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"Our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler drinks no
alcohol and does not smoke.... His performance at work is incredible." (From Auf der Wacht 1937:)
Key messages:
Per capita
cigarette consumption increased during the first six years of Nazi rule but declined during the
war and postwar period The Nazi
anti-tobacco effort must be understood as part of the effort to safeguard the German population against "racial poisons"
The German tobacco industry tried to defuse the anti-tobacco
movement by characterising it as "unscientific"
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Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to explore
the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement in
the 1930s and early 1940s, encompassing bans on smoking in public spaces, bans on advertising, restrictions on tobacco rations
for women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of
lung cancer.
The anti-tobacco campaign must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi
quest for racial and bodily purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era. One topic that has only
recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.
Germany had the world's strongest antismoking movement
in the 1930s and early 1940s, supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco
might prove a hazard to the race. Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco
activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders
of Europe--Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco--were all non-smokers.
Hitler was the most
adamant, characterizing tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor."
At one point the Fuhrer even suggested that Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had
he not given up smoking. |
