4 - Conservation at Work: Four Case Studies

Summary

In 1931, the Netherlands Committee for International Nature Protection published a worldwide overview on the organization of nature protection. In spite of the deficiencies of the German conservation bureaucracy during the Weimar years, this book portrayed it favorably: “There is nowhere else in Europe such an extensive organisation for nature protection as among our neighbors to the east,” the Dutch conservationists declared. It is tempting to speculate what the author would have said about the system of the late 1930s: the 55 regional and 880 county institutions in all parts of Germany. In all likelihood, this was the most comprehensive network for the protection of nature of its time – an array of manpower for conservation purposes that no other country could muster. But manpower is only one requirement for a successful conservation policy. It is difficult, if not impossible, to judge the relative worth of the German conservation administration by laws and institutions alone. After the previous chapter, the general ambivalence should be clear: on the one hand, paragraph 20 of the National Conservation Law meant that the conservationists had veto power over every project that affected the landscape, at least in theory. On the other hand, the final decision on conservation issues remained in the hands of Hermann Göring, and it was clear that conservation concerns ranked lower on Göring's agenda than the military buildup that he chaired as head of the Four Year Plan Agency.