This article offers a first attempt to examine systematically the politics of waste and recycling in the Third Reich, one of the first modern states to articulate 'zero waste' as a political goal. It presupposes that waste, both in its material realities and its everyday representations, offers a powerful guide to any society's implicit order. With respect to Nazi Germany, the suggestion that such presumably neutral materials as trash, waste and garbage order social relations has particularly sinister implications. Focusing on scrap collectors and salvaging practices inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe, this article argues that waste management and recycling were integral to the Nazi racial order and crystallized as central strategies to administer the chaos of war. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers in party, industry and society performed their loyalty and reimposed order by collecting paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rags and bones with the explicit goal of closing the energy cycle, extending the Reich's resource base and increasing the regime's war-making capabilities. In pursuit of these goals, the Nazi state attempted not only to conquer its many enemies but also to erase the evidence of its own proliferating military setbacks. These efforts notwithstanding, the reclamation of waste did not have the power to reverse the fortunes of war. The Nazi politics of zero waste recycled chaos instead. KEYWORDS: garbage; Nazi Germany; recycling; Second World War; Third Reich; waste Often, in the red light of a street-lamp Of which the wind whips the flame and worries the glass, In the heart of some old suburb, muddy labyrinth, Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment, One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head, Stumbling, bumping against the walls like a poet, And with no thoughts of the stool-pigeons, his subjects, He pours out his whole heart in grandiose projects. Charles Baudelaire, 'The Rag-picker's Wine' 1
