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

FIRST TRIUMPH 337on Hitler that he at once commissioned him to draw up a peasantprogram. Darre proved himself a brilliant, convincing propagandist. Theprogram begins:Today we pay for our food imports chiefly with borrowed foreign funds.Thus the German people is led deeper and deeper into the debt slaveryof the international high finance that gives us credit. If the present stateof affairs continues, international high finance will expropriate theGerman people more and more. By blocking credit and hence the importof foodstuffs, in other words, by hanging the bread-basket higher, it cancompel the German proletariat to work for starvation wages in its service,or to let themselves be shipped off to foreign colonies as working slaves.Liberation from this slavery is possible only if the German people cansustain itself mainly from its own soil. To increase the productivity ofdomestic agriculture has therefore become a vital question for the Germanpeople.Therefore taxes on agriculture must be reduced — this was an easypromise and the peasant voter would not normally have had much faithin it; but Darre found a persuasive National Socialist basis for it. Taxes,he declared, were so high only 'because the Jewish world power whichactually governs German parliamentary democracy desires thedestruction of German agriculture, since the German people, andespecially the working class, is entirely dependent on it.' Since,moreover, German agriculture 'suffers from the competition of foreignagriculture producing under more favorable conditions, protective dutiesmust be increased,' The program contained a section directed forpractical purposes against a part of the large landholdings of thePrussian junkers, though the junkers as such are not attacked, butactually encouraged with the words: 'Large-scale agriculture also fulfillsits special, necessary tasks.' But: 'A large number of small and mediumfarms are above all important from the standpoint of population policy.'To preserve and sustain these small and medium farms, and, particularlyin the German East, to prevent them from being sucked up by mechanized,factory-like giant farms, is one of the most important points in theprogram: 'In future, soil can be acquired only by him who means tofarm it himself.'