1895-1953
Walther Darré was born in Buenos Aires, the English educated son of German-Argentinian parents. The family moved to Germany in 1905. After schooling at Heidelberg and Wimbledon, he served as an artillery officer on the Western Front during the First World War. After Germany's surrender, Darré briefly enlisted in the right-wing military Freikorps, before commencing his agricultural and animal breeding studies (1922-1927), qualifying as an agronomist and gaining practical experience on farms in the Baltic region.
He was also an early ideological mentor of Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), future leader of the SS, who Darré met at a 'Back to the Land' Movement meeting in 1928. That year, Darré published the first of three books: The Peasantry as Life Force of the Nordic Race, followed by Blood and Soil (1929) and A New Nobility from Blood and Soil (1930). He began to organise farmers in the Nazi Party and joined in 1930, renouncing his Argentinian citizenship.
In these works, Darré claimed that the Nordic race was the driving force of the Germanic nation and deserved protection by ensuring the economic viability of small peasant farming. Measures to do so included maintaining small peasant holdings, organic farming (Darré himself was influenced by the naturalist 'bio-dynamic' agricultural theories of Rudolf Steiner), government sponsored marketing co-operatives and land conservation.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Darré was appointed a Nazi Minister and head of the SS Race and Resettlement Office, his ideas having found vogue with Hitler, Himmler and deputy party leader, Rudolf Hess (1894-1987). Nazi propaganda drew heavily on the rural mysticism of 'blood and soil' that arose in reaction to rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in Germany from the late nineteenth century, especially among farming groups disadvantaged by this change. Traditional rural virtues of loyalty, morality and racial purity were to guarantee a stable, hierarchical community in which all knew their place. As well, the idealised 'peasant nobility' would serve as an antidote to the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, urban, Jewish, intellectuals. In Darré's writings, Jews were referred to as 'weeds'.
On the more practical side, increased agricultural production was essential to achieve German economic self-sufficiency.
Darré's Hereditary Farm Law which aimed to preserve small farm holdings was passed in September 1933 and is seen by Bramwell as the highpoint in the career of this peaceful rural radical trying to help the poor and forgotten of the countryside.
In practice however, his reforms were largely ineffective. They failed to increase the rural birthrate, or to stop the transformation of the peasant into a capitalist farmer. Urbanisation grew at a greater rate than before. Farm incomes could not keep pace with national income. Historians estimate that more than a million Germans moved from farms to cities between 1933 to 1939. This was a very different kind of social revolution than the one Darré had planned.
By 1939, Darré had lost Hitler's confidence.(His attempts to protect the German farmer from international capitalism brought him into conflict with the free-market views of Hjalmar Schacht. As Schacht was able to bring in large financial contributions from Germany's industrialists Darré lost his influence with Adolf Hitler.)
Opposed to the war, according to Bramwell, Darré was merely a naive idealist, ill suited for the political conflict of the Nazi inner circle. Military considerations assumed greater importance and his impracticality and failure to efficiently organise the wartime German food supply led to his dismissal in 1942.
Convicted by the Allies at the Nuremburg trials, Darré was sentenced to a mere five years imprisonment. Released in 1950, he died in obscurity in Munich three years later.
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http://www.the-battle-of-britain.co....ther_darre.htm
RICHARD WALTHER DARRE
Nazi Reichsminister,
Berlin, 1940
"As soon as we beat England we shall make an end of you Englishmen once and for all. Able-bodied men and women between the ages of 16 and 45 will be exported as slaves to the Continent. The old and weak will be exterminated. All men remaining in Britain as slaves will be sterilised; a million or two of the young women of the Nordic type will be segregated in a number of stud farms where, with the assistance of picked German sires, during a period of 10 or 12 years, they will produce annually a series of Nordic infants to be brought up in every way as Germans. These infants will form the future population of Britain. They will be partially educated in Germany and only those who fully satisfy the Nazi's requirements will be allowed to return to Britain and take up permanent residence. The rest will be sterilised and sent to join slave gangs in Germany. Thus, in a generation or two, the British will disappear."
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Conversation between Richard Walther Darré and Franz von Papen]
10 June 1945
Himmler's connections in the Far East
DARRÉ: Strangely enough Himmler had good connections in Asia. Personal relations, for instance with the brother of Emperor Hirohito.
Von PAPEN: Yes, he sat next to him on the grandstand during the Reichsparteitag.
DARRÉ: Yes, and if I remember correctly, he had a 3-hour private audience with Hitler away from all the officers. Furthermore he (Himmler) had peculiar connections with the Dalai Lama, very strange business; and with the Tartars in Mongolia, too.
Von PAPEN: He could become a Lama priest now, ha ha! Nobody would find him then.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Himmler/interro...MIS/X_P13.html
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