EXCERPT FROM THE FREE REPUBLIC FORUM `` ...First of all, "Nazi" was gutter slang for the verb "to nationalize". The Bider-Mienhoff gang gave themselves this moniker during their early struggles. The official title of the Nazi Party was "The National Socialist Workers Party of Germany". Hitler and the Brownshirts advocated the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, national resources, manufacturing, distribution and law enforcement. Hitler came to power by turning the working class, unemployed, and academic elite against the conservative republic. After Der Fuhrer's election ceased being a political conspiracy and was transformed into a fashionable social phenomenon, party membership was especially popular with educators, bureaucrats, and the press. Being a Nazi was "politically correct". They called themselves "The Children of the New Age of World Order" and looked down their noses at everyone else. As Hitler acquired more power, he referred to his critics as "The Dark Forces of Anarchy and Hatred". Anyone who questioned Nazi high-handedness in the German press was branded a "Conservative Reactionary". Joseph Goebbels, minister of communications, proclaimed a "New World Order". The Nazi reign of terror began with false news reports on the Jews, Bohemians and Gypses who were said to be arming themselves to overthrow the "New World Order" and Hitler demanded that all good people register their guns so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of "terrorists and madmen".Right-wing fanatics of the "Old Order" who protested firearms registration were arrested by the S.S. and put in jail for "fomenting hatred against the Government of the German people". Then the Reichstag (government building) was blown up and Hitler ram-rodded an "Emergency Anti-Terrorist Act" through Parliament that gave the Gestapo extraordinary powers. The leader then declared that for the well-being of the German people, all private firearms were to be confiscated by the Gestapo and the Wermotten (federal law enforcement and military). German citizens who refused to surrender their guns when the "jack-boots" (Gestapo) came calling, were murdered in their homes. By the way, the Gestapo were the federal marshals' service of the Third Reich. The S.W.A.T. team was invented and perfected by the Gestapo to break into the homes of the enemies of the German people. When the Policia Bewakken, or local police, refused to take away guns from townsfolk, they themselves were disarmed and dragged out into the street and shot to death by the S.A. and the S.S. Those were Nazi versions of the B.A.T.F. and the F.B.I. When several local ministers spoke out against these atrocities, they were imprisoned and never seen again. The Gestapo began to confiscate and seize the homes, businesses, bank accounts, and personal belongings of wealthy conservative citizens who had prospered in the old Republic. Pamphleteers who urged revolt against the Nazis were shot on site by national law enforcement and the military. Gypsies and Jews were detained and sent to labor camps. Mountain roads throughout central Europe were closed to prevent the escape of fugitives into the wilderness, and to prevent the movement and concealment of partisan resistance fighters. Public schools rewrote history and Hitler youth groups taught the children to report their parents to their teachers for anti-Nazi remarks. Such parents disappeared. Pagan animism became the state religion of the Third Reich and Christians were widely condemned as "right wing fanatics". Millions of books were burned first and then people. Millions of them burned in huge ovens after they were first gassed to death. Unmarried women were paid large sums of money to have babies out of wedlock and then given medals for it. Evil was declared as being good, and good was condemned as being evil. World Order was coming and the German people were going to be the "peacekeepers". Yes, indeed, I remember the Nazis. And they weren't Republicans, or "right wing", or "patriots" or "militias". They were Socialist monsters. Thomas Colton Ruthford This was a letter to the editor of the Washington Times.. With all this talk of gun bans and tobacco I'm glad I saved them.. "The term Rush uses, "anti-tobacco Nazis", really seems to fit now. First they got the anti-gun law of 1968 from the Nazis, now anti-smoking propaganda. If I were Jewish, I would be starting to worry." I'm not Jewish but I sure am getting concerned.. We all better start getting concerned... I'm a smoker and a gun owner... A real enemy of the state… I hope people save this and distribute it... I plan to... especially to our city council who are proposing a smoking ban for our city.``

Robert N Proctor

Historians and epidemiologists have only recently begun to explore the Nazi anti-tobacco movement. Germany had the world's strongest anti smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s,encompassing bans on smoking in public spaces, bans on advertising,restrictions on tobacco rations for women, and the world's most refined tobacco epidemiology, linking tobacco use with the already evident epidemic of lung cancer. The anti-tobacco campaign must be understood against the backdrop of the Nazi quest for racial and bodily purity, which also motivated many other public health efforts of the era.

Medical historians in recent years have done a great deal to enlarge our understanding of medicine and public health in Nazi Germany. We know that about half of all doctors joined the Nazi party and that doctors played a major part in designing and administering the Nazi programmes of forcible sterilisation, "euthanasia," and the industrial scale murder of Jews and gypsies.

Much of our present day concern for the abuse of humans used in experiments stems from the extreme brutality many German doctors showed towards concentration camp prisoners exploited to advance the cause of German military medicine.

Tobacco in the Reich

One topic that has only recently begun to attract attention is the Nazi anti-tobacco movement.

Germany had the world's strongest anti smoking movement in the 1930s and early 1940s,supported by Nazi medical and military leaders worried that tobacco might prove a hazard to the race.

Many Nazi leaders were vocal opponents of smoking. Anti-tobacco activists pointed out that whereas Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were all fond of tobacco, the three major fascist leaders of Europe-Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco-were all non-smokers.

Hitler was the most adamant,characterising tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor." At one point the Fuhrer even suggested that Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.

German smoking rates rose dramatically in the first six years of Nazi rule, suggesting that the propaganda campaign launched during those early years was largely ineffective. German smoking rates rose faster even than those of France, which had a much weaker anti-tobacco campaign. German per capita tobacco use between 1932 and 1939 rose from 570 to 900 cigarettes a year, whereas French tobacco consumption grew from 570 to only 630 cigarettes over the same period.

Smith et al suggested that smoking may have functioned as a kind of cultural resistance, though it is also important to realise that German tobacco companies exercised a great deal of economic and political power, as they do today. German anti-tobacco activists frequently complained that their efforts were no match for the "American style" advertising campaigns waged by the tobacco industry.

German cigarette manufacturers neutralised early criticism-for example, from the SA(Sturm-Abteilung; stormtroops), which manufactured its own"Sturmzigaretten"-by portraying themselves as early and eager supporters of the regime.

The tobacco industry also launched several new journals aimed at countering anti-tobacco propaganda. In a pattern that would become familiar in the United States and elsewhere after the second world war, several of these journals tried to dismiss the anti-tobacco movement as "fanatic"and "unscientific." One such journal featured the German word for science twice in its title (Der Tabak: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der International en Tabakwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, founded in 1940).

We should also realise that tobacco provided an important source of revenue for the national treasury. In 1937-8 German national income from tobacco taxes and tariffs exceeded 1 billion Reichsmarks.

By 1941, as a result of new taxes and the annexation of Austria and Bohemia, Germans were paying nearly twice that. According to Germany's national accounting office, by 1941 tobacco taxes constituted about one twelfth of the government's entire income.

Two hundred thousand Germans were said to owe their livelihood to tobacco-an argument that was reversed by those who pointed to Germany's need for additional men in its labour force, men who could presumably be supplied from the tobacco industry.

'Tobacco capital' raining down to spoil the people's health.

Culmination of the campaign: 1939-41 German anti-tobacco policies accelerated towards the end of the 1930s,and by the early war years tobacco use had begun to decline. The Luftwaffe banned smoking in 1938 and the post office did likewise.Smoking was barred in many workplaces, government offices, hospitals,and rest homes. The NSDAP (National sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) announced a ban on smoking in its offices in 1939, at which time SS chief Heinrich Himmler announced a smoking ban for all uniformed police and SS officers while on duty.

The Journal of the American Medical Association that year reported Hermann Goering's decree barring soldiers from smoking on the streets, on marches, and on brief off duty periods.

Sixty of Germany's largest cities banned smoking on street cars in 1941. Smoking was banned in air raid shelters-though some shelters reserved separate rooms for smokers.

During the war years tobacco rationing coupons were denied to pregnant women (and to all women below the age of 25) while restaurants and cafes were barred from selling cigarettes to female customers.

From July 1943 it was illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to smoke in public. Smoking was banned on all German city trains and buses in 1944, the initiative coming from Hitler himself,who was worried about exposure of young female conductors to tobacco smoke.

Nazi policies were heralded as marking"the beginning of the end" of tobacco use in Germany.

German tobacco epidemiology by this time was the most advanced in the world. Franz H Muller in 1939 and Eberhard Schairer and Erich Schoniger in 1943 were the first to use case-control epidemiological methods to document the lung cancer hazard from cigarettes.

Muller concluded that the "extraordinary rise in tobacco use" was "the single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancer."

Heart disease was another focus and was not infrequently said to be the most serious illness brought on by smoking.

Late in the war nicotine was suspected as a cause of the coronary heart failure suffered by a surprising number of soldiers on the eastern front.

A 1944 report by an army field pathologist found that all 32 young soldiers whom he had examined after death from heart attack on the front had been "enthusiastic smokers." The author cited the Freiburg pathologist Franz Buchner's view that cigarettes should be considered "a coronary poison of the first order."

On 20 June 1940 Hitler ordered tobacco rations to be distributed to the military "in a manner that would dissuade" soldiers from smoking.

Cigarette rations were limited to six per man per day, with alternative rations available for non-smokers(for example, chocolate or extra food). Extra cigarettes were sometimes available for purchase, but these were generally limited to 50 per man per month and were often unavailable-as during times of rapid advance or retreat. Tobacco rations were denied to women accompanying the Wehrmacht. An ordinance on 3 November 1941 raised tobacco taxes to a higher level than they had ever been (80-95% of the retail price).Tobacco taxes would not rise that high again for more than a quarter of a century after Hitler's defeat.

Impact of the war and postwar poverty The net effect of these and other measures (for instance, medical lectures to discourage soldiers from smoking) was to lower tobacco consumption by the military during the war years. A 1944 survey of 1000 servicemen found that, whereas the proportion of soldiers smoking had increased (only 12.7% were non-smokers), the total consumption of tobacco had decreased-by just over 14%. More men were smoking (101 of those surveyed had taken up the habit during the war, whereas only seven had given it up) but the average soldier was smoking about a quarter (23.4%) less tobacco than in the immediate prewar period.

The number of very heavy smokers (30 or more cigarettes daily) was down dramatically-from 4.4% to only 0.3%-and similar declines were recorded for moderately heavy smokers.

Postwar poverty further cut consumption. According to official statistics German tobacco use did not reach prewar levels again until the mid-1950s. The collapse was dramatic: German per capita consumption dropped by more than half from 1940 to 1950, whereas American consumption nearly doubled during that period.

French consumption also rose, though during the four years of German occupation cigarette consumption declined by even more than in Germany-suggesting that military conquest had a larger effect than Nazi propaganda.

After the war Germany lost its position as home to the world's most aggressive anti-tobacco science.

Hitler was dead but also many of his anti-tobacco underlings either had lost their jobs or were otherwise silenced.

Karl Aster, head of Jena's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research (and rector of the University of Jena and an officer in the SS), committed suicide in his office on the night of 3-4 April 1945.Reich Health Fuhrer Leonardo Conti, another anti-tobacco activist,committed suicide on 6 October 1945 in an allied prison while awaiting prosecution for his role in the euthanasia programme.

Hans Reiter, the Reich Health Office president who once characterised nicotine as "the greatest enemy of the people's health" and "the number one drag on the German economy" was interned in an American prison camp for two years, after which he worked as a physician in a clinic in Kassel, never again returning to public service. Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the guiding light behind Thuringia's antismoking campaign and the man who drafted the grant application for Astel's anti-tobacco institute, was executed on 1 October 1946 for crimes against humanity. It is hardly surprising that much of the wind was taken out of the sails of Germany's anti-tobacco movement.