Nazi Internationalism

In May 1939, the European forestry community “celebrated” the establishment of a new international organization, the Centre International de Sylviculture (CIS), headquartered in Berlin and operating under Nazi patronage. The Nazi government demonstrated the importance it placed on this organization by planning a prestigious new building for the CIS and granting its delegates extraterritorial status. While the building itself was never constructed, the Nazis went on to establish another international forestry body in 1943: the European Wood Commission (EWC). This organization aimed to leverage the knowledge produced and gathered by the CIS to rationalize the European timber market in favour of the Axis powers.

Although the Nazis’ ambitious international plans collapsed with the end of the Second World War, the CIS and EWC did not entirely vanish after Germany's defeat and capitulation in 1945. Instead, the CIS’s assets were transferred to the newly-formed United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO continues to house the CIS’s library, making the archive itself a material part of these organizations’ afterlife. Additionally, some personnel from both the CIS and EWC found their way into the FAO’s Timber Committee, where they were employed as "experts" in the post-war period.

My project examines how knowledge and expertise were politicized—subtly or overtly infused with fascist ideas and ideology—only to be disentangled after the war so they could be repurposed. I explore how these fascist international organizations operated, focusing on their governance: organizational structures, institutional cultures, and ideas disseminated through these organizations and their personnel. Most importantly, I investigate which aspects of these organizations survived and how they shaped the afterlife of fascist forestry knowledge within post-war international organizations such as the FAO.