Social Groups 2
The next social group we will look at is the peasants and small farmers.
What is a ‘peasant’?
A peasant is someone who works only on the
land, usually doing manual labour; he is
unskilled and comes from a background of
peasants. Their pay is low.
And what’s a small farmer?
Someone who farms a small area of land, usually
producing enough to feed his family with some
left over to sell and make a bit of money. They
may have a few animals and grow crops.
The main question in the book is: did
Peasants and small farmers benefit under
National Socialism?
And again, the answer is yes and no.
If you think back to Volksgemeinschaft, the
workers on the land were supposed to be the most
glorious, coming from the land and epitomising
the roots of the German Nation.
The base answer to the question “did Peasants
and small farmers benefit under National
Socialism?” is yes and no; at first, they were
shown to be the real roots of the German nation
and appreciated for that.
It didn’t really help them - appreciation does
not put food in your mouth.
Not only that, when the army began to need more
men, guess where they came from.
That’s right - peasants and small farmers. Big
farmers, with increased mechanisation, could
produce adequate food (to begin with) and so
that left peasants and small farmers available
for conscription.
The main idea for this was Blut und Boden (Blood and soil).
Why did this group find the Nazis had good
answers for them and the world? The Nazis
promised them financial aid, which was important
after the economic depression of the 1920s. The
answer was simple - vote for the Nazis and
they’ll give you extra money to help you
out.
The peasants had begun to feel left out in the industrialisation of Germany; but the leader of the Blut und Boden movement was an intelligent man - Richard Darré.
He recognised that by telling the peasants how important they were to the very bedrock of the new German society, they could be controlled.
Blut und Boden showed the peasants as the
racially most pure part of the Volk (folk,
people), the providers of Germany’s food and the
very symbol of traditional German values.
There were 7 main elements of Blut und
Boden.
ONE
To restore the role
and values of the countryside and to reverse the
drive towards urbanisation by promoting the
concept of ‘Blood and Soil’.
What is ‘urbanisation’?
When people move from the countryside to the
cities.
TWO
To support the
expansionist policy of Lebensraum and to create
a German racial aristocracy based on selective
breeding.
What might a ‘racial aristocracy’
be?
It means that the ‘better’ people in Nazi
Germany either worked on the land or came from
farming families.
THREE
Many farm debts and
mortgages were written off and small farmers
were given low interest rates and a range of tax
allowances.
FOUR
The government maintained
extensive tariffs to reduce imports. That means that
imports had high taxes put on them. To make them
higher priced than German products, so people would
buy the German product.
FIVE
The Reich Entailed Farm
Law of 1933 gave security of tenure (which meant
they could not be thrown off the land if they were
bad a farming) to the occupiers of medium- sized
farms between 7.5 and 125 hectares, and forbade the
division of farms, in order to promote efficient
agriculture.
SIX
The Reich Food
Estate, established in 1933, supervised every
aspect of agricultural production and
distribution, especially food prices and working
wages.
SEVEN
The impact of Nazi
agricultural policy was mixed. At first, all
farmers benefited from an increase in prices
between 1933 and 1936 and so farmers’ incomes
did improve markedly, although they only
recovered to 1928 levels in 1938.
However, it seems that by 1936–7 any benefits
were giving way to growing peasant
disillusionment. As usual, the peasants of a
country are treated fairly badly, no matter what
the government says. So, although the Nazis
wanted everyone to think about peasants in a new
way, it didn’t really happen.
As I have said before, to change the way people
think about something takes quite a lot of time,
not just a few days ‘because the government says
so’.
The problems with peasants and small famers
were these:
1 Agricultural production
increased by 20 per cent from 1928 to 1938, but
urbanisation continued – 3 per cent of the
population. Wages were higher there, and
agriculture just did not have the economic power
to compete with other sectors of the
economy.
2 The positive aspects of the
Reich Food Estate were accepted, but the
regulations became increasingly resented.
Farmers were used to doing as they wanted to,
with their own land, and didn’t like the Nazis
interfering. The Reich Entailed Farm Law also
meant that a farm must be passed to one child
only and not split amongst all children in the
family.
3 With war in 1939 pressures on the peasantry
developed: men were increasingly conscripted to
the military fronts, so agricultural labour
became very short. Pole and Czech imported
workers (for the farms) were not even viewed as
racially acceptable; they came from countries
which had been occupied by the Nazis.
The next group of people in Nazi Germany
are the Landowners.
Question: did landowners lose out under the
Nazis?
Base answer: no, but they were crushed at the
end of the war.
The landed classes had been initially
suspicious of radical social change.
They resented the political interference of the
party, but above all they feared the Nazis would
redistribute the large landed estates, which
meant they would lose their lands and therefore
their income.
However, they soon learned to live quite
comfortably with the Nazi regime and in the
years before 1939 their economic interests were
not really threatened.
Indeed, German victories in the early years of
the war offered the chance of acquiring more
cheap land.
The real blow for the landowners came in 1945
when the occupation of eastern Germany by the
USSR resulted in the nationalisation of land.
The traditional social and economic supremacy of
the German landowners was broken.
The next group of people in Nazi Germany
are the Mittelstand.
Question: did the Mittelstand benefit from
Naziism?
Base answer: Not really. They lost income,
business and eventually disappeared.
What was the Mittelstand?
The Mittelstand was the group of medium sized
businesses.
The main Nazi ideas to support the Mittelstand
were these:
Money from the confiscation of Jewish
businesses was used to offer low interest rate
loans.
What is ‘to confiscate’?
To take something away from someone. For
example, if you do not give your phones in, when
we’re back at school, your phone will be
‘confiscated’ - taken for a period of
time.
The Law to Protect Retail Trade (1933) banned
the opening of new department stores and taxed
the existing ones, many of which were owned by
Jews.
Many new trading regulations were imposed to
protect small craftsmen.
However as Germany’s re-industrialisation
continued, the Mittelstand were unable to
compete with even those new businesses which
were allowed and their sector began to
fail.
By the end of the 1930s, when war began, they
had almost all gone, giving way to either
massive industry or small shops.