Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- A Note on Vocabulary
- 1 The Nazis and the Environment: A Relevant Topic?
- 2 Ideas: Diverse Roots and a Common Cause
- 3 Institutions: Working Toward the Führer
- 4 Conservation at Work: Four Case Studies
- 5 On the Paper Trail: The Everyday Business of Conservation
- 6 Changes in the Land
- 7 Continuity and Silence: Conservation after 1945
- 8 Lessons
- Appendix: Some Remarks on the Literature and Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Nazis and the Environment: A Relevant Topic?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- A Note on Vocabulary
- 1 The Nazis and the Environment: A Relevant Topic?
- 2 Ideas: Diverse Roots and a Common Cause
- 3 Institutions: Working Toward the Führer
- 4 Conservation at Work: Four Case Studies
- 5 On the Paper Trail: The Everyday Business of Conservation
- 6 Changes in the Land
- 7 Continuity and Silence: Conservation after 1945
- 8 Lessons
- Appendix: Some Remarks on the Literature and Sources
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In February 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power, the German conservationist Wilhelm Lienenkämper published an essay on “the protection of nature from a Nazi perspective.” Three years earlier, the Nazi government had passed a national conservation law with great fanfare, and now, Lienenkämper thought, the time was ripe for a preliminary summary of the results. He was full of praise for the law itself and celebrated it as an achievement for the ages. For him, the conservation law was not an accidental by-product of Nazi rule but a direct expression of the “new Weltanschauung.” Whereas the protection of nature had formerly been something “that one can choose to do or not,” National Socialism now bestowed on it a new sense of urgency. As Lienenkämper enthusiastically proclaimed:
The new ideology, and with it the national conservation law, imposes a new postulate for totality. They refuse all kinds of compromise and demand strict, literal fulfillment…. Time and again, we are nowadays talking about sacrifice as a key idea of our society. Those refusing the call for sacrifice are under attack, and rightly so. But when conservationists are likewise asking for sacrifice in the interest of their movement and on the basis of the law, people come up with a thousand ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, with economic interests and special concerns; we are not always proceeding with the firmness and rigidity that we are used to in other fields. The idea of National Socialism demands totality and sacrifice. […]
- Type
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- Information
- The Green and the BrownA History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006