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Seven decades after the defeat of Hitler's dictatorship, the European landscape still bears the scars of war and genocide. With its technologically driven scorched earth strategy and the industrialized mass murder that accompanied it, the devastation wrought by the Nazi military machine belies any image of environmental harmony. Ecological concern is not among the elements popularly associated with the Third Reich. Yet historical debate about purportedly "green" aspects of Nazism has not faded. Timothy Snyder's controversial book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning brought renewed attention to the question of "Hitler's ecological project," reviving a scholarly dispute that has been simmering for years.1 At the same time, this vexing theme seems more and more contemporary. Rising nationalist and populist movements currently claim ecological issues as their own, conjoining them with anti-immigrant sentiment. Journalists in Germany and elsewhere have traced a growing trend of right-wing back-to-the-land movements harking back to the Nazi era and its rural ideology.2
In light of this convoluted past and increasingly relevant present, the underlying historical question deserves careful consideration: Was there a discernibly environmentalist strand within the Nazi regime? If so, what impact did it have on Nazi policy? Perhaps no other figure embodies the contradictions of this unlikely history as clearly as Alwin Seifert, who has been characterized as "the most prominent environmentalist in the Third Reich."3 Seifert was well known during the Nazi era as a proponent of organic farming, championing "rootedness in the soil" and attacking the use of nonnative plant species.4 After 1945, he went on to become a key figure in the postwar environmental movement in Germany. As the charismatic leader of a coterie of like-minded followers, he gained considerable influence in Nazi circles.
From 1934 onward Seifert headed a group of environmental officials known as the Landschaftsanwälte or "advocates for the landscape," whose role was to oversee the ecological impact of public works projects sponsored by Hitler's regime. The importance of these landscape advocates remains contested. Some historians have downplayed their responsibilities, noting that they were "limited to a consultative function."5 Their work on the massive Autobahn construction project in the 1930s has understandably garnered most of the historical attention.6 This emphasis, however, has overshadowed other...