A “Make America Healthy Again” hat. Photo by Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer
May 8, 2025
There are many common arguments against the use of pesticides. Surgeon general nominee Casey Means has an additional one — a connection between pesticides and Nazi Germany.
“Where did all these pesticides that have destroyed our life-giving soil and are creating a fragile food system, which is going to create a food crisis at some point, where did they all come from? Nazi Germany, right?” Means said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in August 2024.
“So Hitler was developing chemicals of war and trying to create agriculture solutions to create more food yields for Germany. And some of these pesticides, these organophosphate chemicals, were turned directly into sprays that we’re putting on all our food,” she said, “The interrelationship between Nazi Germany and what’s being sprayed on every piece of food in the United States is deeply linked, and we need to think about that.”
There is some connection there, according to Peter Thompson, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University and author of the book The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Vision of Chemical Modernity. German chemist Gerhard Schrader famously invented the nerve agent, and he also developed organophosphates that, after the war, were repurposed as pesticides by the Americans and British.
But the first organophosphates, or the class of chemical compounds often used as pesticides, were synthesized by French chemists in the 1800s, long before the war. And Schrader was attempting to kill bugs, not Jews — though the Third Reich did take an interest in his science. In 1943, the Nazis authorized construction of a factory to produce serin, a highly toxic nerve agent developed by Schrader, though Hitler never used the chemical weapon.
Thompson described Means’ argument as a “bait and switch.”
“The suggestion that because this came from Nazi Germany, that therefore it is evil and poisonous, while in some sense, I have sympathy for that argument, in another sense, it’s kind of sloppy,” he said. “To simply say that they’re bad because at one point, a Nazi chemist was involved in their development, it would discount so many things we have in our contemporary world.”
Means, a prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again movement and co-author of the book Good Energy, graduated from Stanford Medical School but dropped out of her surgical residency to pursue alternative medicine. She has expressed skepticism about vaccines and critiqued how mainstream medicine addresses chronic disease.
President Trump tapped Means for the position on Wednesday after withdrawing his nomination for Janette Nesheiwat, a former Fox News contributor who had drawn criticism from far-right activist Laura Loomer for supporting COVID vaccines. Means’ brother, Calley, is a prominent adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Thompson suggested Casey Means look to more relevant modern history in her arguments against pesticides.
“The more interesting claim is, why does the EPA allow it?” he said. “You don’t need to go to Nazi Germany in order to make damning claims about organophosphates.”
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