A silent springtime for Hitler? [Book : The Nazis created nature preserves . . .]

Boston Globe ^ | 4/10/2007 | Alex Beam

[ZGuy]

In anticipation of Earth Day, everyone wants to do his bit. Leonardo DiCaprio is vamping on an Icelandic glacier for the cover of Vanity Fair, alongside a Photoshopped polar bear.

I am reading the important book, "How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich."

I know you are thinking I have fallen for a hoax. No one in their right mind would publish a book stating, "The Nazis created nature preserves, championed sustainable forestry, curbed air pollution, and designed the autobahn highway network as a way of bringing Germans closer to nature." Or: "The Nazis did in fact impact the landscape in ways far out of proportion to the short twelve years they were in power."

But three professors -- Franz-Josef Bruggemeier of Freiburg University, Mark Cioc from the University of California/Santa Cruz, and the University of Maryland's Thomas Zeller -- have done just that.

It's incredible that anyone would actually publish sentences like: "The Nazis, however, were not interested in turning Germany into a tree farm"; "World War II was the opportunity that many modernist landscape architects had been waiting for"; or, "In the end, everyone . . . agreed that it was the wrong moment to embark on any projects with organic farming."

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees.

I knew that Hitler was a vegetarian with a taste for nonalcoholic beer, but I didn't know that SS boss Heinrich Himmler also eschewed meat or that Hermann Goering had a "sincere interest in forest conservation." Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess was a devotee of organic gardening. Did you know that there was an organic herb garden at Dachau? Marvelous! It's depressing how many historians insist on dwelling on the negatives.

How green was Caligula , anyway?

[MuttTheHoople]

Maybe the Nazis were trying to compensate for their carbon footprint.

[dfwgator]

The Nazis competed for the same working class that Communists recruited.

The Nazis had the better beer.

[Moonman62]

The Nazis wore pants, therefore we shouldn’t do that either.

[MuttTheHoople]

Really gives new meaning to the term “Nature Nazis”.

[Cyclopean Squid]

I am of the mind that Fascism/Nazism (and this is what the leaders often said too) was built around the circumstances it found itself in. The goal was the supremacy of the State and Nation, and the particulars didn’t really matter. Since the climate in Italy and Germany leaned Communist, they had to find a way to capture that sentiment and make it their own. Thus appealing to the workers. But they had a message of corporatism, of harmony between the classes, instead of warfare like the Reds preached.

[stockpirate]

The Nazi’s were after all Leftists, not much unlike our very own leftists here in the United States. There was even a very large Nazi Party here in the US before the war. They held meetings all over the country and even filled up Madison Square Garden.

The German Nazi Party was named, “The National Socialist Party”..

Hitler had three SS Divisions made up of all Muslims and they were assigned to the Balkins for the Final Solution.

See:

http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Alex Beam's review is in the dismissive, "Hitler vas a badt mann, shore, but he luft docs undt schilderen" vein. Liberals like Beam hate to be reminded of the obvious parallels between today's liberalism and Nation Socialism. For the most part, the NSDAP, (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ) embraced pretty much the same grab bag of policies as the modern "progressive" politicians in Western countries today.

Remember the game, "Is it Gore or the Unibomber?". You could play the same game by taking any Gephardt speech or passage from Mein Kampf. Substitute "the Jews" for "the rich" and "working families" for "the German people" and the two are indistinguishable.