Significant centralization of agriculture, typical of capitalist development, occurred under the Nazis. There was a deliberate policy, however, to favor existing agricultural elites and a new class of privileged peasants, creating serious political loyalty from the winners. Franz Neumann’s contemporary account (Behemoth, 1942):
“A few figures will quickly dispel any notion that National Socialism has revised or even checked the process of agricultural centralization or realized the romantic ideal of a middle peasant rooted in his soil. As with industry, German agriculture has moved steadily toward bigger and bigger estates. National Socialism can hardly be expected to sacrifice efficiency to an anachronism. Only the ideology remains romantic, opposed to reality, as usual… The average size of the hereditary estates protected by the 1933 statute has increased from 12.3 hectares in 1933 to 22.5 in 1939 [that’s an 83% increase in the average size in six years]. Small peasants have been dispossessed, victims of the process of centralization. And even among hereditary peasants a process of concentration has been taking place… The independent small farmer has not disappeared however. He still makes up 40 per cent of the total of independents. But within the peasantry the economic process of centralization is being paralleled by a social process of elite formation. National Socialism is deliberately creating a reliable elite of wealthy peasants at the expense of the small farmer. The 700,000 hereditary peasants form a privileged body: Their estates cannot be encumbered; they may extend their holdings; their prices are protected. [This] peasant elite is being created without de-feudalizing or even dividing the entailed Junker estates.”
On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> Somebody: Nazism was more traditional and agrarian than you give it credit
>> for. The NSDAP received its highest vote percentages in rural Protestant
...
> Perhaps we're talking past each other... it now strikes me as possible that,
> while I am talking about the leadership and what they did with the support
> they built within the German public, you are talking about the sectors of
> the German public recruited to vote for and materially support the party. I
> don't think we disagree about where the political support came from.
> However, my sense is that the planning and execution of the autobahn, the
> blitzkreig, the rockets, the explosive industrial might and the death camps
> came not from the rural Protestant parts of the country but came, instead,
> from the top down... I know nothing about the agricultural policies of the
> Nazis, do you know about their orientation to tractors, fertilizers,
> pesticides and/or productivity increases?
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