Fascist Ecology: The "Green
Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Published version. "Fascist Ecology:
The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical
Antecedents," in Eco-fascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience.
Eds. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier.
PETER
STAUDENMAIER
FASCIST
ECOLOGY: THE GREEN WING" OF THE NAZI PARTY AND ITS HISTORICAL
ANTECEDENTS
"We recognize that separating humanity
from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction
and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the
whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That
is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is
no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole
... This striving toward connectedness with the
totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is
the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist
thought:
In our zeal to condemn the status quo,
radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and
"ecofascist;' thus contributing to a sort of
conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such
a situation,
it is easy to overlook the fact that
there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which,
however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or
understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually
existing ecofascism:' that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist
movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar
intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine
more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so- called
"green wing" of German National Socialism.
Despite an extensive documentary record,
the subject remains an elusive one, underappreciated by professional historians
and environmental activists alike. In English- speaking countries as well as in
Germany itself, the very existence ofa ((green wing" in the Nazi movement,
much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately
researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations
succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subjecf or a
naive refusal to examine the full extent of the "ideological overlap
between nature conservation and National Socialism:'
This article presents a brief and necessarily
schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both
their central role in Nazi ideology and their practica! implementation during
the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century
precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual
underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.
Two initial clarifications are in order.
First, the terms "environmental"
and "ecological" are here used more or
less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly
associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an
anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights
connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to
endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-19 historical
data can or should be read as "leading inexorably" to the Nazi
calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities
and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in
light of our current situation-to make history relevant to the present social
and ecological crisis.
The Roots of the Blood and Soil Mystique
Germany is not only the birthplace ofthe
science ofecology and the site of Green politics' rise to prominence; it has
also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged
under the influence of the Romantic tradition's
anti-Enlightenmentirrationalism. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this
ominous conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.
While best known in Germany for his
fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry,
which led him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of
German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of 'ecological'
thinking in the modern sense.4 His remarkable 181 article On the Care
and Conservation of Forests, written
at the dawn of industrialization in
Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil,
condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms
strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: "When one sees
nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are
equally important-shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but
all one single unity."
Arndt's environmentalism, however, was
inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism. His eloquent and
prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms ofthe
well-being ofthe German soil and the German people, and his
repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for Teutonic racial
purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of
his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection
between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.
Riehl, a student of Arndt, further
developed this sinister tradition. In sorne respects his 'green'
streak went significantly deeper than Arndt's; presaging certain
tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 18
essay Field and Forest ended
with a call to fight for "the rights of wilderness:' But
even here nationalist pathos set the tone: "We must
save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in
winter, but also so that the
pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that
Germany remains German:'6 Riehl was an implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism
and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values
and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the
"founder of agrarian romanticism and anti- urbanism:'7
These latter two frxations matured in
the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the volkisch movement,
a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric
populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the volkisch temptation
was a pathological response to modernity. In the face ofthe very real
dislocations brought on bythe triumph ofindustrial capitalism and national
unification, volkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the
simplicity and wholeness of alife attuned to nature's purity. The mystical
effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political
vulgarity. While "the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society
that was sanctioned by history,
rooted in nature, and in communion with
the cosmic life spirit;'s it pointedly refused to locate the sources of
alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social
structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban
civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age- old object of peasant
hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. "The Germans
were in search of a mysterious wholeness that
would restore them to primeva! happiness, destroying the
hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy
had foisted on them:'9-
Reformulating traditional German
antisemitism into nature-friendly terms, the volkisch
movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural
prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment
sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence
of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful
chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism,
and environmentalist predilections. In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel
coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline
dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment.
Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for
the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist
philosophy he called 'monism: The Gerrnan Monist League
he founded cornbined scientifically based ecological holism with volkisch social
views. Haeckel believed in Nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing
and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism becarne
fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones
against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.
In this way "Haeckel contributed to
that special variety of Gerrnan thought which served as the seed bed for
National Socialism. He becarne one ofGerrnany's major ideologists for racism,
nationalism and imperialism:'10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule
Society, "a secret, radically right-wing
organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movemenf'11 But more than merely
personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology,
along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bolsche and Bruno Wille,
profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists
by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly woven web of regressive
social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an
intensely reactionary political framework.
The specific contours of this early
marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At
the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of
biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that "civilization
and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout
nature and organic life:'12 This
notion of 'naturallaws' or 'natural order' has long been a mainstay of
reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:
Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most
pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated
importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence
and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational
faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a
universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an
insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured
against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature.1
Other Monists extended this
anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional volkisch motifs
ofindiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly
emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again,
was the conflation ofbiological and social categories. The biologist Raoul
FrancŽ, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so-called Lebensgesetze,
'laws of life' through which the natural
order determines the social order.
He opposed racial mixing, for example,
as "unnatural:, FrancŽ is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a
"pioneer of the ecology movement:,14
FrancŽ,s colleague Ludwig
Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation
for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements.
He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and 'racial,
purity: "Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He
claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened
the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic
forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic,
destroying the virtues ofthe race:,1
Thus by the early years of the twentieth
century a certain type of'ecologicaf argumentation, saturated with right-wing
political content, had attained a measure of respectability within the
political culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War
1, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity
and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.
The Youth Movement and the Weimar Era
The chief vehicle for carrying this
ideological constellation to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous
phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German
popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also
known as the Wandervogel (which
translates roughly as 'wandering free spirits'),
the youth movement was a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending
neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason,
and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for
authentic, non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis
spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it
suffered. They have been aptly characterized as 'right-wing hippies: for
although sorne sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of
emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings
in the process), most of the Wandervogel were eventually absorbed by the
Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Fźhrer worship is worth
examining.
The various strands of the youth
movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly 'non-
pol’tica!' response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct
emotional experience over social critique and action. They pushed the
contradictions of their time to the breaking point, but were unable or
unwilling to take the final step toward organized, focused social rebellion,
"convinced that the changes they wanted to effect in society could not be
brought about by political means, but only by the improvement of the
individual:'16 This
proved to be a fatal error. "Broadly speaking, two ways
of revolt were open to them: they could have pursued
their radical critique of society, which in due course would have brought them
into the camp of social revolution. [But] the Wandervogel chose
theotherformofprotestagainstsociety- romanticism:'17
This posture lent itself all too readily
to a very different kind of political mobilization: the 'unpolitical' zealotry
of fascism. The youth movement did not simply fail in its chosen form of
protest, it was actively realigned when its members went over to the Nazis by
the thousands. Its countercultural energies and its dreams of harmony with
nature bore the bitterest fruit. This is, perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory
of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems
but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political
and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation
in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in
times of crisis, yield barbaric results.
The attraction such perspectives
exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to
enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes. It is in the specific form of
this rejection that the danger lies. Here the work of several more theoretical
minds from the period is instructive. The philosopher Ludwig Klages profoundly
influenced the youth movement and particularly shaped their ecological
consciousness. He authored a tremendously important essay titled "Man
and Earth" for the legendary Meissner gathering of the Wandervogel
in 191 .18 An
extraordinarily poignant text and the best known of all Klages' work, it is not
only "one of the very greatest manifestoes ofthe
radical eco-pacifist movement in Germany;'19 but also a classic example of the
seductive terminology of reactionary ecology.
"Man and Earth" anticipated
just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried
the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global eco-systemic
balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats,
urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic
terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism,
hyper-consumption and the ideology of progress: It even condemned the
environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales,
and displayed a clear recognition ofthe planet as an ecological totality. All
of this in 191 !
It may come as a surprise, then, to
learn that Klages was throughout bis life politically archconservative and a
venomous anti-Semite. One historian labels him a "Volkish fanatic"
and another considers him simply "an intellectual pacemaker for
the Third Reich" who "paved the way for fascist philosophy in many
important respects:' In "Man and Earth" a genuine outrage at the
devastation of the natural environment is coupled with a political subtext of
cultural despair. Klages'
diagnosis of the ills of modern society, for all its declamations about
capitalism, returns always to a single culprit: "Geisf' His
idiosyncratic use of this term, which means mind or intellect, was meant to
denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought
itself. Such a wholesale indictment of reason cannot help but have savage
political implications. It forecloses any chance of rationally
reconstructing society's relationship with nature and justifies the most brutal
authoritarianism. But the lessons of Klages' life and work have been hard for
ecologists to learn. In 1980, "Man and Earth" was republished as an
esteemed and seminal treatise to accompany the birth ofthe German Greens.
Another philosopher and stern critic
of Enlightenment who helped bridge fascism and environmentalism was
Mart’n Heidegger. A much more renowned thinker than Klages,
Heidegger preached "authentic Being" and harshly criticized
modern technology, and is therefore often celebrated as a precursor of
ecological thinking. On the basis of his critique of technology and rejection
of humanism, contemporary deep ecologists have elevated Heidegger to their
pantheon ofeco-heroes:
Heidegger's critique of anthropocentric
humanism, his call for humanity to learn to "let things
be;' his notion that humanity is involved in a "play" or "dance"
with earth, sky, and gods, his meditation on the possibility ofan
authentic mode of"dwelling" on the earth, his complaint that
industrial technology is laying waste to the earth, his emphasis on the
importance of local place and "homeland;' his
claim that humanity should guard and preserve things, instead of dominating
them-all these aspects of Heidegger's thought help to support the
claim that he is a major deep ecological theorist.
Such effusions are, at best, dangerously
naive. They suggest a style of thought utterly oblivious to the history of
fascist appropriations of all the elements the quoted passage praises in
Heidegger. (To his credit, the author of the above lines, a major deep
ecological theorist in his own right, has since changed his position and
eloquently urged his colleagues to do the same.)2
As for the philosopher of being himself, he was-
unlike Klages, who lived in Switzerland after 191 -an active member of the
Nazi party and for a time enthusiastically, even adoringly supported the Fźhrer. His
mystical panegyrics to Heimat (homeland) were complemented by a deep
anti-Semitism, and his metaphysically phrased broadsides against technology and
modernity converged neatly with populist demagogy. Although he lived and
taught for thirty years after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger never once
publicly regretted, much less renounced, his involvement with National
Socialism, nor even perfunctorily condemned its crimes. His work, whatever its
philosophical merits, stands today as a signal admonition about the political
uses of anti- humanism in ecological garb.
In addition to the youth movement and
proto-fascist philosophies, there were, of course, practical efforts at
protecting natural habitats during the Weimar period. Many of these
projects were profoundly implicated in the ideology which culminated in the victory
of 'Blood and Soil: A 192 recruitment pitch for a
woodlands preservation outfit gives a sense of the
environmental rhetoric of the time:
In every German breast the German forest
quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags
and boulders, waters and winds, legends
and fairy tales, with its songs and
its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a
longing for home; in all German souls the German forest
lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness
and strength, its might and
dignity, its riches and its beauty-it is the source
of German inwardness, ofthe German soul, ofGerman
freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German
forest for the sake of the elders and the
youth, and join the new German "League
for the Protection and Consecration of the German
Forest:'24
The mantra-like repetition of the word
"German" and the mystical depiction of the sacred
forest fuse together, once again, nationalism
and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly
significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such
relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing
which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German
Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt,
Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 19 and
194 as forebears
of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement's incorporation of
environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and
state power.
Nature in National Socialist Ideology
The reactionary ecological ideas whose
outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of
the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash
in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National
Socialist "religion of nature;' as one historian has
described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval Teutonic nature mysticism,
pseudo- scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of
racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were
'natural order; organicist holism and denigration of humanity: "Throughout
the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern
a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-a-vis nature, and,
as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature:'2 Quoting
a Nazi educator, the same source continues: "anthropocentric
views in general had to be rejected. They would be valid only 'if it
is assumed that
nature has been created only for man. We
decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception ofnature, man is a
link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism':'26
Such arguments have a chilling currency
within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony
is ascertaining "the eternallaws ofnature's processes" (Hitler) and
organizing society to correspond to them. The Fźhrer was particularly
fond of stressing the "helplessness of humankind in the face of nature's
everlasting law:'27 Echoing Haeckel and the
Monists, Mein Kampf announces: "When people attempt to rebel
against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same
principies to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions
against nature must lead to their own downfall:'28
The authoritarian implications of this
view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the
context of the Nazis' emphasis on holism and organicism. In 19 4 the director of the Reich Agency
for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives
for biology curricula: "Very early, the youth must develop an understanding
of the civic importance of the 'organicism, i.e. the co-ordination of all parts
and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life:'29 This (by now familiar) unmediated
adaptation of biological concepts to social phenomena served to justify not
only the totalitarian social order of the Third Reich but also the expansionist
politics of Lebensraum (the plan of conquering 'living space' in Eastern
Europe for the German
people). It also provided the link
between environmental purity and racial purity:
Two central themes of biology education
follow [according to the Nazis] from the holistic perspective: nature
protection and eugenics. If one views nature as a unified whole, students
will automatically develop a sense for ecology and environmental conservation.
At the same time, the nature protection concept will
direct attention to the urbanized and 'overcivilized' modern human race.
In many varieties of the National
Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian
romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea
of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search
for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan
elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg,
and Walther DarrŽ. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th
Century: "Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the
city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk
and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract
adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos:' 1
Such musings, it must be stressed, were
not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at
the very top ofthe Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated
with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and
animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and
staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even
established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes.
And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing
authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including
environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge)
as alternatives to coal, and declaring "water, winds and tides" the
energy path of the future. 2
Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders
maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an
essential element of racial rejuvenation. In December 1942, Himmler released a
decree "On the Treatment of the Land in the Eastern Territories;'
referring to the newly annexed portions o f Poland. I t read in part:
The peasant of our racial stock has
always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers ofthe soil, plants,
and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. Por him,
respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore,
the new Lebensriiume (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our
settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature
is a decisive prerequisite. It is one ofthe bases for fortifying the
German Volk.
This passage recapitulates almost all of
the tropes comprised by classical ecofascist ideology: Lebensraum, Heimat, the
agrarian mystique, the health of the Volk, closeness to and respect for
nature (explicitly constructed as the standard against which society is to be
judged), maintaining nature's precarious balance, and the earthy powers of the
soil and its creatures. Such motifs were anything but personal idiosyncrasies
on the part of Hitler, Himmler, or Rosenberg; even Goring-who was, along
with Goebbels, the member of the Nazi inner circle least hospitable to
ecological ideas- appeared at times to be a committed conservationist. 4 These sympathies were also hardly
restricted to the upper echelons of the party. A study of the membership rolls
of several mainstream Weimar era Naturschutz (nature protection)
organizations revealed that by 19
9, fully 60 percent ofthese conservationists had joined the NSDAP
(compared to about 1O percent of adult men and 2 percent of teachers
and lawyers). Clearly
the affinities between environmentalism and National Socialism ran deep.
At the level ofideology, then,
ecological themes played a vital role in German fascism. lt would be a grave mistake,
however, to treat these elements as mere propaganda, cleverly deployed to mask
Nazism's true character as a technocratic-industrialist juggernaut. The
definitive history of German anti-urbanism and agrarian romanticism argues
incisively against this view:
Nothing could be more wrong than to
suppose that most ofthe leading National Socialist ideologues had cynically
feigned an agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban culture, without any
inner conviction and for merely electoral and propaganda purposes, in order to
hoodwink the public ... In reality, the majority
of the leading National Socialist ideologists were without any doubt more or
less inclined to agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism and convinced of the
need for a relative re-agrarianization. 6
The question remains, however: To what
extent did the Nazis actually implement environmental policies during the
twelve-year Reich? There is strong evidence that the 'ecological' tendency in
the party, though largely ignored today, had considerable success for most of
the party's reign. This "green wing" of the NSDAP was represented
above all by Walther DarrŽ, Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert and Rudolf Hess, the four
figures who primarily shaped fascist ecology in practice.
Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine
"The unity of blood and soil must
be restored;' proclaimed Richard Walther DarrŽ in 19 0. 7 This
infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between 'blood' (the race
or Volk) and 'soil' (the land and the natural environment) specific to
Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the
enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless,
wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German
blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil.
While the term "blood and soil" had been circulating in volkisch circles
since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was DarrŽ
who first popularized it as a slogan and
then enshrined it as a guiding principie ofNazi thought. Harking back to Arndt
and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe,
predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health
and ecological sustainability.
DarrŽ was one of the party's chief
"race theorists" and was also instrumental in galvanizing peasant
support for the Nazis during the critica! period of the early 19 0s. From 19 until 1942
he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was
no minor fiefdom; the agriculture
ministry had the fourth largest budget
of all
the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war. 8 From this position DarrŽ
was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He
played an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist
tendencies in National Socialism:
It was DarrŽ who gave the ill-defined
anti-civilization, anti- liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments
of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if
DarrŽ had an immense influence on the ideology of National Socialism, as if he
was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the value system
ofan agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and-above all-to legitimate
this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented
toward a far-reaching re-agrarianization. 9
This goal was not only quite consonant
with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one
of its primaryjustifications, even motivations. In language replete with the
biologistic metaphors of organicism, DarrŽ declared: "The concept of Blood
and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as
is necessary to establish a harmony between the body ofour Volk and the
geopolitical space:'40
Aside from providing green camouflage
for the colonization of Eastern Europe, DarrŽ worked to install environmentally
sensitive principies as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultura!
policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained
emblematic ofNazi doctrine. When the "Battle for Production" (a
scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultura! sector) was proclaimed at the
second Reich Farmers Congress in 19
4, the very first point in the programread "Keep the soil
healthy!" But DarrŽ's most important innovation was the introduction on a
large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled
"lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise;' or farming according to the laws oflife.
The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much
reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures
carne from Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic
cultivation.41
The campaign to institutionalize organic
farming encompassed tens of thousands of smallholdings and estates across
Germany. It met with considerable resistance from other members of the Nazi
hierarchy, above all Backe and Goring. But DarrŽ, with the help of Hess and
others, was able to sustain the policy until his forced resignation in 1942 (an
event which had little to do with his environmentalist leanings). And these
efforts in no sense represented merely DarrŽ's personal predilections; as the
standard history of German agricultura! policy points out, Hitler and Himmler
"were in complete sympathy with these ideas:'42 Still, it was largely DarrŽ's influence
in the Nazi apparatus which yielded, in practice, a level of government support
for ecologically sound farming methods and land use
planning unmatched by any state before or since.
For these reasons DarrŽ has sometimes
been regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement. His biographer,
in fact, once referred to him as the "father
of the Greens:'4 Her
book Blood and Soil, undoubtedly
the best single source on DarrŽ in either German or English, consistently
downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him
instead as a misguided agrarian radical. This grave error in judgement
indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an 'ecological' aura. DarrŽ's
published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to
indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a
vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as
"weeds"). His decade-long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover,
architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler's deranged
cause. One account even claims that it was DarrŽ who convinced Hitler and
Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.44 The ecological aspects of
his thought cannot, in sum, be separated from their thoroughly Nazi framework.
Far from embodying the 'redeeming' facets of National Socialism, DarrŽ
represents the baleful specter of ecofascism in power.
Implementing the Ecofascist Program
It is frequently pointed out that the
agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy were in constant
tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic- industrialist
thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization. What is not often remarked is
that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component.
The two men principally responsible for sustaining this environmentalist
commitment in áthe midst of intensive industrialization
were Reichsminister Fritz Todt and his aide, the high-level planner and
engineer Alwin Seifert. Todt
was "one ofthe most influential National Socialists;'4 directlyresponsibleforquestionsoftechnologicalandindustrial
policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet- level
ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and
had "gathered the major technical tasks
of the Reich into bis own hands:'46 According
to bis successor, Albert Speer, Todt "loved nature" and "repeatedly
had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against bis despoiling the
landscape around Obersalzberg:'47 Another source calls him simply "an
ecologist:'48 This
reputation is based chiefly on Todt's efforts to make Autobahn construction-one
of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century-as
environmentally sensitive as possible.
The pre-eminent historian of German
engineering describes this commitment thus: "Todt demanded of the
completed work oftechnoiogy a harmony with nature and with the Iandscape,
thereby fulfilling modern ecoiogical principies of engineering as well as the
'organological' principies of bis own era along with their roots in volkisch
ideoiogy:'49
The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond
an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic
reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests
and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and DarrŽ,
these environmentalist concerns were inseparabiy bound to a volkisch-nationalist
outlook. Todt himseif expressed this connection succinctly: "The
fulfillment ofmere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German
highway construction. The German highway must be an expression ofits
surrounding Iandscape and an expression of the German essence:'so Todt's
chief advisor and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin
Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a "fanatical ecologist." 1 Seifert bore the
official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the
party was "Mr. Mother Earth." The appellation was deserved; Seifert
dreamed of a "total conversion from technology to nature:' 2 and would often wax
lyrical about the wonders ofGerman nature and the
tragedyof"humankind's" carelessness. As early as 19 4 he wrote to Hess demanding
attention to water issues and invoking "work methods that are more attuned
to nature." In
discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness
and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized
agriculture. He criticized DarrŽ as too moderate, and "called for an
agricultura! revolution towards 'a more peasant-like,
natural, simple' method of farming, 'independent of capital'." 4
With the Third Reich's technological
policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis' massive industrial
build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the
party's philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives
often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state.
In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing
Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth "in arder
to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life." Seifert
reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only
the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.
But even near-misses such as these would
have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Minister Rudolf Hess, who
provided the "green wing" of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very
top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate
Hess's power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the
National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for
two decades was Hitler's devoted personal deputy. He has been described as
"Hitler's closest confidant;'
6 and the Fźhrer himselfreferred to Hess as his
"closest advisor:' 7 Hess was not only the
highest party leader and second in line (after Goring) to succeed Hitler; in
addition, alllegislation and every decree had to pass through his office before
becoming law.
An inveterate nature lover as well as a
devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet-not even
Hitler's rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him- and accepted
only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced DarrŽ to Hitler,
thus securing the "green wing" its first power base. He was an even
more tenacious proponent of organic farming than DarrŽ, and pushed the latter
to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche
Landbauweise. 8 His office was also
directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number
of specialists who shared Seifert's ecological approach. 9
With Hess's enthusiastic backing, the "green
wing" was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as
March 19 ,
a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at
national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included
reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and
preservationist
~..
ECOFASCISM REVISITED
decrees blocking industrial development,
undoubtedly "ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time:'60 Planning ordinances were
designed for the protection ofwildlife habitat and at the same time demanded
respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first
nature preserves in Europe.
Along with DarrŽ's efforts toward
re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert's
attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and
industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz
of 19
. This completely unprecedented "nature protection law" not
only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and "natural
monuments" across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access
to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance "required
all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz
authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would
produce fundamental alterations in the countryside."61
Although the legislation's effectiveness
was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its
passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the "definitive fulfillment
ofthe volkisch-romantic longings;'62 and Hans Klose, Schoenichen's
successor as head ofthe Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi
environmental policy as the "high point of nature
protection" in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was
in facilitating the "intellectual realignment of German
Naturschutz" and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the
Nazi enterprise.
While the achievements of the
"green wing" were daunting, they should not be exaggerated.
Ecological initiatives were, of course, hardly universally popular within the
party. Goebbels, Bormann, and Heydrich, for example, were implacably opposed to
them, and considered DarrŽ, Hess and their fellows undependable dreamers,
eccentrics, or simply security risks. This latter suspicion seemed to be
confirmed by Hess's famed flight to Britain in 1941;
after that point, the environmentalist tendency was for the most part
suppressed. Todt was killed in aplane crash in February 1942, and shortly
thereafter DarrŽ was stripped of all his posts. For the final three years of
the Nazi conflagration the "green wing" played no active role. Their
work, however, had long since left an indelible stain.
Fascist Ecology in Context
To make this dismaying and discomforting
analysis more palatable, it is tempting to draw precisely the wrong conelusion-namely,thateventhemostreprehensiblepolitical
undertakings sometimes produce laudable results. But the reallesson here is
just the opposite: Even the most laudable of causes can be perverted and
instrumentalized in the service ofcriminal savagery. The "green
wing" of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and
manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters
and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist
violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their
'ecological' involvements, far from offsetting these
fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their
configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially
responsible for organized mass murder.
No aspect of the Nazi project can be
properly understood without examining its implication in the holocaust. Here,
too, ecological arguments played a crucially malevolent role. Not only did the
"green wing" refurbish the sanguine antisemitism of traditional
reactionary ecology; it catalyzed a whole new outburst of lurid racist
fantasies of organic inviolability and political revenge. The confluence of
anti-humanist dogma with a fetishization of natural 'purity' provided
not merely a rationale but an incentive for the Third Reich's most heinous
crimes. Its insidious appeal unleashed murderous energies previously untapped.
Finally, the displacement of any social analysis of environmental destruction
in favor of mystical ecology served as an integral component in the preparation
of the final solution:
To explain the destruction ofthe
countryside and environmental damage, without questioning the German people's
bond to nature, could only be done by not analysing environmental damage in a
societal context and by refusing to understand them as an expression of
conflicting social interests. Had this been done, it would have led to
criticism ofNational Socialism itselfsince that was not immune
to such forces. One solution was to associate such environmental problems with
the destructive influence of other races. National Socialism could
then be seen to strive for the elimination of other races in order to allow the
German people's innate understanding and feeling ofnature to assert itself,
hence securing a harmonic life close to nature for the future.
This is the true legacy of eco-fascism
in power: "genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of
environment protection:
The experience of the "green wing,
of German fascism is a sobering reminder of the political volatility of
ecology. It certainly does not indicate any inherent or inevitable connection
between ecological issues and right-wing politics; alongside the reactionary
tradition surveyed here, there has always been an equally vital heritage of
left-libertarian ecology, in Germany as elsewhere.66 But certain patterns can be
discerned: "While concerns about problems posed by humankind's increasing
mastery over nature have increasingly been shared by ever larger groups of
people embracing a plethora of ideologies, the most consistent 'pro-natural
arder' response found political embodiment on the radical right:'67 This is the
common thread which unites merely conservative or even supposedly apolitical
manifestations of environmentalism with the straightforwardly fascist variety.
The historical record does, to be sure,
belie the vacuous claim that "those who want to reform society according
to nature are neither left nor right but ecologically minded:'68 Environmental
themes can be mobilized from the left or from the right, indeed they require
an explicit social context if they are to have any political valence
whatsoever. "Ecology, alone does not prescribe a
politics; it must be interpreted, mediated through sorne theory of society in
arder to acquire political meaning. Failure to heed this mediated
interrelationship between the social and the ecological is the hallmark of
reactionary ecology.
As noted above, this failure most
commonly takes the form of a call to "reform society according to nature;'
that is, to formulate sorne version of 'natural order' or 'natural
law' and submit human needs and actions to it. As a consequence, the
underlying social processes and societal structures which constitute and shape
people's relations with their environment are left unexamined. Such willful
ignorance, in turn, obscures the ways in which all conceptions ofnature are
themselves socially produced, and leaves power structures unquestioned while
simultaneously providing them with apparently 'naturally ordained' status. Thus
the substitution of eco-mysticism for clear-sighted social-ecological inquiry
has catastrophic political repercussions, as the complexity of the
society-nature dialectic is collapsed into a purified Oneness. An ideologically
charged 'natural order' does not leave room for compromise;
its claims are absolute.
For all of these reasons, the slogan
advanced by many contemporary Greens, "We are neither right nor left but
up front;' is historically naive and politically fatal. The necessary project
of creating an emancipatory ecological politics demands an acute awareness and
understanding of the legacy of classical eco-fascism and its conceptual
continuities with present-day environmental discourse. An 'ecological'
orientation alone, outside of a critical social framework, is dangerously
unstable. The record of fascist ecology shows that under the right conditions
such an orientation can quickly lead to barbarism.