The Nazi Rag Pickers and Their Wine The Politics of Waste and Recycling in Nazi Germany

Social History
ISSN: 0307-1022 (Print) 1470-1200 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshi20
The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine: the politics of

waste and recycling in Nazi Germany
Anne Berg
To cite this article: Anne Berg (2015) The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine: the
politics of waste and recycling in Nazi Germany, Social History, 40:4, 446-472, DOI:
10.1080/03071022.2015.1076124
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Download by: [190.248.234.92] Date: 26 August 2017, At: 10:31

Social History, 2015
Vol. 40, No. 4, 446–472, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2015.1076124
Anne Berg
The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine:

the politics of waste and recycling in
Nazi Germany
ABSTRACT: This article offers a first attempt to examine systematically the politics
Downloaded by [190.248.234.92] at 10:31 26 August 2017
of waste and recycling in the Third Reich, one of the first modern states to articulate
‘zero waste’ as a political goal. It presupposes that waste, both in its material realities
and its everyday representations, offers a powerful guide to any society’s implicit
order. With respect to Nazi Germany, the suggestion that such presumably neutral
materials as trash, waste and garbage order social relations has particularly sinister
implications. Focusing on scrap collectors and salvaging practices inside Germany
and in Nazi-occupied Europe, this article argues that waste management and
recycling were integral to the Nazi racial order and crystallized as central strategies to
administer the chaos of war. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers in party, industry
and society performed their loyalty and re-imposed order by collecting paper,
bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rags and bones with the explicit goal of closing
the energy cycle, extending the Reich’s resource base and increasing the regime’s
war-making capabilities. In pursuit of these goals, the Nazi state attempted not only
to conquer its many enemies but also to erase the evidence of its own proliferating
military setbacks. These efforts notwithstanding, the reclamation of waste did not
have the power to reverse the fortunes of war. The Nazi politics of zero waste
recycled chaos instead.
KEYWORDS: garbage; Nazi Germany; recycling; Second World War; Third

Reich; waste
Often, in the red light of a street-lamp

Of which the wind whips the flame and worries the glass,
In the heart of some old suburb, muddy labyrinth,
Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment,
One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head,
Stumbling, bumping against the walls like a poet,
And with no thoughts of the stool-pigeons, his subjects,
He pours out his whole heart in grandiose projects.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Rag-picker’s Wine’1
q 2015 Taylor & Francis

November 2015 Nazi rag-pickers and their wine 447
.4
On 23 October 1941, the High Command of the Wehrmacht approached Hans Heck,
the Reich’s Commissioner for Secondary Materials, with the task of immediately
mobilizing 60,000,000 empty bottles through a nationwide campaign. These bottles
were to be filled with much needed ‘warming beverages’ – wine and spirits to be
precise – and distributed to the troops fighting on the Eastern Front. Christopher
Browning draws attention to the copious consumption of alcohol by mobile killing
squads, Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht in Russia during the summer and autumn of 1941,
and alcohol flowed in abandon too during the mass shootings perpetrated by the
Reserve Police Battalion in Poland the following year.2 To ensure that the refilled
bottles would reach their destination before extreme cold could burst them and waste
their precious content, the bottles had to embark on their mission by the end of the
month. Accordingly, the action was planned as a blitz and the collection set for 8
November 1941. The same day 990 people were deported from Hamburg to Minsk as
part of a massive wave of deportations of Jews from the Reich between October 1941
and February 1942.3

As Walter Tießler, the leader of the Reich’s Ring for National Socialist Propaganda,
made his way home to his Berlin apartment on the evening of 10 November 1941, he
was well pleased with himself. He was also pleased with his fellow Berliners. Citizens
had conscientiously followed the instructions disseminated by the propaganda office and
neatly lined up their empties in front of doors and along sidewalks. The racial
community had once again proven its willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the men
fighting on the front, on behalf of their ‘Führer’. Across the Reich, empty bottles were
waiting to be picked up and sent eastward. Tießler’s job was done. The first part of the
operation had run like clockwork.4 But by the time Tießler applauded the diligence of
German citizens, bottles had already been sitting along the sidewalks and on the
doorsteps for two days.
The success of the bottle campaign depended on much more than propaganda and
hence Tießler’s sense of accomplishment was, at least in the eyes of Hans Heck,
unwarranted. The Reichsflaschentag, as the nationwide collection of bottles for the
Wehrmacht was dutifully not to be called, did not require ‘large-scale propaganda’.
In fact, Heck insisted that ‘the purpose of the collection is readily self-evident’.5 The
implementation of the ‘bottle action’ none the less proved far more complicated. Tießler
had reason to worry. The glaring potential for mockery inherent in any composite of the
word Flasche [bottle], which also translates as ‘dud’, ‘wimp’ and ‘palooka’, was an
immediate concern. When bottles remained on doorsteps beyond the scheduled pick-up
date, it is easy to imagine how offhand remarks were quick to jeer at the collection as the
1C. Baudelaire, ‘The Rag-picker’s Wine’, The 3Browning, op. cit., 42.
Flowers of Evil, trans. W. Aggeler (Fresno, CA, 4BArch NS18-1039. Fernschreiben [Teleprint].
1954). Tießler and Pg Witt, Führerbau, München, 11
2
Bundesarchiv, Berlin (hereafter BArch), November 1941.
NS18-1039. Rundschreiben [Circular] Nr. 5BArch NS18-1039. Rundschreiben [Circular]
19/41 GBA. Appendix AE.NR.2308/41. Nr. 144/41 Reichspropagandaleitung [Reich’s

C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion Propaganda Office], 1 November 1941 and
101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, Correspondence between Hans Heck and Pg
1998), 61, 69, 80, 82, 83, 85, 100, 108. Tießler, 28 October 1941.
448 Social History VOL. 40 : NO. 4
‘Reich duds day’ or ‘Reich duds action’. The Reich’s Propaganda Office promptly
decreed a new ‘language rule’ to avert such ridicule, but the logistical difficulties proved
much more tenacious.6
The extent of individual loyalty and collective spirit – but also the administrative
bottleneck (pun intended) – was on public display. Now it was up to the regime’s
army of secondary materials collectors – the rag-pickers of this story – to return
every bit of scrap to the war economy and report on the degree of their success with
impassioned precision.7 Tießler, the propagandist, shared their space as he scrutinized
the city and its inhabitants. He certainly would have told their story as if it had
happened just so. To cast Tießler as a ‘flaneur’ is a deliberate provocation; the allusion
to the downtrodden urban poor is perhaps an even greater tease. Generally
understood as the ‘solitary urban stroller, as detective, tracking down the
transgressions committed in the metropolis’, the flaneur carefully observes the
monstrous curiosity of the crowd, governing it with his gaze. But as Tom
McDonough suggests, the figure of the flaneur can be read in its inverse – as a
criminal himself, indistinguishable from those he keeps under surveillance.8 In
Tießler’s case, the ‘crowd’ he observed was not only the general population of Berlin,
but a national corps of some 100,000 volunteers who were on the hunt for rags, scrap,
bones, bottles, paper and Hitler’s gratitude. Their role was crucial. Unlike the rag-
pickers and peddlers in Baudelaire’s poetry, the Nazi army of scrap collectors were
not social outcasts. They were a systemic force, and their salvaging efforts, even if
unwittingly so, sustained and perpetuated a murderous system. They were deployed
to extend the war economy and ward off inevitable undersupply. The Nazi regime
looked to the salvaging efforts during the First World War, adamant in its efforts to
evade economic constriction, food and resource shortages and thus protect itself from
the discontent (and revolutionary potential) it feared as a result of excessive
shortages.9 To the Nazi regime, the Revolution of 1918/19 was proof enough that all
previous salvaging initiatives had been massive failures. Nevertheless, the successes of
their own collections and scrapping efforts were often dubious and in some instances
counterproductive. But as I illustrate over the course of this article, these diligent
volunteers performed maintenance at a much more basic level. They salvaged
and scrapped, collected and altered, robbed and extracted, repurposed and
redistributed materials with disturbing fanaticism and, indeed, care. They managed
scarcity. They performed efficiency. And in the name of order and efficiency, they
recycled chaos.
6On ‘language rules’ see H. Arendt, Eichmann in 9G. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New Germany, 1914– 1918 (Princeton, 1966) and
York, c. 1963), 85 –6. A. Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian
7
‘Die Front im Osten wird sich sehr freuen’ Interpretation (Oxford, 1991); R. Chickering,
[‘The Eastern Front will rejoice’], Hamburger The Great War and Urban Life in Germany:
Tageblatt (6 November 1941). Freiburg, 1914 –1918 (Cambridge, 2007) and
8
Tom McDonough, ‘The crimes of the B. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and
flaneur’, October, 102 (Autumn 2002), 101– 22. Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel
Hill, 2000).
.4
This article begins to integrate the history of refuse generation and waste management
into the context of the Third Reich’s murderous operations. My interests here are focused
on situating the collection of secondary materials within the context of the Nazi politics
of resource extraction to outline an important venue through which popular
participation could and readily did unfold. The activities of ordinary scrappers not
only align with complex administrative responses to the chaos of war. More importantly,
they distressingly recast some familiar Auschwitz images – the mounds of shoes, glasses,
rags and human hair – as chillingly rational components of an inverted economy of value
rather than as signifiers of pathological excess alone. This locates the Nazi genocide firmly
within modernity. Therein, I follow scholars who illustrate that the regime’s genocidal
logic (and practice) cannot be divorced from more generally accepted economic
principles and widely practised rational behaviours.10 As Michael Thad Allen
convincingly argues, ‘Ideology and “rational” management did not contradict but
rather enforced each other.’11 In my view, this very interaction between ideological (i.e.
racial) maxims and economic rationales invited the enthusiastic support of committed
Nazis and facilitated the compliance with and acceptance of the stipulated waste practices
by less ardent supporters of the regime.
The literature on popular consent in the Third Reich informs my thinking in
important ways. The best work in this regard has expanded beyond the top-down
administered system of consciously manipulated terror and reward, instead illustrating
how individuals and groups of ‘ordinary’ people navigated the system and made it ‘work’
for their various and not always particularist interests.12 When it comes to waste, neither
the system nor personal interest seem to play an obvious role. Whether in the name of
cleanliness or frugality, individual Volksgenossen[people’s comrades] complied with the
Reich’s waste disposal and salvaging regulations as a matter of intuitive necessity and
habit. Taking out the trash in Nazi Germany was neither more nor less political than
elsewhere. But the implications were different. Ultimately my arguments are not only
concerned with the Nazi system but also with the role garbage plays in any system.13 In
the case of the Third Reich and its crass ideological axioms, neither the substances
designated as waste nor the strategies to get rid of them run the danger of appearing
10
M. Roseman, ‘National Socialism and the Gestapo, society and resistance’ in David
end of modernity’, American Historical Review, Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933 –
116, 3 (June 2011), 688 –701; Z. Bauman, 1945 (London, 1994); Robert Gellately, Backing
Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY, 1989); Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
J. Herff, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, (Oxford, 1998); A. Bergerson, Ordinary
Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Germans in Extraordinary Times (Bloomington,
Reich (Cambridge, 1986). On the Nazi 2004); M. Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als
economy see A. Tooze, The Wages of Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der
Destruction (New York, 2006) and M. Allen, deutschen Provinz, 1919 – 1939 [Hitler’s
The Business of Genocide (Chapel Hill, 2002). Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial
11
Allen, op. cit., 49. Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial
12
P. Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich Germany, 1919 –1939 ] (Hamburg, 2007).
(London, 2008); D. Peukert, Inside Nazi 13I would like to acknowledge the debt these
Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism ideas owe to Z. Gille, From the Cult of Waste To
in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste
Haven, CT, 1987); K. Mallmann and G. Paul, in Socialist and Post-socialist Hungary
‘Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent? (Bloomington, 2007).
ideologically neutral. Rather, connections between waste materials and the system in
which they are generated become readily visible.14
Refuse, garbage, waste, trash, detritus or whatever term one prefers may appear
intuitive and uncontentious. The ‘fact’ of garbage seems to follow the logic of ‘porn’
invoked by Christopher Browning in a different context: we know it when we see it.
Define it, we cannot.15 But a careful exploration of the relationships and interactions
between societies and their waste reveals the complicated and highly contentious politics
of making, demarcating, regulating and discarding matter as waste. Rather than dwelling
on the common designators for the ‘stuff’, I shall use them interchangeably here, and
simply note that the attempts by administrators, waste management industries and
garbologists to pin down the meaning of waste with terminological precision only
underscore the fluidity of the very concept.16 If we accept the premise that garbage is not
defined by intrinsic qualities of any given material or idea, but rather the result of
negotiations over place, process and value, then its materiality is heuristic and not
essential. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us in a different context, garbage is inevitably

taken ‘outside’ and thus constitutes this ‘outside’ as a space that is not subject to a single set
of communal rules; as a space that produces malevolence and exchange; as a space that can
be rubbished.17 I therefore am concerned with the processes, discourses and practices
that render and demarcate, rather than with the ontological essence such rendering claims
to fix.
In this article, then, I pay particular attention to scrapping and salvaging, precisely
because recycling (a term not used at the time) is nowadays imbued with an almost
mystical quality of ecological consciousness.18 Irrespective of the very real political
difference between Nazism and the contemporary Global North, I hope to illustrate
that garbage functioned in the Third Reich much like it does elsewhere. Garbage
practices order social relations, they manifest and maintain dominant ways of making
sense of the world, they often lie at the core of justifications and contestations of that
world, and they provide visceral cues to any society’s social, economic and moral
orders.19 Yet, for the most part, they remain deliberately hidden. William Rathje and
14
On environmental inequalities see G. Walker, Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final
Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence and Solution’ (Cambridge, 1992), 22 –36.
Politics (London, 2012); R. Bullard and 16G. Hawkins. The Ethics of Waste: How We
M. Waters (eds), The Quest for Environmental Relate to Rubbish (New York, 2006) and
Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution M. Shanks, D. Platt and W. L. Rathje, ‘The
(San Francisco, 2005); D. N. Pellow and perfume of garbage: modernity and the
R. Brulle (eds), Power, Justice, and the archaeological’, Modernism/Modernity, 11, 1
Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the (January 2004), 61 –87.
17
Environmental Justice Movement (Cambridge, D. Chakrabarty, ‘Garbage, modernity and the
MA, 2005); C. Mills, ‘Black trash’ in Laura citizen’s gaze’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27,
Westra and Bill E. Lawson (eds), Faces of 10/11 (7–14 March 1992), 541–7.
18
Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of C. Alexander and J. Reno, Economies of
Global Justice, 2nd edn (New York, 2001). Recycling: The Global Transformation of
15C. Browning, ‘German memory, judicial Materials, Values and Social Relations (London,
interrogation, and historical reconstruction: 2012).
19
writing perpetrator history from postwar D. N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for
testimony’ in S. Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge,
MA, 2002); W. Anderson, ‘Excremental
.4
Cullen Murphy have convincingly argued that garbage has the unusual ability to
remain out of mind even when in plain sight.20 When garbage does enter public
discourse and public consciousness – and it seems to do so only when its presence
‘shocks’ – the connections between garbage and the wider socio-political dynamics
become visible.21 Therefore, the insistence on Nazi exceptionalism is, perhaps, ill
placed: at the very least with respect to wasteways.22
The Nazi state was obsessed with waste and wastefulness, with dirt and decay, an
obsession we are most familiar with in its inverse admonitions about health and purity,
order and discipline, efficiency and value.23 Increasingly, waste and refuse were
understood to operate outside the system, associated with those individuals, groups,
places and practices that did not belong. Trash, it follows, functioned within the system as
a quintessential other, as a force that produced and encoded elemental difference. It is
precisely this presumed anti-identity that connects the rubbish of the Third Reich with
that of other societies and time periods. The encroachment of garbage matter, the
proximity of the actual ‘stuff’, transforms the boundaries of belonging, of place and un-
place, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere.24 This can be seen with disturbing clarity in the
context of the war Germany unleashed in September 1939. Over the next several years,
waste of all kinds pressed on people’s consciousness: festering household garbage in
abandoned, bombed-out buildings; detritus and junk left in the wake of advancing and
retreating armies; rubble representing the new architecture of the Nazi city; and the
wasted lives of millions. Such matter marred Europe for decades to come and constituted
material evidence of a monstrous crisis.
The garbage crisis of wartime Europe has not (yet) been claimed as such. Only in the
1970s have invocations of a global garbage crisis become perpetual. Public alarm has
proven as chronic as the ‘crisis’ it claims to have identified.25 Scholarly interest has
developed at a significantly slower pace than public disquiet, and more dispassionately at
that. Historians are certainly no exception.26 Since the ‘triumph’ of capitalism and the
colonialism: public health and the poetics of Ordnung: Herrschaftsmechanismen Im

pollution’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (Spring 1995), Nationalsozialismus [Anxiety, Reward,
640–69; M. Melosi, ‘Fresno sanitary landfill in Discipline and Order: Mechanisms of Rule under
an American cultural context’, Public Historian, National Socialism ] (Opladen, 1982);
24, 3 (Summer 2002), 17 –35; Stephanie Foote R. Proctor. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the
and Elizabeth Mazzolini (eds), Histories of the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
Dustheap: Waste, Material Cultures, Social Justice 24My thinking here is informed by the works
(Cambridge, MA, 2012). of K. Brown, A Biography of No Place: From

20W. Rathje and C. Murphy, Rubbish: The Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland
Archeology of Garbage (Tucson, 2001), 45 –6. (Cambridge, MA, 2004); H. Lefebvre, The
21Shanks, Platt and Rathje, op. cit., 71. Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith
22
D. Bloxham, The Final Solution. A Genocide (Oxford, 1991); D. Massey, For Space (London,
(Oxford, 2009). 2005); and T. Cresswell, Place: A Short
23G. Cocks, The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Introduction (Oxford, 2004).
25
Germany (New York, 2012); M. Wildt, An M. O’Brien, A Crisis of Waste? Understanding
Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi the Rubbish Society (New York, 2008).
Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office 26M. Melosi. Garbage in the Cities. Refuse,
(Madison, 2009); M. Mouton, From Nurturing Reform and the Environment, rev. edn
the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and (Pittsburgh, 2005 [1981]); S. Strasser, Waste
Nazi Family Policy, 1918 –1945 (Cambridge, and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York,
2007); C. Sachse, Angst, Belohnung, Zucht Und 1999); B. Miller, The Fat of the Land: Garbage of
subsequent shift of western anxieties from the Socialist Second World to the burgeoning
populations of the Global South, scholarly literature on garbage has grown consistently
and in the last several years it has literally exploded.27 Scholars continue to respond with
criticism to the invocations of ‘crisis’ by environmental activists, the media and the
general public.28 Martin Melosi convincingly argues against casting the problem of
twentieth-century overproduction and waste generation in terms of a watershed:
The idea of a garbage crisis was a convenient, albeit a relatively simplified way, to
label a complex set of issues. The notion of ‘crisis’ confers upon the problem
relatively tangible, concrete properties, which might be resolved through equally
tangible, concrete solutions, such as new technology, effective management, or
popular will. In some sense, however, crisis ignores its persistence over time,
failing to question whether some waste problems were chronic, recurrent, or
temporary.29
The notion of a garbage crisis is perhaps as old as the idea of garbage itself and has
bedevilled humans ever since they began to live in larger settled communities. Such ‘crises’
have shown up with surprising regularity since they first entered the written record
roughly 2500 years ago, in Athens.30 Edward Humes playfully suggests that the language
of a ‘garbage crisis’ may have travelled with other lasting innovations made by the ancient
Greeks: the Olympics, the Oedipal complex, atomic theory, democracy and the municipal
dump.31 Using the world leader in garbage production, the United States, as an example,
scholars have convincingly demonstrated that although garbage production has certainly
increased over the long term, its presence tells a story of relative stability rather than of
rampant cumulative acceleration and crisis.32 I argue with rather than against garbologists
who reject the juxtaposition of historic stability and modern excess. Thinking about
wartime Europe in terms of a garbage crisis helps us to historicize and explain how and why
the very acute sense of crisis engendered by the overwhelming material presence of waste
enters the historical record (or in the case of Nazism failed to do so).
The unspeakable destruction wrought by the advancing and retreating Wehrmacht in
the East did not lead to the pronouncement of a garbage crisis. Why is that the case? What
was the place of waste in the Nazi system? How was waste perceived and why was it
New York. The Last Two Hundred Years (New Garbage In, Garbage Out: Solving the Problems
York, 2000); C. Zimring, Cash for Your Trash: with Long-Distance Trash Transport
Scrap Recycling in America (New Brunswick, (Charlottesville, 2009); J. Scanlan, On Garbage
NJ, 2005); A. Hoffmann and P. Cole, Sacred (London, 2005); H. Rogers, Gone Tomorrow.
Cash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York, 2005);
Geniza (New York, 2011); Foote and E. Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of
Mazzolini, op. cit.; R. Stokes, R. Köster and Trash (New York, 2005). Also note M. Davis,
S. Sambrook, The Business of Waste (New Planet of Slums (New York, 2006).
28
York, 2013); M. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Rathje and Murphy, op. cit., 51.
29
Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, op. cit., 195.
Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000); 30ibid., 4.
M. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, 31Humes, op. cit., 27.

32
Energy, and the Environment (Pittsburgh, 2001). Rathje and Murphy, op. cit., 35.
27E. Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair
with Trash (New York, 2012); V. Thomson,

ignored? In contemplating these questions, I seek to explain how the acute sense of crisis
and its entrance into the historical record is not only contingent on the presence of certain
substances but also on their perceived relationship to the dominant social order. In the
Third Reich, rather than fostering the overproduction and mass consumption
characteristic of our own time, waste practices perpetuated the racial logic upon which
the Nazi economy was premised.33 Over the course of the 1930s, trash (in its material and
abstract forms) was increasingly pushed out of the system, together with those
individuals, groups, places, ideas and practices that were identified as dangerous and alien.
Conceptually, questions about waste focused not on disposal but on erasure. Nazism’s
discursive complex defined two complementary strategies for dealing with waste: the
systematic and total [restlos] destruction of matter deemed devoid of value followed the
ruthless extraction and equally total recycling of any and all residual value. The regime
not only envisioned the absolute destruction of waste but also the elimination of wastage
and squandering. Accordingly, the salvaging and reclamation efforts of the Reich,
chaotic as they were, were intimately connected to the destructive fantasies of

purification.
Here, I rely on the crucial work by historians who have deepened our
understanding of Nazism by demonstrating the antagonistic dualism between party
and state, the copious proliferation of competencies within the administration, and the
very real limits of social control.34 The overlap of various competences within the
administration helps to explain the ‘organized chaos’ that was also characteristic of Nazi
reclamation efforts.35 However, as Michael Thad Allen illustrates, the proliferation of
offices and functions within the administration does not automatically imply that each
office operated arbitrarily, inefficiently and as a mere platform for self-aggrandizing
individual functionaries. Instead, Allen rightly stresses the immense importance of
ideological consensus that inspired activism and animated the burgeoning bureaucratic
apparatus.36 Such consensus-motivated activism can also be demonstrated with respect
to Nazi garbage practices and wartime salvage. Accordingly, my focus on waste does
not offer radically new insights about the Nazi system per se. Rather, I seek to
33
G. Aly, Aussonderung und Tod: die klinische 42; I. Kershaw ‘Hitler: “Master in the Third
Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren [Selection and Reich” or “Weak Dictator”?’, The Nazi
Death: The Clinical Execution of the Unfit ] Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of
(Berlin, 1985); G. Aly and P. Chroust, Interpretation, 4th edn (London, 2000), 69 –92;
Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and I. Kershaw, Hitler: 1889 –1936 Hubris (New
Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, 1994); M. Burleigh York, 1998) and Hitler: 1936 –1945 Nemesis
and W. Wippermann, The Racial State: (New York, 2000).
Germany 1933 – 1945 (Cambridge, 1991); 35G. Otto and J. Houwink ten Cate (eds), Das
R. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer organisierte Chaos: ‘Ämterdarwinismus’ und

(Princeton, 1999); Cocks, op. cit. ‘Gesinnungsethik’. Determinanten national-
34P. Diehl-Thiele, Partei und Staat im Dritten sozialistischer Besatzungsherrschaft [Organized
Reich [Party and State in the Third Reich ] Chaos: ‘Bureaucratic Darwinism’ and ‘Ideological
(München, 1969); P. Hüttenberger, Ethics’. Determining Factors of National Socialist
‘Nationalsozialistische Polykratie’ [‘National Occupation ] (Berlin, 1999); D. Rebentisch,
Socialist polycraty’], Geschichte und Führerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten
Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Weltkrieg [Leadership State and Administration
Sozialwissenschaft [History and Society: Journal in the Second World War ] (Stuttgart, 1989).
for the Historical Social Sciences ], 2 (1976), 417– 36Allen, op. cit., 11.
illustrate and explain the relationship between waste and the perpetuation of the
system’s inner logic.
ZERO WASTE
Racism was a crucial element in the ‘plexus of ideologies’, as Allen describes the potpourri of
axioms and convictions that connected committed National Socialists across the political
hierarchy.37 Adam Tooze, too, has demonstrated that economic principles acquired racial
overtones and were ultimately subservient to racist priorities.38 It follows that the designation
of waste and its subsequent removal were equally bound to the Racial State, channelling fears
about contamination and beliefs about social health [Volksgesundheit].39 The work of
anthropologist Mary Douglas remains crucial here.40 Examining religious ritual as a
particular expression of social processes, Douglas demonstrates that so-called primitive
cultures were not irrational in their attempts to ward off danger or at least their efforts were
no more irrational than the beliefs and actions of their science-bound western counterparts.
Douglas convincingly argues that ideas about ‘dirt’ reflect socially and culturally specific
beliefs and practices to avoid disease and sustain health. Dirt, according to Douglas’s much
quoted passage, is not a particular kind of substance, but ‘matter out of place’.41 Most recently,
Joshua Ozias Reno made the forceful and convincing argument to move beyond a
Douglasian approach to waste as social rejects of various kinds and instead defines waste as
material processed and rejected by an animal body after successfully extracting its value.
Replacing Douglas’s human ‘dirt’ with animal ‘scat’, Reno moves towards semi-biotic (sign-
of-life) analysis of waste and offers a first critique of waste studies’ anthropogenic focus.42
Reno’s definition allows us to understand and trace the waste produced by the Nazi regime
not only as a function of shifts in value but also as part of the progression of Nazi place-
making. Nazi waste practices turned outsides into insides and vice versa – in a Chakrabartian
sense – and asserted the idea of a safe (racially pure) geography against the projected
hazardscape of eastern Europe.43 For my purposes, Douglas’s assertion that ‘where there is
dirt there is a system’ remains crucial none the less, and offers an important starting point for
the present examination of the relationship between the substances deemed waste and the
beliefs and practices that render them such in everyday contexts.44
37The term ‘plexus of ideologies’ has been 40M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of
invoked by Allen, ibid. the Concept of Pollution and Danger (New York, c.
38
Tooze, op. cit.; Allen, op. cit. Also relevant in 1966).
this respect are P. Jaskot, The Architecture of 41Douglas, op. cit., 44.
Oppression: The SS, Forced Labour and the Nazi 42J. O. Reno. ‘Toward a new theory of waste:
Monumental Building Economy (London, 2000); from “matter out of place” to “signs of life” ’,
H. Klemann and S. Kudryashov, Occupied Theory, Culture and Society, 31 (November 2014),
Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-occupied 3–27.
Europe, 1939 –1945 (London, 2012). 43Chakrabarty, op. cit., 542–4. On the concept
39
Compare note 36 and see further G. Aly, of place-making and out-of-placeness, see
Hitler’s Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography,
Nationaler Sozialismus [Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis, 1996).
Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare For the geography of safety see H. de Blij, The
State ] (Frankfurt a.M., 2005). Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and
Globalization’s Rough Landscape (Oxford, 2009).
44Douglas, op. cit., 44.
.4
Waste management presupposes sorting – a meticulous separation of waste from non-
waste. Labelling was certainly crucial and the regime avidly and meticulously categorized
what it deemed useless or dangerous. Initially, much effort was directed towards cultural
products.45 Immediately after the ‘seizure of power’, the regime streamlined agencies
governing publishing, film-making, broadcasting and printing, obliterating the designated
Kulturmüll within a year.46 The book burnings of March 1933 are particularly striking in this
respect. The Degenerate Art Exhibit of 1937 offers another important and visible example of
such sorting practices. Simultaneously, the concept of waste was also applied to humans.
Here, too, sorting commenced immediately. First, politically ‘dangerous elements’ were
incarcerated, followed by individuals deemed ‘defunct’ (the asocial, enfeebled, chronically
ill, disabled and homosexuals); and soon the regime extended the process of identification
and isolation to groups deemed to be inherently of lesser value (Jews, Africans, Sinti, Roma
and Slavs).47 The story of how their subsequent elimination by means of sterilization,
forcible removal and mass murder was connected to and facilitated by the garbage practices
of the Third Reich is vital, but too intricate and thorny to be integrated fully into this article.
However, as should become clear from the discussion below, the regime’s progressive
commitment to eradicating the various manifestations of excess, valuelessness and out-of-
place-ness was not an irrational radicalization of inner-administrative processes but an (ideo)
logical intensification of such processes in the context of war.48
Labelling initially increased the amount of waste – the proliferation of references to
Abschaum [scum, dregs] and Aussatz [waste] are illustrative in this context – which in turn
stimulated the restlose Ausschöpfung[complete, literally leftover-less, extraction] of
resources and the restlose Durchführung[complete execution] of administrative tasks,
indicating zero tolerance for remainders of any kind.49 The expansion of waste bolstered
45R. A. Etlin (ed.), Art, Culture and Media under Im Nationalsozialismus [‘Asocials’ under National
the Third Reich (Chicago, 2002); M. Kater, Socialism ] (Stuttgart, 1995); R. Gellately and
Music and Nazism: Art Under Tyranny, 1933 – N. Stoltzfus, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany
1945 (Laaber, 2003); J. Petropoulos, Art As (Princeton, 2001); M. Burleigh, Death and
Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 1996). Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany c. 1900–
46Reichsgesetzblatt [Reich’s Law Gazette], I 104 1945 (Cambridge, 1994); C. R. Browning and
‘Erlass über die Errichtung des J. Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The
Reichsministeriums für Volksaufklärung und Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–
Propaganda’ [‘Decree for the creation of the March 1942 (Lincoln, 2004).
Reich’s Ministry for Public Enlightenment and 48A. Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi
Propaganda’], 13 March 1933. See D. Welch, Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New
The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, 2nd edn Haven, 2014); P. Longerich, Holocaust: The
(London, 2002 [1993]). For earlier debates over Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford,
smut and trash see D. J. K. Peukert, Grenzen der 2010); S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the
Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der Jews (New York, 1997); Browning, Ordinary
deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878–1932 [Limits of Men, op. cit.; R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the
Social Discipline: Rise and Fall of the German Youth European Jews (New York, 1985).
49
Welfare, 1872–1932 ] (Köln, 1986); K. Petersen, G. Aly and K. H. Roth, Die restlose Erfassung.
Zensur in der Weimarer Republik [Censorship in the Volkszählen, Identifizieren, Aussondern im
Weimar Republic ] (Stuttgart, 1995). Nationalsozialismus [Total Recording: Counting,
47 D. Peukert, ‘The genesis of the “Final Identifying, Eliminating under National Socialism
Solution” from the spirit of science’ in D. Crew (Berlin, 1984). On the use of restlos see Allen op.
(ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1944 cit., 30.
(New York, 1994), 274–99; W. Ayass, ‘Asoziale’
and rationalized fantasies of eradication, and the idea of total processes justified absolute
ruthlessness.50 With the promulgation of the Four Year Plan in 1936, the regime started
to think about waste in a more comprehensive economic fashion.51 To reduce waste,
substantial amounts of it were re-designated as Altstoff [secondary material] and thus
could, in principle at least, be returned to the system as a resource. War further radicalized
this trend and provided the context in which zero waste was turned into state policy.
Today, zero waste is the professed ambition of an increasing number of
environmentally conscious consumers, corporations and political platforms.52 Argu-
ments about sustainable lifestyles figure prominently in the ‘greening’ of the world and
often champion consumer-centred strategies to contend with the planet’s finite
resources.53 Sustainability, which Leslie Paul Thiele defines as an ‘adaptive art’ that
places science in the service of an ‘ethical vision’, certainly had its place in Nazi
Germany.54 The ‘ethical’ vision in the context of Nazism was racial and attempts to
achieve sustainability (a term not used at the time) focused on maximizing ‘ecological
(substitute racial) health, economic welfare, social empowerment and cultural creativity’
for those who constituted the valuable core of the Volksgemeinschaft[racial community]
and its future generations.55
But Nazi Germany was not ‘green’.56 To transpose the designation ‘green’ back in
time not only misrepresents the history of environmental conservation. Like the
contemporary ‘greenwashing’ of market economics, such a conflation further flattens
German green politics and ignores its express connections with pacifist activism and its
pointed critique of western capitalism that were so central to its formation in the 1980s, as
Frank Uekoetter convincingly illustrates.57 Since then, green politics has lost much of its
critical social edge, which is instead carried forward by movements for environmental
justice across the globe rather than by advocates for sustainable development. In my view,
labelling earlier environmental or conservationist movements ‘green’ misunderstands the
very break between conservationism and conservatism which being green once entailed.
50Allen, op. cit., 30. Sustainability: A Biological Perspective

51
Tooze’s chapter, ‘1936: four years to war’ in (Cambridge, 2010); A. M. H. Clayton,
his Wages of Destruction, op. cit., 203–43. Sustainability: A System’s Approach (New
52The following sites offer a good overview of York, 1996).
the shared ideological commitments and goals of 55L. Thiele, op. cit., 4 –5.
56
zero waste politics. http://www.zerowaste.org/; For debates over National Socialism’s ‘green-
http://www.ecocycle.org/zerowaste; http:// ness’ see A. Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Walther
zwia.org/; http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/; Darré and Hitler’s Green Party (Abbotsbrook,
http://zerowasteenergy.com/ 1985); R. Guha, Environmentalism: A Global
53
U. Grober, Sustainability: A Cultural History History (New York, 2000), 19; F.-J.
(Totnes, 2012); J. Dryzek, The Politics of the Brüggemeier, M. Cioc and T. Zeller (eds),
Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford, 2013); How Green Were the Nazis? Nature,
K. Conca and G. Dabelko (eds), Green Planet Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich
Blues: Critical Perspectives on Global (Athens, OH, 2005); F. Uekoetter, The Green
Environmental Politics, 5th edn (Boulder, 2015). and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi
54L. Thiele, Sustainability (Cambridge, 2013), Germany (Cambridge, 2006); F. Uekoetter, The
4 –5; C. Nobbs, Economics, Sustainability and Greenest Nation? A New History of German
Democracy: Economics in the Era of Climate Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014).
Change (New York, 2013); S. Morse, 57Uekoetter, The Greenest Nation, op. cit., 99 ff.
.4
In the Third Reich, zero waste and sustainability were certainly connected, but this
connection was hardly premised on environmentalism as we understand it today. Instead,
economic [volkswirtschaftliche] considerations were central, as the reflections of Hans
Heck, the Reich’s Commissioner for Secondary Materials, make clear:
Since resources do not multiply by growth, they will eventually, when all have
been extracted, cease to exist. To delay this process as long as possible and to
enjoy a raw material advantage over other peoples who did not economize as
frugally, is the prime goal of the extreme exploitation of all secondary materials
. . . and [this process] further renders Germany as independent as possible from
foreign countries.58
Allusions to Four Year Plan tenets of autarky and self-sufficiency are self-evident. But, as
Tooze explicates, Nazi economics were part of a world view in which racial considerations,
considerations of global power dynamics and territorial expansion were pivotal.59 The
health of the race and the nation, the preservation of the German forest and German living
space, the flourishing of German art, the well-being of the Volksgemeinschaft and national
prosperity lay at the core of Nazi visions for self-sufficiency. Zero waste became a key
yardstick by which to measure administrative efficiency that mobilized millions for the
racial re-ordering of Europe and the survival of the ‘master race’.60
Racial politics and the maximization of resource extraction came to coalesce most
evidently during the war, which in turn necessitated concerted efforts to transform waste
into resource. The initial successes of Blitzkrieg highlighted the precarious state of raw
material provisioning at the same time that they spawned the grandiose planning projects
for a thousand-year Reich. These plans subsequently experienced an exaggerated revival
as Germany lay – a rubble-littered blank slate – facing impending collapse.61 Scrapping
and salvaging were part of these visions, even if they rang in a much more sombre tone.
Heck insisted that the ‘squandering of all kinds of raw materials is economically
devastating’. He praised the recovery of ‘junk and scrap metal’ as early as 1940, reiterating
58BArch R2-21423. Reichswirtschaftminister 61M. Bose, M. Holtmann, D. Machule, E.
and Reichsmarschall Göring [Reich’s Pahl-Weber and D. Schubert, ‘ . . . Ein neues

Economic Minister and Reich’s Marshall Hamburg entsteht.’ Planen und Bauen von 1933 –
Göring], 23 December 1940. 1945 [‘ . . . A New Hamburg Emerges.’ Planning
59Tooze, op. cit., 230 ff. See also Kershaw, and Building, 1933 –1945 ] (Hamburg, 1986), 55 –
‘Going for broke’, Hitler: 1936 –1945 Nemesis, 61; J. Petsch, Baukunst und Stadtplanung im
op. cit., 181 –230. Dritten Reich [Architectural Art and City Planning
60M. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis in the Third Reich ] (München, 1976);
Ruled Europe (New York, 2009); W. Lower, M. Mächler, ‘Die Großstadt als Kultur- und
Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in the Raumproblem und die Grenzen ihrer Größe’
Ukraine (Chapel Hill, 2005); V. Lumans, [‘The city as culture and space problem and the
Himmler’s Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche limits of its expanse’], Monatshefte für Baukunst
Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities und Städtebau [Monthly for Architectural Art and
of Europe, 1933 – 1945 (Chapel Hill, 1993); City Building ], 6 (June 1939), 63; H. Krüger,
H. Klemann and S. Kudryashov, Occupied ‘Der Raum als Gestalter der Innen-und
Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-occupied Aussenpolitik’ [‘Space as progenitor of
Europe, 1939 –1945 (London, 2012); Tooze, op. internal and foreign politics’], Reich,
cit., 461–85. Volksordnung, Lebensraum [Reich, Order and
Living Space ], 1 (1941), 77 –176.
that the ‘ore reserves in German soil are limited even with the newly won territories in the
East’.62
From an economic perspective, extracting value from waste was self-explanatory.
But the redefinition of scrap as a resource was also an important first step in the
development of a comprehensive programme to eliminate waste altogether. War was
not a necessary condition. Rather, ideas about purity, utility and efficiency were
crucial here and constituted direct linkages to social-hygienic policies. The regime
developed its first waste-to-resource initiatives in peacetime. In March 1937, Hitler
signed the Law Regarding the Use of Secondary Materials, which stipulated the right
of the Minister of the Interior to demand that secondary materials, particularly rags
and textiles, be cleaned, disinfected or destroyed if necessary to ensure the protection
of the nation’s health [Volksgesundheit] before being returned to the economic cycle.63
Henceforth, the regime enlisted ever growing numbers of volunteers who staffed the
party apparatus – the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), the Hitler Youth,
the League of German Girls, and local cell, block and district leaders were crucial here
as well – to collect, sort and, if necessary, alter secondary materials before cycling
them through the system once more.64 Performance of duty was key, as is evidenced
by the members of the Hitler Youth in Worms who dressed up as tin tubes and cans
and posed for a picture, appealing to the Volksgmeinschaft to ‘help us make Germany
independent’ (see Figure 1).
Economic wisdom in the Depression-stricken United States continued to emphasize
the importance of replacing old, outmoded or broken goods as a means to revitalize
production and protect jobs. The work of Carl Zimring illustrates important shifts in the
collection and re-use of scrap metal since the nineteenth century and demonstrates the
importance of systematic collection of industrial scrap for the development of the waste
trade in the United States and its transformation over the course of the 1930s and 1940s.65
At the same time, the United States reiterated the maxim that consumption rather than
conservation was key for individual consumers, and scrapping, as Susan Strasser
illustrates, was characteristic of the war economy alone.66 In contrast, Nazi Germany
deliberately constricted consumption even in the face of economic recovery. At the same
time that it advertised affordable ‘people’s products’ of all sorts, the regime deliberately
re-routed to finance war production.67 Once at war, the regime justified the same as the
62
BArch R2-21423. Reichskommissar für Disciplinary Politics of the Hitler Youth ]
Altmaterialverwertung. Bedeutung der (Göttingen, 2007); E. Harvey, Youth and the
Altstoffwirtschaft [Reich’s Commissioner for Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford,
Secondary Materials. The importance of the 1993); A. Klönne, Jugend im Dritten Reich []
secondary materials economy], November (Köln, 1982); H. C. Brandenburg, Die
1940. Geschichte der HJ [] (Köln, 1982).
63BArch R43 II-717. Aktennotiz. Gesetz über 65Zimring, op. cit., 81 –101.
66
die Verarbeitung von Altmaterial [Notice: Law Strasser, op. cit., 203 –63.
67
for the utilization of secondary materials] 12 Tooze, op. cit., 149 – 56; W. König,
November 1937. Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft.
64D. Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar ‘Volksprodukte’ im Dritten Reich: Vom Scheitern
to Hitler (New York, 1998); K. Kollmeier, einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft
Ordnung und Ausgrenzung. Die Disziplinarpolitik [People’s Car, People’s Radio, People’s
der Hitler-Jugend [Order and Exclusion: The Community. People’s Products in the Third
.4
Figure 1. Hitler Youth mobilize to collect tin and tin foil, Worms 1938. Source: BArch, Bild 133-375/o.
Ang.
only feasible means to acquire the necessary landmass and resource bases elsewhere to
allow a racially homogenous, economically self-sufficient and indeed affluent community
to flourish and prosper. As Adam Tooze explains, Nazi visions of prosperity were
intimately bound up with their politics of expansion and genocidal war. He argues that
Hitler’s mad logic about an existential threat to the German race propelled Germany into
war at a time when its economy was simply incapable of sustaining one. Locked into the
transatlantic arms race and, as of 1941, stuck in a war on three fronts, Nazism’s ‘global
Blitzkrieg, this grand strategy of racial war, turned out, however, to be a strategy not of
victory but of defeat’.68 In anticipation of the exploitation of conquered Lebensraum, Nazi
propaganda effectively recast austerity as a fundamental critique of Anglo-American
consumerism, in which Germans’ savvy resourcefulness served as the ideological
counterpart to capitalist excess.69
Praising resourcefulness, the regime moved instead deliberately towards a politics of
internal extraction, designed to eradicate waste and excess by cycling materials through
the production process indefinitely.70 The Reich had collected 650,000 metric tons of
recyclable paper, 55,000 tons of junk metal, 8000 tons of rags, 2000 tons of bones (from
canteen kitchens and the food processing industry), and a further 1200 tons of scrap metal
in peacetime alone. Wartime exploits of the secondary material’s economy
[Altstoffwirtschaft] dramatically exceeded these peacetime levels. For example, in total,
the Reich processed 240,637 metric tons of secondary textiles, out of which 188,336 tons
consisted of rags [Hadern], mainly commercial textile scrap reclaimed from inland
production. In February 1944 alone, the regime transported 8526 metric tons of various
Reich. The Failure of a National Socialist und Heimat [Folkways and Home ] (August/
Consumer Society ] (Paderborn, 2004). September 1942), 113–16.
68 70
Tooze, op. cit., xxiv, 661–8. BArch R2-21423. Reichskommissar für
69O. Schmidt, ‘Von der Macht der kleinen Altmaterialverwertung. Bedeutung der
Dinge’ [‘The might of little things’], Volkstum Altstoffwirtschaft, November 1940.
secondary materials from the occupied territories back to the Reich. The Volksopfer, or
People’s Sacrifice, of 25 March 1945 still collected a total of 63,250 metric tons of textiles
from internal sources.71 By 1940, 160 municipalities systematically extracted scrap metal,
bones and rags from household rubbish.72 But war also produced entirely new and at
times unanticipated sources of secondary material that substantially raised the pressure on
the nascent recycling system. The materials extracted from murdered people such as
clothing, gold teeth and hair did not initially figure among the resources the regime
intended to derive from conquered Lebensraum.73
Scrapping was certainly not a Nazi invention. It was neither an exclusive phenomenon
of ‘totalitarian’ regimes, nor was it particular to the Second World War.74 Heike Weber
provides a useful overview of the continuities of German salvage and recycling efforts
from imperial Germany to the Nazi regime and illustrates that only in the context of total
war did the imperial state begin to implement explicit policies for waste recovery.75 In
the eyes of the Nazi leadership, the First World War provided many unsuccessful
examples of economic management, including efforts to salvage value from waste, and
the regime tried to avoid repeating these mistakes at all costs. Interestingly, the lessons
drawn from the First World War were collaborative. The treatise by Claus Ungewitter,
Verwertung des Wertlosen[Utilization of Uselessness], illustrates the international urgency of
the discussion.76 Originally published in German in 1938, the book was translated into
English in 1944 and re-issued in London as Science and Salvage. Written with a particular
interest in the chemical industry and the salvaging of residues, waste and the byproducts
of chemical manufacturing, the book drew on diverging experiences in Europe, Latin
America and the United States. The British edition hoped to utilize ‘[t]he survey in this
book . . . by competent experts’ to economize resources and fight poverty in the post-
war years.77 To British economists, the enemy’s politics of salvage appeared entirely
untainted by Nazi politics proper. Even United States Public Works Associations cited
German waste management practices as exemplary, particularly praising their efficiency
of collection and the design of garbage cans and hydraulic garbage trucks.78
However, we would be misreading Ungewitter if we merely understand his work as a
technical treatise on the possibilities of resource recovery from manufacturing processes,
sewage, air, minerals, ash, forestry products, secondary materials and municipal waste.
71 BArch R8-1-1227. Reichstelle für 73BArch R121-484, various.

74
Textilwirtschaft, Statistische Mitteilung E. F. Armstrong, ‘Introduction’ in
[Reich’s Office for the Textile Economy. C. Ungewitter (ed.), Science and Salvage, trans.
Statistical reports], undated. See BArch R121- L. A. Ferney and G. Haim with an introduction
830 Meldung des Beauftragten für by D. E. Franland (London, 1944), 7.
75
Altmetallerfassung in den gesamten besetzten H. Weber, ‘Towards “total” recycling:
Gebieten [Announcement of the agent for scrap women, waste and food waste recovery in
metal reclamation in the entire occupied Germany, 1914– 1939’, Contemporary European
territories], 3 March 1944. See BArch R3- History, 22 (2013), 371–97.
76
3255 Wochenbericht des Planungsamtes C. Ungewitter, Die Verwertung des Wertlosen
[Weekly report of the Planning Office], 6 [The Use of the Uselessness] (Berlin, 1938).
April 1945. 77Armstrong, op. cit., 7.
72 78
BArch R2-21423. Reichswirtschaftminister Committee on Refuse Collection and
and Reichsmarschall Göring, 23 December Disposal, Refuse Collection Practice (Chicago,
1940. 1941).
.4
Ungewitter’s sense of urgency extends beyond professional enthusiasm. The First World
War, he argued, witnessed the first systematic collection of scrap and worn materials, but
he also noted the insufficient organization of Germany’s scrap collection, which
compared unfavourably with similar efforts expended in the United States. Ungewitter
drew on a list allegedly provided by Joseph Goebbels to detail the collection effort of
Germany during the First World War. Among other items, imperial Germany collected
kitchen waste, pits and stones from fruits, acorns and chestnuts, waste paper, rubber
waste, gramophone records, cork and cork waste, human hair, scrap metal, lamp sockets,
bones, bottles, celluloid and rags.79 While Ungewitter noted that the production from re-
used materials was significant, he juxtaposed it to American statistics from 1929,
according to which the United States produced 999 metric tons of copper from virgin
materials and more than half this amount by means of reclamation. Based on this history,
Ungewitter advocated the systematic reclamation of value from waste, old materials and
low-grade materials as a political task to enlarge the national economy.80
By 1944, salvaging had become excessive. Many saw in Altstoff a very real resource and
devoted their energy to its complete extraction. None the less, the economic effects
remained in large part cosmetic and were unable to contend with the growing wartime
shortages. But these efforts did succeed in performing administrative frugality, efficiency
and resourcefulness at various levels. Individual functionaries combated the squandering
of resources even in concentration camps, pushing for the rationalization of camp
kitchens, for example.81 Systematic and total recycling thus became an important
ideological component of the Nazi programme for economic autarky, and zero waste an
explicit political goal.82
WASTE-TO-RESOURCE INITIATIVES
By 1940, the regime systematically attempted to increase its raw materials base by
salvaging materials, and it even appealed to the population to donate perfectly functional
goods. The focus lay on materials that could be of use to armaments manufacturing and
war-related branches of the economy: iron and metal scrap, paper and textiles were of
particular relevance. As illustrated below, the politics of zero waste often amounted to a
zero sum game in practice, economically speaking. But we would be misguided to
conclude that Nazi salvage was a failure. Rather, the impact and success of Nazi salvage
was primarily political. Secondary material collections involved ordinary people in
routinized performances of frugality and resourcefulness and thus afforded them a very
real sense that their individual efforts were of national significance. Taking kitchen
garbage, rags, bottles and scrap of all sorts to designated collection points or loading their
children’s school packs with household ‘recyclables’, ordinary people actively
participated in re-ordering the effects of war. Children brought re-usable household
79Ungewitter (ed.), Science and Salvage, op. cit., 80Ungewitter, Science and Salvage, op. cit., 100,
100, 101. Also see Weber, op. cit., 387. 101, 176.
81
On kitchen scrap in particular see Weber, op. See Allen, op. cit., 9.
cit., 384–91. 82 BArch R2-21423. Die Bedeutung der
Altstoffwirtschaft, November 1940.

waste – such as bones, rags, metal scrap and paper – to their schools, which functioned as
collection points for recyclables. In 1941, more than 12 per cent of all rags collected were
gathered by so-called Schulsammlungen.83
Scholars have drawn ample attention to the importance of the ritualistic performance
of the Volksgemeinschaft and its potential to muddle ‘the border between true believers and
mere opportunists’.84 Therefore, waste-to-resource initiatives that called for and relied
upon publicly visible compliance were of dual significance. First, large-scale collection
efforts drew on the extensive resources and resourcefulness of the nation as a whole and
thus endorsed the policies of the regime to maximize extraction. As a result, large
amounts of material were collected and returned to the war economy, even when
recycling exacerbated costs and wasted other precious raw materials. Transport costs
were a major factor and fuel was precious. Mistakes, such as the accidental shipment of
iron junk to the Düsseldorf Metal Works, which was expecting aluminum scrap for
aeroplane production, not only exacerbated costs but also wasted already constricted fuel
reserves.85 Whether on an industrial or a communal scale, collective performances of

recycling did not primarily provide material to boost production. Rather, they greased
the feedback loop between essential industries, the military machine, top-level
administrators, the propaganda ministry and the various popular constituencies. Second,
even though collections were unable to alleviate the shortages felt by consumers,
collective effort validated individual sacrifice and, moreover, justified wartime sacrifice in
the name of victory and future prosperity. Citizens in Nazi Germany were also ‘doing
their bit’.86 They backed the logic of the war economy, lived the reality of austerity, and
responded to constant demands for higher levels of personal sacrifice.
Not all initiatives were of equal importance, nor did they resonate equally with the
population. And not all collections focused on already discarded materials. But in
principle they orchestrated collective action as ideological consensus in which self-interest
and national interest appeared congruent. The bottle collection of 1941 illustrates the
coercive power of public performance at a moment when collective enthusiasm was
already on the wane. Nevertheless, the operation ‘Bottles for Our Army’ was able to
draw on over 500,000 devoted citizen-volunteers and a compliant population.87 In big
cities and rural areas, people dropped off their bottles at predetermined collection points
to avoid the expenditure of door-to-door collection. Schoolyards or mayors’ offices again
were the logical choices. In small- and medium-sized towns, citizens placed bottles
outside their doors just before the scheduled pick-up time to avoid theft and breakage.
The Wehrmacht provided fuel, vehicles and additional manpower to transport the bottles
to selected bottling companies – more than three hundred suitable companies had been
identified by the administration and designated to refill the collected bottles with spirits.
Leaflets and posters had to be printed despite the growing paper shortage, and the press,
83 86
BArch R8-1-1227. Reichstelle für See Strasser, op. cit., 229 –63.
87
Textilwirtschaft, Statistische Mitteilung, BArch NS18-1039. Rundschreiben
undated. For the United States, see Strasser, [Circular] Nr. 20/41. GBA ‘Flaschen für
op. cit., 256. unsere Wehrmacht’ [‘Bottles for our
84
Fritzsche, op. cit., 23. Wehrmacht’], 28 October 1941.
85 See BArch R-121-484. Roges Haus-
Mitteilung [internal notation], 28 August 1941.

radio and film industry were enlisted to ensure that every single German would donate at
least two empty bottles on 8 November.88 Propaganda combined with the door-to-door
activism of district leaders, the NSV, Hitler Youth and League of German Girl units
proved effective.89
It none the less seemed that the Reichsflaschentag (here to be understood as the Reich’s
duds day) eventually earned its name. As much as Tießler could be satisfied with his
propaganda campaign and the population’s ready compliance, he certainly had reason to
be displeased with the operation itself. In several cities and regions, the army simply
lacked the necessary fuel reserves to collect and transport the empty bottles to designated
bottling plants. The Office for Secondary Materials and local party offices reassured the
affected district leaders that the collection would be completed by the end of the week.
No effort was too great. Even horse-drawn carts were brought into play. In the city of
Essen, Party Comrade Fischer swiftly mobilized the Reich’s Security and Assistance
Service and secured unofficial fuel reserves. But in many cities and towns the bottles
remained, at least initially, where they had been placed: in front of doors, along sidewalks
and in schoolyards. Soon, the military mobilized regular troops. Soldiers now sorted
bottles and transported them to the requisite filling centres. The allocation of vehicles and
fuel received top priority by order of the High Command. By 21 November, the
concerted efforts of Wehrmacht personnel, the Reich’s Security Service, the National
Socialist soldier’s league, the Schutz Staffel (SS) and regular police units ensured the
successful removal of collected bottles.90 The records fail to indicate whether the bottles
were subsequently filled and delivered to soldiers on the Eastern Front, or whether they
merely disappeared from public view.91
On the surface, the bottle drive appears as a rather curious example of the Reich’s
resource recovery efforts. But like other collections, it drew on both the party apparatus
and the administration, ran up against significant obstacles, and relied on expensive
propaganda and the voluntary compliance of the population. Its abstruse execution
notwithstanding, the bottle collection was part of a systematic response to the chaos of
war. Notions of a closed energy cycle and the total eradication of waste and wastefulness
nurtured the delusional fantasies of the regime to self-heal, regenerate power, infinitely
extend limited resources, and ultimately perpetuate itself in the process of wreaking
unfathomable destruction. The politics of waste rewrote the economy of value.
This ‘primacy of politics’ was readily apparent even in the earliest waste-to-resource
initiatives.92 In 1936, the future Minister of Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe,
aggressively pushed forth the systematic collection of kitchen garbage to be utilized as pig
88
BArch NS18-1039. Rundschreiben [Circular] an Reichsprogandaleitung, Pg Tießler [Letter
Nr. 144/41. Reichspropagandaleitung of the Reich’s Comissioner for Secondary
[Reichspropaganda Office], 1 November 1941. Material to the Reich’s propaganda office, Pg
89
Ungewitter, Die Verwertung des Wertlosen, op. Tießler], 21 November 1941.
92
cit., 128. See also Kollmeier, op. cit., 205. E. Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik.
90‘Viel mehr Flaschen als erwartet’ [‘Many Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preussisch-deutschen
more bottles than expected’], Hamburger Sozialgeschichte [The Primacy of Domestic
Tageblatt (12 November 1941). Politics: Collected Essays on Prussian-German
91 BArch NS18-1039. Schreiben des Social History ], ed. H.-U. Wehler (Berlin,
Reichskommissar für Altmaterialverwertung 1965).
feed. The Relief Works for Victuals, founded that same year as a subsidiary of the NSV,
became the primary recipient of kitchen garbage and was responsible for its distribution
to pig farms across the Reich.93 The leader of the NS-People’s Welfare, Erich
Hilgenfeldt, promptly advanced to the newly created post of Commissioner for Kitchen
Garbage and was charged with oversight of NSV-run piggeries. By February 1938, the
NSV was responsible for 60,000 pigs. Hermann Göring, the plenipotentiary for the Four
Year Plan, envisioned the number of garbage-eating NSV pigs to grow to 1,000,000 per
year. Though still significantly short of the numbers dreamed up by Göring, by August
1940 the NSV-raised pigs had quintupled.94
None the less, real problems remained. The entire enterprise was dramatically
underfunded and utterly unprofitable. Backe and Göring, who were the driving forces
behind ‘recycled pork’, had no illusions about profitability, and political considerations
ultimately outweighed financial losses.95 As early as 1936 organizational and financial
difficulties became apparent and they mounted rapidly in the context of the war. Half of
the kitchen garbage simply spoiled, as fuel and personnel shortages impeded timely
delivery to feedlots. Hydroxypropionic fermentation (first steaming and then pickling
the collected garbage) promised to prevent spoilage and preserve raw garbage for years
but required additional personnel resources and seems not to have been implemented on a
significant scale.96 Feeding pigs on garbage in centralized feedlots remained expensive
even without such extra steps and made little economic sense. By December 1940, the
waste-to-pork programme had incurred losses of 14,000,000 Reichsmark and could claim
only dubious financial prospects. Two years later the amount had increased to
16,647,978.07 Reichsmark. By early 1944, the Reich’s central pay office grudgingly
agreed to pay off the balance run up thus far. However, the Reich’s Finance Ministry
stipulated that future losses would have to be met out of the NSV funds.97
93
BArch R2-19516. Mitwirkung der Gemeinden [Letter from the Reich’s Secretary of the
bei Verwertung der Küchenabfälle zur Interior], 28 August 1940.
Schweinemast. Reichsgesetzblatt [Co-operation 95BArch R2-19516. Reichsbeauftragte für den
of municipalities for the utilization of kitchen Vierjahrsplan an den Herrn Reichsminister der
garbage as pig feed], 3 November 1937. On the Finanzen [Plenipotentiary for the Four Year
National Socialist People’s Welfare see Plan to the Reich’s Minister of Finance], 15
P. Zolling, Zwischen Integration und Segregation: March 1941 and Schreiben des Beauftragen für
Sozialpolitik im ‘Dritten Reich’ am Beispiel der den Vierjahresplan an den Herrn
‘Nationalsozialistischen Volkswohlfahrt’ (NSV) in Reichsminister der Finanzen [Plenipotentiary
Hamburg [Between Integration and Segregation: for the Four Year Plan to the Reich’s Minister
Social Politics in the ‘Third Reich’ – the example of of Finance], 1 November 1941.
the National Socialist People’s Welfare ] (Frankfurt 96 BArch R2-19516. Merkblatt über
a.M, 1986); H. Vorländer, Die NSV: Darstellung Verfütterung von Küchenabfällen [Bulletin
und Dokumentation einer nationalsozialistischen for the feeding of kitchen garbage], April
Organisation [The NSV: Exposé and 1942. As part of normal operations, the garbage
Documentation of a National Socialist used as feed was heated to 90 degrees
Organization ] (Boppart a.R, 1988). Centigrade to prevent epidemics.
94 BArch R2-19516. Mitwirkung der 97BArch R2-19516. Reichsbeauftragte für den
Gemeinden bei Verwertung der Vierjahresplan an Reichminister der Finanzen,

Küchenabfälle zur Schweinemast. 23 May 1941 and Reichshauptkasse Berlin, 18
Reichsgesetzblatt, 3 November 1937. February 1944.
Schreiben des Reichsminister des Innern
.4
The political logic, in contrast, was sound. Waste-to-pork demonstrated the restlose
Verwertung[complete use] of resources and transformed ordinary kitchen garbage into the
ultimate supply of calorific value – bacon. However, neither the citizens, who separated
and stored their kitchen garbage in special containers, nor those who did not, were
rewarded with higher rations of bacon (or anything else for that matter). The complicity
with such measures thus cannot be grounded in personal self-interest or greed but rather
must be seen as an expression of the ideological commitment to zero waste that
underwrote the collective effort in Nazi waste-to-resource initiatives.
IN THE NAME OF ORDER

Collective zeal certainly tapered off as the war dragged on, but saving, scrimping,
scrapping, salvaging and sacrificing continued to present individuals with opportunities
to feel as though they were contributing to the war and bringing it to a swift end, if only
by easing the suffering of a loved one. The fact that their efforts mattered little in the
grand scheme of things was certainly not lost on them. What did escape their grasp,
however, was the disturbing reality that their continued compliance reinterpreted the
plight of war as an incessant struggle against disorder. Although waste-to-resource
practices seamlessly elided with the larger hoarding and stockpiling mania of the Third
Reich, and taxed the population equally, it was the collection of metal scrap, rags, bones,
paper waste and kitchen garbage that mounted a systematic (and at times popular)
defence of the Nazi order. Donations of records and books, of woollens and worn
clothing, performative as they were, merely coped with wartime scarcities. But detritus,
waste and rubble were markers of doom. Their continued removal and subsequent re-use
was ideological in imperceptible yet fundamental ways. Collecting, scrapping and
salvaging materials from waste, Germans re-imposed order on the havoc of war.
Whatever value they were able to extract continued to power the very motor of
destruction. The regime, its apparatus and the Volksgemeinschaft collaboratively recycled
chaos.
These dynamics were most strikingly at work beyond the Reich’s borders and
particularly so in the Nazi-occupied East. Here, the extent to which Nazi garbage
practices were integral and essential to war and genocide becomes readily apparent.
To illustrate this claim and explicate its far-reaching implications, I begin with an unusual
report sent to the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler by a certain Sergeant Hörrmann in
March 1943. Herein, Hörrmann detailed his observations after seventeen months of front
experience in Russia. Stalingrad, not surprisingly, remains absent from his account.
Instead of the suffering endured (and inflicted), he describes a landscape littered with
recklessly abandoned, unused riches. Millions of Reichsmark, in the form of bombed-out
tanks and military vehicles, heavy artillery, pieces of machinery, shells, cartridges and
tyres were falling victim to the wind, weather and civilian exploitation (see Figure 2).
These ‘resources’ are permanently lost to the Reich’s armaments industry, Hörrmann
lamented. His prognosis was that the Russians would seize the moment, use this booty to
build new tanks and deploy them against the German front with lethal force. Hörrmann
had learned his lessons well. He suggested a special unit that would, equipped with the
Figure 2. ‘Abandoned riches’ in Bialystok, June 1940. Source: BArch, Bild 101I-006-2202-29/Lessmann.
requisite tools to salvage the junk, return these precious resources to the German
armaments industry. The goal and purpose, he insisted, was to contribute ‘to the capture
of final victory’.98 Reading between the lines, we can understand these descriptions of the
eastern junkyard as an indictment of German shortcomings, an indictment that
nevertheless remained squarely within Nazism’s ideological frame.
The High Command of the Wehrmacht instantly jumped on this opportunity and
commissioned the Groß-Schrottaktion – a massive junk recovery mission – in May 1943.
In close co-operation with the SS, the High Command planned to reach beyond even
Hörrmann’s wildest dreams and return to the Reich not only junk, scrap metal,
serviceable parts of machines, salvageable equipment, vehicles, tanks and rubber, but also
all sorts of recyclables (to use contemporary terminology again) such as empty bottles and
all sorts of textiles. In July, Himmler personally endorsed the Groß-Schrottaktion.
He followed up with a peremptory request to higher SS functionaries in the East insisting
on the collection and removal of all junk from destroyed Russian villages and towns.99
But as Mark Mazower observes, ‘The SS was a lot better at destroying things than
building them up.’100 The director of the Reich Raw Materials Office, SS
Standartenführer Albert Kloth, was unfortunately auf Kur [on medical leave] as the
planning for the Groß-Schrottaktion commenced. Therefore Kloth’s qualifying remarks
followed Himmler’s orders with considerable delay. Citing difficulties encountered in
Greece during the recovery of junk from disarmed shells, Kloth sought to confute the
commonly held misconception that the ‘availability of junk metal already guarantees the
recovery of iron’. Kloth further drew attention to the very limited capacity of blast furnaces
in the Reich and pointed out that the collected junk could not possibly be processed. Even
98
BArch NS19-0285 Erfahrungsbericht [Field Himmler an SS Obergruppenführer von dem
report], G. Hörrmann, 8 March 1942. Bach, an die Höheren SS und Polizeiführer in
99BArch NS19-0285. Oberkommando des den Ostgebieten [Himmler to SS Leader von
Heeres. Abschrift. Betr. Gross-Schrottaktion dem Bach, to all higher SS and police leaders in
[Wehrmacht High Command. Copy. Great the eastern territories], 11 July 1943.
scrapping action], 31 May 1943 and Heinrich 100Mazower, op. cit., 312.
.4
so, Himmler ordered that collection ought to proceed, but that all matters relating to
secondary materials must be co-ordinated with the Office for Raw Materials and none of
the materials collected should be shipped back to the Reich without prior approval.101
Accordingly, the Nazis now religiously collected and stored rubbish all across Europe.102
Hörrmann’s initiative was certainly unusual. But unknown to Hörrmann, the
reclamation efforts already had a three-year-long history. The Reich had begun
systematically to collect junk and metal scrap in the occupied territories in the summer of
1940, as soon as the western campaign was completed. The idea to salvage war debris was
apparently the ‘brain child’ of Hermann Göring, the plenipotentiary for the Four Year
Plan, and built directly on earlier experiences inside the Reich, most importantly the
Reich Metal Collection.103 Looking back at the failures effectively to implement scrap
collection during the First World War, Hermann Göring decided in February 1940 that it
was time to round up every metal ashtray, ornament, kettle, plate, goblet and emblem
and offer them together with dispensable signs, hooks, doors, banisters and metal-made
household wares as a collective gift of the Volksgemeinschaft on the occasion of the Führer’s
fifty-first birthday on 20 April 1940 (see Figure 3).104 The propaganda value of the
collection was undeniable. In response to the call for donations, not only did individuals
rummage through their closets and bins; industry, party offices and the public sector also
participated. They removed bells from churches, city halls and ships; they parted with
metal hinges, tin plates and beer jugs. Office workers dismantled metal plaques and signs
from administrative buildings and hospitals. The people’s community overexerted itself.
Individuals who had no metal wares to spare approached the collection points and instead
offered money as a birthday present to the Führer. By 19 April, Germans had donated
50,000,000 kilograms of metal.105 The quantities collected were staggering, so much so
that transport to ironworks and smelting could not keep pace. In fact, vast quantities of
metal ware still weathered the elements in the storage lots years after the war had ended, as
the church bells in Hamburg’s harbour illustrate (see Figure 4).
The birthday collection set the tone for future Reich collections in important ways.
It explicitly connected personal sacrifice to Hitler’s gratitude.106 It affirmed Hitler’s
leadership and endorsed his war. As Ian Kershaw convincingly argued, the bond between
the individual and the Führer was crucial in maintaining popular consent and overcoming
the frequent disgruntlement with party officials and the party apparatus. Working for the
Führer was essential to maintaining the Hitler myth.107 Germans were so eager to please
that they inadvertently donated items of immense cultural value, which specially trained
101 BArch NS19-0285. Rohstoffamt. Aktennotiz für Pg Hoffmann [Notation for

Aktenvermerk [Raw Material Office. Party Comrade Hoffman], 7 March 1940.
105
Notation], 30 August 1943 and Himmler BArch NS18-1037. Anordnung [Decree]
Order, 8 September 1943. A42/40, Berlin, 11 April 1940 and Vorlage für
102BArch R3-1657. Leiter des Planungsamtes den Stabsleiter [Original for Staff Leader], 19
an Herrn Generalleutant Waeger [Leader of April 1940.
106
Planning Office to Major General Waeger], 14 BArch NS18-1037. Rundschreiben an die
March 1944. Gauleiter [Circular to Gau leader], March
103BArch 121-484. Aktennotiz [Notation], 14 1940.
107
May 1942. I. Kershaw, ‘Working towards the Führer’,
104BArch NS18-1037. Göring’s letter to the Hitler: 1889 –1936 Hubris, op. cit., 527–91.
Reich’s ministers, 23 February 1940. See also
Figure 3. Metal collection on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday, April 1940. Source: BArch, Bild 183-
L03189/o. Ang.
Figure 4. Church bells awaiting shipment in Hamburg harbour, 1947. Source: BArch, Bild 183-H26751/o.
Ang.
officials then had to identify and rescue from being ‘recycled’ into armaments. In Gau
Koblenz, an overly heavy pestle and mortar drew the attention of a staff member
at the collection point. It turned out to have been used by an apothecary in the
.4
108
sixteenth century. In 1940, the metal collection did not yet have to manage shortages of
the magnitude that characterized subsequent years. Rather, it anticipated them, since many
of the wares hauled to collection points across the Reich would have hardly been discarded
otherwise. Efforts that followed – a tool collection for laymen workers of the Wehrmacht;
NSV collections to furnish soldiers’ quarters; a collection of instruments, sheet music,
gramophones and record collections; book collections; a collection for woollens and
textiles – attempted to cope with the chronic undersupply spawned by war.109
Inefficiencies and logistical backlogs affected donations of woollens and textiles as much
as they did booty and secondary materials extracted and recovered from the occupied
territories.110 Göring simply ignored such inefficiencies and thought up a more
comprehensive scheme of scrap recovery after continental western Europe had been
defeated and occupied. He placed Cavalry Captain Hans Schu in charge of the large-scale
junk and metal reclamation efforts in the occupied western territories with the goal of
extracting and returning metal booty junk [Beuteschrott] to German industries. Schu, a
former Schrotthändler[scrap merchant], had already functioned as the lead organizer for the
Reich’s Consortium for Secondary and Waste Materials, had been in charge of the
scrapping actions in the General Government after the occupation of Poland, and was then
put in charge of all junk recovery in the West, with headquarters in Brussels. Schu’s reach
and significance expanded with the expansion of war, and as of 9 July 1941 he was entrusted
with the organization of metal reclamation in the entire occupied territories. For this
operation, Schu relied entirely on military personnel – with the exception of female
employees who were civilians – and Schu himself answered to the staff of the High
Command. On the receiving end, German businesses were co-ordinated into consortia that
relied heavily on foreign and forced labour for sorting and processing reclaimed
materials.111 Military agencies were responsible for both the delivery of recovered junk to
designated buyers in the Reich as well as for the final disposal [Verschrottung] of materials not
re-used. A key agent was the ROGES [Rohstoff und Handelsgesellschaft], an ‘independent’
corporation in which the regime held the majority of shares, which financed and organized
transport of the massive junk and booty shipments from the occupied territories.112
By 1943, even soldiers like Hörrmann (the ordinariness of whom I am in no position to
judge) became aware of the omnipresence of junk and debris. Unaware of the systematic
waste recovery missions run by Schu, Sergeant Hörrmann not only attempted to explain
the turned fortunes of the war. More importantly, he formulated a strategy of redress and
reversal. Hörrmann found the abundance of abandoned ‘resources’ in view of the ‘empty
trains’ returning to the Reich unbearable, when trains could instead be bursting with
precious materiel to be remobilized for ‘final victory’.113 But the freight trains rolling
back to the Reich were not empty and final victory was not within reach.
108 BArch NS18-1037. Rundschreiben 111BArch R121-1539. Bericht der Deutschen

[Circular], Koblenz, 6 April 1940 and Schreiben Revisions- und Treuhand-Aktiengesellschaft
von Haake and Gauleiter [Letter by Haake to Gau Berlin [Report of the German Revision and
leaders], Koblenz-Trier, 30 March 1940. Trust Corporation Berlin] (1941), 3 –5 and 8.
109BArch NS18-1041. 112 BArch R121-2043, BArch R121-1539,
110
On junk and booty junk see various in BArch R121-1436.
BArch 121-229; for woollens and textiles in 113 BArch NS19-0285. Erfahrungsbericht.
Poland see BArch 144-824, R3101-34177. G. Hörrmann, 8 March 1942.

By 30 June 1941, the Nazis had transported roughly 460,000 metric tons of metal junk
from the occupied western territories. Sometimes, quantities were recorded in kilos and in
wagons, the latter measure implying their prompt return to the Reich’s economy.
By August 1943, Rittmeister Schu reported to the High Command that he had
personally overseen the return of almost 5,000,000 tons of booty material (Beutematerial)
to the Reich’s industrial apparatus.114
On a single day in October of the same year, one wagon with iron pipe couplings, one
wagon with melanite billets, one wagon with new galvanized wire, one wagon with
concrete reinforcing iron, one wagon of iron sheeting, one wagon of iron masks, one
wagon containing anvils and spades, and fourteen wagons containing empty food cans
arrived in Nürnberg for re-use by the Bavarian Schrott AG.115
Purity of shipments was key, not only because specific kinds of metal were needed for
specific kinds of production processes. The more sinister implications of Nazi fantasies
about purity and zero waste are evident in the use of human hair, which was sold and
shipped to Alex Zink Pelzfrabrik, a fur manufacturer in Nürnberg. The fact that camp
records preserved the distinction between hair extracted from Holocaust victims and hair
collected in adjacent SS barber shops illustrates how deeply enmeshed racial and
economic logics had become.116 In the face of the Red Army’s advance, the Reich’s Raw
Materials office requested that all textiles be transported to save them from destruction.117
Out of the 570 wagons stuffed with secondary materials extracted from the camps in
Lublin and Auschwitz by February 1943, thirty-four wagons were filled with men’s and
women’s clothing, 400 wagons with rags, 130 with bed feathers, five with mixed
secondary materials and one wagon with women’s hair. These figures, chilling as they
are, only represent the material collected by the Reich’s economic ministry. Other
collections by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle [ethnic German centre], the Reich’s Youth
Leadership, the concentration camps and others added another 825 wagons of clothing of
various kinds.118
Scholars have carefully explicated the complex relationship between war and genocide
in the East.119 While they have highlighted war as a necessary precondition for genocide,
it is important to note how these connections also hinge on the presumably neutral
extraction of raw materials. As Heike Weber illustrates, women’s hair was donated during
the First World War and functioned as an Ersatz [substitute] for rubber in joints and
gaskets.120 In contrast it is worth noting that the methods of extraction implemented by
the Nazi regime were genocidal, rather than simply mechanical. The Nazi race war was
114BArch R121-484. Schreiben von Schu an Concentration Camps], 4 January 1943. BArch
das Oberkommando des Heeres [Letter from NS3-386; see also BArch NS4-FL384.
117
Schu to High Command], 23 August 1941. BArch R3-3255. Aktennotiz für
115BArch R121-229. Lieferschein [Bill of Besprechung mit Herrn SS-
lading]. Obergruppenführer Frank [Notation about
116
Hair from Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, the Conference with SS Leader Frank], 10
Neuengamme, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen January 1945.
was sold at Reichsmark 0.50/kg to Alex Zink 118 BArch NS19-225. Abschrift [Copy];
Pelzfabrik AG in Roth near Nürnberg. Aufstellung [List], 6 February 1943.

119
Wirtschaftverwaltungshauptamt an See Tooze, op. cit., 385, 391 ff., 545 ff. See
Amtsgruppe D Konzentrationslager [Main also Mazower, op. cit., 259 ff., 313–14.
Economic Administrative Office to Bureau D 120Weber, op. cit., 378.
.4
not only a radical facilitator of excessive violence, it also brought forth its own economic
rationality. Cast as a matter of life and death, the extraction of materials provided a
powerful rationale for violence, a rationale that in turn was grounded in postulated racial
difference. Tooze’s work demonstrates that extermination was predicated on and
accelerated by a politics of resource extraction. The Polish Campaign and the initial set-
up of the General Government forcefully removed hundreds of thousands of Poles and
transported them as forced labour into the Reich’s territory, ‘freeing up’ the more fertile
regions of Poland annexed to the Reich for ‘settlement’ by ethnic Germans.121 With
increasing food shortages by the end of 1941 and throughout 1942, the regime avoided
cuts to rations for the Reich’s population as a direct result of the genocidal policies
‘predicated on the elimination of the Polish Jews from the food chain’.122 At the height of
the killing, German rations improved based on a dramatic influx of deliveries from the
occupied territories.123 Labour and food supplies, however, were not the only cargo on
trains returning to the Reich. Already in 1940, wagons of ‘Polentuche’, or Polish cloth,
made their way to the SS-run tailoring sweatshops at Ravensbrück concentration

camp.124 Ravensbrück was also conceptualized as a main hub for the re-utilization of
secondary material stored in several large halls by 1942 or 1943. By 1944, its weaving
mills were converted and processed rags and secondary textiles extracted from the Jews
murdered in Auschwitz.125 Certainly, textiles [Spinnstoff] and metal junk were not the
only substances subject to systematic collection. Tools, household wares, even coal dust
and empty food cans, gold from human teeth and human hair were among the many
materials meticulously catalogued, collected and returned to the Reich for processing if
train space was available.126 Often, however, transport stoppages led to mountainous
accumulations of secondary materials in the occupied territories.127
Desperate initiatives like the Groß-Schrottaktion as well as the systematic resource
recovery efforts were hapless attempts to establish order and clean up the mess of war
with most sinister implications. Already the Reich’s fortunes had turned and,
increasingly, the wreckage was homeward bound.128 As if the reclamation of waste
had the power to halt and reverse its impending collapse, the regime set out to battle the
effects of its own destruction. The destruction, redolent in Hörrmann’s catalogue of
abandoned riches, only bred more of the same.
121
Backe’s demand for labour was voracious. Judenumsiedlung [Report on the utilization of
By early 1940, ten trains per day filled with a secondary textiles from Jewish resettlements], 6
thousand workers each reached the Altreich. See February 1943.
Tooze, op. cit., 362. 128See U. Büttner, ‘ “Gomorrha” und die
122
Tooze, op. cit., 545. Folgen. Der Bombenkrieg’ [‘ “Gomorrah” and
123ibid., 548. the consequences. The air war’ in Hamburg im
124H. Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft der SS [The Dritten Reich [Hamburg in the Third Reich ], ed.
Economy of the SS ] (Berlin, 2003), 950. Forschungstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg
125
ibid., 959–61. (Göttingen, 2005), 613– 32; H. Nossack, Der
126See various entries in BArch R121-229, Untergang: Hamburg 1943 (Hamburg, 1981);
BArch R121-587 bd. 1, BArch R121-484, W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of
BArch R81-1218. Destruction (New York, 2004).
127BArch NS19-225. Bericht über die bisherige
Verwertung von Textil Altmaterial aus der

Nazi Germany did unleash a garbage crisis of unfathomable proportions. But this crisis
remained unspoken, hidden by a first iteration of zero waste economics. Forced labour
was instrumental in building NSV feedlots for pigs that were fed on kitchen trash as well
as in the re-utilization of all sorts of extracted secondary material. Scrap metal, church
bells, bottles and textiles collected at a cost of millions in propaganda expenditure sat in
schoolyards and makeshift storage facilities where they rotted and rusted. Millions of
volunteers, workers, soldiers and ordinary citizens rallied together to turn trash into
‘treasure’ with the single goal of sustaining a system that perpetuated grossly distorted
hierarchies of waste and value, epitomized by the economy of Auschwitz, where human
hair was woven into blankets for German soldiers as memories, lives and the future of
millions were recklessly hoisted on to the trash heap of history.129
University of Michigan
129No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

The Nazi Rag Pickers and Their Wine The Politics of Waste and Recycling in Nazi Germany

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ISSN: 0307-1022 (Print) 1470-1200 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshi20

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The Nazi rag-pickers and their wine:

KEYWORDS: garbage; Nazi Germany; recycling; Second World War; Third

Often, in the red light of a street-lamp

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

and February 1942.3

19/41 GBA. Appendix AE.NR.2308/41. Nr. 144/41 Reichspropagandaleitung [Reich’s

essential. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us in a different context, garbage is inevitably

colonialism: public health and the poetics of Ordnung: Herrschaftsmechanismen Im

(Cambridge, MA, 2012). of K. Brown, A Biography of No Place: From

M. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, 31Humes, op. cit., 27.

with Trash (New York, 2012); V. Thomson,

chaotic as they were, were intimately connected to the destructive fantasies of

R. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer organisierte Chaos: ‘Ämterdarwinismus’ und

50Allen, op. cit., 30. Sustainability: A Biological Perspective

58BArch R2-21423. Reichswirtschaftminister 61M. Bose, M. Holtmann, D. Machule, E.

and Reichsmarschall Göring [Reich’s Pahl-Weber and D. Schubert, ‘ . . . Ein neues

71 BArch R8-1-1227. Reichstelle für 73BArch R121-484, various.

Altstoffwirtschaft, November 1940.

reserves.85 Whether on an industrial or a communal scale, collective performances of

Mitteilung [internal notation], 28 August 1941.

Gemeinden bei Verwertung der Vierjahresplan an Reichminister der Finanzen,

IN THE NAME OF ORDER

101 BArch NS19-0285. Rohstoffamt. Aktennotiz für Pg Hoffmann [Notation for

108 BArch NS18-1037. Rundschreiben 111BArch R121-1539. Bericht der Deutschen

Poland see BArch 144-824, R3101-34177. G. Hörrmann, 8 March 1942.

Pelzfabrik AG in Roth near Nürnberg. Aufstellung [List], 6 February 1943.

made their way to the SS-run tailoring sweatshops at Ravensbrück concentration

Verwertung von Textil Altmaterial aus der

129No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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