When its armies were finally defeated in May 1945, the vaunted Third Reich lay in waste and smoldering ruin. The air was foul, the cities ablaze, the countryside blighted; forests, fields, and rivers were blasted and defiled. Adolf Hitler, the messianic Führer or leader of the nation, had promised his people a thousand years of prosperity and peace. Instead his 12-year reign left nothing but desolation. Across Europe, the trail of German forces stank with the wreckage of shattered communities, ravaged landscapes, and exterminated lives. The destruction that Nazi Germany inflicted on the continent was unparalleled in human as well as environmental terms.

This somber truth about Nazism is painfully obvious in retrospect. But it was not obvious to millions of Germans when Hitler came to power in 1933. In order to understand the course that the Nazi movement took from the 1920s onward, we need to see how these developments unfolded over time. That means taking seriously the enormous appeal that Nazism exercised. For some Germans, Nazism represented an ecological outlook and a return to a more natural way of life founded on environmental harmony. Inspired by this image, they lent their support to a regime that spawned a vast military machine and a dreadful legacy of concentration camps and mass murder. Their actions between 1933 and 1945 left an unresolved enigma in the history of Nazi Germany and the history of environmental politics.

As perplexing as it may seem today, there were historical reasons why environmentally minded Germans were drawn to National Socialism, as the Nazis called their own doctrine. Nazism arose within the ferment of dissident beliefs that swept through Germany in the wake of World War I, when early environmental values also found a foothold. Though the two movements now appear to have little in common, they shared several affinities. Despite its predominantly industrial thrust once in power, Nazism included ecological facets, sometimes expressed in obscure form. Tracing the history of those ecological facets is the task of this book.

Other scholars have examined this history before, with a remarkable array of positions. Many focused on the role of conservationists and nature protection activists in the Third Reich. Several of these studies incorporated the period before and after Nazi rule, widening the historical context, or provided illuminating regional case studies.Footnote ¹ No consensus emerged from this research. Some accounts downplayed the significance of environmental strands within Nazism, portraying them as marginal and ineffective, or depicted the points of contact between conservationists and Nazi officials as perfunctory and opportunistic. Others cast green rhetoric under Nazi auspices as a matter of cosmetic ideology with little practical import.Footnote ²

In contrast, older works that emphasized an environmental component to Nazi programs were marked by an apologetic agenda, an attempt to rehabilitate purportedly “green” Nazis.Footnote ³ Detractors of environmentalism, meanwhile, constructed a category of “Nazi ecology” as a warning against the alleged dangers of excessive environmental zeal.Footnote ⁴ Positions like these, from authors sympathetic to their Nazi subjects or skeptical of environmental radicalism, have had an outsized impact on discussions of the topic in spite of their questionable premises. The reaction against such positions has sometimes made equally questionable claims.

A number of more recent publications have endeavored to counter “the myth of green Nazism.”Footnote ⁵ These accounts argue that there were no genuinely environmentalist elements within the Nazi movement; Nazis concerned with nature only cared about human-modified landscapes rather than “untouched wilderness.”Footnote ⁶ Hence “the barest minima of ecological politics” were “completely missing” from Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁷ There are several problems with these arguments. They depend on an obsolete conception of nature as “wilderness” that environmental historians have long since abandoned.Footnote ⁸ More important, they ignore a substantial body of research by German scholars on various forms of ecological politics as part of the polycratic institutional terrain of Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁹ Perhaps the biggest problem with typical counter-arguments against the “green Nazism” thesis is that they misunderstand the intrinsic uncertainty of environmental ideals as such. If there were green influences to be found in the Third Reich, they were scarcely a perfect reflection of some normative model; they were as confused and compromised as in any other society.

Moving past the debates of the last three decades, this book takes a different approach. Because conservationists have already been well studied, they are less central to my account. I have focused instead on organic agriculture movements, proponents of “life reform,” and self-styled “advocates for the landscape” as primary representatives of the politics of nature during the Nazi era. Each of these currents had its own history, yet they all interacted in complex ways, forming a broad environmental milieu whose specifically German features were nonetheless readily recognizable in global perspective. Organic agriculture initiatives, for example, which emerged in multiple countries in the early decades of the twentieth century, established several competing factions in 1920s Germany. All of them courted the Nazis in the 1930s. The following chapters try to understand how this happened, what it can tell us about Nazism, and what it can tell us about environmentalism.

Although the book centers on the period from 1933 to 1945, the historical issues cannot be reduced to the span of the Nazi dictatorship. Germany has a long and honorable share in the history of environmentalism. It was the birthplace of scientific ecology in the nineteenth century and of Green politics in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and home to internationally influential nature conservation organizations in the intervening years.Footnote ¹⁰ The movements examined in this book partook of that longer history. For readers unfamiliar with German environmentalism’s prolific past, the political volatility of these movements may seem surprising, as ecological values wavered back and forth between right and left. An especially salient trend for the generation of the 1920s was the frequent rapport with nationalist, authoritarian, and reactionary currents. There were vital traditions of grassroots environmental politics on the left as well, showing the concrete alternatives that existed a century ago.Footnote ¹¹ But many environmentalists, implicitly or otherwise, leaned toward the right. Life reform circles were a common venue for this sort of crossover.

A diffuse medley of improvement endeavors joined by the ideals of natural lifestyle and organic community, life reform encompassed back to the land projects, vegetarianism, holistic health, and unconventional attitudes toward the body and society. In a modern world degraded by materialism and urban civilization, life reformers called for the recovery of simple and authentic ways of living. Politically diverse and ideologically disjointed, life reform was not so much a movement as a mentality, a shared frame of reference that cut across standard social expectations. Like other environmental tendencies, those attracted to its precepts typically came from middle-class backgrounds.Footnote ¹²

For many life reformers, the virtues of wholeness and natural balance appeared distinctively German. From the turn of the century onward, life reform proposals mixed with racist and antisemitic themes. This led to increasing overlap with the far right völkisch milieu, whose obsession with ethnic revival clouded German culture before and after World War I. Once Germany lost the war in 1918, the convergence between life reform and völkisch currents strengthened.Footnote ¹³ Environmental movements in many countries linked nature and nation, but in the German context this connection became unusually fraught during the Weimar Republic, the democratic interlude between the end of World War I and Hitler’s rise to power. Weimar was much more than a waystation on the route to the Third Reich. It was a moment of possibility, with rich historical potentials pointing in manifold directions. Nothing predestined life reformers toward National Socialism; they made varied choices under changing conditions, like everybody else.

Both life reformers and völkisch adherents found allies in organic farming ventures, which took an ambivalent stance toward Germany’s fragile democracy. Distrustful of mainstream norms, organic pioneers sought new political solutions as the economic situation deteriorated. They had a small but active part in the agrarian upheaval and hastening collapse of democratic institutions that gave way to the Third Reich. Several different organic coalitions appear in the chapters to come. The chief protagonist for much of the book, however, will be the biodynamic movement, which was by far the most successful organic tendency during the Nazi era and remains the most recognizable brand within the flourishing organic scene in Germany today. Debates surrounding the movement embodied all of the contradictions inherent to environmental aspirations under Nazi rule.

Whether as devotees of life reform or practitioners of organic agriculture, supporters of environmental causes often found willing partners in disparate sectors of the Nazi apparatus. Part of this mutual response was rooted in the myth of “blood and soil” that animated much of Nazism’s rural momentum. The phrase, which had been circulating in völkisch groups before the Nazis appropriated it, suggested an age-old bond between German blood and German soil.Footnote ¹⁴ As with other myths prominent at the time, it was a quintessentially modern construct built on an imagined ancient past. Even in its supposed ancestral trappings stretching across millennia, the myth of blood and soil was a product of the twentieth century. Myths are not merely untrue beliefs; they have a powerful effect on how people view the world and how they act. I refer to the notion of blood and soil as a myth both because it was based on false assumptions and because it played a key role in structuring Nazi thought and practice. Myths inspire action, and it is actions, not just ideologies, that stand at the center of this book.

While the cherished slogan of blood and soil was a myth, it articulated something all too real: the link between agrarian and racial principles. Environmentalists affirmed this association well before the Nazi regime imposed it as official policy. Race was integral to some early forms of ecological engagement, helping shape their understanding of the proper relationship between society and nature. Scholars have noted “the strong influence of racial thinking” within the German conservation movement.Footnote ¹⁵ Life reformer Gustav Simons professed that race was an imperative feature of alternative health and nutrition as early as 1906.Footnote ¹⁶ Hermann Löns equated nature protection with racial protection before World War I.Footnote ¹⁷ Apostles of an organic worldview celebrated the “community of blood and soil” as the core of “living nature” and warned of the “degeneracy” spread by the Jews in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁸ With the arrival of the Third Reich, environmentalists offered an explicit racial rationale for nature protection.Footnote ¹⁹ As myths tend to do, the blood and soil creed warped the politics of nature in Nazi Germany in countless ways.

Had the passion for national rebirth remained within German borders, its environmental echoes might seem less incongruous. But the myth of blood and soil was premised on imperial expansion. From the opening pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to the final months of World War II, Nazi propaganda proclaimed that plough and sword were one: German conquest of new lands would be achieved not only through military might but through tilling the soil and making it fruitful for generations to come. The Nazis called this aim seeking Lebensraum or “living space,” a term that revealed the biological underpinnings of Nazi geopolitics.Footnote ²⁰ Invoking the plough and the sword signaled commitment to a colonial arcadia secured by force and an agrarian idyll sustained through conscientious stewardship. It furnished a natural justification for war. By 1943, Nazi environmentalists declared that “the fighting power of the German people” was grounded in “love for nature” and a unique bond with “our Mother Earth.”Footnote ²¹

This book offers a critical examination of the conflicted path that brought plough and sword together and tied environmental ideals to Nazi practices. Expanding the politics of nature beyond the conservation movement opens new perspectives on this vexing history while raising difficult questions that resist straightforward answers. Because it unsettles established expectations about environmentalism as well as Nazism, the book is a reminder that historical research continually asks us to re-examine what we thought we knew about the past. The contentious politics of ecology were as fractured in the Third Reich as they are in our own time, and an adequate analysis calls for careful attention to the shifting contours of environmental interaction with a capricious regime.

Departing from much of the previous scholarship, my findings indicate a more widespread implementation of ecological priorities with Nazi backing than acknowledged in earlier works.Footnote ²² In turn, environmental ideals were consistently coupled with potent national and racial myths. Historians of the Third Reich have begun to recognize “the links between antisemitism, eugenics, and environmentalism that became integral to National Socialism.”Footnote ²³ I try to probe them in depth here. It is not a comprehensive history, and there are areas where my investigation falls short. Important subjects like forestry receive little consideration. Jewish environmentalists, targeted by Nazi persecution, are absent. And this is a history in which, to borrow Jane Austen’s words, there are hardly any women at all. Most of the figures in the following pages are men. As much as I would like to blame these failings on the sources, the ultimate responsibility is mine. I have tried to make up for such flaws through innovative inquiry, new evidence, and critical engagement with a broad range of scholarly interlocutors.

But there are more than historical questions at stake. In the face of the current rise of the global far right and the ongoing ecological crisis, seemingly arcane disputes about the past can take on unexpected resonance. That is what makes topics like this so charged and so easily misunderstood. Apologists for Nazism are all too eager to publicize ostensibly redeeming aspects of the regime, while anti-environmentalists gladly seize on any suggestion of a link between ecology and Hitler. It is possible to misuse this history in an effort to discredit the politics of nature as a whole, or to whitewash the image of the Third Reich, or to build up an invented lineage that reclaims ecology for the right.Footnote ²⁴ As chants of “blood and soil” arise at far right rallies in the twenty-first century, scholarly engagement with environmentalism in Nazi Germany demands both historical and political insight. Comforting platitudes about the distance between the Nazi period and the present will be of little help, but research on the ambiguities of environmental politics can offer a useful guide.Footnote ²⁵

Against that backdrop, the book begins with organic farming activists who sought common ground with the Nazi movement years before 1933 and traces their divergent paths after the party consolidated power. Much of Chapter 1 addresses initiatives that eventually failed, a familiar feature in the history of environmental politics. It also upends current connotations of alternative agriculture. Organic movements in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s were often oriented toward völkisch concerns. “In early twentieth century Germany,” one study observes, “ecological agriculture and its biological approach to farming belonged decisively to the right.”Footnote ²⁶ Setting the stage for later developments, the chapter draws on previously unknown archival sources and offers the first detailed reconstruction of events while introducing the unsteady relations between various Nazi agencies and their would-be environmental allies.Footnote ²⁷ Attending to the complexities involved in these problematic exchanges can help forestall the tempting simplifications of ex post facto guilt by association reasoning.

Chapter 2 turns to the biodynamic movement, whose Demeter and Weleda products form such a popular part of the organic marketplace today. To its admirers, biodynamics represents the “future of environmentalism.”Footnote ²⁸ Yet its past remains poorly understood. Through a case study of the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture, founded in 1933, the chapter explores the active connections linking multiple strands of environmental advocacy across distant branches of the regime. Biodynamic representatives promoted their mode of farming as “spiritually aware peasant wisdom” in contrast to “civilization, technology, and modern urban culture.”Footnote ²⁹ They claimed that biodynamics “awakens a genuine love for Mother Earth.”Footnote ³⁰ With the aid of high-ranking Nazi patrons, the Reich League thrived for years until it became caught up in Nazi infighting and was forced to disband in 1941. In Nazi Germany, as elsewhere, the politics of nature begat friends as well as foes.

Controversial environmentalist Alwin Seifert, who led a coterie of “advocates for the landscape” as agents of Nazi policy, is at the center of Chapter 3. Existing portrayals of Seifert and his associates sometimes present them as either not truly ecological or not truly Nazi, rather than recognizing that they were both at once. I approach the question through a thoroughgoing reassessment of the archival record. My findings show that Seifert and the landscape advocates applied environmental techniques even in the face of resistance from other wings of the Nazi bureaucracy, with the support of a surprising variety of party and state functionaries. Though their achievements were limited in significant ways, they assertively maintained their Nazi allegiance while putting sustainable projects into practice.

Just as controversial as Seifert is the subject of Chapter 4. Nazi Minister of Agriculture Richard Walther Darré is often seen as the personification of the blood and soil myth. Darré joined the Nazi party in 1930 and helped it win over rural voters, a crucial step on the road toward power. Many agrarian debates during the Third Reich revolved around him, debates that continue to divide historians. His biographer insists that Darré’s racial worldview contained no ecological dimension and had nothing to do with the natural environment.Footnote ³¹ I challenge this claim by reconstructing Darré’s evolving relationship with organic farming methods, including the increasing influence of biodynamic representatives on his staff. As with Seifert, my focus is not just on Darré but on those who worked with him, bringing attention to a larger set of principal figures. The chapter provides a novel vantage point on the constantly contested nature of environmental questions in Nazi Germany, reflecting competing political, economic, and military interests.

In the final Chapter 5, I confront the devastating effects of the plough and the sword in the war that Nazism unleashed on Europe. Since German military power was built on intensive industrial development, the prevailing view is that environmental initiatives were consigned to insignificance during the war. But the militarist and environmentalist factors within Nazi Germany were not so much opposite poles as intertwined tendencies that sometimes collided and sometimes converged. When war made it possible to extend ecological procedures to the landscapes of Eastern Europe, many environmentalists heeded the call. The chapter demonstrates the real consequences of the blood and soil myth in practice, as an amorphous combination of racial and ecological beliefs took on deadly form in occupation decrees, settlement operations, and concentration camps.

This dismal legacy has never been resolved. Like so many other aspects of the history of Nazism, it has met with decades of denial, diversion, and trivialization. In an extended Epilogue, I try to assess the repercussions for German environmentalism of this failure to face the past.Footnote ³² To avert the mistaken conclusion that such versions of blood and soil were exclusively German, the Epilogue adds historical material from Italy and Britain for comparative context. The politics of nature in Nazi Germany, in the end, were akin to the politics of nature in other places. All of the chapters complicate traditional categories by consistently crossing the boundaries between the history of environmentalism and the history of Nazi Germany.

The Third Reich rested on industrial exploitation, technological expansion, and resource exhaustion. Nazism’s “environmental balance sheet” was undoubtedly negative.Footnote ³³ But that retrospective judgment is too neat and simple if it overlooks the countervailing dynamics that led so many environmentalists to embrace the Nazi cause. Life reformers, organic growers, and landscape advocates were not mere opportunists. They were not passively drawn into the orbit of Nazism, nor did they defensively attempt to accommodate a totalitarian regime. They responded emphatically and with enthusiasm to the new Germany that Hitler heralded in 1933, and their active complicity in Nazism only ended with its defeat in 1945.

Many of the policies that environmentalists proposed in the Nazi years were never realized; some were planned but not begun or started but not completed. A number of them left a decidedly ambivalent mark on the landscape. From an environmental history perspective, that is quite common; unequivocal successes are the exception, not the norm. It is important to recognize that these programs were not a pretense but a constituent element of Nazi practice, subject to the same antagonistic forces and contradictory demands as other National Socialist undertakings. That is especially true of wartime environmental initiatives, which were not peculiar deviations from the destructive path of the Nazi juggernaut but part and parcel of the Nazi project for remaking the landscape of Europe, racially as well as ecologically. This insight still meets with considerable resistance, even among scholars.

For all their merits, influential works on the topic have left key questions unexplained. Historians have doubted whether Darré really supported organic agriculture, whether biodynamic programs continued during the war, or whether there were meaningful ecological components to Nazism at all. Some studies suggest that environmentalists were seduced by Nazism due to their own political naïveté.Footnote ³⁴ Such approaches underestimate how pro-actively and persistently environmental proponents sought out collaboration with Nazi agencies. I clarify these questions and others, showing the complexity and durability of green projects before 1933 and through 1945. These may seem like historical details, but their cumulative effect changes how we understand the politics of nature in Nazi Germany.

Rather than a bold new historical thesis, this book provides a close look at those very details. The story I have to tell, based on evidence open to revision by subsequent research, is a winding one with a predominant trajectory. Environmentalists of varying kinds tried over and over, with determination and tenacity, to ally themselves with the Nazi movement and find positions of influence within the Nazi regime. Whether they succeeded did not typically depend on general decisions about environmental policy by the Nazi leadership, but on the internal rivalries that characterized the Nazi system of rule, rivalries which often had little to do in any direct way with substantive disputes over environmental questions. Deeply held beliefs about race and nation were a common factor shaping this protracted process, though they did not always play out primarily in the ideological arena; practical tasks were paramount.

In other areas of environmental history, such arguments are not new. There are perceptive studies of authoritarian and regressive strands in early ecological politics, and scholarship on North American contexts highlights “the racial ideas underlying modern environmentalism.”Footnote ³⁵ A more critical engagement with the environmental past has increased awareness of right-wing ecology in its various formations.Footnote ³⁶ For specialists, there is nothing shocking about close ties between race and ecology or between an environmental orientation and reactionary political views, even if it goes against the grain of popular images of the Third Reich. Yet, to many people, environmentalism in Nazi Germany remains an oxymoron rather than a historical reality that requires critical analysis.

Comprehending that historical reality involves diverse disciplines, and this study builds on current trends in international research. It brings together the politics of food, land use, and agrarian innovation, all of which have received deserved historical attention.Footnote ³⁷ But it examines these themes through the lens of environmental politics, as they were understood in interwar Germany. The book is an extended argument for how much environmental historians and historians of Nazism have to learn from each other, and how much this apparently academic topic speaks to current public concerns. As environmental questions become more and more acute, historians have an obligation to take extra care in our treatment of them. Though this is a scholarly work, my perspective has been fundamentally shaped by my own involvement in various ecological movements – I was an environmental activist for years before becoming an academic historian – as well as my commitment to a critical understanding of the history of Nazism.

With the tools of historical inquiry at our disposal, the internal clashes over nature in the Third Reich look much more challenging when viewed without the hindsight we take for granted nearly a century later. They also point to problems of our own. One reason we look to the past is to help make sense of the confusions of today. There is more work to do in coming to terms with the troubling intersection of ecological concern and far right politics, which has grown more urgent in recent years.Footnote ³⁸ When rising nationalist movements the world over lay claim to environmental issues, conjoining them with xenophobic resentments, we have a responsibility to discern the background to that fateful encounter. This is why it matters when the politics of nature are wed to the myth of blood and soil, and why it is essential to think through them as clearly and critically as possible. The dilemmas of the present ask us to reconsider a disconcerting part of the past and face what we find there.