Nazi spiritual eugenics (III): Blood and Soil
A group of SS officers with a bride approved for marriage. On the left of her, R. Walther Darré. On the right, Heinrich Himmler
This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality.
In 1879, in Breslau, a group of idealistic young Germans gathered round an oak tree at midnight to swear an oath. They swore to do everything they could to return the German race to the glories of its Teutonic past, and to found a utopian commune. A young man called Alfred Ploetz, 19, was chosen to be its future president.[1]
Ploetz travelled to the US to stay in a socialist commune in Iowa, called the Icarians, and learn about their constitution. But he felt the Icarian commune was in disarray. Like Plato before him, he decided any utopian community would fail unless it paid attention to the biological quality of its citizens.[2]
Returning to Europe, Ploetz studied under the pioneering Swiss scientist Auguste Forel, who taught him that most mental and physical illnesses were hereditary, and he started to publish his own work on the improvement of the species. His first paper, in 1895, began with a quote from Nietzsche: ‘the way forward led from being a species to a super species.’
Eventually, in 1905, he and his fellow oath-brothers established the Racial Hygiene Society, the first eugenics society in the world. It was dedicated to helping society ‘return to a healthy and blooming, strong and beautiful life’, in Ploetz’ words. Its members saw themselves as a eugenic elite — every founder underwent a physical examination before joining, they practiced archery and hiking together, and unmarried members were advised to consult the Society before choosing a mate. When the Nazis came to power, Ploetz was appointed as a government advisor.
The oath-brothers were not alone in imagining an Aryan eugenic utopia. The volkisch movement was full of secret societies like the Teutonic Order or the Thule Society, membership of which required you to prove your Aryan purity through genealogy charts and ‘blood-oaths’. [3] This was a reaction to the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century, and what was seen as the disastrous mingling of races. Some of these societies acted as match-making services for their members, to help them make eugenic and racially-pure marriage choices (much like alt-right dating apps today). They were obsessed with the idea of breeding a new German nobility.
Blood and Soil
Some of these utopias tied their dreams to back-to-the-land agrarianism. Notable in this respect was the Artaman League, which was founded in 1923, emerging out of the German youth movement. The name comes from medieval German, meaning ‘agriculture man’. Its founder, August Georg Kenstler, published an obscure magazine called Blut und Boden, or ‘Blood and Soil’, preaching the spiritual-biological unity of the German people and their fields. A later leader of the movement, Willibald Hentschel, published Mittgart (1904), a pamphlet which called for 100 strong Aryan men and 1000 Aryan women to found a polygamous agrarian colony:
Among the young applicants, men and women, the best should be selected. Height, facial and hair color, physique and performance should be taken into account, the men are tested in long and high jumps, the women in races. Experts should also check the internal organs of all applicants for health and performance.
In Hentschel’s Mittgart, couples would mate when they feel like it and stay together only until the mother is pregnant. The children are raised in a hearty, outdoor environment of farming, sporting contests, singing and circle-dancing (activities copied by the Hitler Youth, as shown in the propaganda video below).
Hentschel envisaged 300 such colonies around Germany, annually producing a hundred thousand ‘fresh, unbroken, ascending human children’, who would constitute a new nobility: ‘I do not doubt that the word superman, which has been misused to the point of disgust, would once again gain meaning.’ [4]
The membership of the Artaman League included two young agricultural students, R. Walter Darré and Heinrich Himmler. Both were fascinated by animal and plant breeding, indeed, Darré had worked at a German horse stud-farm after graduating. He wondered if similar breeding techniques could be used to create a German master-race.
In 1930, Darré published A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. He sought to protect German agriculture from capitalist predators, by creating small agricultural holdings, and then making them hereditary. This, he thought, would root the German peasantry to the land. However, German farmers should only get to inherit the farm if they and their wife pass a eugenic test, which would probe their Aryan ancestry and physical health.
Using animal husbandry techniques to breed humans could seem utterly soulless. But Darré insists it will lead to the spiritual regeneration of the volk: ‘the spiritual and moral equilibrium of a people is only achieved when a well-understood breeding mentality is at the center of its civilization.’ And it would also lead to the regeneration of nature against the ravages of industrial capitalism:
Whoever wants to develop nobility in the true and actually German sense of the word must transplant the families chosen for this purpose out of the cities and into the countryside … Working on their fathers’ soil, struggling with the forces of nature, and caring for and nurturing plants and animals in various seasons generates a very specific soul force…The result is a growing together with the soil….[5]
He was influenced by the Theosophist Rudolf Steiner, who pioneered an early form of organic agriculture called ‘biodynamic agriculture’, and who believed in a soul-connection between the living soil and the German race. And he was also inspired by Nietzsche, who he called ‘the herald of a new era in humanity’. [6] Like Nietzsche, Darré dreamt of breeding a race of ubermensch, and insisted on the need to ‘weed out’ the ‘under-men’, including by preventing Aryans from cross-breeding with the rootless, inferior races found in cities. A healthy garden needs a gardener, who ‘with a cutting hand, weeds out anything that might rob the higher-quality plants of sufficient air, light, and sun’.[7]
The SS as ‘Teutonic breeding farm’
Darré’s vision impressed fellow Artaman member, Heinrich Himmler, who in the late 1920s was working to turn the Artaman League into an organ of the Nazi party. When the Nazis took power in 1933, Darré was made minister of agriculture, and passed the Hereditary Farm Law of 1933, under which every German farm could only be passed on through male inheritance, and every farmer had to prove their Aryan ancestry back to 1800.
Himmler, meanwhile, became head of the SS, or Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads), in 1929. The SS was created in 1925 as a bodyguard for Hitler, but under Himmler its range of operations expanded until it had responsibility for most German policing, and a lead role in the mass murder of Jews and other untermenschen.
Himmler was also obsessed with the idea of breeding good stock, but he took this obsession down occult by-ways. In 1935, he founded a research institute called the Ahnenerbe (it means ‘ancestral heritage’), dedicated to exploring the ancient roots of the Germanic-Aryan race. It funded research into German runes, a museum on freemasonry, an expedition to Tibet to meet the Dalai Lama, a search for the Holy Grail and the lost hammer of Thor. It was closer to Gaia TV than a serious academic institution.
Himmler on an archeological site, examining Germanic runes — belief in magical German runes was a central dogma of an anti-Semitic German nationalist version of Theosophy called Ariosophy
Himmler peered deep into the mythical past, but also gazed into the future. He envisaged the SS as an elite mystical-eugenic order:
what we want for Germany is a ruling class destined to last for centuries and the product of repeated selection, a new aristocracy continuously renewed from the best of the sons and daughters of our nation…representing eternal youth for our nation [9]
In a wartime speech, Himmler described how he selected SS soldiers ‘we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded, quite unashamedly, to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS’. They all needed to be over 1.70cm in height, to be able to prove their ancestry back to at least 1800 (i.e. before the emancipation of the Jews), to have good fitness, and preferably not wear glasses, as Himmler did.
Then he would use their seed to sire a new nobility. In late 1931, he appointed Darré as leader of the SS Rassenamt (Race Office) and, on 31 December 1931, he announced the SS Marriage Order:
The desired aim is to create a hereditarily healthy clan of a strictly Nordic German sort…Every SS man who intends to get married must procure for this purpose the marriage certificate of the National Leader of the SS. [10]
Any SS soldier who wanted to get married needed to complete four forms: a race and settlement questionnaire (RuS-Fragebogen), a genealogical tree proving their Aryan ancestry (Ahnentafel), a hereditary health form (Erbgesundheitsbogen), and a medical examination form (Ärztlicher Untersuchungsbogen).
By end of the war, the SS had around 800,000 members. Every member’s marriage application had to be processed by the Race Office and personally approved by Himmler. He would reject partners if the woman was too short, too old, too foreign, even if she looked too Slavic.
Sometimes the officer insisted and Himmler relented. It was hard, after all, to get his men to marry at all. They complained they didn’t have time to find wives. Himmler suggested holding an SS Summer Solstice marriage festival, where unmarried men and women competed in sports, then the winners were paired off together. [11] He also founded bridal schools, where future brides went for a two-month course before marriage, learning the ‘Ten Commandments for the German Woman’, which included ‘Keep your body pure’ and ‘Hope for as many children as possible’.[12]
Marriages of SS officers could take place in the SS castle at Wewelsburg, with the presentation of rings inscribed with Germanic runes, and readings from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra on marriage and procreation: ‘Not only onward shalt thou propagate thyself, but upward!’ When a child was born, it was consecrated in the SS’ own ritual — the baby was placed in front of an altar draped with the Swastika, and passages from Mein Kampf were spoken or sung, then the congregation chanted:
We believe in the God of the universe / And in the mission of our German blood / that grows eternally young from the German soil. / We believe in the nation, the bearer of this blood / And in the Fuhrer, whom God has given us.
An SS baptism
Himmler wanted his SS officers to have large families. He was persuaded that, unless the average German family had at least three children, the German volk would soon be extinct. The SS should lead the way, becoming shining beacons for the joy of large families. They should win the ‘victory of the cradle’.[13]
Himmler approved a number of measures to try and encourage large families, but the most famous is the Lebensborn (Fount of Life), a foundation to support Aryan mothers, which SS officers supported through paid subscriptions. It mainly provided support to the wives of SS officers during pregnancy and in the months after delivery. However, the programme also supported unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children, if they were good German stock, especially if they were the offspring of SS officers.
It’s this aspect of the Lebensborn programme which led it being dubbed a ‘Teutonic breeding farm’ by American lawyers at the Nuremburg trials. Historians have tried not to sensationalize the story and one recent historian of the SS writes: ‘there is no evidence whatsoever that SS men were ever ‘put out to stud’. [14]
But there is, in fact. For example, after the war, a German woman called Hildegard Trutz told a German paper how, in the mid-1930s when she was a teenage member of the League of German Girls, her league leader suggested she could ‘give a child to the Fuhrer’ through the Lebensborn scheme. She said was proud to be chosen as a ‘Nordic Beauty’ with a child-bearing pelvis’. She and other volunteers were introduced to SS men and given a week to choose a man. She and her chosen man felt ‘no shame or inhibition of any kind’ because they ‘believed completely in the importance of what we were doing’. She stayed in the Lebensborn premises until her son was born, then he was taken from her after two weeks — and possibly given to an SS family who wanted to adopt.[15] If you’re wondering, this scheme was one of the inspirations for Margaret Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale.
The League of German Girls, which put forward candidates for the Lebensborn programme
Himmler was adamant that illegitimate Aryan children and their mothers should be supported by the German volkgemeinschaft (folk community). In this he claimed to have the support of Hitler. Indeed, when Himmler joined the Fuhrer for dinner, Hitler discoursed on society’s inevitable shift to procreation outside of marriage as a means to expand the volk:
Social prejudices are in the process of disappearing. More and more, nature is reclaiming her rights…I’ve much more respect for the woman who has an illegitimate child than for an old maid. [16]
Hitler saw the SS as a means for spreading good Nordic seed (much as Friedrich Wilhelm I’s specially-selected unit of tall soldiers was supposed to have raised the average height in Potsdam). Hitler told Himmler:
At Berchtesgaden we owe a great deal to the infusion of SS blood, for the local population there was of especially poor and mixed stock…To-day, thanks to the presence of a regiment of the Leibstandarte [SS Panzer Division], the countryside is abounding with jolly and healthy young children…to those districts in which a tendency towards degeneracy is apparent we must send a body of élite troops, and in 10 or 20 years’ time the bloodstock will be improved out of all recognition. [17]
Finally, the SS would play an important role in the Nazi expansion east. They would lead the expulsion, enslavement and extermination of non-German untermenschen, then they would lead the settlement of new agricultural colonies by Germans. Nature herself would be regenerated by these blood-and-soil colonies. Himmler imagined the creation of village colonies, similar to the garden cities of England. He declared:
The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensräume are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. [18]
We will see the bloody consequences of this plan in the next chapter.
The long shadow of Blood and Soil
As far as SS positive eugenics goes, Darré and Himmler’s schemes were a failure. The SS Marriage Order led to long delays, so Himmler eventually relaxed his rules. SS marriages produced on average one child — lower than the national German average.[19] And, of course, the entire Nazi project to breed a new nobility was scuppered by the fact that it was engaged in a bloody war, in which SS casualties were very high.
Nonetheless, the blood-and-soil ideology inspired other Nazi environmental measures which had a longer influence: the Nazis created the first European nature reserves, they passed laws for the protection of forests and animal and plant species, they built Autobahns to connect city dwellers to the countryside, and some members of the government promoted Steiner-style organic farming. [20]
These measures proved an inspiration to the early organic farming movement in the UK, which in the 1930s was pushed forward by mystical-agrarian organisations like English Mistery and the Kinship of Husbandry. These organisations were the closest thing Britain had to blood-and-soil societies like the Artaman League. They attracted agrarian revivalists like Rolf Gardiner, RG Stapledon, Jorian Jenks and Gerard Wallop, the Earl of Sandwich, who shared a passion for organic farming, rural folk culture, eugenics, and anti-Semitic fascism. But they remained fringe figures in British politics. The English could never quite take ‘blood and soil’ as seriously as the Germans. In Germany, it was made national ideology. In UK, dismissed as ‘muck and mystery’. [21]
The closest Britain came to blood-and-soil fascism was figures like Jorian Jenks, who joined the British Union of Fascists before co-founding the Soil Association and editing its magazine, ‘Mother Earth’
Nonetheless, these figures did play a role in establishing organic farming in the UK, through the founding of the Soil Association in 1945. Since then, of course, organic farming and organic food has soared in popularity, as have the health food stories pioneered by the German lebensreform movement. Perhaps one still hears hints of the eugenic ideology of human perfectibility in that movement, like in the saying of Japanese ‘natural farming’ advocate Masanobu Fukuoka: ‘The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.’
Alas, the ecofascism pioneered by the Nazis has also risen in popularity. Darré’s Blood and Soil was translated into English by an American neo-Nazi publisher in 2021, and his ideas are increasingly referenced by the far-right (see the tweets below). ‘I would say that the Blood and Soil philosophy of Walther Darré is something we all share’, one online ecofascist told the New Statesman’s Sarah Manavis. [22] The mass shooters in Christchurch and Buffalo both cited ecofascism in their manifestos, which beseeched white people to breed more, and were illustrated with kitsch photos of white farmers in fields of corn.
I think it’s important not just to explore toxic ideas but to show the actual, human victims of them
Environmental groups are disturbed by this resurgence of ‘avocado politics’ (green on the outside, brown on the inside [23]). ‘Don’t call it eco-fascism, it’s just hate’, implored the Sierra Club. But, as we’ve seen throughout this project, there is a strong tendency in ecological thinking to authoritarianism and eugenics, going all the way back to the founder of ecology, Ernst Haeckel (who supported eugenics and euthanasia) and passing through HG Wells, Julian Huxley, Madison Grant and others, all the way up to the Nazi professor of botany, Ernst Lehmann, who declared:
Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger…This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.[24]
The tendency to authoritarianism is a risk inherent in ecological, holistic thinking. Why? Because ecologists historically shifted from individual rights to the need of the whole, the species, or the planet — as defined by them. Secondly, ecologists tended to be Malthusians and to advocate top-down measures for birth control, aimed particularly at lower classes or other races. And third, ecologists often defined humans as an animal like any other, who need to be managed like other livestock — including by culling the weak and sick. That’s why historically ecologists in the past often supported eugenics.
But this does not mean there is an essential and inevitable link between ecology, organic farming, and eugenics or fascism. Not every founder of the Soil Association was a eugenic fascist. Lady Eve Balfour, author of The Living Soil, was a New Age farmer descended from spiritual eugenicists on both sides of her family (she was descended from the Lyttons and the Balfours). But, although she believed humanity was evolving into superhumans, she wasn’t a fascist, and she didn’t think anyone needed to be sterilized or killed to get there.
This was not an opinion shared by the Nazis, as we explore in the next chapter.
Notes:
[1] Also among the group was Gerhart Hauptmann, who would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912
[2] Quoted in The Well-Born Science, Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, edited by Mark B. Adams, OUP 1990, p. 15
[3] Volkmar Weiss, ‘The Pre-History of the Passport of Aryan Descent’
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356407344
[4] Willibald Hentschel, Mittgart: a way for renewal of the Germanic race, 1904, English translation here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r1r8tgtr500ao09/AAC38MPR743NfIMKnDSJ3Aaoa?dl=0
[5] Darré, Richard W.. A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. Antelope Hill Publishing, 2022, p. 125–6
[6] Ibid, p. 207
[7] Ibid, p. 180
[8] Ibid p. 225
[9] Quoted in Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, OUP:2012, p. 358
[10] https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1505
[11] Longerich, p. 186
[12] See Emily Greenhouse, ‘The Perfect Nazi Bride’, in the New Yorker, Sept 27 2013: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-perfect-nazi-bride
[13] See Carney, Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS.
[14][14] Weale, Adrian. The SS: A New History. Little, Brown Book Group, 2010, p. 126
[15] See Carney p. 68
[16] Hitler’s Table Talk, New York: Enigma Books (2000), p.353
[17] Ibid, p. 435
[18] Quoted in Staudenmaier and Biel, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, AK Press: 1990, p. 13
[19] See Carney p. 72
[20] See Peter Staudenmaier’s 2010 thesis, Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900–1945, p. 226
[21] On the far right and eugenic roots of organic farming in the UK, see Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, ‘A ‘Secret Society’? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941–52’, in Rural History (2004) 15, 2, 189–206; Philip Conford, ‘Organic Society: Agriculture and Radical Politics in the Career of Gerard Wallop, Ninth Earl of Portsmouth (1898–1984)’, The Agricultural History Review , 2005, Vol. 53, №1 (2005), pp. 78–96; see also Mike Tyldesley and Matthew Jefferies, Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain, Routledge: 2010
[22] https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2018/09/eco-fascism-ideology-marrying-environmentalism-and-white-supremacy
[23] See Nils Gilman, ‘The coming avocado politics’: The Breakthrough institute, February 7 2020: https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-12-winter-2020/avocado-politics
[24] Quoted in Staudenmaier and Biel, p. 1