Document Qkj9zKzjRwavqBbne3eRxonEv

218 CHAPTER 6 genetic counselors to ensure that individuals from two separate cancerous families did not marry.154 There is also, as already hinted, an important gender aspect. Women and girls were much more strongly dissuaded from smok ing than were men and boys. The Nazi antitobacco campaign was rooted in a presumption of the sanctity and delicacy of the female body; hence the ubiquitous slogan "Die deutsche Frau raucht nicht!" (The German woman does not smoke!).155 Part of this em phasis derived from the notion that the primary duty of females was to bear and care for children; there was also the idea that the female body was more fragile than the masculine body and there fore more in need of protection. Lickint was typical in his insis tence that women were "much more sensitive" to tobacco smoke than men, being rather "like children in this respect," with easily excitable nervous systems. He worried that women's child-rearing duties might be impaired by tobacco abuse; he also worried that nicotine might damage the German germ plasm (though he does not mention a possible impact on sperm).156 A great deal of research at this time focused on the vulnerability of the female organism to tobacco smoke and tobacco habits. One remarkable medical thesis at the University of Jena looked at how female prisoners coped with tobacco withdrawal while incarcer ated (women were not allowed to smoke in prison); the subtext of the study was not just that "bad women" smoked, but also that women were more easily addicted and more easily damaged.157 Women's groups joined in the struggle: the Reich Mothers' Service (Reichsmutterdienst) launched an antismoking and antialcohol ini tiative in the summer of 1942, though the effort was supposed to be "low-key" lest it incite "unrest among the population."158 Gender images blurred with other associations, including ste reotypes 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 espe cially likely to smoke, and to foist their filthy habit on others. Ra cial hygiene journals depicted decadent women with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Smoking was associated with jazz, with swing dancing, with rebellion, with Africa, with degenerate THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOBACCO 219 blacks, Jews, and Gypsies (see figs. 6.15-6.17), with many of the other fears that inspired the Nazi retreat into a paranoid, xeno phobic fortress of purity, cleanliness, and muscular macho health fanaticism. It is therefore an oversimplification to say that the antitobacco movement can be traced either to the personal fanaticism of Hitler or to the effort to stanch the flow of precious hard currency out of the country.159 Hitler was clearly disgusted by the tobacco habit: Eva Braun he would not allow to smoke in his presence, and Mar tin Bormann was similarly barred. The Fiihrer was never particu larly happy about the fact that Hermann Goring continued to puff away in public, and at one point early in the war he chided his Reichsmarschall about being commemorated in a statue with a cigar in his mouth. Hitler encouraged his close associates not to smoke and is known to have rewarded those who did manage to quit with a gold pocket watch.160 We also know that the Fiihrer at one point characterized tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man, vengeance for having been given hard liquor." Hitler seems to have regretted having allowed his soldiers to smoke: on March 2,1942, he noted that "it was a mistake, traceable to the army leadership at the time, to have started giving our soldiers daily rations of tobacco at the beginning of the war." He added that it was "not correct to say that a soldier cannot live without smoking," and vowed to put an end to military tobacco rations once peace was achieved. Hitler himself had smoked some twenty-five to forty cigarettes per day in his Vi ennese youth, until he realized how much money he was wasting, whereupon he "tossed his cigarettes into the Danube and never reached for them again." He also claimed--strange as this sounds today--that Germany might never have achieved its present glory if he had continued to smoke: "perhaps it was to this, then [that is, his giving up smoking], that we owe the salvation of the German people."161 Of course, one could also counter, paraphrasing Freud, that sometimes giving up smoking is just giving up smoking. Hitler's personal aversion was only one of several factors in the Nazi war on tobacco. The more important concern, repeated over and over again in public health literature, was the productive and