Going East: Colonial Conquest and the Creation of National Parks during World War II

The paper looks at the plans for the creation of national parks in German occupied Poland during World War II. The ideal of wilderness, i.e. nature untouched by human beings, that forms the basis of national parks has often been described as an American peculiarity that is lacking in European countries, most notably in Germany. Here the notion of the cultural landscape, i.e. nature transformed by human beings, as homeland dominated nature conservation. The paper takes this contrast as point of departure to trace how the inner-European colonialism practiced during the war resulted in putting the previously absent notion of wilderness on the agenda of German nature conservation. The focus is on the plan of the Reich Office for Nature Conservation to create new large-scale national parks in Poland, explicitly evoking the American example in the official documents. National parks as envisioned by the Office were one element within the General Plan East that aimed for the total re-arrangement of space in the annexed territories, including detailed plans for the organization of agriculture, forestry, industry, and last but not least control of the human population. The paper shows that genocide was one of the central preconditions for the plan to create national parks, i.e. natural areas free of human intervention. It argues that it was colonial conquest that gave rise to an idealization of wilderness and made German wartime nature conservation more similar rather than different to the nature conservation found in other countries, first of all the United States.