Document EvxEZVvvnyG3wpjQ3wevj9EJR

206 CHAPTER 6 2. Limits on Advertising Methods Advertising for tobacco products may not be conducted: a. In films. b. Using billboards or posters, especially on gables but also along railway lines, in rural areas, at sports fields and racetracks. c. On posters in post offices. d. On billboards in or on public or private transportation, at bus stops of similar facilities. e. On posters (Bogemnschlage) on walls, fences, at sports arenas or racetracks, or by removable tags on commercial products or adhe sive posters on storefronts and doors of shops. f. By loudspeaker (on top of cars, for example). g. By mail. h. By ads in the text sections of journals and newspapers.121 Tobacco ads did continue to be published, however, even in Nazi magazines. Austrian tobacco ads occasionally featured a prominent swastika--an outcome of the fact that the Austrian in dustry was a state-run monopoly. The weekly storm-trooper peri odical Die SA published full-page ads for Reemtsma cigarettes in nearly every issue in 1940 and 1941--an ironic development, given the brownshirts' rabid attacks on the company a decade earlier. (Some patriots protested the fact that cigarette ads were taking up 25 percent of all German advertising space--when even the par ents of fallen soldiers were being asked to keep obituaries as brief as possible.)122 Tobacco ads in the war years often featured rustic farm or village scenes in Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, or Macedonia-- where much of Germany's raw tobacco originated. The peaceful, romantic landscapes contrast sharply with the images of war per fusing the magazine. Karl Astel's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research Antitobacco activism culminated in the seventh and eighth years of Nazi rule, encouraged by the success of the early military cam paigns and the recognition that rationing might provide a palat THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOBACCO 207 able excuse for a broader effort to curb tobacco consumption. Wolfgang Klamer began his 1940 Erlangen medical thesis by pro claiming that Germans were witnessing "the beginning of the end" of tobacco,123 amid rumors that tobacco was slated to "disappear entirely from the Reich" once the war was over.124 Hitler in April of 1941 issued a strongly worded order barring any increase in the acreage devoted to tobacco farming;125 Nazi party leaders by this time had already begun to pressure tobacco manufacturers to con vert their factories to nontobacco ends,* the initiative apparently coming from Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel's office in Thuringia but also from the NSDAP's Economic Policy Commission.126 It was in this climate of mounting antitobacco sentiment that scholars launched the single most important antitobacco institu tion of the Nazi era, the Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research (Wissenschaftliches Institut zur Erforschung der Tabakgefahren), established at the University of Jena in the spring of 1941 by a grant of 100,000 RM from Hitler's Reichskanzlei.127 The institute was advertised as the first such institute anywhere in the world, and the boast is probably not without merit. Fritz Lickint ap plauded the founding of the institute in a letter to its director: Now, finally, it will be possible to establish an effective bulwark against the efforts of the heretofore omnipotent "tobacco interests" to monopo- * On February 28, 1939, Philipp F. Reemtsma, Germany's all-powerful tobacco mogul, wrote to Bernhard Kohler, head of the NSDAP's Economic Policy Commis sion, protesting Kohler's call for tobacco factory owners "over the course of time to convert their manufacturing centers, that is to liquidate their factories." Reemtsma in his ten-page letter comes off as nonchalant, noting that his personal fortunes extend far beyond tobacco, but he also counters that cigarettes are the mildest form of tobacco with the lowest nicotine content, and that if German tobacco manufac turers were to cease production, then the important tobacco markets of the Ori ent--notably Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey--would come to be dominated by Lon don companies. He comes close to labeling Nazi propagandists "fanatics," but he also cautions that the prohibition of one form of Genussmittel would likely lead to its replacement by another. Appealing to the homeopathic medical practices insti tutionalized in the Rudolf-Hess-Krankenhaus, he argues that a substance function ing as a poison at one dose might well be beneficial at another; he also states that tobacco companies were working "full steam" to lower the nicotine content of ciga rettes. See Philipp F. Reemtsma to Bernhard Kohler, February 28, 1939, R43/745b, BAP.