The Blitz Experience is one of the key attractions of London's Imperial War Museum. This display has visitors huddle together in a re-created air-raid shelter and uses not only sounds (radio reports, sirens, exploding bombs) but also smells to evoke the experience of an attack on London during World War II. To the best of my knowledge, no one has tried to create a similar display about the Cold War, and the reasons are not difficult to understand. Of course, the Cold War had a deep impact on popular culture, but there was no sensual drama to its key military event: the standoff between two huge, nuclear-armed empires. In East and West alike, every citizen knew that if the Cold War were to turn hot, it would probably last only a few hours. The awareness that global destruction could come at the push of a button only added to the horror.

This aspect of the Cold War experience is worth recalling for two reasons. First, it helps us to understand the ironies involved in any discussion of turning points in the history of the Cold War. For all the evidence that the essays in this collection muster, the significance of the Cold War for the environment clearly pales in comparison with the potential turning point that the Cold War could have been had someone pushed that button.

What are the intellectual roots of German conservation? For Schoenichen, the former head of the Prussian Agency for the Protection of National Monuments, the answer was simple: “The idea of conservation is essentially an outgrowth of romanticism,” he wrote in his overview of German conservation published in 1954. Today's historians will need to provide a more complex answer. Schoenichen was right in his emphasis that the idea of conservation was indeed much older than the organized conservation movement that arose around 1900, but romanticism was only one of multiple strands that defined thinking on conservation issues in Germany. In fact, it is a matter of debate whether there was actually a clearly defined philosophy of nature protection in Germany at any time, and especially during the first decades of conservation history. During the nineteenth century, conservation was a sentiment rather than a social movement, and its key proponents were often freelance authors who showed little interest in molding their ideas into a clear political agenda, let alone formal organizations. The best-known example was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose 1854 book Naturgeschichte des Volkes (“Natural History of the German People”) celebrated rural life, the German forests, and a natural “right to wilderness.” However, the book, based mostly on Riehl's personal experiences while traveling through Germany's regions, was much more than a treatise on conservation: it put forward a harmonious ideal of social relations, with nature being a harbinger of peace, and key concepts, such as modesty and honor, revealed Riehl's longing for an idealized premodern society.

Uncertainty was the dominant sentiment in the German population in the summer of 1945. Of course, people were glad that they had survived the war, but the exigencies of everyday life made it difficult to rejoice. Six years of war had taken its toll practically everywhere, and living conditions were always difficult and often disastrous. In many cases, city dwellers were hit particularly hard: the war had destroyed more than half of all urban housing, and the remaining population was mostly starving. The food supply was meager at best: in the summer of 1945, the average urbanite received only 1,300 calories a day in Munich, 1,000 in Stuttgart, and 700 to 800 in the Ruhr region. This dismal situation was made worse by a total lack of political power: after the unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime on May 8, 1945, there was no longer a national authority, neither institutionally nor in spirit, that could voice the concerns of the German population. Instead, Allied soldiers stood in all parts of Germany, and everybody knew that these soldiers were under the impression of a kind of warfare that the world had never seen. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that few Germans showed much interest in politics in 1945; whereas the German defeat in World War I had led to a political radicalization, most Germans were now tired of anything that smacked of ideology.

The history of conservation during the Nazi era is one of the better-researched topics in German environmental history, and some 25 years of scholarly activity have produced a considerable number of important books and a multitude of essays on a wide range of topics. It is not the intention of the following remarks to give a complete account of the range of publications or to provide in-depth descriptions of the major works: a comprehensive overview that the author wrote in 2002 filled thirty-five pages. The goal of this appendix is more modest in that it seeks to provide a rough overview on the most important books and articles as a guide to everyone who would like to read more. At the same time, it will give a more precise idea of the general direction in which this book seeks to push conservation history.

It is not surprising that the majority of publications have appeared in German, but a number of important contributions are in English. The most recent monograph is Thomas Lekan's Imagining the Nation in Nature, a book that draws strongly on Lekan's research on conservation work in the Rhineland from the late 1800s to 1945. The books of Alon Confino and Celia Applegate provide important insights into different aspects of German regionalism, whereas Raymond Dominick discussed the Nazi era extensively in his account of the German environmental movement.

In 1931, the Netherlands Committee for International Nature Protection published a worldwide overview on the organization of nature protection. In spite of the deficiencies of the German conservation bureaucracy during the Weimar years, this book portrayed it favorably: “There is nowhere else in Europe such an extensive organisation for nature protection as among our neighbors to the east,” the Dutch conservationists declared. It is tempting to speculate what the author would have said about the system of the late 1930s: the 55 regional and 880 county institutions in all parts of Germany. In all likelihood, this was the most comprehensive network for the protection of nature of its time – an array of manpower for conservation purposes that no other country could muster. But manpower is only one requirement for a successful conservation policy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to judge the relative worth of the German conservation administration by laws and institutions alone. After the previous chapter, the general ambivalence should be clear: on the one hand, paragraph 20 of the National Conservation Law meant that the conservationists had veto power over every project that affected the landscape, at least in theory. On the other hand, the final decision on conservation issues remained in the hands of Hermann Göring, and it was clear that conservation concerns ranked lower on Göring's agenda than the military buildup that he chaired as head of the Four Year Plan Agency.

Being popular is probably the most natural goal of any social movement. Therefore, it does not look surprising on first glance that German conservationists were investing a significant amount of time and energy into lectures and public education; a recurring slogan declared that “conservation is a matter for the people (Naturschutz ist Volkssache).” And yet it is rewarding to take a closer look. If conservationists addressed the general public, it was often not aimed at developing a powerful lobby for the conservationists' cause, at least not in the first place. Rather, the goal was to assure compliance with government regulations. As early as 1929, Schoenichen had published a book on “Dealing with Mother Green” (Der Umgang mit Mutter Grün) that gave instructions on the proper behavior in nature, in which his humorous style (or attempt thereat) poorly concealed his arrogant attitude. “The starting point for all conservation efforts is a decent and well-mannered conduct towards plants, animals, and the landscape,” Hans Schwenkel declared in 1941, and other conservationists likewise pledged “to educate the people in the preservation and reverent contemplation of our Heimat nature.” Typically, one regional government published a decree that supplemented the call to win the public for the cause of conservation with a warning that failure to record hitherto unknown natural monuments with the authorities was punishable by law. Clearly, the conservation community saw administrative work as its core activity and popularizing its concern as a mere afterthought.

When radio announcers in Bavaria broadcast the current traffic situation, chances are good that you will hear a reference to Irschenberg Mountain. Located on the Autobahn between Munich and Salzburg, the Irschenberg creates a steep incline for drivers heading for Munich, and when vacationers head back in droves from the Alps or Italy, congestion on the Irschenberg is almost inevitable. Of course, the drivers' reactions differ widely depending on individual tempers, driving time, and the other people in the car. However, few realize that their frustration is, at least in part, a result of arbitrary decisions in the Nazi era. It was the personal wish of Fritz Todt to follow the difficult route over the Irschenberg Mountain, for only such a path would offer a panoramic view of the Alps and the scenic Chiemgau. After Todt's death in 1942, Hitler even thought of building a mausoleum for Todt on the Irschenberg as a special tribute to the supreme engineer of the Nazi era. Construction was to start after the victorious conclusion of World War II.

The example of Irschenberg Mountain shows that an environmental history of the Nazi era will remain incomplete if it deals only with laws, institutions, and people. The Nazi regime also had an impact on the German landscape, and this impact was the result of both intentional design, like the Irschenberg detour, and the unintended consequences of other Nazi projects.

When environmental historians recount a chapter from the history of nature protection, they often do so in a sympathetic mode. However, the situation is different if that chapter happens to be the history of conservation in Nazi Germany: few will read this book with much sympathy for the conservation community of the Nazi era. The reasons do not call for explanation: the cruelty of the Nazis' rule, and the immense human toll that it claimed, make Hitler's regime a disturbing topic even more than 60 years after his death. Seeing a cause dear to one's heart aligned with such a regime is painful, and many readers will have read this book with a sentiment of “never again.” But understandable as this sentiment may be, it is also clear that it calls for specification: what precisely has to be done to prevent a repetition of this story? What are the lessons that the current environmental movement, or other social movements, for that matter, should learn from the Nazi experience?

Of course, this question is anything but new, and a number of authors have put forward answers to it. Anna Bramwell was the first to connect historical and political discussions when she argued that there was a “green party” in Nazi Germany, with Richard Walther Darré, the Nazis' minister of agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader (Reichsbauernführer), at its center. However, her argument quickly drew massive criticism from other researchers.

If anything can be said in summary about the relationship between conservation ideas and Nazi ideology, it is that taken by itself, that relationship cannot explain the general dynamism in the cooperation between the green and the brown. It was, after all, a much too complicated mix of ideas: at some points, ideas overlapped, whereas others were more or less at odds, and the fundamental pillars of Nazi ideology were so distant from the ethos of nature protection that a distinct Nazi brand of conservation never came into being. Accordingly, one would expect an equally diverse set of contacts between the conservation community and the Nazi regime: a wide spectrum from sympathy to opposition, with indifference probably being the most frequent attitude.

However, the actual picture differs markedly from such a scenario. The distance between the conservation community and the Nazis was much smaller in practice than one would expect from the background of the divergent philosophies: cooperation was far too intensive, and far too cordial, to be explained by a partial coincidence of goals. Thus, an analysis of the ideological relationship needs to be supplemented by a discussion of institutional ties. For the conservation movement, the Nazi regime offered a number of unprecedented opportunities, which conservationists tried to seize to the greatest extent possible. It was institutional links that created the atmosphere of sustained sympathy, if not unbridled enthusiasm, that permeated the conservation literature of the Nazi era.

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: