By Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D.
Posted: Sunday, April 1, 2001
ARTICLES
Publication Date: April 1, 2001
Who are less like the Nazis— agronomists and genetic engineers, or those who would straightjacket such sciences?
"Genetic engineers, neo-Darwinists and the biotech industry," said self-styled Internet guru Keith Parkins in a 1999 essay,1 "are the new Nazis. The Nazis in the 1930s only experimented on the Jewish race, the new Nazis are experimenting on the entire human race."
Analogies relating to the Nazis have become a staple of the propaganda of those opposed to agronomy, high technology, and science in general. A relatively complex analogy of this sort— from Jon Rappoport, who describes himself as an artist, a philosopher, and an investigative journalist— is based on the fact that some German companies that served the Nazis are involved in modern biotechnology and in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and agronomic products.2
Science as Holocaustal
The connecting of modern science, the Nazis, and the Holocaust emerged at the end of World War II, in Frankfurt, Germany, in such works as Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany Max Horkheimer and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. This connection is by no means rare or fading. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and its animal rights/"animal liberation" allies compare the breeding and slaughter of chickens to the Holocaust. PETA's notorious assertion—"Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses"—nowise suggests how humans differ from broilers. In a discussion of agricultural gene splicing and the Human Genome Project published in the June/July 2000 issue of Ethical Consumer Magazine, clinical geneticist Michael Antoniou, Senior Lecturer in molecular pathology at a teaching hospital in London, England, raised the specter of Nazi programs in eugenics.
Some writers of this disposition at least implicitly blame the Nazi horrors on modernism and/or on the Enlightenment—the post-Renaissance climate that brought scientific empiricism, skepticism toward traditions and religious doctrines, and many humanitarian reforms—and portray postmodernism as the cure for fascistic tendencies. What "postmodernism" means is indefinite, but those styles, customs, and movements that are described as postmodern are typically characterized by a revival of traditional principles and techniques. And it seems that subscribers to postmodernism tend to disfavor what most mainstream scientists call science.
In Technoscientific Angst: Ethics + Responsibility (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Raphael Sassower, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, states:
Modernity, with its instrumental rationality, its bureaucratic aura, and its cult of efficiency . . . simply extended its tenets and commitments during the Holocaust. . . . Concentration camps are not to be seen as an aberration in any sense of the term: They are extremely disturbing but absolutely rational manifestations of the concern with the Jewish problem.
Sassower further cites author Robert N. Proctor [See " Nazis Versus Cancer: The Flip Side of Fascism?", PfH, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1999], Professor of the History of Science at The Pennsylvania State University, to the effect that the Nazis did not "abuse" science but rather "contextualized" it in a "vacuum" to fulfill a "specific political agenda."
In Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988), Proctor stated: "The Nazis 'depoliticized' problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms."
The connecting of modern science, the Nazis, and the Holocaust emerged at the end of World War II . . . . This connection is by no means rare or fading.
In Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 1989), social theorist Zygmunt Bauman stated that the Final Solution had arisen from "a genuinely rational concern," that it had been "generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose," and that "rules of instrumental rationality" were "singularly incapable of preventing such a phenomenon." According to Bauman, "modern rational society" paved the way for the Holocaust, and anti-Semitism was not responsible for it. This was also a thesis of German historian Detlev J. K. Peukert (d. 1990) in a 1988 University of Pennsylvania conference address aptly titled "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science."
Peukert was the author of The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) and, until his death, the director of the Hamburg Research Institute for the History of National Socialism.
In Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (Yale University Press, 1989), Peukert had discussed "pathologies of modernity" and argued that "in the epoch of 'classical modernity,' instrumental reason and the spirit of science assumed hegemonic roles in the ordering of German society" as the Nazis elevated the "destructive tendencies of Industrial class society"—part of the "pathologies and seismic fractures within modernity itself"—"into mass destruction."
To those who accept Horkheimer and Adorno's line of thought, German anti-Semitism could not have been responsible for the Holocaust, because such causation would have made the Holocaust a unique event instead of an outgrowth of a crisis in capitalism (or modernity)—a "singularity"—that necessitates scapegoating certain segments of the population. Proctor has compared the Final Solution to the practice of medicine. And Bauman provided a gardening analogy in which the victims of the Holocaust are weeds. The Holocaust, according to the sociologist, was a "by-product of the modern drive to a fully designed, fully controlled world." Neither author, however, has offered in his writings any evidence of a causal relationship between science and the Final Solution.
I consider the experiments for which the Nazis are notorious altogether unscientific. Proctor merely denies that they were simply poor instances of science. His thesis in The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton University Press, 1999) is, in part, that the Nazis carried on "good science." It would be odd simultaneously to impugn science, to blame Nazism on science, and to claim that the Nazis engaged in prescient "good science"—unless one believes, as Proctor evidently does:
* that the "good science" of the Nazis would today be termed "alternative, organic, holistic, or otherwise heterodox";
* that some of the major fruits of science—namely, commercial manmade chemicals, modern medical practice, and agronomy—are deadly to humans; and
* that such deadliness is a hallmark of modern or mainstream science.
The Antiscience Worldview
The worldview of postmodern thinkers and ecofeminists emphasizes, misleadingly, dichotomization of reductionism and holism and of vitalism and mechanism. In "Understanding Nazi Animal Protection and the Holocaust" (published in a 1992 issue of Anthrozoos), Dr. Arnold Arluke, Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, and Boria Sax, Ph.D., coauthor of Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2000), stated that the Nazis "exalted synthesis against analysis . . . and Volk legend against scientific truth. . . . Life . . . had an organic unity . . . . the invisible force that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts."
Vitalism and derivatives of holism pervade alternative medicine, biodynamic farming, and the New Age movement. But none of the four theories mentioned above is invariably scientific or unscientific. Influential Nazis tended to approve of the occult and of unscientific manifestations of vitalism and quasi-holism, including biodynamic farming, homeopathy, and a precursor of holistic medicine.
Nazism was very complex and is not reducible to a single group of beliefs, particularly in terms of the aforementioned theories. But within the Nazi movement of the early 20th century were influential figures who publicly subscribed to tenets remarkably similar to the prevalent antiscience claims of today's advocates of postmodernism, deconstructionism, and/or ecofeminism. Indeed, some of the antiscience canons of postmodernism were enunciated by key members of the Nazi regime. This alone casts doubt on the assertion of a causal relationship between science and Nazism and/or the Holocaust. Furthermore, except for Germany, no crisis in any of those countries that during the 20th century were capitalistic and highly industrialized has resulted in anything of a sort even approaching that of the Holocaust.
The concept of "rootedness" and of how it defines peoples, cultures, and the landscapes of homelands obsessed Nazis as a group. Of this obsession, French philosopher Luc Ferry says in The New Ecological Order: Trees, Animals and Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995):
. . . [T]he hatred of the artifice connected with our civilization of rootlessness is also a hatred of humans as such. For man is the antinatural being par excellence. This is even what distinguishes him from other beings, including those who seem the closest to him, animals. This is how he escapes natural cycles, how he attains the realm of culture, and the sphere of mortality, which presupposes living in accordance with laws and not just with nature.
In latter-day Germany, critics have injected the issue of Nazism into public discourse on biology and biotechnology, with social scientists there tending to connect biological selection and the Final Solution, and natural scientists primarily relating such selection to Darwinism. In "Frankenstein in the Land of Dichter and Denker" (published in the December 3, 1999, issue of Science), Princeton University's Manfred D. Laubichler stated: "What most distinguishes the 'two cultures' in Germany is their different understanding of certain key concepts of science and history." He further stated: "Genetics today is not the same as eugenics and racial hygiene in the 1930s, which were more concerned with technocratic solutions on the level of whole populations than with any detailed understanding of the role of genes in development and dis-ease. . . . Framing the debate exclusively in terms of literary images . . . or the crimes and ideology of the Nazi Period is not enough." Still, according to Laubichler, "the close association of Nazi ideology with the language of biology . . . hangs like a shadow over any discussion of the implications of modern biology and biotechnology."
But was the language of the Final Solution scientific—specifically, biological—or was it pseudoscientific? Comparing the bioengineering of foodstuffs and Nazi experimentation on humans is not uncommon among pundits opposed to such gene splicing. Often, this supposed parallelism is presented as a self-evident analogy. If, however, the Nazi experimentation cited was—as I believe—unscientific, the comparison is off-base.
The Romanticism of the Nazis
Romantics have long complained that science lessens the mysteriousness and enchantment of the natural world and of how it figures in shaping one's identity. In The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: Macdonald & Co.; New York: American Elsevier Inc., 1971), history professor Dr. Daniel Gasman stated that for Adolf Hitler, "the great defect of modern Western society was that man was in constant violation of nature." In Mein Kampf, his manifesto and 1925-27 autobiography, Hitler stated: "When a man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man. And this attack against nature must lead to his own doom." He also stated: ". . . I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord."
As a rule, influential Nazis:
* romanticized the natural world—and defined what is natural—similarly to the way in which many leaders of some current movements portray nature and naturalness;
* were preoccupied with bodily and racial "purity";
* disfavored the use of artificial fertilizers and manmade pesticides;
* advocated "preservationism" (an extreme mode of environmentalism), animal rights, vegetarianism, and consumption of mineral water; and
* favored health-related practices that would in the second half of the 20th century be called "holistic" and/or "alternative."
As a rule, influential Nazis . . . favored health-related practices that would in the second half of the 20th century be called 'holistic' and/or Ôalternative.'
For example, Schutzstaffel (SS) chief Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), whose obsession with "racial purity" led to the plot to exterminate Jewry, had some concentration camps maintain organic honeybee hives and raise organic spices and organic medicinal herbs for German troops.
Before the Nazi reign, German landscaper Hans Schwenkel stated: "According to the first book of Moses, the Jew does not know nature preservation, because God gave all plants and animals, all that creep and fly, as food to the children of Israel. Only the civilized man, and almost exclusively the Nordic man, gains a totally new relationship towards nature, namely one of reverence, on which nature preservation is also based."
Modern neo-Nazis have combined Nazism and the apocalyptic rhetoric current among extremist environmentalists. According to Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999)—by Jonathan Olsen, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside—"right-wing ecologists" hold that an "environmental apocalypse" is imminent and that its imminence calls for establishment of an "eco-dictatorship." Those activists who fight the cultivation of gene-spliced crops by "rooting out genetic pollution" in fields are describing their actions in language too reminiscent of 1930s Germany. It seems that what connects the similarities between such activists and the Nazis in general is at least a sense that one's thoughts and actions are pure and that one is acting in defense of oneself and of high moral principles. To compare modern transgenics and Nazi eugenics is preposterous; as a group, influential Nazis favored the "pure" over the "impure" in all things, but particularly with regard to races and species. Modern transgenics would have been as abhorrent to them as it is to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
Idealizing or romanticizing one's past, or the past of any group with which one identifies, can be very dangerous. In National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), Robert A. Pois, Ph.D., a history professor at the University of Colorado, showed that in 1930s Germany "the myth of the large morally pristine, pre-industrial family" was not merely believed but also imitated. "A fetishistic cultural pessimism," said Pois, "necessitated the creation of a history-defying totemistic past." Any group unsuited to this myth was a threat to "purity."
Vitalism and Agrivitalism
Vitalism—the supreme sticking point between alternative medicine and mainstream biomedicine—has long been, at least implicitly, a central tenet of organic farming. Since 1946, the year after that marking the end of World War II, the Soil Association—the British guild that publishes the quarterly Living Earth—has been advocating organic farming as "the key to sustainable agriculture." It characterizes genetic engineering as a "contradiction" to the "principal aims of organic agriculture" it upholds. Its Director, Patrick Holden, claims that conventional or intensive farming "is devitalising our food."3
In an essay on natural plant toxins published in July 2000 on the newsgroup "AgBioView,"4 Dave Wood, the coeditor of Agrobiodiversity: Characterization, Utilization and Conservation (Wallingford, U.K.: Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, 1999), stated:
It seems that a lot of the aversion to GM [gene-spliced] crops is intellectually the same as the aversion to inorganic fertilizers at the time of the founding of the Soil Association in the late thirties . . . . This was politely called neovitalism (and less politely, "muck and magic")—the belief that there was a vital principle in plants which came from the "natural" soil, and which promoted plant health, and in turn, human health. It couldn't be proved, but that didn't matter. Now we have the argument that GM crops are unhealthy—can't be proved, but so what! The parallels are close.
Many Nazi officials were exponents of anthroposophy—the mystic, spiritualistic cult founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1919. In the chapter on anthroposophy in Mystical Diets: Paranormal, Spiritual, and Occult Nutrition Practice (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993), PfH editor Jack Raso stated: "Anthroposophy is not a user-friendly philosophy. Tortuous and dense, even forbidding, it . . . . provides no shortcuts to comprehension, and at once defies simplification and tempts oversimplification."
Anthroposophy encompasses anthroposophical medicine; biodynamic farming (approved by Alwin Seifert, Reich Advocate for the Landscape and a friend to the editor of Demeter, a Nazi biodynamic-farming journal); and a mode of teaching that stresses art, drama, and "spiritual development," as embodied in the Anthroposophical Society's Waldorf Schools.
But in The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1976). historian James Webb stated:
Steiner's ideas form less a "system" than an accumulation of sometimes apparently disconnected items. Thus, from Theosophy he took the ideas of karma and reincarnation; from his mystical studies . . . a personal "Rosicrucianism." He discovered an entirely new idiosyncratic and poetic interpretation of Christianity, and somehow contrived a seeming coherence with these teachings for theories of the social and artistic life of man. The underlying unity which he and his followers found in these elements of Anthroposophy lies in their source in Steiner's . . . . faculty of "clairvoyance."
Raso explained:
Simply put, acceptance of Steiner's teachings rests ultimately on faith in his alleged extrasensory abilities. Steiner claimed . . . access to the "Akashic Chronicle," or "Akashic Record," a supposed cosmic reservoir or library. The Chronicle is believed to preserve—in the form of impressions on the "astral plane"—every thought and action that has ever occurred in the material world since the beginning of the universe. These impressions are believed to be intelligible to psychics. Anthroposophy holds that the earth evolved through seven epochs and civilizations, with Lucifer and Ahriman (the Persian god of evil) forever opposing human progress. According to The Universal Human: The Evolution of Individuality, published in 1990 by the Anthroposophic Press, Steiner stated in 1909 that humanity's "clairvoyant consciousness" had declined since the "Atlantean catastrophe," but that this decline had enabled Christ to take human form. "However," he added, "we must not remain like this. We must ascend again into the spiritual world." Webb relates Steiner's belief that the (mythical) founder of the Rosi- crucian Brotherhood (to which Steiner belonged) "sent his favorite pupil, Buddha, to Mars, where he . . . regenerated the planet as Christ had redeemed earth."
For Steiner and Nazi advocates of organic farming, the crux of organic farming was nonuse of manmade fertilizer. Two assumptions constituted the basis of such nonuse: that artificial fertilizer was alien to the environment, and that it was dead. Steiner and his followers recommended as fertilizer the end product of ultra-diluting cow dung with rainwater, burying the mixture in a cow horn, and keeping it so over a winter.
In Dynamics of Nutrition, originally published in 1975 in German, anthroposophist Gerhard Schmidt asserted that the "life forces" of plants oppose the destructive forces of nature. He stated: "A living plant is filled with forces that take its substance into spheres which are cosmic rather than earthly." According to Schmidt:
* when one eats plant foods, one is "involved with" the "etheric formative forces of the plants";
* these forces "continue to be active in the plant even when it has been picked";
* a plant "must lose its life" (i.e., must undergo "de-vitalization") before man's etheric and astral bodies can assimilate it;
* similarly, "animal food must . . . be divested of its typical animalistic character";
* if "the forces needed to overcome foods from plants and animals" are "not awakened," underutilized, or "allowed to atrophy through disease," they will "recoil back into the organism" and "their effect on man is then very tiring and disturbing";
* animal foods are easily "overcome" or "humanized" by man, but a "doubled effort" is necessary to "overcome" plant foods; and
* plant foods are more healthful than animal foods because of this greater capacity for stimulation.
According to the Association of Waldorf Schools in North America, in Fair Oaks, California, there are approximately 800 Waldorf Schools, with about 150 of them in North America. These and other anthroposophical centers advocate biodynamic farming, which according to some anthroposophists makes typical organic farming look like strip-mining. Publication of some of the organic-farming journals of Nazi Germany, such as Demeter, resumed after the war and has since continued. Partly because agrivitalism is nonfalsifiable, making believers therein doubtful of it can be very difficult. The vitalism of Nazi Germany and the Soil Association has never been scientific; indeed, it is contrary to a major aspect of 19th- and 20th-century science.
It is ironic that German scientists figured in the developments that precipitated the vitalist backlash: In 1828 chemistry professor Friedrich Wöhler, M.D. (1800-1882), accomplished the first laboratory synthesis of an organic compound (specifically, urea). He thus proved that chemistry could duplicate, even without organic molecules, a product of animal metabolism. The vitalists of Wöhler's time maintained that organic molecules could not derive from inorganic molecules.
Another chemistry professor, Justus Baron von Liebig (1803-1873), a cofounder of agricultural chemistry, refuted the theory, then prevalent, that only organic material (specifically, humus) nourished plants. Among Liebig's highest achievements was his discovery that minerals alone could fertilize soil. Wide acceptance of this discovery has enabled better nourishment of human-kind—despite that humans number more than six times what they did before the discovery.
In 1845, one of Wöhler's students—Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884)—accomplished the first synthesis of an organic compound (acetic acid) from its elements. Upon this, wrote Sidney Toby, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry at Rutgers University, in the December 14, 2000, issue of Nature, "[t]he death-knell of vitalism in chemistry was sounded."
Many prominent advocates of Nazism treated vegetarianism and organic farming as integral to their ideology. Hitler and other elite Nazis who upheld the notions of "organic health" were vegetarians. Walther Richard Rudolf Hess (1894- 1987), whom Hitler made third deputy of the Reich in 1939, demanded that only food with "biologically dynamic ingredients" be served to him. In the aforementioned Anthozoos article, Arluke and Sax stated: "Vegetarianism became the symbol of the new, pure civilization that was to be Germany's future."
In 1930, Richard Walther Darré (1895-1953), who would hold the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Reich Minister of Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, declared: "The unity of blood and soil must be restored." This notorious declaration concerns an alleged mystical connection between Germans ("blood") and their natural environment. Darré—the author of Neuadel aus Blut und Boden ("A New Nobility out of Blood and Soil")—promoted "agriculture according to the laws of nature" and "farming methods according to the laws of life." And in a letter of instruction for Dachau Concentration Camp and Ester-wegen, a "punishment camp for prisoners," Himmler stated: "I wish the SS and the police also will be exemplary in the love of nature. Within the course of a few years the property of the SS and the police must become paradises for animals and Nature."
Many prominent advocates of Nazism treated vegetarianism and organic farming as integral to their ideology.
According to German scholar Klaus Wiegand—a proponent of organic farming—other Nazi supporters of organic farming included:
* Alfred Bäumler (1887-1968), head of the Department of Inner Security;
* Hermann Wilhelm Göring (1893-1946), the founder of the Gestapo and for years second in command to Hitler;
* Alfred Leitgen, for years one of Hess's adjutants;
* SS general Otto Ohlendorf;
* Jewish-conspiracy theorist, mystic, and war criminal Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), author of The Myth of the 20th Century (1930); and
* Walter Schoenichen, head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection.
Homeopathy was an important bastion of vitalism in Nazi Germany . . . .
Last year Wiegand stated: ". . . [I]t would be wise for nowadays organic farmers to keep their distance from Rudolf Steiner and 'friends.'"
Homeopathy was an important bastion of vitalism in Nazi Germany and is among the major modes of vitalism in alternative medicine. As a group, influential Nazis treated nascent biomedicine as Jewish and, therefore, as decadent. In Doctors of Death (Geneva: Ferni Publishers, 1976), Philippe Aziz quotes Gerhard Wagner, the führer of the German medical profession: "[Jewish doctors] are sterilizing the medical art and impregnating generations of young doctors with a mechanistic way of thinking."
In Racial Hygiene, Proctor stated: "The Nazis provided support for areas that today would be considered alternative, organic, holistic, or otherwise heterodox—areas such as ecology, toxicology, and environmental science . . . linked with broader social movements that were trying to reorient German science and medicine towards more natural or 'volkish' ways of thought and living." Hess and Himmler were active proponents of homeopathy. German defenders of making medicine more holistic poured scorn on the contemporary mainstream medical ways of western Europe, often in terms having a present-day postmodern ring. For example, in the 1930s, homeopathy exponent Karl Kotschau wrote: "In the last hundred years . . . science has turned from 'systems' to 'analysis,' from the recognition of human subjectivity to a belief in 'objectivity' and in a 'science free of suppositions.'" Gerhard Wagner, the chief physician of the Third Reich, labeled as "purely Jewish" a resolution of the 1935 International Medical Congress in Montreux, Switzerland, that read: "Science is simply a matter of truth, and this can never be national. It can only be international, bound to common humanity; science can therefore only be apolitical."
Roots and Rights
Nazi notions about the environment were likelier contributors to the Holocaust than were science and modernism. In Nature and Nationalism, Olsen describes Nazi assumptions about cultures: ". . . [C]ultures were rooted in the soil, organic as plants. Those cultures, such as those of the Gypsies or the Jews (in short, all "cosmopolitans"), that had no particular landscape or Heimat ["Heimat" loosely means "homeland."] could not really be said to be cultures at all, were rootless, and thus contemptible." According to Dr. Gasman, Hitler considered the Jew the "only human capable of adapting himself to any climate." Before Hitler's reign, the German socialist, sociologist, political economist, and historian Werner Sombart (1863-1941), the author of Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) and Luxus und Kapitalismus ["Luxury and Capitalism"] (Munich and Leipzig, 1913), had linked the "wandering Jews," deserts, and modern capitalism. In contrast, he had depicted Nordics as a forestial people "attuned to the mysterious, immediate, dreamlike, and concrete" and the craftsmen and peasants among them as "living, organic . . . and matured." In Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Jeffrey Herf of Ohio University cited those of Sombart's claims that are stated below.
Nazi notions about the environment were likelier contributors to the Holocaust than were science and modernism.
* The extraordinary sunlight and clear nocturnal skies of deserts encouraged abstraction and rationality but "discouraged 'sense perception and an emotional relation' to inner and outer nature."
* The nomadism of Jewry "first elevated quantity over quality in economic life."
* Capitalism was "the product of the 'endless desert' rather than the rooted forest."
In Landscape and Memory (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995), Simon Schama, a professor in the history and art history departments at Columbia University, stated that, to the Nazis, the Germans were "a biologically pure and inviolate race, as 'natural' to its terrain as indigenous species of trees and flowers." Many influential Nazis held that the German people had resulted from a "race-specific landscape," and that Jews, Gypsies, and foreign plants were alien to this "landscape" and therefore fit for extermination. Reinhold Tuexen, head of the Central Office for Vegetation Mapping of the German Reich, asserted that it was necessary "to cleanse the German landscape of unharmonious foreign substance." In 1942 a team of botanists from Saxony5 supported by Tuexen equated the fight against foreign plants and that against "the plague of Bolshevism [Russian communism]." The Third Reich applied the concept of Germanizing lands even to territories it had annexed as lebensraum ("living space")—land it claimed was necessary for Germany's survival or for the continuation of its independence.
In a 1987 issue of Planning Perspectives, Dr. Gert Gröning, a professor at the University of Arts, in Berlin, and Joachim Wolschke- Bulmahn, editor of Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1997)—both authorities on Nazi garden design—described such Germanizing as deeds of an "ecological religion" and of "ecohumanism" and, in effect, as a flight from "political reality." In Nature and Nationalism, Olsen states that, on the basis that "all Slavs were inherently destructive of their environment," Nazi "environmental planners . . . set about reshaping the Polish landscape."
Like present-day champions of postmodernism, many influential Nazis were opposed to anthropocentrism. Olsen states: "According to national socialist ideology, an anthropocentric view of nature—that man stands above nature, rather than being simply one, non-privileged part of nature—was to be decisively rejected." He quotes Himmler: " . . . [M]an is nothing special, only a piece of nature." According to the SS training manual, "the concept of humanity is biological nonsense."
Hitler was touted as the strongest fighter against abuse of animals . . . .
Hitler was touted as the strongest fighter against abuse of animals—especially vivisection, which Nazis described as an abominable product of the "Jewish-materialistic" school. A 1933 National Socialist German Workers' Party press release included:
. . . [A]mong all civilized states, Germany is the first country to end the shame of vivisection. The New Germany not only frees people from the curse of materialism, egotism and cultural bolshevism, but also gives rights to the tortured, tormented and until now, completely unprotected animals . . . . [W]hat Reich Chan-cellor Adolf Hitler and Prime Minister Göring did and will do for the protection of animals, stands as a guideline to the leaders of all civilized states.
As minister of the interior of Prussia, Göring issued an edict forbidding vivisection of animals of any species and warning that anyone vivisecting in the Prussian territory would be deported to a concentration camp.
Were the Nazis Modernists?
Many proponents of organic farming, ecofeminism, postmodernism, and/or kindred beliefs, customs, or movements steadfastly hold that Nazism marked the summit of "western" science—which they describe as modernist, reductionist, anti-environment, and male-dominated ("logophallocentric"). But the Nazi revolution was a revolt against modernism (specifically, that of Germany of the late 1920s). Refugee from Nazi Germany Peter Gay, in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), for which he won a National Book Award in 1969, correctly described the rise of the Nazis as a "revolt against reason." According to Gay, the "fear of modernity" that accompanied this rise led to a "hunger for wholeness" and a "desperate need for roots."
The contention that Nazism exemplified modernism, or that modernism was Nazi, is—at best—very dubious. Hermann Rauschning (1887-1961) was the mayor of the seaport Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) before he immigrated to Switzerland, in 1936, and defected to the Allies. In Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1940) Rauschning purportedly quoted der Führer:
We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising. There is no truth, in the scientific sense. That which is the crisis of science is nothing more than that the gentlemen are beginning to see on their own how they have gotten onto the wrong track with their objectivity.
In A Diaspora and Its Blessing: A Review of Hitler's Gift: Scientists Who Fled Nazi Germany by Jean Medawar and David Pyke (London: Richard Cohen Books, 2000), Walter Gratzer, Ph.D.—Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at King's College, in London—quotes Hitler: "[If] science can't do without Jews then we shall have to do without science for a few years."
Among those who significantly influenced the doctrines of the major Nazi propagandists was the German poet Friedrich Georg Junger. According to Herf's Reactionary Modernism, in 1926 Junger described rationality as "synonymous with weakness, decadence, and lack of communal feeling characteristic of those intellectuals who 'betray the blood with intellect.'" Herf stated: "True Germans favored not rationality but a 'community of blood.'" This, he said, symbolized a "reactionary modernism" that created the "paradoxical combination of irrationalism and technics" fundamental to Nazism. Herf further stated: "The reactionary modernists believed that modern technology could be made compatible with particularity, immediacy, and experience rather than with analysis, intellect, and abstraction; with life, soul and feeling rather than with deadly concepts and formulas, with blood rather than with money."
The Bottom Line
Partly because if its nationalism, romanticism, and quest for wholeness, the Nazi movement favorably attracted some major early environmentalists. Key leaders in the Third Reich tended to favor extremist environmentalism, organic farming, vegetarianism, animal rights, vitalism, occultism, and homeopathy and to disfavor science and high technology. This description appears much less appropriate to genetic engineers and modern agronomists than it is to advocates of postmodernism, deconstructionism, and/or ecofeminism. But on the whole such proponents are by no means nazis even in the loosest sense of the word. In my opinion, one should restrict use of the word to members of the original National Socialist German Workers' Party (abolished in 1945) and those of such Nazis' contemporaries who distinctly supported them. And then it might behoove one to bear in mind that some Nazis were only nominally so—Oskar Schindler, for example.
Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D., is the author of Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense (Iowa State University Press, 2001), a member of ACSH's board of directors, and Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. His Web homepage is http://www.uh.edu/ ~trdegreg.
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1 www.heureka.clara.net/gaia/ genetics.htm
2 http://home.earthlink.net/~alto/boycott.html
3 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_588000/588589.stm
4 www.gene.ch/gentech/2000/Jul/msg00158.html or
http://agbioview.listbot.com/cgi-bin/subscriber?Act=view_message&list_id=agbioview&msg_num=642&start_num=659
5 the German state whose capital is Dresden
(From Priorities, Vol. 13, No. 2)
