This is a counterfactual "what if" article from the new scientist. It says that if the NAZIs had won the war, they would have introduced laws enforcing environmentalism, vegetarianism and anti-vivesection.

Interesting to find something like this in a pop culture magazine.

.............................................................................................................................................

What if? 1943

A darker shade of green

If the Nazis had won, a sinister form of environmentalism would reign, says Steve Fuller

IN EARLY 1941, the Nazis invaded Russia, a disastrous decision that ultimately cost them the second world war. But it wasn’t the only course they could have taken. As John I points out in his 1999 essay ‘How Hitler could have won the war”, the Nazis could easily have chosen to conquer the Middle East’s oilfields instead. Even if this had not been entirely successful, Hitler would have probably ended up controlling enough of Europe’s energy supplies to force a stalemate, ending the war two or three years early. This outcome would have prevented most— if not all —of the Holocaust, which may have been inspired by the cosmic approval that Hitler read into his early Russian victories. The consequences for science would also have been profound.

Had the Nazis won (or at least not lost), the scientific agenda of the next half-century would have been dominated not by subatomic physics and nuclear energy, but by ecology. Ideas such as biodiversity, the precautionary principle and animal rights would be the dominant concepts of a political form of social Darwinism, built on the tenets of racial hygiene.

At first sight this seems an unpalatable conclusion. It is hard to believe that the success of Nazism could have given rise to a world with any redeeming features. But even in the real world, the Nazi defeat did not stop much of their science from being assimilated by the victor nations. Had we been heir to a Nazi victory, Nazi science would now appear in an even more positive light.

Suppose, then, a 1943 peace treaty allowed Hitler to retain his European and Asian conquests. Nazi economists, aware of Germany’s lack of natural resources, would have demanded a re-agrarianisation of conquered nations to prevent them from becoming competitors. Command over at least some of the Middle East’s oil would have allowed the Nazis to limit the pace of competition among the remaining free nations. The Nazi empire would thus have become a global superpower.

What would that have meant for science and technology? The ideology of racial hygiene — which pre-dated Hitler’s rise and

declined only with his fall — took Earth’s point of view, nowadays popularised as Gaia, with deadly seriousness. Racial hygienists held, for example, that global misery resulted from misguided human attempts to reverse the effects of natural selection. Thus, one important result would have been the end of mass immunisation, which the Nazis considered emblematic of counter-selection”. For racial hygienists, vaccines did not restore the body to a natural state, but artificially enhanced the body. Vaccine research had also historically been driven by the mixing of peoples caused by imperial expansion, which despite their disregard for human life, the Nazis abhorred vivisection led racial hygienists to conclude that only states with stable and “pure” populations could survive naturally. The implications for medical research and policy would be clear. The Nazis would have omitted vaccines from what we now call preventive medicine, a field in which they were otherwise pioneers.

This interest in preventive medicine, however, meant that research into the health effects of radiation, asbestos, heavy metals, alcohol and tobacco would have advanced more rapidly. The Nazis would have also mandated the production of organic foods, outlawed vivisection and encouraged vegetarianism and natural healing. What is more, the eco-friendly Nazis’ sensitivity to the scarcity of the world’s oil supply would have sparked an early scientific interest in curtailing carbon emissions and shifting to alternative energy. In short, the late 194os would have seen scientifically informed policies that only began to be pursued for real in the late 1960s.

There would also have been compulsory sterilisation and permissible euthanasia, done in the name of reversing the “damage” caused to the human ecosystem by those 19th-century enemies of biodiversity, the bacteriologists Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, who failed to grasp that, say, tuberculosis was nature’s way of culling an unsustainable human population. Overtime, as a balance to nature was deemed to have been restored, sterilisation and euthanasia might no longer have been required.

All of these developments presuppose a state-enforced “corporate environmentalism” that would have reached an early accommodation between big business and the environment. In the process, however, the value of human life would have become negotiable. Those who raised objections to the natural selection of Homo sapiens would be consigned to the political and scientific margins. The centre ground would be occupied by debates over whether the culling of humans should be an active or passive process.

The Nazis would also have pioneered the first manned space missions. They would have realised that sending surplus people into space might enable them both to test the limits of their most advanced physical sciences — astrophysics and aeronautics—and to expand the Reich’s carrying capacity to other planets or orbiting space stations. The latter would have come to be seen as a humane yet informed alternative to culling.

Finally, what of nuclear physics? An early end to the war would have halted the race to build the atomic bomb, which the Nazis had undertaken grudgingly in response to the Manhattan Project. And with much of the ecosystem under direct political control, there would be little need to research nuclear energy. The very idea of smashing atoms to release untold energy, as outlined in Albert Einstein’s letter of 2 August1939 encouraging President Roosevelt along these lines, would have been used to stoke the flames of anti-Semitism. Jews would have been demonised for having recommended a bomb that upon explosion would have brought about a different but equally lethal final solution.