When you think of the most prominent conservationists of the 20th century, a few names might spring to mind: David Attenborough, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir.
How about Hermann Göring? At least this is the company he would like to imagine himself in, had he not been executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity following the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Göring viewed himself as a committed naturalist, a man who could wield his massive power to transform the natural world into a paradise: the Dauerwald, or eternal forest. Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, such Nazi environmentalism was replete with perverse laws, used as a vessel for channeling their depraved moral codes which elevated the status of animals above certain groups of humans.
In his renowned biography of Göring, the British journalist Leonard Oswald Mosley (who fortunately bears no relation to another Brit with a similar name, lest the biography be tainted with bias) wrote that were Göring “to be judged today simply for what he did for Germany’s flora and fauna, he probably would have been hailed as a conservationist of great imagination and achievement”.
While this is a little generous, Göring did have some ideas which were revolutionary for the natural environment in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the world was turning towards globalisation; before the start of the Great War, Germany’s manufacturing output was almost a 15 per cent share of the world’s total, ahead of Britain’s 13.6 per cent share.
Shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, they got to work expediting laws which built upon popular animal rights campaign points, such as regulating slaughter and outlawing experimenting on animals. In August of that year, Göring announced over the radio that he would be ending the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments”, threatening to send those who mistreat animals to concentration camps which had begun to be built earlier in the year. As time progressed, however, and depravity became the norm, this law was walked back as grotesque experiments on animals became commonplace throughout the Nazi regime. Additionally, it was a commonly held belief, not only in Germany but throughout much of Europe at the time, that a large portion of those who performed vivisections were Jewish, and so outlawing this was an early anti-Semitic policy aimed at removing Jewish people from the workforce.
Several times more animal welfare laws were passed under Göring than under the preceding regime, a large amount of which were relatively sensible and were the results of actual commissioned scientific treatises and debates among officials, showing that a democratic process could be followed if the desire was there, though it often wasn’t. Laws were introduced mandating proper procedure in everything from shoeing horses to administering anaesthesia, and a large debate was had over the most humane method of killing lobsters and crabs for eating; the consensus was to, er, throw the live crustaceans into pots of boiling water. Perhaps the methodology was flawed after all.
The vegetarianism of senior Nazis was a bizarre form of holistic healthy-eating mixed with eugenic beliefs
Many of these laws were expected to be seen through the national-socialist lens of race, as yet another manifestation of Aryan ideology in the natural world, reflecting the social order that the regime was attempting to establish. In introducing laws that added many safety and firearms stipulations to hunting practices, the primary motive was eugenicist; the preface to the hunting laws stated that such careful species management would allow “a more varied, stronger and healthier breed” to flourish. A similar law was enacted to “awaken and strengthen compassion as one of the highest moral values of the German people”. These laws reflect the Nazi command’s view of themselves as Übermenschen, willing themselves into existence through the sheer power of overcoming struggle. Many laws passed by Göring relating to nature preservation are still in existence in German law today.
One of Göring’s ambitious but thoroughly misguided laws that he introduced during his time as Masters of the Forests was the 1934 law “Concerning the Protection of the Racial Purity of Forest Plants”, a comically Nazi way of saying they wanted to select for seeds which would only grow straight, rather than crooked, trees. The bizarre language of “racially pure” seeds being the only kind allowed to grow in a certain area tied in well with the overarching ethnocultural Nazi ideology, and was used by Göring to help convince certain Nazi Party commanders that it was worthwhile to spend money on ecological projects in the antebellum period.
Seemingly not busy enough being both the President of the Reichstag from 1932 and the Chief of the Luftwaffe High Command from 1935, Hermann Göring created for himself the roles of Master of the Forests and Master of the Hunt in order to realise his goals of creating a paradise in rural Germany. He sought to reintroduce species of birds and animals which had been hunted to the point of extinction, and imported wild elk and bison from as far afield as Canada to bolster their ranks. Göring referred to the forests of Germany as “God’s cathedrals”, seemingly unaware that cathedrals in general tend to already be God’s cathedrals, and subsequently sought to fill the pews even with those who did not want to be there.
One anecdote comes from Sir Eric Phipps, a prewar British Ambassador to Germany, who was among the first guests at Göring’s new country residence Carinhall in the Schorfheide Forest, just north of Brandenburg. On first meeting his guests, Göring, bizarrely clad in “aviator’s garments … with a large hunting-knife stuck in his belt”, set up a microphone outside and lectured the crowd on the steps he was taking to revitalise the forests. At one point, Göring had decided to put on a display of one of his imported Canadian bison mating with the native cows, however according to Phipps the “unfortunate animal emerged from his box with the utmost reluctance and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it”.
Göring appeared genuinely concerned about the endangerment of many species of animals in Germany as a result of overhunting, such as the bison mentioned above, but also wild horses, bears, and many species of rare birds. Despite the anecdote above, he did succeed in breeding these bison eventually; 47 local bison were successfully reared, and work was begun on a sanctuary for them. He also created several nature reserves, and produced a research laboratory to work on the reintroduction of species to the area, including otters, beavers, and ravens. While these moves were well-spirited and arguably constitute positive changes, species reintroduction shouldn’t be fast-tracked under the auspices of environmentalism, as certain species can have vast impacts on the natural landscape and its living constituents which may turn out to be a net negative in the long run.
As Germany ramped up its manufacturing and production of goods in the prelude to war, this posed an issue for the preservation of the Dauerwald. Previously, Göring had passed the Law Against Forest Devastation in 1934 which prohibited those in charge of forests from clear cutting more than 2.5 per cent of their estates. As he was placed in charge of the Four Year Plan in 1936 and the drive for autarky, however, this care for the environment was replaced by the need to supply the Nazi war machine with increasingly large amounts of timber.
As war progressed and Germany conquered neighbouring states, they reverted back to the initial aims of the Dauerwald and outsourced timber production to those areas now under German control, requisitioning the forests of Poland and other nations east of Germany for their own needs. This is nimbyism in its purest form, refusing to utilise the resources and benefits that are available to you immediately for the sake of maintaining the normality that you enjoy at home. As with much of German political ideology at this time, the Nazi regime was content to hoist the weight of sacrifice onto the shoulders of others.
While it is true that Hitler and other members of Nazi High Command became vegetarians, this was not done out of concern for animal welfare; rather, it was a bizarre form of holistic healthy-eating mixed with standard Nazi eugenic beliefs. They took inspiration from Richard Wagner’s view on the topic, that the eating of meat would taint the pure Aryan blood with the blood of the beast. Not one to shy away from extremes, Hitler viewed many of humanity’s problems, from chronic illness to moral weakness, as direct results of eating meat, and was vocal in his regard of meat as “corpses” and “cadavers”. If he was still around today, he may wish to speak at the Green Party Conference.
It is popularly viewed today that Nazi environmentalism and animal welfare was hypocritical when human beings were treated so terribly during their reign. Rather, when looking in depth into the specific laws which were passed and the first-hand accounts of the individuals involved, it is clear that such environmental policies were introduced as a way to enforce and subsequently prove the Aryan Weltanschauung of the new natural order. Alfred Rosenberg, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust (who was himself accused of having non-Aryan ancestry as early as 1936), wrote in his 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century that it was bizarre that humans were so concerned with rearing purebred, yet had no interest in being purebreds themselves. He was appointed Reichsleiter for the entire period 1933-45, the second-highest rank in the Nazi Party and subordinate only to Hitler. Viewing the horrors of Nazi Germany through this lens, one begins to understand why animals were treated so humanely, and why some humans were treated like animals.
