Sportfishing and the “Aryanization” of Recreational Space During the Third Reich

Abstract This article explores how sportfishing became an instrument of the Nazi regime in integrating “Aryans” into the Volksgemeinschaft (racial or national community) through coercive measures and the promise of policies benefitting anglers. Most scholarship on the structure and function of sports in the Third Reich focuses on mass participatory sports or the 1936 Olympic Games. This article shows that leisure activities also played a significant role within the Nazi state and society, as authorities controlled who had access to outdoor spaces and waters, thereby defining who was included and excluded within this Volksgemeinschaft. Restricting access to fishing waters to only “Aryans,” Nazi policies were an important part of the “social death” of German Jews. Although new sportfishing opportunities for “Aryans” fell short of Nazi promises, conquests fed anglers’ desires of the East as a space of unbound recreation. In this sense, even recreational activities such as sportfishing were inextricably tied to larger Nazi policies of exclusion, war, expansion, and potential for plunder.