Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany
Adolf Hitler’s personal distaste for tobacco and the Nazi reproductive policies were among the motivating factors behind the Nazi campaigns against smoking. The Nazis banned smoking in trams, buses, and city trains, promoting health education, limiting cigarette rations in the Wehrmacht, organizing medical lectures for soldiers.
About Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany in brief
Anti-tobacco movements grew in many nations from the middle of the 19th century. Adolf Hitler’s personal distaste for tobacco and the Nazi reproductive policies were among the motivating factors behind the Nazi campaigns against smoking. The German movement was the most powerful anti-smoking movement in the world during the 1930s and early 1940s. However, tobacco control policy was incoherent and ineffective, with uncoordinated and often regional efforts by many actors. Germany has some of the weakest tobacco control measures in Europe, and German tobacco research has been described as \”muted\”. Anti-smoking measures have a long history in German-speaking areas. For instance, in 1840, the Prussian government reinstated a ban on smoking in public places. The 1880s invention of automated cigarette-making machinery in the American South made it possible to mass-produce cigarettes at low cost, and smoking became common in Western countries. This led to a tobacco prohibition movement, which challenged tobacco use as harmful and brought about some bans on tobacco sale and use. In 1920, a Bund Deutscher Tabakgegner in der Tschechoslowakei was formed in Prague, after Czechoslovakia was separated from Austria at the end of World War I. These groups published journals advocating nonsmoking. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Weimar Republic was at the cutting edge of tobacco research. Research on tobacco’s effects on health were more advanced in Germany than in any other nation by the time the Nazis came to power. While a link between smoking and cancers had been observed as early as 1700s, it was not observed as good as in the early 1900s.
The first such German language journal was Der Dergner, published between 1912 and 1932 by the Bohemian organization Deut scher Tabagner. The Nazis banned smoking in trams, buses, and city trains, promoting health education, limiting cigarette rations in the Wehrmacht, organizing medical lectures for soldiers, and raising the tobacco tax. The number of smokers increased from 1939 to 1945, but cigarette consumption declined; rationing and post-war poverty meant that the increasing numbers of smokers could not buy as many cigarettes. These measures were widely circumvented or ignored. The movement did not reduce the number of cigarette use in the Nazi regime, between 1933 and 1939. After 1941, anti-Tobacco campaigns were restricted by the Nazi government. Even by the end the 20th century, the anti- smoking movement in Germany had not attained the influence of the Nazi anti- Smoking campaign. The movement was not as strong as it had been during the early 20th Century, and by the mid-20th century it had not reached the level of influence that it had in the 1950s and 1960s. A directly-supported tobacco research institute produced work of only marginal scientific importance, but substantial academic work was done privately, with little to negative official support. In 1912, the first German-language journal was published in Dresden from 1919 to 1935, and was the second journal on tobacco.
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This page is based on the article Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
