Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

336 DER FUEHRERThe National Socialists had a far better understanding of the agrarianstruggle. Convinced that by propaganda he could make his citysupporters swallow anything, Hitler tried to set himself at the head ofthe peasant uprising against the cities. In a great agrarian programpromulgated in March, 1930, he proclaimed that the 'country peoplewere the chief bearers of hereditary racial health, the people's fountainof youth, and the backbone of our military power.' His conclusion wasthat 'the preservation of an efficient peasant class in numericalproportion to the total population constitutes a pillar of NationalSocialist policy.'He discovered this pillar when the debt-ridden, mortgaged, taxcrushed,bomb-throwing peasants began to fill his meetings — notbefore. He appointed to his staff a new man, an agricultural expert, R.Walter Darre, who, though new in the movement, had achieved apowerful influence over Hitler. Another of the many 'Germans abroad,'Darre was born in 1895 at Belgrano in the Argentine. He was anagrarian specialist with academic training. The agriculture ministries ofthe Reich and of Prussia had sent him to observe foreign farmingmethods in Latvia and Estonia, where for centuries, under thegovernment of the Russian tsars, a German upper class had dominatedthe peasantry. It may be presumed that Darre, although a learnedspecialist, did not concern himself only with the Latvian egg production.At all events, he sent reports on the conditions among the Latvian andEstonian Germans to the Deutsche Akademie in Munich; this was aninstitute founded by Karl Haushofer for research on the culture of theGermans abroad; for a time Rudolf Hess had worked at the institute asHaushofer's assistant. For a German raised abroad and hence imbuedwith the arrogant conception of the Herrenvolk, these Baltic countrieswere a good school; here the past glory and the present misery of theHerrenvolk could be studied day in and day out in the newspapers. Thelearned agronomist built a theory on the basis of his observations, andwhen in 1929 he came into conflict with his superiors and was forced toleave the service, he returned to the vicinity of Wiesbaden on the Rhineand there wrote a book: The Peasantry as the Life Source of the NordicRace. Rudolf Hess brought him to the National Socialist Party; Darremade so strong an impression