Hitlers Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum

Author:David Schoenbaum [Schoenbaum, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82233-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

The Third Reich and Agriculture

SINCE FARM POLICY was one of relatively few social issues on which there was something like a consistent Nazi attitude, if not a program, it stands in retrospect as a kind of guidepost to the direction and consequences of the Third Reich.

Only Mittelstandspolitik might have played a similar role in mobilizing decisive support for the Nazis en route to power. But one wonders how many active Nazis genuinely identified themselves with the goals—stuffy, bourgeois, undynamic—of their petit-bourgeois supporters. The animus against the department store had a certain negative dynamism. Anti-Semitic, anti-urban, anti-commercial, it found its “capitalist” target in an object incomparably more tangible than a steel cartel or a bond issue. But one can scarcely believe that its conscious purpose was to make the world safer for the corner shopkeeper. Nazi economic logic in fact precluded it. Characteristically, the Mittelstand ideology had practically vanished by 1936. Those who still advanced it—isolated SA groups and local Party leaders—were representing only their own vested interests. They had themselves become a rear guard, victims of a kind of culture-lag, old-fashioned Nazis, representatives of institutions whose stars had been on the wane since Hitler’s triumph. Feder, the spokesman of “shopkeeper socialism” par excellence, was an outsider from the beginning, a man with as little place in Hitler’s New Deal as William Jennings Bryan might have had in Roosevelt’s. Ohlendorff’s SS lobby represented business as such. It was no more than a shadow of Renteln’s old Kampfbund. But Blut und Boden went on.

Of course this had its practical side. Farm recovery was as crucial to the Third Reich as business recovery, and farm productivity was still crucial after the recovery of small business had lost urgency. Farm morale was a constant factor in the political calculation of public opinion as the morale of the half-satiated, half-intimidated Mittelständler was not. The very pressures the Nazi economy imposed on agriculture and particularly on farm labor required propagandistic redress. There was no inevitable contradiction in the apparent lunacy of the Völkische Beobachter which demanded more industrial labor and deplored the loss of farm labor in the same week.1 That there might be a connection between the demand for the former and the shortage of the latter was a fact that can scarcely have escaped the editors’ attention. That there was a shortage of labor, both on the farm and in the factory, was nonetheless a fact and worth publication if only to remind farmers that official agencies were aware of it.

What was not a fact was the ideological thesis that accompanied such publication. That the farmer was the ideological darling of official Germany in 1939 as he was in 1933 had a certain logic, however the economic situation of the farmer and the economic situation of the Reich had changed in the meanwhile. But that the language in which this affection was declared, and that the official goals to which it was applied, remained fixed as the situation changed—this was a matter not of logic but of faith.

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