Darré, Richard Walter

Reich Farmers' Leader of the NSDAP, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture

Born: 14.07.1895 in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Died: 05.09.1953 in Munich

Darré spent his childhood in Buenos Aires, but then came to Germany, where he attended the German colonial school in Witzenhausen, among other places. During the First World War, he volunteered for the Western Front and joined a Freikorps. In 1922, he moved to Wiesbaden, where he wrote his fundamental writings on Nazi agricultural policy: "Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse" (1928) as well as "Um Blut und Boden" (1929) and "Neuadel aus Blut und Boden" (1930). As a member of the radical right-wing association "Artaman e.V.", he became friends with Heinrich Himmler. In 1930, Adolf Hitler made him his agricultural advisor. Darré joined the NSDAP and became a member of the SS. The party's agricultural program, written by Darré and published under Hitler's name, led to his immediate promotion. One year later, the staunch anti-Semite headed the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. This put him on the same level as Reinhard Heydrich in the Nazi hierarchy. After coming to power in 1933, Hitler appointed Darré Reichsbauernführer and Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture. In 1940, the NSDAP party headquarters in Munich bought Darré's former home at Walkmühlstraße 83 in Wiesbaden in order to preserve his study as a kind of memorial to the "blood and soil" myth.

Darré's plans for a peasant colonization in the conquered East brought him internal party rivals. The SS did not want to be talked into their murderous eastern settlement policy, which was decimating the population. Darré fell out with Himmler and was dismissed from all offices. This enabled him to claim at the Nuremberg trial in 1949 that he had been an opponent of Himmler and had tried to have him dismissed as a minister. Darré was sentenced to seven years in prison for "crimes against humanity, plundering and membership of a criminal organization", but was released after just one year. Three years later, he died in a Munich hospital.