With the emergence of extreme environmentalism in the sacraments of global climate change, and in particular with the recent introduction of the rather more than extreme Green New Deal in Congress, it is worthwhile to remember a bit of history. In particular, how the reasonably harmless, some would say pleasant, “greens” of the late 19th century came to be involved with the Nazi totalitarian state.
Writing in American Thinker in October, 2010, Mark Musser describes “The Original Enviro-Nazis” as the first to join the peaceful philosophies of such as Goethe and Muir to a government — in this case tied to the horror of the Nazi Party.
One of the most embarrassing environmental facts of the 1930s was that between 60% and 70% of the German greens were Nazi Party members, compared to only 10% of the population at large. In fact, German greens outperformed even medical doctors and teachers, with Nazi foresters and veterinarians leading the charge. Somehow, the so-called independent German wandervogels (German word for “wandering free spirits”) found themselves at the footstool of Der Führer. Their wandervogel attitudes about civilization and the wild forestlands found a political niche in the isolationist biology of the Nazi Party. Furthermore, their strong beliefs in holism found a political voice in the totalitarian Social Darwinism of the Nazis…
Before long, the growing environmentalist movement began accreting power to itself at the same time the Party was using them in return to build a philosophical foundation excusing their actions.
Though the German greens predated the Nazis by well over a hundred years, with the advent of the Nazi Party, their previous Romanticism was transformed into something far more sinister because of its ties to a strong totalitarian state, where, for the first time, they became political players at the federal level. While environmental historians are quick to point out that the Four Year Plan’s great battle for production later compromised the new conservation laws, the fact of the matter is that the idea of a political totalitarian environmentalism was born in the Third Reich. Indeed, the 1935 Reich Nature Protection Act trumpeted the slogan, “it shall be the whole landscape.”
Writing in Haaretz in 2013, Esther Zandberg describes how the green philosophy was expanded to include the ecology of human beings.
Beyond the question of whether and to what extent the Nazis were green, [historian Dr. Boaz Neumann of Tel Aviv University’s Department of History] notes a disturbing process in which a more substantive link between Nazism and ecology is being established – that is, in the context of discussions of the Holocaust. Alongside various interpretations of the Holocaust as an ideological, ethnic or racial project, the Holocaust can be termed an “ecological project,” which included human ecology. To clarify this point, Neumann recalls the term “ecology” as it was coined in the 19th century by Ernst Haeckel as the “study of the natural environment including the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings.”
It did not take the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei long to explicitly tie this to “the Jew problem”:
According to Nazism, following in Haeckel’s footsteps, ecological order must be imposed on the relationship between the organism and its environment; thus, those who were “worthy” must be allowed to remain in that environment or must be returned to it, while those who were “unworthy” must be distanced from the “living space,” a term that has been irrevocably stained. Those who were to be distanced were primarily the Jews, the “radical Other,” explains Neumann, that was perceived not just as an ethnic and racial problem but also as an “ecological problem, as an actual environmental blight, as a polluted and polluting figure.”
Since World War II, the environmental movement (which has little interest in true environmental stewardship) has been used by many state entities to exert control over their peoples. In turn, the environmentalists have leveraged their usefulness to increase their own power and influence, in an evil symbiotic dance that has caused and will continue to cause immeasurable harm to us, our environment, and our world. Where this dance will end is anybody’s guess.
Oh, and by the way, the stump of Goethe’s favorite oak still exists today in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where it has been preserved to celebrate the glory of the mighty oak tree. Here it is:
