A Suffocating Nature: Environment, Culture, and German Chemical Warfare on the Western Front

Abstract

The story of chemical warfare is that of a relationship between nature, the military, industry, and culture. By the turn of the twentieth century, German industry, especially its chemical companies, came to dominate Europe. Their success brought both considerable economic development and considerable environmental damage from chemical pollution, especially to rivers such as the Rhine and the Emscher. These economic changes made in exchange for landscape degradation conflicted with long-held cultural beliefs in Germany that promoted the beauty of nature and the importance of conserving its aesthetics. The First World War's effect of the environment, including the effects of chemical weaponry, highlighted this paradox on a nationwide scale. In an effort to win the Great War, German military leaders turned to their chemical industry for answers. Using the flat terrain of Western Europe, winds strong enough to push massive toxic clouds, and their extensive knowledge of chemistry, the Germans chose chemical warfare agents based on meteorological conditions and their ability to overcome the obstacles of trench warfare. Millions of acres were doused in chemical clouds and shells, killing every form of life at the front and all but permanently altering the landscape and soils. This created an atmosphere of total environmental war, where chemicals were intentionally used to contaminate land and kill all life for the sake of military gains. The home front also suffered, as in Germany where the levels of chemical contaminants in their rivers were directly linked to the course of the chemical war. Germans wrote numerous diaries, journals, and memoirs that documented the ecological damage caused by these poisonous agents. These visceral descriptions of gas warfare and chemical disasters relating to clean up operations helped to solidify a national picture of what the gas war experience was like, and how many Germans came to see warfare and humanity as a destroyer of nature. Simultaneously, Europeans faced the daunting task of cleaning and repairing their landscapes. Millions of acres of land were contaminated, and tons of chemical ordnance was to be disposed. Yet an antagonistic political climate, steep financial costs, and the German leadership's desire to continue chemical weapons research limited Europeans' ability to restore their land. Their actions resulted in horrific environmental and human consequences, including everything from the contamination of land with buried ordnance to the phosgene cloud catastrophe at Hamburg in 1928. Not only did the damage caused by chemical weaponry force German military officials to rethink military operations and tactics, chemical weapons also compelled the German people to solidify new cultural relationships between war and nature, specifically those which took environmental damage into account when thinking about the war experience. German artistic and written culture at that time reflected the environmental damage through pacifistic and anti-technological lenses, creating a framework where modern environmentalism could take shape. Ultimately, the use of chemical weapons for military gain shaped German cultural attitudes and changed European landscapes. It ushered in a new form of total war, and demonstrated how the environment directly influenced both the outcome of the chemical war in the field but also German cultural beliefs regarding the relationship between nature and warfare.