The ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes noted that botanists should write history because so much history involves plants. Coincidentally, I am a botanist with a deep interest in history. I began as a child botanizing abandoned farmers’ fields, and now I am always on the lookout for topics at the intersection of plants and human affairs. The books on my list are among many I read while researching for my book. In exploring the role of plants in warfare, I have synthesized vast information about human and military needs, from rationed foods to camouflage and battlefront medicine. Germany provided many unexpected findings.
I wrote...
Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II
My book, the first botanical history of World War II, examines military history from the perspective of plant science. From victory gardens to drugs, timber, rubber, and fibers, plants supplied materials that played key roles in victory. Vegetables provided the wartime diet in North America and Europe, where carrots, cabbages, and potatoes nourished millions.
In England and Germany, herbs replaced pharmaceutical drugs; feverbark was in demand to treat malaria, and penicillin required a growth medium made from corn. Rubber was needed for gas masks, cotton and hemp provided canvas and rope, and timber was used for bombers. Ironically, the Nazis condemned non-native plants but adopted Asian soybeans and Mediterranean herbs. Jungle camouflage required botanical knowledge, and survival manuals detailed Pacific Island edible plants.
I was amazed to learn of the Nazi obsession with nature, from sustainable forestry to air quality and native plants. During the 1930s, German environmentalists set forth the Third Reich agenda to preserve the natural world.
Embedded in German nationalism was a deep feeling for the land and landscapes of the Nazi native land; even the Autobahn was designed to allow easy access to natural sites and hiking trails!
However, the Nazi military agenda to dominate Europe and beyond ultimately derailed their green agenda. This eye-opening book unpacks the connection between German Volk and environmentalism despite the pseudo-scientific premises of Third Reich doctrine.
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. How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich is the first book to examine the Third Reich's environmental policies and to offer an in-depth exploration of the intersections between brown ideologies and green practices.
Environmentalists and conservationists in Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazi regime with open arms and hoped that it would bring about legal and institutional changes. However, environmentalists soon realized that the rhetorical attention they…
I always wanted to learn more about the forgotten aspects of the history of the biological sciences, and Biologists Under Hitler did not disappoint in this regard.
Biologists in Nazi Germany were faced with some hard choices—did they adopt the pseudoscientific Nazi party line about racial disparities, or did they abandon their scientific posts? By the end of the war, the German natural sciences dwindled, and biology was particularly hard hit; could biologists who survived the Third Reich be trusted by their global colleagues?
In particular, I was interested in learning about scientific research conducted by the SS, which seems like an oxymoron but did indeed occur in a disordered way, guided by Heinrich Himmler's botanical and medical interests.
On the subject of science in Nazi Germany, we are apt to hear about the collaboration of some scientists, the forced emigration of talented Jewish scientists, the general science phobia of leaders of the Third Reich - but little detail about what actually transpired. "Biologists Under Hitler" examines the impact of Nazism on the lives and research of a generation of German biologists. Drawing on previously unutilized archival material, Ute Deichmann, herself a biologist, explores not only what happened to the biologists forced to emigrate but also the careers, science and crimes of those who stayed in Germany. "Biologists Under…
I have been intrigued by the coexistence of crackpot notions and prescient science in the Third Reich, and the medical science of oncology provides some remarkable examples of the latter. German doctors realized that the high incidence of stomach cancers correlated with diet, leading to suspicion of smoked meats, aflatoxins, coal tar dyes, and various adulterants as possible causes of various cancers.
As cheap alternatives to modern medicine and processed flour, herbal teas and whole grain foods became part of the Third Reich social doctrine for reasons of both health and economy. Meat was eyed with suspicion (and growing crops as fodder wasted energy), and so vegetable cookery was encouraged.
Beyond cancer concerns, I found awareness of fetal alcohol syndrome to be quite surprising; Third Reich doctors admired the U.S. temperance policy and encouraged expectant mothers to drink unfermented cider to avoid alcohol effects on fetal development.
Collaboration in the Holocaust. Murderous and torturous medical experiments. The "euthanasia" of hundreds of thousands of people with mental or physical disabilities. Widespread sterilization of "the unfit." Nazi doctors committed these and countless other atrocities as part of Hitler's warped quest to create a German master race. Robert Proctor recently made the explosive discovery, however, that Nazi Germany was also decades ahead of other countries in promoting health reforms that we today regard as progressive and socially responsible. Most startling, Nazi scientists were the first to definitively link lung cancer and cigarette smoking. Proctor explores the controversial and troubling questions…
Science collapses when scientists ignore objectivity and unbiased analysis, and Robert N. Proctor argues this effectively in this book.
I had long assumed (incorrectly) that racial doctrine during the Third Reich came directly from Hitler, but many German scientists actively espoused racial policies with supposed scientific justification. It may be hard to accept that some scientists became sympathizers overnight, no doubt for their own welfare and survival.
Proctor illustrates that pure science can be adapted for evil intent and that a self-centered agenda can result in illegitimate outcomes.
Scholars exploring the history of science under the Nazis have generally concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science or the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Racial Hygiene focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Robert Proctor demonstrates that the common picture of a passive scientific community coerced into cooperation with the Nazis fails to grasp the reality of what actually happened-namely, that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.
Conservation was an offshoot of the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology of the Third Reich, in which Aryan families were linked to the land through a hereditary right and the promotion of rural values.
Native plants and countryside habitats were considered superior and worthy of preservation, and conservation evolved from its 19th-century origins to nationalist thinking in the 1930s. I was particularly intrigued by the Dauerwald (continuous forest), a set of forestry practices in which clear-cutting was replaced by selective cutting, keeping habitats and plant populations intact.
The growing demand for wood in the wartime economy required conservation, which was viewed with suspicion after the war because of its connections to Third Reich doctrine.
This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of conservation in Nazi Germany. Looking at Germany in an international context, it analyses the roots of conservation in the late nineteenth century, the gradual adaptation of racist and nationalist thinking among conservationists in the 1920s and their indifference to the Weimar Republic. It describes how the German conservation movement came to cooperate with the Nazi regime and discusses the ideological and institutional lines between the conservation movement and the Nazis. Uekoetter further examines how the conservation movement struggled to do away with a troublesome past after World War II, making the environmentalists…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway.
Beyond enduring the Arctic winter’s twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold, as well as Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy.
The Last Whaler is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter's twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold as well as Astrid's unexpected pregnancy. The Last Whaler concerns the impact of…
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