ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about smoking have operated at a national level being in Britain and Germany during the Second World War. The different paths taken by Britain and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s explains the political make-up of the respective states and the position of smoking within them. The provision of tobacco for the troops was as important in Germany as it was in Britain. In the immediate post-war period, anti-smoking groups in West Germany continued to operate as NGOs, pushing health in relation to tobacco policy onto the agenda at a federal level, in a way that was absent in Britain. The early twentieth century onwards in Britain and Germany, tobacco brands were increasingly promoted within discourses of nationalism and, in the British context, Empire. The tobacco industry sought to capitalize on nationalistic discourses in both countries, by and large successfully. The nationalistic discourses were superseded by the international claims and pressures of the 'new public health'.
