German Leadership

Richard Walther Darré

"The unity of Blood and Soil must be restored". Richard Walther Darré as SS-Gruppenfuhrer (later Obergruppenfuhrer). An Argentinian-born German, Darré developed an early interest in agriculture, and completed his PhD at the University of Halle in what we would now call Agricultural Science. His early writings were mainly concerned with his speciality - farm animal breeding - but he also ventured into the human end of the business, stressing the German agricultural community as the heart and core of the German "Volk". He also advocated the elimination of weak and polluted elements of the population, as he saw it. Not surprisingly, Darré's views caught the attention of his fellow-agriculturalist, Heinrich Himmler. He was inducted into the NSDAP and the SS in 1930, in the course of Himmler's programme of expansion that also brought such luminaries as Reinhard Heidrich and Karl Wolff into, so to speak, the fold. In 1932, he became head of the newly-minted SS Race and Resettlement Office (RuSHA) and, following Hitler's accession to power, Agriculture Minister and "Leader of Reich Farmers". Eventually, Darré found himself before an Allied court in the "Ministries Trial", in which he was found guilty on a number of counts. The result was a 7 year prison sentence, although he was released much sooner. One wonders whether this was a lenient judgement in the light of his overall contribution to Nazi "thought". Apart from his contribution to agriculture and rural development (not, it must be admitted, always well-directed), Darré had a major input into putting system (if not sense) on Nazi racial policy and practice, not excluding the extermination of Jews, undesirables and the racially impure, the proposed enslavement of the Slavs and the Himmlerite conception of a slave-based SS realm in the East, ideas from which millions of murders flowed. Perhaps it was Darré's relative good fortune that he fell from power well before the end. His position was eroding from the late-1930s, owing to a combination of poor harvests on the agricultural front, the usual Nazi leadership in-fighting (for which Darré does not seem to have been very well equipped), and his own increasingly erratic and inappropriate behaviour. Following in his late father's footsteps, Darré had developed a substantial alcohol problem, and this seems to have accentuated his tendency to retreat into theory and mysticism when practical approaches to problems were ever more urgently required. He was removed from his offices in 1942, when his main political patron, Himmler, finally lost patience with speeches and statements that were increasingly divorced from current practical requirements, and embarrassing in revealing, perhaps all too clearly, an outline of the Nazi (or SS) vision of Europe's future. Richard Walther Darré died of liver cancer in 1953. Best regards, JR.