Papering Over History - JSTOR Daily

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Open one of the drawers in a collections cabinet at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and you’ll find a small booklet of Efka cigarette papers. The papers are part of a broader story the museum tells about Nazism, corporate collaboration, and wartime propaganda.

But walk just a half mile across the National Mall to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and you’ll find a very different story about this particular artifact. At the Smithsonian, Efka rolling papers are part of a collection of objects associated with the use of marijuana and the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.

How did these objects come to tell two such diametrically opposed stories?

After World War II, German companies aggressively worked to whitewash their Nazi past and rebrand themselves. By the 1960s and 1970s, as the youth market exploded and memories of war faded, advertising campaigns for German companies such as Volkswagen promoted their products as symbols of the counterculture. Across America, young men and women strapped on their Birkenstocks, hopped into their VW Beetles, and rolled a joint with Efka papers—all before heading off to protest what they often described as “American fascism.”

Few of these protestors knew, however, that the products they used had been tightly linked to German fascism just decades earlier. At times, these histories are murky. Carl Birkenstock joined the Nazi Party in 1940 in the hopes of securing Nazi contracts, although—unlike Hugo Boss—he never did. But, as journalist Tim Loh points out, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

In contrast, the Volkswagen car company was closely allied with the Nazis and saturated with its ideology. The car company was founded in 1937 by the Nazi program “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, KdF), an initiative aimed at improving the quality of life for the German “Aryan” population (i.e., the Volksdeutch) and thereby strengthening their indoctrination into Nazi society. The company was tasked with producing an affordable car for the unified German Aryan people. In many ways, Volkswagen became a symbol of the Nazi Party throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. Ironically, Volkswagen plants never produced a single consumer model, having been absorbed into the German war machine soon after its founding, as Natalie Scholz points out in Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology.

Efka’s story falls between these two—demonstrating the ways in which small, lesser-known companies benefited from both the initial rise of Nazism and the subsequent push to rebuild Germany in the years after World War II as well as from the lax approaches to de-Nazification and the dissembling of corporations that had been linked to Nazism.

Like many twentieth-century German companies, Efka’s financial success was perversely tied to the economic collapse after the First World War but also the rise of Nazism. Smoking is a relatively inexpensive habit that provides instant gratification and which its practitioners find pleasurable. It’s also addictive, which means that even those who are struggling financially often find it difficult to give up. Germans smoked in heavy numbers during the 1920s and 1930s.

During the 1920s, as soaring inflation across Germany led to widespread poverty, growing numbers of German smokers began to reject pre-rolled cigarettes. Loose-leaf tobacco was not only cheaper than a pre-roll, it was also taxed at a lower rate, making it more enticing to smokers on a budget. People who rolled their own cigarettes typically bought and used rolling papers made from a variety of materials such as rice paper, corn paper, and market cellulose as well as from paper made from wood pulp. Spanish and French manufacturers had long dominated this market in Europe. Although some American paper manufacturers had also begun to make and sell papers around the turn of the twentieth century, these companies sold their products only or predominantly at home.

The owner of a stationary shop that sold cigarette papers in the town of Trossingen, Fritz Kiehn had long recognized his fellow citizens’ insatiable demand for rolling papers. Even before the economic collapse of the 1920s, his shop had sold cigarette rolling papers. In 1920, he decided to increase his profits by manufacturing and selling his own brand of rolling papers—Efka, a play on his initials.

Efka papers were sold in a green box bearing a distinctive design that featured Egyptian pyramids and camels; Kiehn and his wife had honeymooned in Egypt and fallen in love with the country’s history. But the design appealed to Germans and others simply because the discovery of Ramesses II’s mummy and coffin in 1881 and Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 had sparked a global craze for anything with an Egyptian motif.

By the early 1930s, Efka had become a household name across Germany. Kiehn, however, had grander ambitions for his company, as Catherine Epstein makes clear in her review of Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh’s biography of Kiehn, the English translation of which was published in 2015. Kiehn joined the Nazi Party in 1930, three years before its rise to power. Even before it was financially expedient to do so, Kiehn donated heavily to the Party and became especially close to an individual who could assist him in his grand designs: Reichsführer of the reviled SS, Heinrich Himmler. Connections like these, as well as Kiehn’s election to a variety of political offices, enabled him to appropriate, at no cost to himself, two of the tens of thousands of German Jewish-owned companies that were “Araynized” after 1933 in the wake of the Nazi government’s campaign against Jews. These acquisitions included a cellulose manufacturer and a company that made cigarette cases.

While Kiehn’s ascension to corporate powerhouse wasn’t always smooth—his meteoric rise was resented by fellow Nazi Party members—his company became sufficiently dominant that his rolling papers were distributed widely for free during the war to German soldiers. Like most of society at the time, German soldiers continued to smoke excessively even though Hitler, a non-smoker, championed an anti-smoking campaign.

With the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad as well as the increase of bombing raids on their cities in 1943, the British government believed that the time was ripe to disseminate propaganda as part of a wider effort to encourage Germans to end the war. Around March of that year, the British psychological warfare unit reproduced Efka packets, replacing the cigarette papers with ten thin papers printed with suggestions for how to avoid work, feign illness, or simply malinger.

The small size and relative inexpensiveness of these fake papers meant that they could be left at cafes, inserted in coat pockets, and even air dropped into Germany from Allied planes.

After Germany’s defeat in the war, Fritz Kiehn was deemed a Nazi war criminal and imprisoned for the better part of three years. Though not tried at Nuremberg, Kiehn’s rolling papers made an appearance there. Curators at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believe that the Efka papers in their collection may have been distributed to smokers during the post-war trials of Nazi war criminals.

After serving time, Kiehn returned to Trossingen, where he set out to remake Efka and his fortune. Eager to rebuild the town’s economy and despite Kiehn’s decision to hire former Nazi Party friends and colleagues, Trossingen’s city councilors welcomed him with open arms and provided him with a substantial grant to rebuild his businesses. Fellow citizens likewise viewed Kiehn and the rebirth of his businesses in a positive light; the city of Trossingen even named a street and plaza after him.

In this post-war era, Efka’s reemergence extended far beyond Germany.

Like their counterparts abroad, some American tobacco smokers in the Cold War era continued to roll their own cigarettes. But rolling papers were not used only for tobacco. Since at least the 1930s, marijuana smokers had also used pre-packaged rolling papers to make joints. In the 1960s and 1970s, as marijuana use increased and became a part of mainstream American culture, the demand for rolling papers rose, according to the entry on the plant in the Encyclopedia of Social Deviance.

New American companies such as E-Z wider emerged to meet this demand, creating extra-wide rolling papers explicitly intended for marijuana smokers. But American smokers, whether of tobacco or marijuana, also continued to do what they had always done: they bought cigarette rolling papers from companies with long histories of manufacturing rolling papers outside the US. Zig-Zag, made in France since the nineteenth century, along with Big Bambú, whose history dates to the eighteenth century in Spain, were favorites among American pot smokers. While never as popular as those aforementioned brands, Efka was among the many different papers marketed during this period.

The Efka papers held by the National Museum of American History are part of a collection of 231 objects that came from the Upper Berks County Grain Company (UBC), a large distributor of pipes, bongs, rolling papers, and other drug paraphernalia to “head shops” during the 1970s. UBC served as a wholesaler to tobacco shops as well and used a mail-order catalogue to advertise their wares. Their salespeople transported merchandise by traveling directly to their customers, most of whom could be found up and down the East Coast and Midwest. The National Museum of American History’s collection illustrates the widespread nature of the illegal drug markets of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Into the early 2000s, retailers and distributors like UBC often skirted anti-drug paraphernalia laws by claiming that the products they sold were intended for use with legal products. This practice was common even when manufacturers altered a specific product to reflect the needs of marijuana users, thereby making the product less effective for tobacco use. Rolling papers for marijuana, for example, need to be wider than those used for cigarettes—yet head shops routinely sold extra-wide rolling paper claiming it was for tobacco use. Most of the rolling papers sold by UBC were bought from larger distributors, with some of these papers imported from outside the United States.

Efka papers, unlike E-Z Wider, weren’t double-wides, so it’s difficult to know for what specifically American customers bought them. Yet, given that the papers in the National Museum of American History’s collection were associated with and intended to be sold in “head shops,” it seems likely that these Efka papers were intended to be used for smoking marijuana.

While Americans were lighting up their Efka joints, the company itself was experiencing dramatic change in Germany. Due to mismanagement of the business, Kiehn’s grandchildren took control of the company from him in 1972. In doing so, they sought to sever and make a clean break with the company’s Nazi past, even while they kept its distinctive branding.

American customers, meanwhile, remained as ignorant of Efka’s decision to cleave it from its Nazi roots as they had been of the company’s Nazi history.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

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