Accuracy in Media – October 28, 2010
How and Why the Nazis Went Green
By Mark Musser
Albert Speer’s defense at the Nuremberg trials oddly concluded with a warning about the potential destructive powers of science and technology. He strongly pointed out that such a technology could easily be used to dominate people—as was the often the case in the Third Reich, especially with regard to the spread of propaganda. Sounding like a preface to the entire modern environmental movement which sprang into worldwide action in the 1960’s, Speer thus managed to deflect some sense of responsibility away from himself and the German people by shoving blame upon Western man’s technological prowess to dominate “helpless” people. Thus, Avatar was at Nuremberg some 60 years ago. Even stranger still, Speer’s defense worked. He eluded the death penalty.
More troublesome is how so many have naively followed in the footsteps of Speer’s defense, always blaming Nazi technology, industry and the economy for the holocaust. Leftists in particular are eager to paint “right wing” modern industry and Capitalism with Nazi blood. In fact, thanks to Marxist propaganda and Nazi compromises with German industry, it is not well known that the Nazis loathed Capitalism just as much as Marxism.
The Nazis attacked both of them as an unnatural Jewish rebellion against Nature and her Social Darwinian laws. Communism and Capitalism were considered international Jewish heresies where Marxist universal values and superficial capitalistic commercialism posed a serious threat to the natural biology of the German race. This was rooted in Ernst Haeckel’s ‘scientific’ evolutionary ecology of the 1800’s and was further buoyed by Richard Wagner’s wild revolutionary Romanticism. It was this romantic belief in an Aryan cultural superiority based on Nature’s laws, all dressed up in modern scientific biology, that was the ideological bread and butter of the Third Reich. As such, surprisingly enough, Speer’s defense at Nuremberg was thus a continuation of this Nazi ‘green’ ideology.
The Nazis, of course, needed money to fund their national regeneration program. With a very fragile German economy to draw from, they were thus forced to make some important concessions to big business and industry that many Nazis considered a betrayal of their values. Moreover, the Nazi economy was flying by the seat of its pants throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. Nazi hatred for international Jewish capitalism placed them on a suicidal path of national autarky, economic isolation and destruction. Weighed down with war reparations, a weak economy, and lacking natural resources that had to be imported from abroad, the Nazi economy became an ersatz economy. Synthetic substitutes produced locally at home had to be found to fill in the gaping holes. That the chemical giant IG Farben was at the heart of the Nazi economy should come as no surprise. Producing synthetics became vital to make up for their import restrictions. Their Aryan biology/ecology thus created a government controlled ‘local only’ economy that was doomed to fail.
The Nazis further survived by placing severe government restrictions on imports. They also subsidized their exports. While both actions became extremely profitable to the big industrialists, the Nazi economy was mostly guns without butter. Sound financial decisions were routinely ignored in favor of revving up the war economy. By 1942, Germany itself was on the verge of severe food rationing. This shortage, however, was relieved by stoking up the gas chambers on the Eastern Front.
Nazi isolation from international trade only intensified their Malthusian natural resource math problem.
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