 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Richard Walther Darré" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Richard Walther Darré | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture | |
| In office 29 June 1933 – 6 April 1944 (On leave from 23 May 1942) | |
| Chancellor | Adolf Hitler |
| Preceded by | Alfred Hugenberg |
| Succeeded by | Herbert Backe |
| Chief of theSS Race and Settlement Main Office | |
| In office 1 January 1932 – 12 September 1938 | |
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Günther Pancke |
| National leader (Reichsleiter) | |
| In office 3 June 1933 – 23 May 1942 | |
| Additional positions | |
| 1933–1945 | Member of theGreater German Reichstag |
| 1932–1933 | Member of theReichstag |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Ricardo Walther Óscar Darré (1895-07-14)14 July 1895 |
| Died | 5 September 1953(1953-09-05) (aged 58) |
| Nationality | German Argentinian |
| Political party | Nazi Party |
| Alma mater | University of Halle |
| Profession | Agronomist |
| Cabinet | Hitler cabinet |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | German Empire |
| Branch/service | Imperial German Army |
| Rank | Leutnant SS-Obergruppenführer |
| Battles/wars | World War I |
Richard Walther Darré (bornRicardo Walther Óscar Darré; 14 July 1895 – 5 September 1953) was one of the leadingNazi "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden) ideologists and served asReich Minister of Food and Agriculture. As the National leader (Reichsleiter) for agricultural policy, he was a high-ranking functionary in theNazi Party and as a Senior group leader (Obergruppenführer) in theSS, he was the seventh most senior commander in that organisation.
Born inBelgrano, Buenos Aires to German parents, Darré was schooled in Germany and saw active service in theImperial German Army during theFirst World War. After the war, he pursued a degree in agriculture at theUniversity of Halle and joined theagrarian andVölkischArtaman League, where he began to develop the tendency which would become "blood and soil". His philosophy was a major influence onHeinrich Himmler, a fellow Artaman. In 1930, Darré joined the Nazi Party. Himmler appointed him chief of theSS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) in 1932, and a year later he was made Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture.
Darré was gradually sidelined as both Hitler and Himmler came to regard him as excessively theoretical. Himmler asked him to step down as leader of RuSHA in 1938, and by 1942 he was effectively forced into retirement. At the end of the war, Darré was arrested, tried and found guilty on three counts at theMinistries Trial. He was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment; following his release, he spent his final years inBad Harzburg and died ofliver cancer in 1953.
Darré was born inBelgrano,[1][page needed] aBuenos Aires neighbourhood in Argentina, to Richard Oscar Darré, a German withHuguenot ancestry (born 10 March 1854,Berlin; died 20 February 1929,Wiesbaden)[2][3][page needed][a] and Emilia Berta Eleonore, née Lagergren (born 23 July 1872 inBuenos Aires to aSwedish-born father and German-born mother; died 20 July 1936 inBad Pyrmont).[b] His father moved toArgentina in 1888 as a partner of the German international import/export wholesaler Engelbert Hardt & Co.[3][page needed][c] His parents' marriage was not a happy one; Richard Walther remembered his father as "a hard drinker and a womaniser".[5] They lived prosperously and educated their children privately, until they were forced to return to Germany as a result of worsening international relations in the years precedingWorld War I. Darré gained fluency in four languages: Spanish, German, English, and French.
Darré's parents sent him to Germany at age nine to attend school inHeidelberg. In 1911, he attendedKing's College School inWimbledon as an exchange student. The rest of the family returned to Germany in 1912. Richard (as he was known in the family) then spent two years at theOberrealschule inGummersbach, followed in early 1914 by theKolonialschule atWitzenhausen, south ofGöttingen, for training officials for theGerman colonies, which awakened his interest in farming.
After a single term at Witzenhausen, he volunteered for army service. He was slightly wounded a number of times while serving duringWorld War I.[6]
When the war ended, he contemplated returning to Argentina for a life of farming, but the family's weakening financial position during the years of inflation made that impossible. Instead, he returned to Witzenhausen to continue his studies. He then obtained unpaid work as a farm assistant inPomerania. His observation of the treatment of returning German soldiers there influenced his later writings.
In 1922, he moved to theUniversity of Halle to continue his studies. He undertook an agricultural degree, specialising inanimal husbandry. He did not complete his PhD studies until 1929, at the age of 34. During those years, he spent some time working inEast Prussia andFinland.
He married twice. In 1922, he married Alma Staadt,[d] a schoolfriend of his sister Ilse. The marriage produced one daughter, Anneliese, born 1923. He and Alma divorced in 1927 and, in 1931, he married Charlotte Freiin von Vittinghoff-Schell, who survived him. The second marriage also produced one daughter, Elin, born 1938.
As a young man in Germany, Darré initially joined theArtaman League, aVölkisch youth-group committed to theback-to-the-land movement.[8] In that context, he began to develop the idea of the link between the future of theNordic race and the soil, the tendency which became known as "Blut und Boden" orBlood and Soil, where "blood" represents race and ancestry, while "soil" expresses the concepts of territory, land. The essence of the theory involved the mutual and long-term relationship between a people and the land that they occupy and cultivate.
Darré's first political article (1926) discussedInternal Colonisation and argued against Germany attempting to regain its lost colonies in Africa. Most of his writing at that time, however, concentrated on technical aspects of animal breeding. He wrote his first book,Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse ('Peasantry as the life-source of the Nordic Race'), in 1928.[9] It asserted that German farms had previously been bestowed on one son, the strongest, ensuring the best were farmers, butpartible inheritance had destroyed that.[8] Darré demanded the restoration of the ancient tradition, as well as serious efforts to restore the purity of Nordic blood througheugenics.[8]
In her biography of Darré, Anna Bramwell interprets his writing as an early example of "Green" or Conservationist thinking. He advocated more natural methods of land management, placing emphasis on the conservation of forests, and demanded more open space and air in the raising of farm animals.[1][page needed] Other scholars, however, have challenged that view. One sees Bramwell's books as "devoid of credible evidence" and containing "gross errors".[10] Another acknowledges Bramwell's biography as "undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English", while at the same time saying that she "consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical."[11][page needed]
Those who heard and heeded Darré's arguments includedHeinrich Himmler, himself one of the Artaman.[8]
Darré's work also glorified "peasant virtues" – as found in the remnants of the Nordics who lived in the country – and disparaged city living.[9]
In his two major works, he defined the German peasantry as a homogeneous racial group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the cultural and racial core of the German nation, and promoted the idea that since the Nordic birth-rate was lower than that of other races, the Nordic race was under a long-term threat of extinction.[12]
In July 1930, afterPaul Schultze-Naumburg had introduced him toAdolf Hitler, Darré joined theNazi Party (# 248,256) and theSS (# 6,882).[13]On 1 January 1932, the chief of the SS (Reichsführer-SS) Himmler appointed him chief of the newly establishedSS Race and Settlement Main Office, a racist andantisemitic organization concerned with the implementation of racial policies and the control of the racial integrity of SS members.[14] In 1932 Darré was given the rank of SS-Group leader (SS-Gruppenführer) and in November 1934 he was promoted to SS-Senior group leader (SS-Obergruppenführer).[15]During the 1932 presidential election, Darré engaged in a campaign of anti-Semitic harassment againstTheodor Duesterberg, the candidate of the conservativeGerman National People's Party, who, it emerged during the campaign, was the grandson of a Jewish convert to Lutheranism.[16] Duesterberg was so wounded by Darré's attacks that he challenged him to a duel, a challenge that Darré declined under the grounds that it was beneath him to fight a man with "Jewish blood".[16] Duesterberg then took up his dispute with Darré before the court of honor of the Former Officers of the 1st Hanoverian Field Artillery Regiment of Scharnhorst, number 10 to which Darré belonged.[16] The court ruled in Darré's favor.[16]
Darré was elected to theReichstag in July 1932 and in the following two elections from the Nazi Partyelectoral list. He would continue to serve as a deputy until the fall of the Nazi regime in May 1945, being elected from electoral constituency 6 (Pomerania) in the November 1933 election and from constituency 28 (Dresden-Bautzen) in the March 1936 and April 1938 elections.[17] Darré was not part of thefirst coalition government headed by Hitler. However, on 29 June 1933, shortly after the approval by theReichstag of theEnabling Act of 23 March, he became Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, succeedingDNVP leaderAlfred Hugenberg, who had resigned. He concurrently was made Prussian Minister of Agriculture, and subsequently was named to thePrussian State Council by PrussianMinister PresidentHermann Göring. He was also named Reich Farmers Leader (Reichsbauernführer) in May 1933.[18] On 2 June 1933 Hitler appointed Darré a National Leader (Reichsleiter) of the Party.[19] He was also a founding member of theHans Frank'sAcademy for German Law in October 1933.[20]
Darré went on to set up an agrarian political apparatus to recruit farmers into the party operating along three main directives: to exploit unrest in the countryside as a weapon against urban governments; to win over the farmers as staunch Nazi supporters; to gain a constituency of people to be used as settlers displacing theSlavs in future land grabs in the East. The German historianKlaus Hildebrand described Darré together with Himmler andAlfred Rosenberg as one of the leaders of the "agrarian" fraction within the NSDAP who championed anti-industrial and anti-urban "blood and soil" ideology, expansion into Eastern Europe to gainLebensraum, an alliance with Great Britain to defeat the Soviet Union, and staunch opposition to restoring the pre-1914 German colonial empire.[21] The "agrarian" fraction took the view that Wilhelmine imperialism had taken Germany in the wrong direction by colonizing lands that were unsuitable for mass colonization by German settlers and had unwisely antagonized Britain.[21] The lesson that the Nazi "agrarians" drew from the German Empire was that Germany must focus its ambitions to the continent of Europe in order to win an alliance with Britain and land suitable for German colonization.[21]
Darré was instrumental in founding the Nazi Reich Food Society (Reichsnährstand)[22] as part of the Nazification process of the German society (Gleichschaltung). Darré campaigned for big landowners to part with some of their land to create new farms, and promoted the controversial Hereditary Farm Law (Reichserbhofgesetz), which forcibly converted most of the country's small farms (from 7.5 to 125 hectares - 19 to 309 acres),[23] into hereditary estates that were to be passed from father to son under the ancient laws ofentailment. While the law protected small farmers fromforeclosure and the ordeal ofrepossession, it also tied them and their descendants to their hereditary farm forever, not allowing it to bealienated normortgaged.
At the Nazi 'agricultural school' inBurg Neuhaus, the "Reich School of the Reichsnährstand for Physical Exercises" Darré promotedNordic racial purity througheugenics and the "New nobility of blood and soil". Darré appointed the photographersAnna Koppitz and German sports photographer Hanns Spudich to produce pictures of the hand-picked young peasant farmers exercising forRudolf Bode'sNeuhaus gymnastik.[24] The pictures appeared in the June 1939Die 5. Reichsnährstands-Ausstellung ("5th Reich nutrition exhibition") in Leipzig and inOdal, the organ of Nazi propaganda.
Darré developed a plan for"Rasse und Raum" ("race and space", or territory) along the ideological lines of "Drive to the east" ("Drang nach Osten"), "Living space" ("Lebensraum") and "Hitler's dream of conquest" earlier expounded inMein Kampf.[25]
Darré strongly influenced Himmler in his goal to create a German racial aristocracy based on selective breeding.[26] The extremeNazi policies of eugenics would lead to the annihilation of millions of non-Germans. In the course of the preparations for the "Master Plan for the East" (Generalplan Ost), Himmler would later break with Darré, whom he saw as too theoretical.[27] Although Darré was considered one of the few Nazi ministers who knew his field well,[28] he was generally on bad terms with Economy MinisterHjalmar Schacht, particularly as Germany suffered poor harvests in the mid-1930s.[citation needed]
Darré's influence began to wane as Hitler and Himmler both came to feel that he was too much of a theoretician and an incompetent administrator.[15] By September 1938, Himmler demanded that Darré step down as leader of theSS Race and Settlement Main Office in favour ofGünther Pancke.[27] Darré was later placed on an extended leave of absence as Reich Minister on 23 May 1942, ostensibly on health grounds, and his duties were assumed by hisState Secretary,Herbert Backe. Darré nominally remained Reich Minister until Backe formally took over as Reich Minister on 6 April 1944.[29] However, Darré was effectively sidelined from May 1942 and retired to his hunting lodge in theSchorfheide forest outside Berlin until the end of theNazi regime.[30]
The transcript of a 1940 speech, supposedly given by Darré, was published inLife magazine, 9 December 1940, reads:
By blitzkrieg . . . before autumn . . . we shall be the absolute masters of two continents . . . a new aristocracy of German masters will be created . . . . [with] slaves assigned to it, these slaves to be their property and to consist of landless, non-German nationals . . . we actually have in mind a modern form of medieval slavery which we must and will introduce because we urgently need it in order to fulfil our great tasks. These slaves will by no means be denied the blessings of illiteracy; higher education will, in future, be reserved only for the German population of Europe . . . .[31]
In April 1945, the American authorities arrested Darré, interned him atFlak-Kaserne Ludwigsburg and tried him at theSubsequent Nuremberg Trials, as one of 21 defendants in theMinistries Trial, also known as the Wilhelmstrasse Trial (1947–1949).[32]
He was charged under the following counts:[32]
Darré was sentenced to seven years atLandsberg Prison. He was released in 1950 and spent his final years inBad Harzburg. He died in aMunich hospital, on 5 September 1953, ofliver cancer. He is buried inGoslar.
Darré's works were primarily concerned with ancient and present Nordic peasantry, and the ideology ofblood and soil. Within this context, he made an explicit attack against Christianity.In his two main writings,
Darré accused Christianity, with its "teaching of the equality of men before God," of having "deprived the Teutonic nobility of its moral foundations", the "innate sense of superiority over the nomadic tribes".[33]
.svg)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Minister of Food and Agriculture 1933–1942 | Succeeded by |
