thomas Lekan, Frank Uekötter, Gesine Gerhard, Thomas Rohkrämer, Mark Bassin, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn.

Genres: History

283 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2005

Reviews

[Traci]

Now that Wal-Mart and the Nazi's are a part of the green movement I want to stop recycling and have a lot of babies.

[Aria Izik-Dzurko]

Nothing is black or white. Or green. Or brown, for that matter. Good ideas spring from unlikely sources, bad ideas grow in the most puritanical of minds.

[[ J o ]]

Need need need.