A New Nobility of Blood and Soil

A New Nobility of Blood and Soil

A NEW NOBILITY OF

BLOOD AND SOIL

—R I C H A R D  W A L T H E R  D A R R É—

Translated by

AUGUSTO SALAN  &  JULIUS SYLVESTER

Foreword by

Warren Balogh

A N T E L O P E H I L L P U B L I S H I N G

English translation copyright © 2021 Antelope Hill Publishing

Second printing 2021.

Originally published in German as Neuadel aus Blut und Boden by J. F.  Lehmanns Verlag, Munich 1930.

Translated by Augusto Salan ([email protected]) and Julius Sylvester, 2021.

Cover art by sswifty.

Cover image: The hunter with his family gathered around the table over supper by Adolf Eberle (1843-1914)

Edited by Augusto Salan.

Interior formatting by Margaret Bauer.

Antelope Hill Publishing

www.antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-49-7

Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-96-1

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-29-9

Dedicated in admiration and friendship to

Paul Schultze-Naumburg

There will come a time when it will be recognized that man does not live on horsepower and tools alone. There are also goods which he does not want to and cannot do without. And he will learn to economize, and he will not seek to win one thing, only to lose everything else with it. For if man had gained everything that could be gained with his technology, he would have come to the realization that life on the now disfigured earth—which has been made so excessively easy and simple—is actually no longer worth living; that we have indeed snatched everything that our planet had to give away, and in the process we have destroyed it, and thus ourselves, in this extractive work. Each one of us has to take care of his own part, so that the change may come before it is everywhere too late forever!

Paul Schultze-Naumburg

Heimatschutz I: Die Laufenburger Stromschnellen

(Homeland Conservation I: The Laufenberger Rapids, Kunstwart)

Richard Walther Darré (1895-1953)

CONTENTS

Foreword by Warren Balogh

Preface

Introduction

On The History and Evolution of the German Nobility

Means and Possibilities for the Formation of a New Nobility

Basic Questions of German Agriculture

The Hegehöfe

Outline of the Nobility’s Structure and Governance

The Basic Ideas of Breeding Duties and Marriage Laws

Some General Guidelines for the Education of the Young    Nobility and for Their Position in the German Nation

Appendix A: Recommended Works

Appendix B: Glossary of Cited Figures

FOREWORD

By Warren Balogh

This book is the first-ever English translation of the most important written work of Richard Walther Darré, a major leader of the Third Reich and one of the chief ideologists of National Socialism. Darré served as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture of Germany, Reich Peasant Leader, Obergruppenführer in the SS, and as a Reichsleiter of the NSDAP, the second-highest political rank of the party.

Born in Argentina to upper-middle class German parents on July 14th, 1895, Darré was sent to school in Germany while still a child. He spent a year as an exchange student at Kings College School at Wimbledon and went on to study colonial agriculture until the outbreak of the First World War. Although still an Argentinian citizen, he volunteered immediately in August 1914 and served in two artillery regiments during the war, both of which suffered heavy casualties. Darré was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class during the Battle of the Somme, was wounded in 1917 after being promoted to Lieutenant, and went on to serve in the Battles of Verdun, Champagne, and the Spring Offensive of 1918.¹

After the war, although his life and family fortunes were upset by the instability and upheavals of the Weimar period, Darré married and continued his agricultural studies. Gaining practical farm experience and studying plant and animal breeding, he completed his doctoral studies in 1929. A prolific writer, Darré authored dozens of papers and articles over the course of his career² and wrote two books: Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse (The Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race, 1928) and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, 1930). That same year, he was recruited by Adolf Hitler into the NSDAP.

Blood and Soil was not a phrase coined by Darré,³ but he did more than anyone else to popularize it, and it is most often associated with his life and work. Its theme is the interconnectedness of a people, race, or nationality and the land which they inhabit. This is a crucial concept in National Socialism, and reiterations of this theme appear throughout Hitler’s writings and speeches even before Darré joined the party.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that "for myself and all true National Socialists there is only one doctrine: people and country (Volk und Vaterland)."⁴ In his inaugural speech as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler declared:

People and Earth (Volk und Erde), these are the two roots from which we draw strength and on which we base our resolves…. the conservation of this People and this Soil (Erhaltung dieses Volkes und dieses Bodens) can alone represent our purpose in life.⁵

Hitler explicitly invoked Blut und Boden in his proclamation at the opening of the Party Congress at Nuremberg on September 6th, 1938, when he described the tasks which the party had to perform:

It had to break up and destroy the other world of parties; it had to declare unrelenting war on the world of class and social prejudices; it had to ensure that without consideration of birth or of origin the German who was strong-willed and capable might find his way upwards. It had to purge Germany of all those parasites for whom the need of their Fatherland and people served as a source of personal enrichment. It had to recognize the eternal values of blood and soil, and to raise the respect paid to those values until they became the supreme laws of our life. It had to begin the struggle against the greatest enemy who threatened to destroy our people—the international Jewish world enemy!⁶

At the time of Darré’s recruitment into the NSDAP, his works were already widely read and discussed in racial nationalist circles.⁷ His proposals and theories were taken very seriously by Hitler and other leading members of the party, and he was brought in as both an expert on agriculture and on race and breeding. Put in charge of the party’s Agrarpolitischer Apparat (ApA), Darré was tasked by Hitler with developing agricultural policy and organizing the rural population of Germany into the movement.

Darré set out the new aims and tactics of the agricultural campaign of the party in a series of important directives.⁸ Prior to his appointment, the NSDAP tried to organize its own agrarian special interest group to challenge the Landbund, the main farmer’s association in Germany. Because the Landbund had deep ties to the DNVP—the mainstream conservative nationalist party of the Weimar era—external attacks only succeeded in uniting the farmers in the Landbund against the NSDAP, which was still too small and lacking in resources to compete.

Instead, Darré’s new tactic was to conquer the existing agricultural organizations from within by form of a factory cell technique.⁹ The ApA kept up the pressure by holding meetings and demonstrations to coincide with general meetings of the Landbund local committees, and aggressively infiltrated the organization.

In some cases they were successful in turning the Landbund meeting into a demonstration of support for the NSDAP. By the beginning of 1932, the DNVP regional organization for East Friesland was complaining that "more and more of the committees (of the Kreislandbünde) are composed of Nazis." Once a Kreislandbund was in the hands of the NSDAP, it could be used as a forum for a much wider audience than would attend a normal party meeting. Above all it could be used to push Nazis into leading positions in the regional organizations.¹⁰

The ApA organized countless meetings of peasants and published a National Socialist agrarian news magazine that addressed specifically peasant issues.¹¹ After succeeding in getting NSDAP members elected to the Chamber of Agriculture, Darré was able to increase pressure on the Landbund to recognize the party as the leading political advocate of agriculture in Germany. The ApA became perhaps the most successful of all the party’s professional organizations,¹² instrumental in the conquest of rural communities for National Socialism, which led directly to the seizure of power in 1933.

Germany was still in an extremely precarious position internationally.  Encircled by former enemies from the First World War, still recovering from the loss of her eastern territories and colonies, the food situation in Germany was a matter of utmost strategic urgency. The British naval blockade was perhaps the most devastating weapon used against Germany and Austria from 1914–18. From the winter of 1916 onwards, the German people began to suffer from malnutrition and, in some cases, starvation. Pressure to break the blockade led to the German adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought America into the war.¹³ Ultimately, this pressure fomented the seeds of mutiny and revolution, toppling the ancient Hohenzollern dynasty and bringing the German home front to its knees.

When DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg was forced to resign as Minister of Agriculture in June of 1933, Richard Walther Darré was appointed by Hitler to this vital position. The world was in the grip of the Great Depression, and German agriculture was on the brink of ruin. Around twelve billion Reichsmarks of new debt had been contracted by German farmers between 1924 (when the currency was stabilized) and 1932. The total land area of farmsteads foreclosed on and sold at auction was equivalent to a major German state. Proceeds from farm produce were down by about forty percent from 1928–32, not enough to even cover production. Farmers were weighed down by high taxes and intolerable debt payments.¹⁴

The revolutionary, far-reaching aims of National Socialist agricultural policy were summarized by Darré in an interview with the American journalist Lothrop Stoddard in 1939. According to Darré:

When we came to power in 1933, one of our chief endeavors was to save German agriculture from impending ruin. However, our agricultural program went far beyond mere economic considerations. It was based on the idea that no nation can truly prosper without a sound rural population. It is not enough that the farmers shall be tolerably well-off; they should also be aware of their place in the national life and be able to fulfill it. Here are the three big factors in the problem: First, to assure an ample food supply; second, to safeguard the future by a healthy population increase; third, to develop a distinctive national culture deeply rooted in the soil. This ideal logically implies an aim which goes far beyond what is usually known as an agrarian policy.¹⁵

These goals were implemented by three monumental pieces of National Socialist legislation under Darré:  the creation of the National Food Estate, the Market Control Statute, and the Heredity Farmlands Law. Stoddard himself, who described Darré as a big, energetic, good-looking man… one of the most interesting personalities among the Nazi leaders, described the awesome scope of these measures:

The Food Estate is a gigantic quasi-public corporation embracing in its membership not only all persons immediately on the land but also everyone connected with the production and distribution of foodstuffs. Large landowners, small peasants, agricultural laborers, millers, bakers, canners, middlemen, right down to local butchers and grocers—they are one and all included in this huge vertical trust. The aim is to bring all these group interests, previously working largely at cross-purposes, into a harmonious, co-ordinated whole, concerned especially with problems of production and distribution. The Market Control Statute links all this with the consumer. The aim here is a thoroughgoing, balanced economic structure based on the principle known as the just price. Everybody is supposed to make a profit, but none are to be out of line with the others. Furthermore, the ultimate consumer is to be protected from profiteering….

The Hereditary Farmlands Law revives the old Teutonic concept that the landowner is intimately linked to the land. It is officially stated that The idea engendered by Roman law that land was so much merchandise to be bought and sold at will is profoundly repugnant to German feelings. To us, soil is something sacred; the peasant and his land belong inseparably together. Emphasis is thus laid on the Bauer, imperfectly translated by our word peasant. The German Bauer is an independent landowner, self-respecting and proud of the name. We can best visualize him like the old English yeoman.¹⁶

Darré already was appointed head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in 1932, where he developed marriage guidelines for SS members on similar lines found in Neuadel.¹⁷ Now as Reich Minister of Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader, Darré was in a position to implement his most radical ideas. Readers of this book will immediately recognize the outlines of the Hereditary Farmlands Law in Darré’s theoretical plans for the development of the Hegehöfe.¹⁸

Darré’s National Socialist policies towards the peasants may be compared to the situation of farmers under American capitalism or Soviet communism during roughly the same period. In the United States, unregulated exploitation of the land led to the Dust Bowl, which displaced millions of American farmers and, along with the mass foreclosures of the Depression, led to historic homelessness and poverty. During the Russian Civil War, the depredations of the Bolsheviks against the peasantry led to the uprising known as the Tambov Rebellion, after which tens of thousands of Russian peasants were starved, tortured and murdered by the dreaded Cheka.¹⁹

The success of Darré’s programs is conceded even by mainstream historians virulently hostile to National Socialism such as Adam Tooze. In an exhaustive study of the economic history of the Third Reich, he is forced to admit:

What the RNS [National Food Estate] was able to achieve was not only a substantial increase in domestic food production, but also a substantial improvement in the resilience of German agriculture in the face of shocks…. When we bear in mind the disastrous situation of world agriculture in the 1930s it is clear that German farmers, in fact, enjoyed a historically unprecedented level of protection and it is hardly surprising that this came at a price. In return for the exclusion of foreign competition from home markets, peasant smallholders had to accept comprehensive regulation and control. Farming in Germany, as in Europe generally, from the 1930s onwards resembled less and less a market-driven industry and more and more a strange hybrid of private ownership and state planning. The true story is told by the level of prices paid to German farmers compared to those that German farmers would have received if they had been exposed to the full force of foreign competition. On this basis the record is completely unambiguous. Though it is true that grain producers clearly enjoyed a larger margin of protection than dairy farmers, for all major types of farm produce the prices paid to German farmers under National Socialism were at least twice those prevailing on world markets….

The promise Hitler made on the night of 30 January 1933 was to restore the economic fortunes of the German peasantry within four years and the RNS certainly made good on that pledge. According to figures calculated by Germany’s most authoritative economic research agency, total farm income, of which animal products accounted for more than 60%, rose by almost 14% in 1933-4 and by another 11.5% in 1934-5. At the same time the burden of taxes and interest payments fell significantly. When we allow for the general deflation in prices, increases in money incomes on this scale more than made up for the Depression.²⁰

As Reich Peasant Leader, Darré presided over the Third Reich’s massive annual harvest celebration at Goslar, called the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival.²¹ In the gently rolling hills around this ancient medieval town, which was once the capitol of the Holy Roman Empire,²² the National Socialists paid tribute to the accomplishments of the peasantry in speeches and events that dwarfed even the huge Nuremberg rallies held for the annual Party Congress. The festival was attended by about 1.2 million people in 1937, and it was here that Hitler announced the passage of the Hereditary Farm Law in 1933.²³

Over 700,000 farms were established along the Hegehof model under this law, a great achievement.²⁴ Lothrop Stoddard visited a number of the farms established by this law, and he left behind an extremely interesting (and very positive) anecdotal description of them from an American perspective.²⁵ The long-term success of the Heredity Farm Law is difficult to assess, because the war later put enormous stresses on agricultural labor and production, and because the law itself was repealed by the Allied occupation.²⁶ Because the law concerned the long-term racial and demographic regeneration of the German people, one cannot appreciate its full effects without the benefit of observation over decades or even centuries. However, one aspect of the law that might interest modern readers is highlighted by Hitler biographer Brendan Simms:

Unlike the previous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Prussian agrarian legislation, which had been designed to protect Germans against Slavic subversion, mainly by Poles, the criteria of the Reichserbhofgesetz were racial, rather than national. Those specifically excluded from the capacity to become farmers were Jews and Africans. By contrast, the law placed peoples of tribally related blood on the same level as non-Jewish Germans. The Ministry of the Interior defined these as peoples who had lived in coherent national settlements in Europe some time back in historical time. Gypsies were explicitly excluded, even if they were sedentary, but the list of acceptable farmers included not only all supposed Aryans, but also many other races such as the Hungarians, Estonians, Finns, Slavs, Danes and Lithuanians. If they had German citizenship, they could become or remain farmers. In other words, the potential racial pool comprised virtually the entire European continent.²⁷

This interpretation of the law, which could be described as White Nationalist, was also commented on by Darré’s biographer Anna Bramwell:

Since his 1933 legislation attempted to put his major ideas into practice, it is worth looking at Darré’s actual method of racial selection, once he was given the opportunity. It does seem to demonstrate that a coercive racial selection was not envisaged, and lends emphasis to the distinction, drawn earlier, between a defensive intra-racial eugenics, which aimed to prevent the disappearance of a group, and the expansionist super-stud mentality popularly associated with Nazis. Under the Hereditary Farm Law, only farmers of German and similar stock, who could prove descent back to 1800, could inherit the protected farm…this definition included Polish farmers…. Racial education was part of the curriculum of the peasant university at Burg Nauhaus and the SS Racial Office (part of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office). Examples of this work include a circular sent to the SS education department, suggesting that a textbook be produced showing photographs of good racial stock. Darré offered a textbook on horses as an example. SS leaders were shown films on Blood and Soil, harvesting, ploughing, to persuade them of the desirable nature of the life.

The key point, though, is the voluntary nature of these activities. Darré did not try to enforce compulsory breeding laws. He did not incite riots against Poles and Jews and demand the compulsory sterilization of the unfit…. He looked to racial education to create what he called a positive racial consciousness, rather in the way in which today, especially in the USA but to some extent in England, television and other media make special efforts to present the black minority in a favorable light in drama series, children’s programmes, and so on. Darré wanted farmers and their families to be educated into racial consciousness—White is Beautiful—as part of a process of instilling a sense of identity. It was seen as a rescue operation for a vanishing breed.²⁸

During the Second World War, Darré’s political career went into decline. As a man best suited to the realization of visionary long-term goals in peace time, and due to the difficult demands of the wartime economy, he was eventually replaced as Minister of Agriculture by his technocratic deputy Herbert Backe in 1944. After the war, Darré was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and spent five and a half years in prison at Landsburg (in the same prison where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf), before his release due to declining health. Of his interrogation by Allied forces, Bramwell remarks:

What does emerge clearly from all his interrogations is the ignorance of the American interrogators of the structure and functioning of the Third Reich. The whole process seems to be motivated by a vengeful incompetence, in part fueled by the salacious hate-propaganda of the American Press. Even as late as 1946, the mass suicide of Russians who had fought for Germany and were to be repatriated back to Russia, was headlined by the USA Army paper Stars and Stripes as Red Traitors Dachau Suicide Described as Inhuman Orgy. Darré found his hereditary farms described as Teutonic Breeding Centers.²⁹

A typical example of this hate-propaganda may be seen in a supposed secret speech of Darré printed in Life magazine in December, 1940 under the heading: Secret Nazi Speech: Reich Minister Darré Discusses the World’s Future Under Nazi Rule. At the time of this writing, an excerpt from this article is the only quote by Darré included on his Wikipedia page:

[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 fulfill 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...³⁰

The original Life article, sandwiched between garish advertisements for Coca-Cola and other consumer products, is accompanied by an editor’s note in very tiny print:

How Life came into possession of this amazing speech delivered in early May 1940 by Richard-Walther Darré, Germany’s Minister of Agriculture, to a group of high Nazi officials, cannot be divulged. Nevertheless, after thorough investigation, Life has satisfactory reasons for believing this speech is authentic as briefed on these pages. An even better reason for printing this secret address exists in the fact that, even if it was not delivered exactly as recorded here, it might have been. Readers should therefore regard it not as a mere journalistic scoop but as something far more important—a fair sample of the kind of doctrine that is currently being voiced by highly placed members of the Nazi government.³¹

With the first-ever publication of Neuadel in English by Antelope Hill, American readers can now, for the first time in ninety-one years, decide for themselves whether the words above accurately reflect the views and sentiments of the real Richard Walther Darré!

One aspect of Darré’s life and legacy that has attracted significant controversy in recent decades is the assessment that he was one of a number of Green Nazis, or members of the Third Reich who represented early ecological interests and concerns. In this context he is labeled as a major influence on what is pejoratively labeled ecofascism.³² This view was first put forth by his biographer Anna Bramwell in her book Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ and expanded further in Ecology in the 20th Century. Leftist academics have since viciously attacked her views,³³ while others have validated her claims. According to Bramwell, writing in the 1980s:

Today it would be difficult to ignore fears about erosion, the destruction of animal species, anxieties about factory farming, the social effects of technology and the loss of farmland…. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she focused the world’s attention on the ecological destruction caused by pesticides and other chemicals in the lakes and earth of North America…. It is not widely known that similar ecological ideas were being put forward by Darré in National Socialist Germany, often using the same phrases and arguments as are used today. He began to campaign for these ideas, especially organic farming, from 1934 onwards, and during the Second World War stepped up the effort to introduce organic farming methods into Germany. After the war, as a broken, discredited politician, he continued to write about soil erosion, the dangers of artificial fertilizers and the need to maintain the biomass, until his death in 1953. Two decades later, these ideas about man’s relationship with nature and the organic cycle of animal-soil-food-man known as organic farming, had gained wider attention.³⁴

Bramwell also cites examples of Darré’s post-war activities as evidence of his early environmentalism:

Another move to form a German Soil Association was made in December 1952, when Darré met the Town Clerk (Oberstadtdirektor) in Goslar at the Hotel Niedersachsischer Hof, and made notes about a society to be called "Mensch und Heimat. Its function would be to further organic ideas, a healthy soil and care for the homeland" (Heimatpflege)…. During the years after his release, he wrote steadily, articles with titles like The Living Soil, Peasant and Technology, and Mother Earth. The articles on organic farming were usually inspired by English works, such as those by Sir Albert Howard, Sir George Stapledon, and Lady Eve Balfour, although he also referred to the USA’s Friends of the Soil, and American efforts to combat erosion. In 1953, he enthusiastically reviewed Lady Eve Balfour’s The Living Soil. As in the 1930s, he wrote about the American dust bowl, this time under the pseudonym of Carl Carlsson, and called for Germany to adopt soil protection measures of a similar kind to America’s 1947 anti-erosion law….³⁵

There is no doubt Darré was a nature-lover and a conservationist,³⁶ as were many of the leaders of the Third Reich,³⁷ but what is perhaps more troubling to the modern Left is the fact that the racial views of National Socialism exist very comfortably along the same moral-ideological continuum as concern for nature and the land. The word ecology itself, coined by nineteenth-century Romantic, nationalist, racialist, and zoologist Ernst Haeckel,³⁸ implies the relationship between species and their environment. So in that way, the concepts Volk und Vaterland, Volk und Erde, and Blut und Boden are inherently ecological, insofar as Volk and Blut are conceptualized in racial-national terms.

Care for the health of the land and wild spaces was not something separate from Darré’s racial views, but wholly integrated with them. What mainstream scholars and critics of ecofascism never seem to reconcile is the idea that there is a real ideological and moral continuity between care for the race and care for the land. Both positions challenge the view, common to both liberal capitalism and Marxism, that man is somehow separate and above nature, that the laws of nature do not apply to man, or that the environment can be compartmentalized as an issue unconnected with the long-term development of racially healthy peoples and their connection with the land. One could go so far as to say so-called ecofascism is not a synthesis of two separate strands of political thought, but rather that National Socialism—as an ideology rooted in the unity of People/Race/Blood and Land/Earth/Soil—is inherently ecological. The question modern environmentalists must wrestle with is: can any ideology grounded in an objectively false and unscientific egalitarianism, such as liberalism or Marxism, ever truly solve world ecological problems?³⁹

Richard Walther Darré received hundreds of letters of support after his release from prison, affectionately addressed to Herr Minister.⁴⁰ He continued to write articles attacking large corporations and opposing exploitative attitudes to the land⁴¹ until he was too ill to continue. He died in 1953 at the age of fifty-eight and was buried in Goslar, the site of his former greatest triumphs. His funeral was attended by hundreds of local residents, but his grave is covered by an unmarked stone, and all traces of his life and accomplishments have been carefully scrubbed from occupied Germany.⁴²

Darré’s face and voice are forever immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens, where he briefly appears as one of a number of NSDAP leaders to address the 1934 Nuremberg rally on his favorite subject: peasants and the land.

A New Nobility of Blood and Soil is an essential work of National Socialist thought. In keeping with Darré’s tendency to support visionary goals and ideals with grounded, pragmatic reasoning, the book not only outlines several detailed proposals for the coming Third Reich but also explains the principles behind them. A careful reading of the text reveals both the subtle and nuanced considerations by which Darré reached his conclusions, and the brilliant and sensitive mind behind them. At times—and especially compared with the obscene vulgarity of what passes for political thinking in the early twenty-first century—one feels one is not reading the thoughts of a man from the past, but of the meditations of some moral and intellectual superman of the future.

On October 16th, 2017, upon accepting the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the American Senator John McCain exasperatedly exclaimed, We live in a land of ideals, not of blood and soil! He decried any dogma consigned to the ash heap of history and reaffirmed the values of liberal-capitalist globalism.⁴³ The Senator—who has himself since passed onto the ash heap of history—was reacting to the fact that, two months earlier, young White men marching in Charlottesville, Virginia had chanted the old slogan of Richard Walther Darré.

That the public invocation of this phrase is still capable of shaking the elites of the present world order to their core is proof its powerful resonance will only grow louder in the future.

Warren Balogh

Hillsboro, West Virginia

September 19th, 2021

PREFACE

The present work is the logical continuation of the basic ideas of my book Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (The Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race), which discussed tangible proposals for a German Reich of the German people—a Third Reich—to which we all aspire to. It may seem astonishing that I begin these proposals not with the peasantry but with the nobility. I must counter that in the correctly understood Germanic sense of the word, there is probably a degree of difference between the nobility and the peasantry (in the sense that both were incorporated into the Germanic rural estates with different tasks), but there is not a fundamental difference. It therefore is the essential task of this book to explain such relations in more detail, and also to show that the caste-like stratification of nobility and peasantry—which has developed in German society since the Middle Ages—is both thoroughly un-Germanic and un-German, two terms which today basically mean the same thing.

In the following poem, Baron Börries von Münchhausen out of an unshakeable German feeling captures the essence of the nobility, at least as it should be, and presents it:

This is us!

Born to helmet and shield,

Chosen to protect the land,

To the king his officer,

Faithful to our old customs,

In the midst of our peasants,

This is us!

We sow our fields,

We cherish our forests,

For child and grandchild.