| Richard Walther Darré | |
|---|---|
| Reich Minister of Food Nazi Germany |
|
| In office 29 June 1933 – 23 May 1942 |
|
| Chancellor | Adolf Hitler |
| Preceded by | Alfred Hugenberg |
| Succeeded by | Herbert Backe |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Ricardo Walther Oscar Darré 14 July 1895 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Died | 5 September 1953 (aged 58) Munich, West Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Political party | Nazi Party |
| Spouse(s) | Alma Staadt (div.) Charlotte Freiin von Vittinghoff-Schell |
| Alma mater | University of Halle |
| Cabinet | Hitler |
| Religion | Paganist |
Richard Walther Darré (born Ricardo Walther Oscar Darré, 14 July 1895 - 5 September 1953) was an SS-Obergruppenführer and one of the leading Nazi "blood and soil" (German: Blut und Boden) ideologists. He served as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942.
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Darré was born in Belgrano,[1] a Buenos Aires neighbourhood, in Argentina to Richard Oscar Darré, a German with Huguenot ancestry, (born 10 March 1854, Berlin; died 20 February 1929, Wiesbaden)[2][3] and the half-Swedish/half-German Emilia Berta Eleonore, née Lagergren (born 23 July 1872, Buenos Aires; died 20 July 1936, Bad Pyrmont). His father moved to Argentina in 1888 as a partner of the German international import/export wholesaler Engelbert Hardt & Co.[2] Although his parents' marriage was not a happy one (according to Richard Walther, his father was a hard drinker and womanizer[4]), 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 preceding World 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 in Heidelberg; in 1911 he was sent as an exchange pupil to King's College School in Wimbledon. The rest of the family returned to Germany in 1912. Richard (as he was known in the family) then spent two years at the Oberrealschule in Gummersbach, followed in early 1914 by the Kolonialschule for resettlement in the German colonies at Witzenhausen, south of Göttingen, where his interest in farming was awakened.
After a single term at Witzenhausen, he volunteered for army service. He was lightly wounded a number of times while serving during World War I, but fared better than most of his contemporaries.
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 this impossible. Instead he returned to Witzenhausen to continue his studies. He then obtained unpaid work as a farm assistant in Pomerania: his observation of the treatment of returning German soldiers there influenced his later writings.
In 1922 he moved to the University of Halle to continue his studies: here he took an agricultural degree, specialising in animal breeding. He did not complete his PhD studies until 1929, at the comparatively mature age of 34. During these years he spent some time working in East Prussia and Finland.
He was married twice. In 1922 he married Alma Staadt,[5] a schoolfriend of his sister Ilse. He divorced Alma in 1927, and subsequently married Charlotte Freiin von Vittinghoff-Schell, who survived him. The first marriage produced two daughters.
As a young man in Germany, Darré initially joined the Artaman League, a Völkisch youth group committed to the back-to-the-land movement.[6] Against this backdrop Darré began to develop the idea that the future of the "Nordic race" was linked to the soil in what came to be known as "Blut und Boden". Here "Blut" (blood) represents race or ancestry, while "Boden" can be translated as soil, territory, or land. The essence of the theory was the mutual and long-term relationship between a people and the land that it occupies and cultivates.
Darré's first political article (1926) was on the subject of Internal Colonisation, which argued against Germany attempting to regain the lost colonies. Most of his writing at this time, however, was on technical aspects of animal breeding. His first book, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse ('Peasantry as the life-source of the Nordic Race'), was written in 1928.[7] It asserted that German farms had previously been bestowed on one son, the strongest, ensuring the best were farmers, but partible inheritance had destroyed that.[6] The ancient tradition had to be restored, as well as serious efforts made to restore the purity of Nordic blood, including exterminating the sick and impure.[6]
The transcript of a 1940 speech given by Darré was authenticated by and published in Life magazine, 9 December 1940: "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... to consist of landless, non-German nationals... a modern form of medieval slavery which we must and will introduce of fulfill our great tasks. These slaves will by no means denied the blessings of illiteracy..."[8]
In her biography of him, Anna Bramwell attempts to interpret 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., though this view has been challenged by other scholars, her books being described as "devoid of credible evidence" and containing "gross errors".[9]
Those who heard and heeded Darré's arguments included Heinrich Himmler, himself one of the Artamans.[6]
Darré's work also glorified "peasant virtues" - as found in the remnants of the Nordics who lived in the country - and disparged city living.[7]
"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. [..] Since the Nordic birth-rate was lower than that of other races, the Nordic race was under a long-term threat of extinction."[1]:55
After Paul Schultze-Naumburg had introduced him to Adolf Hitler, Darré in July 1930 joined the Nazi Party and the SS. Darré's NSDAP number was 248,256 and his SS number was 6,882.[10] Darré went on to become an active Nazi Reichsleiter and to set up an agrarian political apparatus to recruit farmers into the party. Darré saw three main roles for this apparatus: to exploit unrest in the countryside as a weapon against the urban government; to win over the peasants as staunch Nazi supporters; to gain a constituency of people who could be used as settlers to displace the Slavs in future conquests in the East. On 1 January 1932 he became head of the newly established SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt or RuSHA), a fiercely racist and anti-Semitic organization, in the rank of a Gruppenführer.
In his religious views, Dárre would belong to the paganist fraction within the Nazi movement (see: Religious aspects of Nazism); however, unlike Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, he has not become a figure of interest in the speculation about Nazi occultism.[11]
Darré's works were primarily concerned with the ancient and present Nordic peasantry (the ideology of Blood and soil): within this context, he made an explicit attack against Christianity. In his two main works (Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse, Munich, 1927 and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, Munich, 1930), Darré accused Christianity, with its "teaching of the equality of men before God," to have "deprived the Teutonic nobility of its moral foundations", the "innate sense of superiority over the nomadic tribes".[12]
Soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Darré became Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture succeeding resigned DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg, and Reichsbauernführer (usually translated as Reich Peasant Leader, though the word Bauer also denotes Farmer), serving from June 1933 to May 1942. He was instrumental in founding the Nazi Reichsnährstand corporation[13] as part of the Gleichschaltung process. Darré campaigned for big landowners to part with some of their land to create new farms, and promoted the controversial Reichserbhofgesetz, which reformed the inheritance laws to prevent splitting up of farms into smaller units.
He developed a plan for "Rasse und Raum" ("race and space", or territory) which provided the ideological background for the Nazi expansive policy on behalf of the "Drang nach Osten" ("Drive to the east") and of the "Lebensraum" ("Living space") theory expounded in Mein Kampf. Darré strongly influenced Reichsführer-SS Himmler in his goal to create a German racial aristocracy based on selective breeding. The Nazi policies of eugenics would lead to the annihilation of millions of non-Germans. In the course of the preparations for the Generalplan Ost, Himmler would later break with Darré, whom he saw as too theoretical. Darré was generally on bad terms with Economy Minister Hjalmar Schacht, particularly as Germany suffered poor harvests in the mid 1930s.
By September 1938, Himmler was already demanding that Darré step down as leader of the RuSHA in favour of Günther Pancke. Darré finally had to resign as Reich Minister in 1942, ostensibly on health grounds, and was succeeded by his state secretary Herbert Backe.
In 1945 the American authorities arrested Darré at Flak-Kaserne Ludwigsburg and tried him at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials as one of 21 defendants in the Ministries Trial, also known as the Wilhelmstrasse Trial (1947-1949).[14]
He was charged under the following counts[14]:
Darré was sentenced to seven years at Landsberg Prison. He nevertheless was released in 1950 and spent his final years in Bad Harzburg. He died in a Munich hospital on 5 September 1953 of cancer of the liver, induced by alcoholism. Darré is buried in Goslar.
His two main writings were Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (1928) and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1934), translated into English as "The Peasantry as Life Source of the Nordic Race" and "A New Nobility of Blood and Soil" respectively.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Alfred Hugenberg |
Minister of Food 1933–1942 |
Succeeded by Herbert Backe |
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