Document 3kbQd1kvGXkX2g8waEwkRy6E

232 CHAPTER 6 being stigmatized as persons "outside the Volksgemeinschaft" and "on a par with Jews"--dangerous charges in 1941.177 Funk wrote to the party leadership for a ruling on the question in May of that year,178 but Hitler allowed the campaign to continue. The health consequences of smoking outweighed economic concerns, he ar gued, and tobacco workers should probably be employed in more "war-important" pursuits.179 We do have reason to believe, however, that Nazi tobacco bans were not always effectively enforced. A 1940 medical disserta tion complained that smokers sometimes indulged their habit in train cars reserved for nonsmokers, and that conductors occasion ally had to be called to get the affronting transgressors to cease. Smoking bans in hospitals were sometimes violated, even by physicians, a practice recognized as compromising the counsel given to patients not to smoke.180 As the war dragged on, in fact, the antitobacco campaign lost much of its steam. Wartime urgen cies led a military physician in 1944 to write that "only a fanatic" would withhold a drink or a smoke from a soldier trying to calm his nerves after the horrors of battle.181 The surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, an occasional contributor to antitobacco literature, argued that it was "wrong to regulate, slavishly, the life of every individual" by tobacco bans and the like.182 Complaints about the inadequacy of tobacco rations began to grow, and in 1943 Heydrich's Security Service (SD) produced a secret report detail ing the nature and extent of public grumblings.183 When agricul tural authorities again raised the question of increasing tobacco yields in the spring of 1944--mainly to satisfy military demands-- Hitler acquiesced and said that cultivation could rise again to 1941 levels.184 Economic factors were important in the early failure to curb Ger man smoking. The economic recovery in the first six years of Nazi rule boosted the average German's purchasing power, and tobacco companies took advantage of the boom to promote their products. German antitobacco activists were aware of this and frequently complained that their own efforts were no match for the power ful "American-style" ad campaigns waged by the industry-- THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOBACCO 233 campaigns redolent of (in Hans Reiter's words) "the tasteless methods of the era of Jewish domination."185 One also has to reckon with the fact that, in Germany as else where, tobacco provided an important source of revenue for the national treasury. In 1937/38, German national income from to bacco taxes and tariffs was in excess of a billion reichsmarks--a not inconsiderable sum for a government striving both to modernize and to militarize the nation's economy.186 By 1941, as a result of new taxes and the annexation of Austria, Germans were paying about twice this amount. According to Germany's National Ac counting Office, tobacco taxes by this time constituted about a twelfth (!) of the government's entire income.187 Hundreds of thou sands of Germans were said to owe their livelihood, directly or indirectly, to tobacco--an argument that was also easily reversed by those who pointed to Germany's need for an additional three million men in its labor force--some of whom could presumably be supplied from the tobacco trade.188 Of course, German tobacco companies were not entirely passive in such matters. German cigarette manufacturers early on recog nized the direction of the nation's political drift and by 1933 were casting themselves as eager supporters of the regime. One place this can be seen is in the elaborate cigarette card albums published by tobacco companies. American companies had begun to package card-like photos with cigarettes in the previous century, and by the First World War Germans had begun to follow suit. There were many different series, from "The German Army" and "The 1936 Olympics" to the more upscale "Paintings of the Gothic and Early Renaissance."189 The albums--now collectors' items--sold for as little as fifty pfennigs, and tempted smokers with the prospect of completing their collections. Cigarette albums were often very pa triotic and sentimental, as when the Waldorf-Astoria Company la mented the passing of the time (Germany's grosse Vergangenheit) when German naval forces projected "power over countries and oceans." The Kosmos company's 1933 album glorified the first eight months of Nazi rule and bragged on its title page of having been a "purely German enterprise [i.e., judenfrei] since 1886."190