The ‘Green’ Economy of the Third Reich by R. Mark Musser
Green Lebensraum: The Nazi Roots of Sustainable Development by R. Mark Musser
The Green Nazi Tycoon Alfred Toepfer by R. Mark Musser
The Aryan ‘Local Only’ Sustainable Economy of the Third Reich
by R. Mark Musser
Albert Speer’s famous 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. Speer even spoke of intercontinental super rockets that could now rain down atomic fire upon cities without warning. He went on to say that “science will be able to spread pestilence among humans and animals,” and that “chemistry will be capable of inflicting unspeakable suffering upon an increasingly helpless humanity.” With the shockwaves of the nuclear age being recently imposed upon the entire world, Speer was virtually warning everyone present at the trial – beware.
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, oddly enough, Avatar was at Nuremberg some 60 years ago. Even stranger still, Speer’s defense worked. Although he was certainly one of the primary players in the holocaust and all of the wanton destruction that was World War II, he eluded the death penalty. He wound up serving 20 years at Spandau prison with Rudolf Hess, one of Third Reich’s original green mystics going all the way back to the party’s origins.
Even stranger still is how so many have naively followed in the footsteps of Albert Speer’s defense, always blaming Nazi technology, industry and the economy for the holocaust.Secular leftist and Marxist scholars always find ways to focus on the Third Reich’s economy so they can paint ‘right wing’ modern industry, capitalism and Euro-American colonialism with Nazi blood. This argument even became much more plausible thanks to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 when Hitler, Himmler and Goering arrested and later assassinated Ernst Roehm, the homosexual leader of the very left leaning nationalist SA.
Roehm’s execution, however, was much more due to practical considerations than true ideological differences. Not only was Roehm a personal friend of Hitler, but the Nazis had originally intended to use the SA as a powerful shock troop to take over the Germany Army.The problem was that Hitler surprisingly won the election by a fair vote. Roehm thus became not only expendable, but also a liability.The German Army hated Roehm and the SA, and if news got out to the German public that he was a flaming homosexual, the Nazis would find themselves in a very precarious political situation since their victory was a very narrow one.
Neither can it be ignored that the Nazis 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 Roehm and the leftist SA considered a betrayal of Nazi values. Roehm’s days were therefore numbered, which were also further shortened by the power hungry green Nazis – Himmler and Goering. In fact, on the very evening that the Night of the Long Knives was reported by Hitler, Goering celebrated Nazi Germany’s new green game law. With the death of Roehm, here is seen the removal of the pink helmet from within a growing green swastika inside the higher echelons of the Nazi Party.
Although the Nazis hated Communism, because of Marxist propaganda and Nazi compromises with German industry, it is not well known that they also loathed Capitalism as well. The Nazis attacked both Communism and Capitalism as being an unnatural Jewish rebellion against Nature and her Social Darwinian laws. The Nazis treated both Communism and Capitalism as 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 Nazi Germany’s wild romantic belief in an Aryan cultural superiority based on Nature’s laws, all dressed up in modern scientific biology and often camouflaged with ecological predilections that was the ideological bread and butter of the Third Reich. Jews and Slavs were, in fact, murdered in the name of Nature, not because the Nazis were capitalists, much less Christians. As such, surprisingly enough, Albert Speer’s defense at Nuremberg was thus a continuation of this Nazi ‘green’ ideology that the war effort had greatly compromised, something which Speer himself even later acknowledged.
The Myth of the Nazi Burgeoning Economy
Thus the idea that the Nazi Germany was an economic, capitalistic juggernaut is purely fictitious. It is a myth of the modern leftist mind. The fact of the matter is that the Nazi economy was flying by the seat of its pants throughout the 1930’s and 40’s.Their intense hatred for international Jewish capitalism placed them on a suicidal path of national autarky, economic isolation and destruction. It placed them under a siege of their own making. 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 thus not be so surprising. Producing synthetics through the chemical industry became vital to make up for their import restrictions.Their Aryan Social Darwinian biology/ecology thus created a government controlled ‘local only’ economy that was doomed to fail.
The Nazis also survived this dearth of natural resources by placing severe government restrictions on imports and by subsidizing their exports, both of which became extremely profitable to the Big Industrialists of Germany, but did very little to help the struggling economy for small business and the average citizen. This, in effect, created corporate welfare which became very corrupt as the relationship between the Nazi Party and the big corporations became ever entwined in a corporatism of growing terrorism. Their later territorial acquisitions in western and central Europe only slightly improved their predicament as Nazi Germany also inherited the weaknesses of the countries they acquired. The Nazi economy was thus mostly guns without butter. In fact, it was purposefully sacrificed on the Nordic altar of the Roman god of war. The Nazis were interested in the economy only insofar to make weapons. Sound financial decisions were routinely ignored in favor of revving up the war economy. Not surprisingly, by 1942, Germany itself was on the verge of famine with severe food rations being contemplated on the home front. This problem, however, was relieved by stoking up the gas chambers on the Eastern Front.
The Aryan ‘Local Only’ Economy
As such, Nazi isolation from international trade only intensified their Malthusian natural resource math problem. As the Nazi economy was severely limited by its own living space with too many Germans and too little land, the drive eastward to take land by force became more radical, ominous and sinister, especially as the war effort began to go badly. The Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum (a German word for ‘environmental living space’) thus merged geopolitics with a tribal Social Darwinism that would not be undone until all the smoke cleared from the battlefields of World War II since the survival of the German race depended upon its success.
In other words, rather than overcome their natural resource deficits through competitive commercialism and international trade, which was all deemed a corrupting international Jewish-American conspiracy, the Nazis decided to subjugate the European continent for their own hegemony. This was, in fact, an exact reversal of European colonialism of the past where such land grabs were usually done outside of Europe in much less populated areas in primitive conditions.As such, rather than “go west young man,” the Third Reich headed East in a massive blitzkrieg that the Nazi hierarchy knew had no chance of success unless the Russians were defeated within the first year of the war. Many knew that the lack of natural resources would doom the Wehrmacht if there was a long war off attrition. This also helps explain why Hitler seized the Ukraine in September of 1941 when the war effort began to slow down on the Russian front. He then attempted to take the Caucasus in 1942 because of the vast oil fields there. Lebensraum was always more important to him than Moscow, much to the chagrin of the German generals who knew that immediate victory was more crucial at the gates of the Kremlin.
Lebensraum & Nazi Sustainable Development
More to the point, with their ownLebensraum in the East, this would allow the Nazis to compete with the American-Anglo industrial complex without having to resort to the corrosive effects of Jewish capitalism. More importantly, they could become self sufficient with plenty of land in the East to be used for growing food and for sustainable development under Nazi state control that could later be extended throughout the entire Reich. Land reclamation projects, very destructive to the German water table, could be drastically scaled down in Germany itself. Dam building could be moved to Norway with all of her natural fjords. Poland would become Germany’s ‘green’ Ireland. Ukraine would become the frontier agrarian bread basket of the Reich. The old idea of draining the vast Pripit Marshes to make it more arable for farming was shelved as early as 1941 because Hitler feared it would turn the Ukraine into a dust bowl.All of the East, including Belarus and western Russia, would be depopulated of its citizens and turned into a massive ruralized countryside where Aryan cultural development, model towns, forests and nature could live harmoniously together. Autobahns would also be built to connect the East with Germany, yet this would be done in the name of a warrior romanticism dating back to the old Roman roads.
Heinrich Himmler would even become the leading industrialist of this eastern empire. This oxymoron, however, would be used to finance and construct a green garden park for the natural health of the German race in the occupied territories that would take some 200-300 years to build. Himmler, Darre and the SS obsessed over what they called “land flight.” People were corrupting themselves and their biological systems by moving into dirty, international towns away from the clean, rugged countryside which would make them strong and healthy. Lebensraum could thus be used to help alleviate this national crisis.
The Germans would thus develop their newly acquired territories, yet this would all be done with a certain respect for the natural world – something very important to SS environmental planner Konrad Meyer who had his fingerprints all over this green plan for the East. Had it not been for the fact that Konrad Meyer was an SS Nazi professor, he could easily be considered one of the original gurus of the cult of sustainable development and environmental planning. Even the four year plan, i.e., the great battle for production to get Nazi Germany ready for war, was to be regulated by many of Konrad Meyer’s ‘scientific’ environmental sustainable development ideas. A whole book on environmental planning was produced for this very purpose and signed by a whole cadre of leading Nazis, including Albert Speer.
In the early years of the war, Nazi landscape planners were salivating at the wide open opportunities that would be afforded them in the East where crowded areas and private property would no longer interfere with their grandiose plans. Hitler even declared in November of 1941, just as the Wehrmacht neared the outskirts of Moscow, “But there is one thing I can predict to eaters of meat, that the world of the future will be vegetarian!”
In a word, the Nazi quest for Lebensraum in the East was an early pioneering attempt at what is today called the Green Economy. Lebensraum was, in fact, a backward eco-imperial plan of Aryan sustainable development, all at the expense of Jews and Slavs, and all dressed up in the latest scientific vocabulary of the day. Even though the Nazis were planning on introducing a regressive, barbarous regime throughout all of Europe, fascism always paints itself with the most progressive of intentions, which continues to confuse many a modern scholar on the whole Nazi enterprise.
Subverting Motive with Means
To fixate on Nazi technology, industry, and the economy, therefore, as the explanation for that all that was evil about the Third Reich is to subvert the means of holocaustic murder with the motive. It is no different than the hollow leftist diatribe of blaming the existence of guns for violence rather than the holding the murderer himself accountable. This is actually very typical of leftist thinking in general which has drawn too much from the wells of Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism. In its reductionist secularism, it downplays the role of ideology and always finds ways to blame the material means of production for all that is evil in the world, and this has been especially the case with regard to the leftist/Marxian interpretation of the Nazi experience.
The Nazi economy was merely the means by which the holocaust was paid for. The Russian Front, including the dwindling food supply, provided the opportunity for murder. But the motive of the holocaust was an Aryan environmentalism rooted in a romantic philosophy of man and nature that had little to do with science, but was certainly promoted as such, leaving much confusion as to what Nazism was really all about, no thanks to Albert Speer’s Nuremberg defense. Albert Speer’s defense is, in fact, a perfect exhibition of his own leftist thinking where he manages to shift some blame upon western progress and technology to cloud up his own accountability in the greatest murdering spree witnessed in the history of all mankind.
Copyright April 2010 by R. Mark Musser
Permission is herewith given to copy and distribute by electronic or physical means as long as it is not sold – the copyright notice is included and credits are given to the author.