Nazi antismoking campaign

“Gender images blurred with other associations, including stereotypes of race and class. Smoking becomes associated not just with sexual depravity and licentiousness, but with communism and Judaism. Jewish and communist women were said to be especially likely to smoke, and to foist their filthy habit on others. . . Smoking was associated with jazz, with swing dancing, with rebellion, with Africa, with degenerate blacks, Jews, and Gypsies, with many of the other fears that inspired the Nazi retreat into a paranoid, xenophobic fortress of purity, cleanliness, and muscular macho health fanaticism” (Proctor, 218-19). “Hitler’s personal aversion was only one of several factors in the Nazi war on tobacco. The more important concern . . . was the productive and reproductive performance of the German Volk. Tobacco, like alcohol, was said to be sapping the strength of the German people – at work, at school, in sports, in the bedroom and the birthing clinic, and on the field of battle . . . What we find is a merger of the earlier moral critique with an increasingly medical critique. The moral element is not lost but is in fact strengthened through the incorporation of the Nazi-era rhetoric of bodily purity, racial hygiene, performance at work, and the ‘duty to be healthy.’ Gesundheit über Alles is one of the hallmarks of Nazi ideology” (221-22).