25th June 1939
Reichsnährstand

Reichsnährstand/ 'Blut und Boden'

and the Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft (1885-1934, 1947 - Present day)

Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft (DLG)

The DLG was founded on 11th December 1885 by the agricultural engineer Max Eyth together with the farmer and politician Adolf Kiepert in the English House in Berlin's Mohrenstraße. Adolf Kiepert was the society's first chairman. From 1902 onwards, the association's headquarters were located near the government district. In 1934, the DLG was dissolved and incorporated into the Reich Food Estate. On 18th September 1947, the German Agricultural Society was re-founded at Hohenheim Castle; its headquarters have been in Frankfurt am Main ever since. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reichsnährstand

The Reichsnährstand or 'State Food Society', was a government body set up in Nazi Germany to regulate food production.

The Reichsnährstand was founded by the Reichsnährstandsgesetz (decree) of 13th September 1933; it was led by R. Walther Darré.

The Reichsnährstand had legal authority over everyone involved in agricultural production and distribution. It attempted to interfere in the market for agricultural goods, using a complex system of orders, price controls, and prohibitions, through regional marketing associations. Under the 'Hereditary Farm Law of 1933' (Reichsnährstandsgesetz), farmers were bound to their land since most agricultural land could not be sold. The law was enacted to protect and preserve Germany's smaller hereditary estates that were no larger than 308 acres. Below that acreage, farmlands could 'not be sold, divided, mortgaged or foreclosed on for debt.' Cartel-like marketing boards fixed prices, regulated supplies and oversaw almost every facet in directing agricultural production on farmlands. Besides deciding what seeds and fertilizers were to be applied to farmlands, the Reichsnährstand secured protection from selling foreign food imports inside Germany, and placed a moratorium on debt payments.

As the scope and depth of the National Socialists command economy escalated, food production and rural standard of living declined. By autumn of 1936, Germany began to experience critical shortages of food and consumer goods, despite the spending of billions of Reichsmarks on price subsidies to farmers. Germans were even subjected to rationing of many major consumer goods, including produce, butter and other consumables. Besides food shortages, Germany began to encounter a loss of farm labourers, where up to 440,000 farmers had abandoned agriculture between 1933 and 1939.

The Reichsnährstand's argument that Germany 'needed' an additional 7-8 million hectares of farmland, and that consolidation of existing farms would displace many existing farmers who would need to work new land, influenced Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union.

Source: Wikipedia

Blut und Boden

'Blood and soil' is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a racially defined national body ('Blood') united with a settlement area ('Soil'). By it, rural and farm life forms are idealised as a counterweight to urban ones. It is tied to the contemporaneous German concept of Lebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.

'Blood and soil' was a key slogan of Nazi ideology. The nationalist ideology of the Artaman League and the writings of Richard Walther Darré guided agricultural policies which were later adopted by Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Baldur von Schirach.

The German expression was coined in the late 19th century, in tracts which espoused racialism/racism and romantic nationalism. It produced a regionalist literature, with some social criticism. This romantic attachment was widespread prior to the rise of the Nazis. Major figures in 19th century German agrarian romanticism included Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who argued that the peasantry represented the foundation of the German people and conservatism.

Ultranationalists who predated the Nazis frequently supported country living by claiming that it was healthier than city living, with the Artaman League sending urban children to the countryside to work in the hope that they would be transformed into Wehrbauern (lit. 'soldier peasants').

Richard Walther Darré popularised the phrase at the time of the rise of Nazi Germany in his 1930 book Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility Based On Blood And Soil), in which he proposed the implementation of a systematic eugenics program, arguing that selective breeding would be a cure-all for the problems which were plaguing the state. In 1928, he had also written the book, Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, in which he presented his theory that the alleged difference between Nordic people and Southeastern Europeans was based in the Nordic people's connection to superior land.

Darré was an influential member of the Nazi Party and a noted race theorist who assisted the party greatly in gaining support among common Germans outside the cities. Prior to their ascension to power, Nazis called for a return from the cities to the countryside. This agrarian sentiment allowed opposition to both the middle class and the aristocracy, and presented the farmer as a superior figure beside the moral swamp of the city.

The doctrine not only called for a 'back to the land' approach and re-adoption of 'rural values'; it held that German land was bound, perhaps mystically, to German blood. Peasants were the Nazi cultural heroes, who held charge of German racial stock and German history—as when a memorial of a medieval peasant uprising was the occasion for a speech by Darré praising them as a force and purifier of German history. Agrarianism was asserted as the only way to truly understand the 'natural order.' Urban culture was decried as a weakness, labelled 'asphalt culture' and partially coded as resulting from Jewish influence, and was depicted as a weakness that only the Führer's will could eliminate.

The doctrine also contributed to the Nazi ideal of a woman: a sturdy peasant, who worked the land and bore strong children, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work. That country women gave birth to more children than city ones was also a factor in the support.

Carl Schmitt argued that a people would develop laws appropriate to its 'blood and soil' because authenticity required loyalty to the Volk over abstract universals.

Neues Volk displayed anti-Semitic demographic charts to deplore the alleged destruction of Aryan families' farmland and claim that the Jews were eradicating traditional German peasantry. Posters for schools depicted the flight of people from the countryside to the city. The German National Catechism, German propaganda widely used in schools, also spun tales of how farmers supposedly lost ancestral lands and had to move to the city, with all its demoralising effects.

The program received far more ideological and propaganda support than concrete changes. When Gottfried Feder tried to settle workers in villages about decentralised factories, generals and Junkers successfully opposed him. Generals objected because it interfered with rearmament, and Junkers because it would prevent their exploiting their estates for the international market. It would also require the breakup of Junker estates for independent farmers, which was not implemented.

The Reichserbhofgesetz, the State Hereditary Farm Law of 1933, implemented this ideology, stating that its aim was to: 'preserve the farming community as the blood-source of the German people' (Das Bauerntum als Blutquelle des deutschen Volkes erhalten). Selected lands were declared hereditary and could not be mortgaged or alienated, and only these farmers were entitled to call themselves Bauern or 'farmer peasant', a term the Nazis attempted to refurbish from a neutral or even pejorative to a positive term. Regional custom was only allowed to decide whether the eldest or the youngest son was to be the heir. In areas where no particular custom prevailed, the youngest son was to be the heir.

During the Nazi era, the eldest son inherited the farm in most cases. Priority was given to the patriline, so that, if there were no sons, the brothers and brothers' sons of the deceased peasant had precedence over the peasant's own daughters. The countryside was also regarded as the best place to raise infantry, and as having an organic harmony between landowner and peasant, unlike the 'race chaos' of the industrial cities. It also prevented Jewish people from farming: 'Only those of German blood may be farmers.'

The concept was a factor in the requirement of a year of land service for members of Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. This period of compulsory service was required after completion of a student's basic education, before they could engage in advanced studies or become employed. Although working on a farm was not the only approved form of service, it was a common one; the aim was to bring young people back from the cities, in the hope that they would then stay 'on the land'. In 1942, 600,000 boys and 1.4 million girls were sent to help bring in the harvest.

Blood and soil was one of the foundations of the concept of Lebensraum, 'living space'. By expanding eastward and transforming those lands into breadbaskets, another blockade, such as that of World War I, would not cause massive food shortages, as that one had, a factor that aided the resonance of 'Blood and soil' for the German population. Even Alfred Rosenberg, not hostile to the Slavs as such, regarded their removal from this land, where Germans had once lived, as necessary because of the unity of blood and soil. Mein Kampf prescribed as the unvarying aim of foreign policy the necessity of obtaining land and soil for the German people (again, 'German people' defined by the Nazi Party as racially pure).

While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian 'breadbasket' and expressed particular hostility to its 'Russian' cities as hotbeds of Russianness and Communism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war. Even during the war itself, Hitler gave orders that Leningrad was to be razed with no consideration given for the survival and feeding of its population. This also called for industry to die off in these regions. The Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns. This would also encourage large families.

Furthermore, this land, held by 'tough peasant races', would serve as a bulwark against attack from Asia.

Source: Wikipedia

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