Enforced Purity? 
By Bruce P. Shields 

Ann Coulter in January of 2007 published an article in which she stated that the Nazis were vegetarians.  As one might expect with invective aimed at other targets, her point is partially accurate.  The connection of Nazi propaganda -- talking points, books, pamphlets, opinion pieces, and party platforms -- to vegetarian ideals is very complicated yet real.

The Nazi enterprise began as a loose coalition of various grassroots organizations right after World War I.  France during the 18th and early 19th century was the most aggressively imperialist power in continental Europe, capturing most of North Africa and extensive tracts in the rest of the world.  France also (following the doctrine laid out by Napolean for "squaring the boundary") captured and forcibly Frank-ised several places in Europe in which the majority population spoke a Germanic language.  Germany until the mid-19th Century was never a single nation.  It was a wide-ranging group of independent principalities speaking more than a dozen similar languages ranging from Dutch and Flemish in the West to Hoch Deutsch [High German -- i.e. the Alpine version of German] in the East. An ideal of many German nationalists from the 18th Century on was to unite all the German speakers in Europe into one nation, just as Italian speakers united to form Italy, Spanish speakers to form Spain, and so on.  The Austrian Emperor to many German nationalists represented the highest ideal of German-ness.

Following World War I, despite Woodrow Wilson's ineffectual protest, the French were successful in humiliating the Germans politically -- they forced the end to the Austrian empire, and installed the Weimar Republic, which became a symbol of democracy imposed by force to many German nationalists.  And France also successfully destroyed the German economy, which had been the third largest in the world prior to the war.  And so the coalition of anti-Weimar political cells which later became the Nationalistic Socialist party [abbreviated Na-zi according to the common German way of creating acronyms] embraced many groups with somewhat disparate goals.  During the 1920's, the Nazis struggled under Joseph Goebbels to develop a set of themes which would stir the widest acceptance, would motivate the core constituencies most deeply, and would engage the aspirations of most people who were not firmly committed Nazis.

The broadest group of early Nazis came from the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) movement, a rural party analogous to America's Grange movement which agitated for German language, German customs, and local community control of farms and markets.  This movement had a great deal in common with the later developing Ecology movement: for instance, it stressed recycling in the extreme, arguing that nutrients carried in produce to towns should be returned to the earth from which it came.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was settled by many Germans who cherished their connections to the homeland.  You may know that Milwaukee in the 1940's marketed a fertilizer called Milorganite processed from the solids from the City of Milwaukee sewage treatment plant.  The slogan in Germany for this ideal translates as "Each turd returns home."

As an agrarian movement, the Blut und Boden people were also very suspicious of city people, and were especially aggrieved by the intrusion of capitalist modes of organization into the traditionally communitarian institutions of the ancient rural economy.  In many rural areas, a kind of code word for capitalism was Jewish, in some small part inflamed by the very spectacular success of the French Jewish family of Rothschild in investment banking.  So the core Nazi group coalesced around the idea of purity: racial purity, purity of language, purity of communitarian customs.  With its agrarian base, the Nazi propaganda (excluding the extreme racism normally present) would read today like the program of the Green Party.

The Nazi party never officially embraced vegetarianism.  However, given the background of the core activists, it is not surprising that several leading Nazis were vegetarian.  Dame Anna Bramwell of Oxford University [A History of Ecology in the 20th Century] notes that both Hitler and Himmler were vegetarian -- not aggressively so, but consistently.  Himmler moved during World War II into a very rigidly Vegan position, prompting one recent biographer to speculate that he harbored a repressed guilt for the death of so many Jews.  Curiously, both Himmler and Hitler also sponsored many animal rights measures which were imposed by the 3d Reich, such as a ban on veal.  Many Nazi leaders were influenced by the doctrines of homeopathy as developed by the communitarian Rudolph Steiner, whose thought also influenced a number of organizations still active in the US.  Hermann Goering embraced several of these ideas simultaneously: he purged a huge area of several hundred square miles on the Polish border of the alien Polish residents and replaced them with a small number of pure German villages sprinkled among a vast natural wildlife area to which he restored several threatened and endangered species -- which he would hunt annually.

None of this should suggest that one may call modern American ecological politics Nazi.  It is useful, however, to understand how evil a movement could be which paraded many ecological values at the front of its agenda.  The unique damage of the Nazis came from blending notions of ecological purity with standards of cultural, economic and racial purity, and focusing the whole power of the State to enforce these standards of purity.

Bruce Shields has retired from three professions; college English teacher, sawmiller and executive of the Vermont Forest Products Association, and operator of a farm supply store.  In retirement, he works his woodlot and maple sugar place, sits on the boards of several statewide organizations related to natural resources, and serves as Lister in the town of Eden, VT.