The insecticidal feature of DDT was discovered in 1939 and came to widespread use in agriculture following World War 2 ). In the 1950s and 1960s, the application of DDT increased dramatically. But rising awareness for environmental issues in the 1960s also took place in the agricultural sector. By this time, DDT had grown into a model compound in ecotoxicological studies, whose unfavorable results led to waning enthusiasm for the pesticide . At the end of the 1960s, the GDR government found itself constrained to react to the global wave of DDT bans, which endangered its own food and crop exports. As a result, a stepwise substitution plan was adopted: From 1971 until 1976, more and more DDT bans for the most application intensive crops were installed, visible in decreasing amounts of distributed DDT in the GDR from ca. 280 Mg•a -1 in 1972 to ca. 20 Mg•a -1 in 1977 .