This ability to track the Google searches that lead people to my blog is offering up a wealth of information. Someone was searching “Nazis and cigarettes” yesterday and when I saw what results they got other than my post about Prince Harry, I was amazed to discover a whole aspect of Third Reich history that I’d never heard about. Did you know that Hitler was the first world leader who campaigned against the evils of tobacco? Of course, he did it in a hideous way and drew connections between tobacco distributors and his ever-popular international conspiracy of Jews and communists, but he also had teams of doctors publishing research studies about the effects of cigarettes on the human body, including its link to lung cancer, long before anyone in our free society was making this information known.
Obviously Germany’s anti-tobacco campaign has to be looked at against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial purity, they didn’t give a damn if Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals smoked like chimneys. But I had no idea that under the Nazis smoking was banned in public places and there were big restrictions placed on tobacco advertising.
Hitler used to like to point out that while Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were smokers, the three major fascist leaders of Europe—Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—were all non-smokers. Hitler was the most adamant crusader. I’m reluctant to post any photos of Hitler on here for fear of the scary searches I might get, but I saw one poster of Adolf with the tagline, “Our Fuhrer drinks no alcohol and does not smoke…His performance at work is incredible.” Yikes.
The Nazis also published reports about the dangers of smoking by pregnant women and even the perils of secondhand smoke. Not that Hitler’s anti-smoking efforts had a huge impact on the German people. For the first six years of the Nazis rule, smoking rates grew in Germany, some say as a kind of cultural resistance. Oh great—many Germans stood by shrugging their shoulders as Germany’s Jews were deprived of their rights and then dragged away to their deaths, but let the Nazis try to take away their cigarettes and that’s when these folks rise up and revolt? The German tobacco industry tried to fight the Nazis’ anti-smoking campaign, pronouncing the research "unscientific" and depicting the doctors who railed against tobacco use “fanatics.” Sound familiar?
What a shame that the German anti-smoking research had to be abandoned wholesale after the war. Talk about throwing the baby away with the bathwater! If anything, at the end of the war cigarettes were seen as a potent symbol of American freedom—remember all those newsreels of American GIs tossing packs of cigarettes to the grateful crowds?
It would take decades before the medical community would be able to muster up enough support to make people acknowledge the links between cigarettes and disease. Hitler’s anti-smoking policies probably set the movement back at least twenty years. So now I can add my mother’s death from lung cancer to the Nazis endless list of crimes against humanity.
Hello All,
I was reading around some of the posts here and I found interesting things that you guys talk about, I just made a blog about quitting smoking resources and ideas that you might want to check out.
If someone is interested in this topic just go to; http://endthehabitnow.blogspot.com and let me know what you think.
Thanks in advance.
Posted by: exsmoker | September 26, 2007 at 09:25 AM