‘Nazi Agent’ and Development Pioneer: Johann Albrecht von Monroy, National Socialist Europe and Unknown Origins of FAO's Forest Related Development Activities

Abstract

By exploring the career of the German forester Johann Albrecht v. Monroy from the 1920s to the 1950s, this article seeks to further differentiate and expand the historiography on development. It reveals that experts like Monroy who were deeply involved in the National Socialist quest for hegemony in Europe took an active part in shaping the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) forest-related development activities after the Second World War. The article provides two explanations why Monroy became a lauded development pioneer: Firstly, he was a widely acknowledged and well-connected member of a transatlantic expert community that he had helped to shape in the 1920s and 1930s. Secondly, he enormously benefitted from German expansionist policies. In the 1930s, Monroy became a senior official responsible for turning forestry and wood processing industries into a central branch of Germany's war economy. During the war, he was in charge to establish the most modern wood processing plant in Slovakia. Monroy based this project on a specific approach to development that he had elaborated since the mid-1930s and that adapted schemes shaped for colonial contexts to the very special international environment of German-controlled Europe. That Monroy could realize this project in Slovakia turned him into an expert wanted by the FAO due to an almost unrivalled experience.