Just ten years ago it was still difficult to find English-language books on the conservation policies of the Nazis. British and American environmental historians were more interested in the first flowering of nature protection in the late nineteenth century, or in regional campaigns to save the Rhineland or Black Forest, or in the immediate circumstances that gave rise to the Green Party and today's urban-based environmentalism. Historians of the Third Reich, for their part, seemed interested in nearly every aspect of the Nazi era except its conservation practices. Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun to fill this gap. Frank Uekoetter's The Green and the Brown is the latest and, in many ways, the best contribution to this burgeoning field.

It has long been recognized that certain high-ranking Nazi officials—Hermann Göring, Fritz Todt, Heinrich Himmler, Richard Walther Darré, among them—championed the cause of nature conservation, native plant preservation, and homeland protection. It has also long been recognized that certain features of the Nazi Reich—including its racialist, expansionist, and “blood and soil” rhetoric—were readily adapted to the “green” ideas of reform-minded agrarians, nature preservationists, and landscape architects in the 1930s. But it has only recently become fully clear just how well the rank-and-file conservationists of the Weimar era adjusted and adapted to the Third Reich, and just how tenaciously they promulgated their ideas despite the mounting burdens that the Nazi economic war machine placed on Germany's (and later Europe's) natural resources. Nazi-era conservationists were, above all, opportunists, as Uekoetter rightly emphasizes: “you had to take what you could get, and you had to leap at opportunities.” This accommodation was accomplished through “ideological convergence,” “tactical alliances,” “simple careerism,” and even “crimes against humanity” (p. 16).

At the heart of Uekoetter's book are four case studies—focused on the Hohenstoffeln Mountain quarry, the Schorfheide National Nature Reserve, the Ems River rectification project, and the Wutach Gorge hydroelectric development plan—that illuminate various aspects of Nazi-era conservation policies. While he does not claim that these case studies are “representative,” he nonetheless has endeavored to pick controversies that highlight a wide variety of problems that arose in different regions of Germany during different periods of the Nazi regime. The Hohenstoffeln controversy revolved around the persistent efforts of a local conservationist, Ludwig Finckh, to halt the destruction of a mountain in Baden. After his Weimar-era campaign came to naught, he wrapped himself in Nazi discourse, gained the ear of high-ranking Nazi leaders, and agitated publicly for an end to the quarrying. “I see this as a victory of the German law over the Roman-Jewish literal interpretation of the law,” Finckh declared in 1939, upon hearing that the Nazis had decided to shut down the quarry without compensating the owners (p. 97). Uekoetter's second case study focuses on Hermann Göring's efforts to turn the Schorfheide forest, formerly a royal hunting ground located near Berlin, into a national nature reserve for bison, moose, wild horses, and other animals that had all but disappeared from Europe's landscapes. Never a true reserve (he appropriated 300 acres for himself, upon which he built Carinhall mansion and planned to build the Hermann Göring Museum), it was blasted into near oblivion by the invading Red Army in 1945 and later became a hunting retreat for East German authorities.

The third case study—the Ems River regulation dispute in Westphalia—centered on Weimar-era plans to shorten and tame the Ems in the interest of flood control and agricultural productivity. Westphalian conservationists, who had been left out of the consultation process during the Weimar era, tried to convince Nazi leaders to alter or abandon the Ems project. In the end, however, all they achieved was a change in rhetoric: the Ems rectification work proceeded almost exactly as originally planned, even as Nazis loudly proclaimed their devotion to riparian conservation. Local conservationists were only slightly more successful in their campaign to save Baden's Wutach Gorge (Uekoetter's fourth case study) from being dammed by a hydroelectric plant. They forced the hydroelectric company to leave about one-third of the Wutach's water in its original bed (roughly twice what the company originally planned), but they could not convince the Nazis to stop construction of the dam itself. Only the exigencies of war kept it from being completed by 1945.

Uekoetter argues that the polycentric model is more appropriate than the Gleichschaltung model in explaining Nazi conservation policies. Hitler himself evinced no strong opinions on the subject, leaving policy formation entirely in the hands of his bureaucrats. This resulted in conservation policies that were fragmentary and contradictory rather than consistent and uniform, and produced policies that reflected the ups and downs of bureaucratic infighting rather than an overarching “green” vision. On the one hand, some prominent Nazi leaders lent support to a variety of conservationist causes, even when this support threatened their pet projects in other arenas. On the other hand, conservationists typically found themselves marginalized whenever issues of national security and economic prosperity loomed large, as was often the case; they could win the occasional scuffle but never the larger political battle.

All four of Uekoetter's case studies illustrate this bureaucratic muddle well. Finckh was able to “save” Hohenstoffeln Mountain from destruction, but quarrying continued unabated elsewhere, often with the use of concentration-camp labor. The Schorfheide reserve was nothing but a byproduct of Göring's enormous ego and his equally enormous love of hunting; his vision for the reserve died with him. Neither the Ems River nor the Wutach Gorge disputes were decided in favor of the conservationists; only cosmetic changes were made to the original plans. “The general dilemma of the conservation community was familiar to many Germans of the Nazi era,” Uekoetter notes: “how far do you go in terms of concessions and compromises toward a totalitarian regime?” (p. 166).

Any book based primarily on four case studies is open to criticism, and future researchers will no doubt uncover similar controversies during the 1930s and 1940s that will cast a slightly different light on the events and policies of the Nazi era. Uekoetter, however, has a sound grasp of the general contours of Nazi-era conservation, and he presents his arguments in a highly readable and engaging manner. Well researched and cogently argued, this book should be read by environmental historians and Third Reich historians alike, and most especially by scholars in search of new and innovative research projects in these fields.