A New Nobility of Blood and Soil

Fearsome and provocative, the slogan "Blood and Soil" speaks to the interplay between the land and the people on it-the power of a land to shape a people and the power of a people to shape a land. Richard Walther Darre, an Obergruppenfuhrer in the SS, was the leading "Blood and Soil" ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.This worldview held that Germany's natural elite, its nobility of blood and soil, was the nation's last hope against both the rapacious elite of capitalist wealth and the degenerate elite of ancient privilege. The hardworking and industrious peasant, who has no other country to call home, no riches with which to escape his duties, no international connect