Blood and Soil: A Fundamental Idea of National Socialism

By Richard Walther Darré

Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, Reich Farmers’ Leader, Reichsleiter
of the National Socialist Party

 

From the doctrine of the law of the state, as it has been taught hitherto, the conventional view is well known: To a state belong:

1. a Volk,

2. a national territory on which the people live,

3. a state power.

 

It has long been recognized that these three basic components of the state: „Volk“, „It is precisely this inner connection of a people with its territory and with its state order that makes a state unique and gives it its living character, i.e., makes a problem of organization a living organism. It is precisely this inner connection of a people with its territory and with its state order that first constitutes the peculiarity of a state and first gives it its living character, i.e. makes a vital organism out of a problem of organization. Thus, it is no accident what kind of people lives on its soil and what kind of state authority is established by this people on its territory. From this alone it is evident that the State - at least according to our conception - is not characterized by the idea of an unlimited perfection of power over its people and in its territory, but that the power of the State is exhausted from the special kind of interaction in which the life-legal forces of the people, the formation of its soil, the willpower of its leaders, and the nature of the State’s structure interpenetrate each other and are united into a unity. It should not be overlooked that the State is also conditioned by the manifold forces acting outside its borders, and that even in peace it must assert itself against these external influences. In particular, we wish to emphasize that the character of our State is not determined by foreign territories, as is characteristic of the great colonial empires, nor by a foreign population which is only subject to the power of the State, but that our State has its centre of gravity in its own life and in its own people, and that it must develop its concept of the State on this basis. This soil and this people provide our State with its tasks; at the same time, they offer the natural forces which make possible and limit the development of State power and determine its nature.

 

The special relationship of the people to the State has always been the subject of scientific and constitutional consideration, and today it has gained increased importance in the cooperation between the Party and the authorities, and in the division of public administration into State administration and the tasks to be left to self-administration. As an example of such self-administration, I will cite here only the corporatist structure of the National Socialist food industry. Here the markets for agricultural products were organized for the sake of the public necessity of a secure state food basis with the help of a self-governing association under public law. In such self-administration the interplay of state objectives, necessary for the sake of the whole, and state outlook on the one hand, and an orderly self-administration of the economic forces on the other, is shown - a practical example of the interlocking of the forces of the people and the state. The inner connection between the formation of the state and the people in the sense of blood-related connections between the people has also been recognized and appreciated for a long time - especially thanks to Romanticism and philosophical German idealism. National Socialism was able to build on these intellectual traditions with its concept of people and state. In our time, the connection between state and territory has also been scientifically clarified; I recall only the work in the field of geopolitics, which examined the influences of space on historical processes and in many cases uncovered connections that are worthy of serving in the future as prerequisites for a statesman’s store of knowledge. On the other hand, it seems to me that up to now science has not paid sufficient attention to the relationship of the people to the soil, at least not in the sense of the life-legal effects of the land on the people and the life-legal community of destiny existing between the two.

 

The connection between the people and the soil on which they live is not exhausted by the fact that the condition of the soil, the yield of the soil, and the mineral resources have a natural influence on the economy and the material conditions of the culture of this people. Early historical research and modern racial research have already pointed out the importance of the type of soil and the formation of the terrain for the settlement history of the people. But if we go beyond the general influence of the soil on the conditions of life for a certain race and a certain national life, and if we ask about the particular way in which a people itself forms its relationship to the soil, in what form it owns and administers the native land, this question can only be answered by the law of the soil. Land law determines how the land is assigned to the life-legal forces of the people. Thus, in practice, land law at the same time decides the internal structure of the state. This basic truth can also be extended to say that land law inevitably determines the future of a state. I even maintain that there is no Germanic or Indo-European state which did not undergo a transformation of its land law before it became extinct in history. The decline of these states is always preceded by a revolution of their land law, often unconscious to themselves and very seldom noticed by our historians, which in the first place creates the preconditions for bringing the vitality of their statesmanlike blood to a standstill.

 

In this respect the conditions in Sparta are most clearly shown, where the fate of the hereditary courts of the Spartiates, created by Lycurgas, and the fate of the Spartan state quite clearly go hand in hand. We have such excellent clarity about these connections in Sparta because Busolt, who unfortunately died too early, investigated them in detail and brought them into the light of judgment. We do not yet possess very many similar investigations of other states of Indo-Germanic and Germanic type. But these few investigations already clearly show that the assertion I have just made is justified, as soon as one approaches the problem of the rise and fall of states of Indo-Germanic and Germanic nature from the point of view of the relation of their land law to these events. I consider these connections to be so decisive and significant that, in my opinion, they would justify the establishment of a chair at every German university.

 

The political effect of the current law on land is conditioned in particular by the fact that land and the work on it have always had a persistent, constant character. The arable land does not yield a quick profit - as, for example, a block of shares does in times of rising economic activity or as other movable assets do - but the arable land requires constant care, which is determined by the nature of the soil. This peculiarity of land cultivation has always resisted a rapidly changing right of ownership and has favoured a consolidation of land rights, such as is known in legal history under the word of the transformation of personal property rights into urgent and hereditary rights to the land. Especially the actual cultivation of the soil forces the peasant family into the service of the field and the farm, and thereby connects the generation growing up on it so firmly with the soil that the subordination of the family to the laws of the field is felt to be the natural thing and a self-evident commandment. From this, in turn, springs the custom or law that only one of the blood heirs should later carry on the business, lest the law of the farm and field should suffer by division of the inheritance. Let us compare this bound property, which requires of the owner a certain way of life and daily work, with a banked estate. This contrast may make it clear that such a movable capital cannot point the way to the work of the next generation and cannot form an obligatory tradition as, for instance, the ownership of a farm can. That is why the arable land is the place of firm tradition and constant custom. This is what gives land law its political significance. For the viability of every state leadership is conditioned by certain basic laws of constancy, and these character traits necessary for this develop more easily or more exclusively in the rural population than in the structuring mass of a non-rural population driven by aspects of economic conjuncture.

 

According to this it is to be understood that, as far as the historical tradition reaches, the right to the soil has formed a core question for the building up and downfall of states, and that especially in our time, in the revolutionary transformation of the neighbouring regions to the east, the agrarian reforms there are at the centre of events. I may point out that the Russian state to this day sees in its agrarian constitution the core of its internal political power. According to this alone, it would be clear that a lasting agrarian constitution pointing to the future was a fundamental necessity for the construction of the Third Reich. Instead of this, under the influence of the BGB. all rural steadiness threatened to flow away completely and thus to achieve the opposite of what the value of a rural population is. The possibilities of indebtedness, and with it the burden of interest, as well as the dependence on an immense, unregulated market, which was dominated by foreign influences, brought the peasant holdings more and more under the dominion of a foreign creditor capital. And while the BGB protected this creditor capital and its creditors to the greatest possible extent, it had not even included the word „peasant,“ this primal concept of all steadfastness, in its vocabulary, let alone bothered about a peasant right. From this arose the task of the National Socialist legislation to re-establish a firm land law and to secure the economic existence of the peasant farms through orderly sales on the markets. But if we want to fully grasp this significance of land law in the German state of today, we must go deeper and ask, beyond the value of an enduring firm agrarian constitution, what the peasantry means to our people. And here the peculiarity of National Socialist agrarian policy becomes apparent in comparison with the agrarian policy of other states. For us, too, it is indispensable to link the holders of the right to the soil firmly to the structure of the State, i.e., to do justice to the political significance of land ownership; and we have therefore united all peasants and farmers in a public-law organization, the Reichsnahrstand, which is closely linked to the State and the Party in terms of personnel and administration. It is also our duty to create the economic prerequisites not only to maintain domestic agriculture, but also to enable it to achieve the best possible increase in output. Only a few years ago, the future of German agriculture was envisaged as being based on the American model of farming, i.e. an agricultural economy geared to maximum profits, dependent on the economic cycle and calculated on the basis of stock market capitalist profitability. As we know, farming has collapsed in the United States today. If our peasantry had really adapted to this farm economy, most farms would be at a standstill today, the country would be desolate, and we would probably not be able to fight a battle of production. Instead of this, the German rural economy is today in the midst of the battle of production, in order to secure freedom of nutrition, i.e., the minimum requirements of the people from their own soil, thus relieving our foreign trade balance and freeing up means of payment for the import of industrial raw materials.

 

The National Socialist agricultural policy shares this objective with the nationalist agricultural policy of other countries, for example, of the fascist Italy. The peculiarity of our method, however, lies in the fact that we combine the economic policy goals with the population and cultural policy necessities and, in short, bring politics and economics into harmony in the sense of the one summarizing and dominating idea of National Socialism. National Socialist agricultural policy is concerned not only with the food economy, but at the same time with the preservation of the peasantry as the blood source of the people. And this last circumstance is very decisive and fundamental. For it is the first time that the conclusion has been drawn from the fact that in a state of a Germanic nature blood is preserved and multiplied in generations only in the countryside, but that the turning away from rural life causes a strong attrition of the sexes. If we may use the comparative image, we may say that the blood of a people bubbles up, as it were, like a spring on its farms, only to dry up sooner or later in the city. For peoples whose basic character is nomadic, for example for the Jewish people, this law does not apply; on the other hand, it applies absolutely to Germanic blood and can be called the iron law of fate of Germanic humanity. National Socialist agricultural policy has conceived its task in the light of these fundamental ideas: by means of the same measures it attempts at the same time to secure the nourishment of the whole people and to guarantee the preservation of farms and farming families in their capacity as the blood source of the people. We know that the number of births in the countryside is greater in proportion to the number of the population than in the cities. In 1927 the average birth rate in the Reich was 10% lower than the birth rate needed to maintain the population: in the country, on the other hand, there was a birth surplus of 13%! In 1933 the birth rate, calculated per 1000 of the resident population, was 18 live births per 1000 in the municipalities with less than 2000 inhabitants, i.e., in the rural municipalities, in the middle group of municipalities from 2000 to 400,000 inhabitants only 14.5 per 1000, and in the large cities only 11.2 live births per 1000 inhabitants. But it is not only a question of the numerical existence of our people, but also of the preservation of the hereditary factors to which we owe all the efficiency and all the achievements of our people. Here the one-sided movement of the aspiring forces from the countryside to the cities in connection with the development of metropolitan civilization means a danger.

 

The Swedish population politician Professor Lundborg, Upsala, once described the cities as a „traps“, which he’d use to describe the places from which the bearers of good hereditary traits are lured and where their hereditary traits are wiped out in a few generations. It is necessary to realize clearly the whole dreadful implications of this realization. Everything that has ever been accomplished in the German people has been accomplished out of its hereditary stock, which, in accordance with the circumstances, knew how to master the tasks that presented themselves. The liberal-democratic delusion that talent can be replaced by education is today recognized in all its hollowness. But talent depends on heredity, as we know. But if this is so, then our people has only one absolute asset, namely the hereditary values of German blood, which it possesses and which will continue to give it, centuries from now, the leaders and inventors it needs to prove itself equal to the tasks of those centuries and thus to be able to assert itself as a people among other peoples. No material economic prosperity, no treasures of the world will secure the future of the German people as much as the germs of valuable hereditary material which it possesses today.

 

Today we make balance sheets and statistics about all areas of our national existence, but unfortunately none about the biological foundations of our national life. And we are still further away from being able, on the basis of an impeccable biological balance sheet of our national body, to also to draw up a biological budget for once. Like a parvenu who has become rich overnight, we do not yet have any relationship to what has made us rich and, like him, waste his money on our precious blood. With cold hearts we watch our most precious blood lying idle or wasting away, and in this respect we act like a fool who throws precious stones with full hands into the sea where it is deepest and no soul will ever see them again. In this connection I am reminded of a truly revolutionary word by Gustav Frenssen, who once related in „Seagulls and Mice“ (page 247): A clever man told me that, travelling in Thuringia, he had seen in the train a young man who had been similar to Goethe in his whole appearance, and thought that there was probably more than one of Goethe’s blood living in Thuringia and around there. I think that this is indeed the case and said: „It is a pity that there are not more. The time will come when, in the name of religion and morality, they will emasculate those of bad heritage and demand many children from a man like Goethe.“So much for Frenssen! And if we are not yet able to accept this last mental demand of a thinking poet because of its novelty, we must be fools if we do not want to do something against the fact that our rural source of blood is drying up as a result of the law hitherto in force and is wasting itself uselessly in the non-rural sector of our national existence. And all this after all history proves to us that our culture is conditioned by Germanic blood and that this, in turn, depends for its viability on the land law under which it must live.

 

The basis for the rural exodus of the enterprising and capable in the course of the last century was the spirit of liberal capitalism and its liberal land law. Liberal capitalism impelled man to follow only the pursuit of profit; as a result of the economic opening up of the world that began through it and with it, it brought high prospects of profit in urban industrial occupations. The peasant, however, was plunged into uncertainty as to whether he would find any market at all for the yield of his land and his labour, and what fluctuating price he could expect. The land law of liberalism valued the possession of farm and field no differently from the possession of movable property embodied in papers, and allowed the same legal transactions and the same right of inheritance for both. The BGB. stabilized liberalism legally and thus broke the baton over every German peasantry that stood on the soil, but with it also broke the baton over every affirmation of the laws of blood in the German people. This dangerous gap in our legislation, which was in the offing in the 19th century, was correctly recognized from the outset by Ernst Moritz Arndt, the farmer’s son and scholar. I quote from his writing „On the Care and Preservation of Forests and Peasants in the Sense of a Higher, i.e. Human, Legislation“, published in 1820: „Persons must be free, but when sticks and stones and forests and mountains pass from one hand to another like feathers in the wind, when even the most solid things become mobile and fleeting, then nothing remains solid in people, even in that which should make the laws unshakeable in the mind. But the two classes of men who preserve this core strength of a people most simple mindedly and intimately are the peasants in the country and the craftsmen in the cities. But these lose all their solidity and all their moral conduct when, in the country, the farms and estates of the peasants are made easily alienable and when, by dissolving the guilds and introducing the praised general freedom of trade, the last old strictness and discipline of the trades is broken through. It cannot be said enough to an age staggering along in the deluded fraud of liberty, that all is not liberty which has the appearance and name of it.“ And elsewhere: “This few have considered, that if everything is left free, nothing remains free, but a state of dissolution and debauchery must necessarily arise, which kills freedom in its germs. This is the secret of true liberty, that by many material bonds, by institutions which relate first to things apart from him, and only in the third and fourth instance to him, man is kept and urged to discipline and order, and to that sacred sense of the steady and abiding, without which no good citizens can be.“

 

So much for Ernst Moritz Arndt. For the National Socialist agrarian policy, the tasks arose from this insight: On the one hand, the liberal- capitalist attitude in the peasantry had to be eliminated, and the conditions must be created so that the farmer and his children, instead of being guided by a capitalist striving for economic growth, once again become proud of their own kind and remain faithful to the law of life of the peasantry. Only by cultivating the peasant spirit can we hope to keep precisely the valuable peasant children as peasants in the countryside, and that on the old and on the new settlement farms. In this way we are already directly preventing the extinction of the best hereditary stock. The prerequisite for this change of attitude among the rural population was, however, the detachment of agriculture from the capitalist cyclical economy and the establishment of a steady economic form corresponding to the natural conditions of arable farming. On the other hand, it was necessary to create the land law corresponding to the peasant law of life. For a peasant attitude cannot be maintained in the long run if the law denies it recognition, i.e., in our case, if the development and continuity of a peasant attitude is counteracted in the law of succession by the legal equalization of arable land and pecuniary property. The National Socialist agrarian legislation serves both tasks, a down-to-earth economy and a land law affirming the peasantry. The market system creates fixed prices and secure sales for all agricultural products. It thus re-establishes a down-to-earth economic form for the farms, makes the farmer independent of the influences of the stock exchange and fluctuating economic cycles, and frees him to serve the people’s nutrition. It is not the striving for temporary maximum profits through a one-sided increase in this or that branch of production, but the striving for a general increase in yield through the most versatile possible cultivation of all the forces of the peasant enterprise that becomes the driving demand for the peasant. This also corresponds to the life-law of the farm and the best traditions of German peasantry. The rural form of economy is legally secured by the corresponding land law, which is also linked to the rural tradition of Germany. It corresponds to the peasant thinking of the Germanic people that the farm and the field are not a capital arbitrarily available for the purposes of one generation, but an inheritance handed down from ancestors and to be passed on to the descendants. It is an ancient German legal tradition that land and soil are not to be counted among the landed property.

 

The living generation has to administer and maintain the inheritance, and for its needs it is entitled to the income it earns from it. The peasant custom brought this view to bear even at the time when the law had alienated itself from peasant thought and regarded the property of a peasant in inheritance as divisible as a sum of money. Here the custom of transfer contracts practically preserved in large areas an undivided inheritance of the farm.

 

But the conflict between the legal possibility of division and the peasant custom of undivided inheritance endangered peasant customs and attitudes. This can be seen in particular in the numerous state laws on inheritance of the 19th century. Although they were aimed at transferring the farm to an heir, the calculation of most of these laws on inheritance, the settlement shows that they basically count the farm as part of the mass to be divided and calculate the rights of the individual co-heirs from this mass according to head shares; the farm is here already regarded as capital, the value of which - even if after deduction of a so- called „ advance“ for the an heir - is to be distributed. If the peasant tradition were to be restored, that the farm serves the clan, the coming generations no less than the present and the past, then the farm had clearly to be taken out of this capitalistic calculation of inheritances or settlements. This cleared the way in the law of hereditary farms, in accordance with ancient custom and law, to use the proceeds of the farm for the needs of the living generation, and to enshrine this purpose in the law itself. Now the descendants of the farmer, who are soft heirs, have again been given the right to equipment and vocational training in accordance with the proceeds, and for emergencies the right of home refuge on the farm. Thus the rights of the clan at the farm are preserved. Thus a new, but very old German legal concept of property has come into effect in the farm and the connection between old custom and valid law has been restored. The influence of custom and of the peasant’s own outlook on the shaping of law in individual cases is secured by the fact that the terms of the law of inheritance correspond to peasant and National Socialist thinking itself: Ackernahrung, Bauernfahigkeit, peasant honour are the prerequisites for the Erbhof. The interpretation and application of these terms is placed in the hands of courts in which peasants participate alongside judges. Thus, as far as this is legally possible, a guarantee is given for the harmony of law and custom, and a legal basis is created for the peasant way of thinking. One is generally less aware of the fact that an old peasant demand from the time of the peasant wars has finally been heeded. As a people becomes conscious of its own values in its law, so does the individual estate become conscious of itself in its law. This is why the right of inheritance is the basis for a peasant’s own self-awareness and thus for the strengthening and purification of the peasant’s conception of marriage. I have emphasized the connection which links all the measures of National Socialist agricultural policy. We have seen the questions of the food economy in their connection with the questions of the peasantry, and we have regarded the peasantry at the same time as the nutrient state and the blood source of the people. The unified approach, which brings together the economic, legal and political tasks of the population and integrates them into the overall task, is rooted in the National Socialist view of the vital unity of the farmer and the farm, the people and the soil.

 

This brings me back to my starting point. The connection of our people with its soil can neither be grasped only economically, nor is it a mere question of the distribution of power in the state. The connection of our people with its soil is rooted in the peasant character of our people and in the indissoluble unity of life of the peasantry in the Germanic-Germanic sense with its arable soil. The field can bring a steady yield and enables the generation that tills it to last forever, as far as we can see. The sex that cultivates the field can attain such duration if it maintains the field and itself on it in a form of law and economy corresponding to arable farming. The agrarian legislation has nothing else to do than to give validity to this vital law of the peasantry of our people under the present conditions of our national economy and to secure it in the form necessary today. The National Socialist land law and the land- based economic system with its market order are based on this. It is on this that the population and food security of the State is based. In this sense, the law of unity of blood and soil is a fundamental idea of the National Socialist concept of the state. And this concept of the state of blood and soil differs fundamentally from all merely nationalistic concepts of the state in that it makes blood, i.e. race, the axis of its world view and of all political considerations, whereas the purely nationalistic concept of the state is also possible without the concept of blood; in this connection I recall the concept of the state of the Soviets, which is hostile to the peasantry and negates race, but is by all means nationalistic, and the fascist concept of the state, which affirms the rural population but negates the question of blood. It would be wrong to extract individual elements from the uniform and unique whole of the agrarian constitution and to transfer them to completely different subject areas without the same natural and moral conditions being present there. It must therefore be rejected when, in the controversy of opinions about the structure of the industrial economy, the catchword „hereditary courts of the economy“ is coined. For the peasant hereditary farm was not created in order to stabilize, in the liberal-economic sense, an economic form which, for nationalistic reasons, was somehow in need of protection, but which was worthy of preservation, namely the peasant. Rather, the Erbhof was created solely to preserve our blood for centuries to come.

 

It is the preservation of the blood, of the race, that is important, not the economic form. And this blood, according to all the experiences of our history, can be preserved through generations only on peasant soil, not on urban soil. In addition, however, the farmer must also enjoy economic protection because he must always reckon with the uncertainties of weather and weather conditions, which can be reduced to almost nothing in the city, because there one can make oneself independent of them in the buildings. It is therefore, in my view, a distortion of the National Socialist idea of peasants and hereditary farms to speak of „hereditary farms of the economy“ in the commercial sector of the economy. If there are enterprises in the commercial sector of the economy which are to be preserved from being broken up by inheritance, or if, for reasons of a healthy middle-class policy, it is desired that they be preserved in a family, then a right of inheritance would suffice for this purpose, which would ensure the transfer of the enterprise to a child. For this purpose, however, it is not necessary to water down, so to speak, the peasant concept of the hereditary farm of National Socialism and to turn it into the opposite, so that one no longer mentions or foregrounds its actual task, the preservation of the blood for generations to come, but does foreground the preservation of the economic form of the farm, and in this way achieves a quite skewed representation of things. The situation is similar with the concept of the entail, which is discussed again and again in certain circles in public. In itself, from a purely legislative point of view, there is no fundamental difference between the old entail and the present National Socialist Erbhofgesetz, not even a difference in degree: only the preconditions from which they were created and the objectives they serve are different in the two institutions. In the Reichserbhof Law the German people want to secure their existence for centuries to come, after experience has taught them that they must look to the peasantry as the source of their blood. The German peasantry has secured the existence of the people through the centuries up to the present day, and from this realization the legislator has drawn the logical conclusion. In the Fideikommifl, on the other hand, a territorial principality wanted to stabilize a family that was valuable to it and supported its rule, and it did so by protecting this family from the increasingly noticeable mobilization of land as a result of the spread of capitalism. Thus both institutions have in this a common fundamental idea, that they preserve a race, that is, the blood, from economic accidents, and thus protect it want to stabilize. While the Reichserbhof Law, however, was created out of a national spirit and refers to the preservation of the German people as a whole, and is therefore socialist, the idea of the entail presupposes a territorial principality, for the stabilization of which the families devoted to it are privileged. The Reichserbhofgesetz thus has a socialist portent, the Fideikommiflrecht presupposes the return of territorial princely feudality.

 

Today, the Reichserbh of Law is sufficient to link a family of great value to the German people to the Scholle, even in the case of large landholdings, just as the Fideikommifl did in the past. If, in spite of this, the question arises again and again whether it would not be possible to create a right of entail in addition to the Reichserbhof Law, this can only be explained by the fact that certain circles still hope to be able to occupy a special position in National Socialist Germany in the future because they once did so under other conditions of constitutional law. Such circles completely forget that this question can be answered in the affirmative for them only if their services to the National Socialist State are as extraordinary as those to their former territorial rule, so that they could also be extraordinarily rewarded.

 

That the National Socialist State is prepared to take such an attitude it has proved in the case of the family estate of the von Hindenburgs. It is also no secret when I declare that the National Socialist Government is quite prepared to proceed along this path and to reward extraordinary services to the State and the people in an extraordinary way. This is quite in accordance with the National Socialist principle that whoever assumes increased obligations in the service of the German people may also enjoy corresponding privileges, but it is senseless to demand from the present State privileges of past times without at least presenting present services to this State as compensation. This is especially true when one takes into account that the memory of the German people is not so bad as to forget that the catastrophe of 1918 was due to a failure of its then ruling class and that - what is perhaps even more significant here - the names of this responsible and privileged ruling class, especially of the former owners of the entailed estates, do not appear among the dead of Adolf Hitler’s freedom movement, those dead who washed away with their blood a disgrace which the political failure of those responsible at that time, after all, helped to bring about. It should also be borne in mind that it was only through the sacrifice of hundreds of dead under Adolf Hitler’s banner that it was possible to re-establish legal conditions which today make it possible for us to have an orderly constitutional state and protect us from Bolshevism. I therefore have no understanding for today’s discussions on entailment, which lack any prerequisite in terms of merit or blood in the National Socialist sense. The Reichserbhofgesetz certainly gives the possibility of binding even large estates, so to speak, in a fideicommiss like manner, if they meet the requirements of § 5. However, this presupposes proof of the value of the lineage in hereditary value or in its performance for the present State of Adolf Hitler, for it is on the quality of the blood and its preservation that we are concerned. In this sense we have also already made a number of larger estates, which met the requirements of the Reichserbhof Law, into hereditary estates. However, the Erbhof Law has no room for persons with a Jewish weaving defect in their genealogical table, no matter how nice-sounding their names may be and how well-sounding they may be in history. For this would be a contradiction in terms, since the Erbhof Law, with a view to the German future, seeks to preserve the blood source of the people, and that also means to keep it pure. Unfortunately, practice proves that the resistance to the Reich Hereditary Court Law on the part of individual large landowners must often be attributed to the fact that the families concerned are afraid to correct a hitherto carefully concealed defect in their genealogical table due to Jewish blood by applying for recognition of their hereditary court. The only thing I can recommend today, based on rich experience, is to always obtain a picture of the pedigree of such opponents of the Reichserbhofgesetz, if possible, back to all great-grandparents.

 

Today, on the basis of rich experience, I can only recommend that in the case of such opponents of the Reichserbhof Law, one should always first obtain a picture of their genealogical table, if possible back to all great-grandparents, before one takes their opposition seriously from a factual point of view. With this I may come to the conclusion: When the Deputy of the Fuehrer, Party Comrade Rudolf Hess, said at the Reich Party Congress of the NSDAP. in Nuremberg in 1933 that National Socialism meant nothing other than applied race science, he was saying at the same time that for National Socialism the race question is not only the key to understanding world history, as a witty Jew who knew something about politics expressed it in one of his novels, but also that the race question represents the axis of all political considerations of National Socialism. But since no statesmanship in the world can disregard the earthly conditions of the territory in which the people live, it is evident from this that the concepts of „blood“ and „soil“ become the decisive fundamental idea of National Socialism.