Ricardo Walther Oscar Darré ( Buenos Aires , 14 of July of 1895 - Munich , 5 of September of 1953 ), military and SS - Obergruppenführer , was one of the ideologues Nazis major of Blut und Boden ( ‘Blood and Soil’). He was minister of the Reich of Agriculture and Supplies between 1933 and 1942.
Biography
He was born in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires , Argentina , the son of a German father of French ancestry ( Huguenot ) and an Argentine mother of Swedish and German ancestry. His father was director of an export and import company. Although the union of their parents was not happy, they lived prosperously and educated the children themselves until they were forced to return to Germany, due to the worsening of the international relations in the years that preceded the First World War . Darré’s personal education was quite good; He learned four languages: English, Spanish, German and French.
His parents sent him to Germany at the age of nine, where he attended school in Heidelberg ; In 1911 he was sent as an exchange student to the King’s College School in Wimbledon . The rest of the family returned to Germany in 1912. Ricardo (as he was known in the family) spent two years in the Oberrealschule in Gummersbach , followed in early 1914 by the German colonial school in Witzenhausen , south of Gottingen , where he awakened his Interest in crops and farms.
After a year in Witzenhausen he voluntarily enlisted in the army. He was wounded a good number of times while serving in World War I, but he fared better than most of his contemporaries.
When the war ended it wanted to return to Argentina to devote to agriculture, but the family’s financial position weakened during the inflationary years and this became impossible. He returned to Witzenhausen to continue his studies. He then obtained an honorary job as an assistant on a Pomeranian farm : observing the treatment given to the returning German soldiers impressed him.
In 1922 he moved to the University of Halle to continue his studies: there he devoted himself to studies of animal husbandry. He did not finish his doctorate in philosophy until 1929, at the age of 34 years. During this time he was working in eastern Prussia and Finland .
As a youth in Germany, Darré initially entered Artamans , a youth group völkisch (German ethnic), which advocated a return to earth. In this context Darré began to develop the idea that the Nordic race should be tied to the ground: this idea came to be known as Blut und Boden (‘Blood and soil’). His first political article in 1926 was on the subject of internal colonization, arguing against the German intention to recover colonies lost during the war of 1914. Most of his work written at this time, however, was related to the technical aspects Of livestock rearing.
His first book, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse ( The farmer as a source of life of the Nordic race ) was written in 1928. He advocated more natural methods for land management, placing great emphasis on the conservation of forests, And demanded more open space in the expansion of animal farms. Among those who were impressed by these concepts was Heinrich Himmler , another of the members of Artamans .
Its entrance in the Nazi party
Darré was an active Nazi from the summer of 1930. He created a political agrarian program to recruit farmers for the NSDAP . Darré relied on three main keys to this program:
- To exploit the discomfort in the countryside as a weapon against the government of the city.
- Win the peasants as Nazi supporters.
- To win electoral districts of people who could be used as settlers to displace the Slavs in future conquests in the East.
After the Nazis came to power from June 1933 to May 1942 , Darré became the Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture, director of the Office of Race and Resettlement ( Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or RuSHA ), and Reichsbauernführer (leader of the peasants). He spoke to the large landowners to give up some of their properties to create new farms, and promoted the Erbhofgesetz , which reformed the inheritance laws to prevent the division of farms into smaller units.
In his passage through the Office of Race and Resettlement (linked to the SS ), he developed a plan for the Rasse und Raum (‘Race and Space’, or ‘Territory’) that provided the ideological background for the Nazi expansionist policy. Darré strongly influenced Himmler in his goal to create a German racial aristocracy based on selective breeding.
Darré resigned in 1942, apparently for health reasons, but in fact it was because he discussed an order of Hitler to reduce the rations in the fields of work. [Citation needed ]
Darré was arrested in 1945 and tried in Nuremberg in the trial of ministries between 1947 and 1949. He was acquitted of many of the most serious charges, specifically those relating to genocide , however, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Released in 1950, he died in Munich on 5 September 1953, a victim of liver cancer , induced by his alcoholism .
Bibliography
- Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darre and Hitler’s “Green Party” by Anna Bramwell (Kensal Press, 1985, ISBN 0-946041-33-4 )
- Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees, ( 1991 , ISBN 0-13-089301-3 )
- The Plow and the Swastika: The NSDAP and Agriculture in Germany, 1928-45 by JE Farquharson ( London , 1976 , reprinted by Landpost Pr, 1992 , ISBN 1-880881-03-9 )