Blood and soil
Based on Wikipedia: Blood and soil
The Deadly Romance of Dirt and DNA
In the summer of 2017, hundreds of men carrying tiki torches marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting three words: "Blood and Soil." The phrase sounded ancient, primal, perhaps even mystical. It was, in fact, a direct translation of a Nazi slogan—Blut und Boden—that had helped justify the murder of millions. The men in Charlottesville knew exactly what they were invoking.
But where did this phrase come from? And how did an idea about farming become one of the most dangerous concepts in modern history?
The Peasant as Hero
Long before the Nazis rose to power, a romantic current ran through German thought. The peasant—the man who worked the earth with his hands, who lived by the turning of seasons rather than the ticking of clocks—was imagined as the authentic German. The city, by contrast, was viewed with deep suspicion. Urban life was "asphalt culture," a moral swamp where traditional values dissolved into cosmopolitan corruption.
This wasn't unique to Germany. Agrarian romanticism appeared wherever industrialization threatened traditional ways of life. What made the German version distinctive was how it merged two ideas that don't logically connect: that a particular ethnic group (defined by "blood") was spiritually bound to a particular territory (the "soil"). The peasant wasn't just a farmer. He was the guardian of racial purity and national destiny.
The idea crystallized in the late nineteenth century through figures like Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who argued that the German peasantry represented both the foundation of the German people and the essence of conservatism. The land didn't just feed the people—it shaped them. And only those shaped by German land could be truly German.
The Man Who Made Farming Fascist
Richard Walther Darré was not himself a peasant. Born in Argentina to German parents, educated in England and Germany, he was an agricultural scientist with a flair for ideological synthesis. In 1930, he published a book with the revealing title A New Nobility Based on Blood and Soil. His argument was startling in its ambition: selective breeding of humans—eugenics—combined with a return to the land would cure all of Germany's problems.
Two years earlier, Darré had written Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, claiming that the superiority of Nordic peoples over Southeastern Europeans came from their connection to superior land. The soil literally made the blood better.
This was pseudoscience, of course. But it was politically useful pseudoscience.
Darré became an influential member of the Nazi Party precisely because his ideas resonated with ordinary Germans outside the cities. The doctrine allowed the Nazis to attack both the middle class and the aristocracy simultaneously. Businessmen were corrupt. Nobles were decadent. Only the farmer, hands in the dirt, remained pure.
Before taking power, the Nazis called for a mass return from cities to the countryside. The future of Germany, they proclaimed, lay not in factories and offices but in fields and forests. The city was a Jewish-influenced weakness; only the Führer's will could eliminate it.
Women, Children, and the Ideal Body
Blood and Soil shaped Nazi ideas about women too. The ideal German woman was not a sophisticated urbanite but a sturdy peasant, tanned from outdoor labor, bearing many strong children. That rural women had higher birth rates than city women became a matter of national importance. The female body was territory to be cultivated, just like the land itself.
Children were drawn into this ideology through compulsory service. Members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were required to spend a year working on the land after completing basic education, before they could pursue advanced studies or employment. The hope was that exposure to rural life would keep young people "on the land." By 1942, six hundred thousand boys and 1.4 million girls were being sent each year to help bring in the harvest.
Schools reinforced these messages. The German National Catechism—propaganda material used in classrooms across the country—told stories of farmers losing ancestral lands and being forced into the corrupting cities. Posters showed the "flight" from countryside to metropolis as a national tragedy. Charts in publications like Neues Volk claimed to show Jews systematically destroying Aryan families' connection to their land.
The Law That Made Farms Eternal
In 1933, the Nazi government passed the Reichserbhofgesetz—the State Hereditary Farm Law. Its stated aim was chilling in its clarity: "to preserve the farming community as the blood-source of the German people."
Selected farms were declared hereditary. They could not be mortgaged or sold. Only these farmers could call themselves Bauern—a word the Nazis tried to transform from a neutral or even slightly negative term into a title of honor. The law dictated inheritance rules: typically the eldest son would inherit, though regional custom could designate the youngest. Brothers and their sons had priority over daughters. The patriline was sacred.
And then there was this provision: "Only those of German blood may be farmers."
With a stroke of a pen, Jewish people were legally prohibited from working the land.
The Contradiction at the Heart
Here's the paradox that the Substack essay you're reading alongside this article captures perfectly: fascism despised the city, but it was fundamentally of the city. The Nazi movement was born in Munich's beer halls, organized through urban propaganda networks, and powered by industrial capacity. Darré's peasant utopia was a fantasy that the regime's own priorities undermined.
When Gottfried Feder, an early Nazi economic theorist, tried to actually implement the back-to-the-land vision—proposing that workers be settled in villages around decentralized factories—he was blocked. Generals opposed it because it interfered with rearmament. The Junkers, the Prussian aristocratic landowners, opposed it because breaking up their estates would end their ability to exploit the international agricultural market. The program received endless propaganda support but almost no actual implementation.
Blood and Soil was more useful as mythology than as policy.
Living Space: From Farms to Genocide
But if Blood and Soil was mostly theatrical domestically, it became deadly when pointed outward. The concept was foundational to Lebensraum—the doctrine of "living space" that justified Nazi expansion eastward.
The logic was this: German blood required German soil. But there wasn't enough soil. Therefore, Germany must expand, conquering territories in Eastern Europe and transforming them into German farmland. The native Slavic and Baltic populations would be displaced, expelled, or exterminated. This wasn't a side effect of conquest—it was the point.
Hitler envisioned Ukraine as Germany's "breadbasket." He expressed particular hatred for Ukrainian cities, which he saw as hotbeds of Russian identity and communism. Germans, he decreed, should never live in these cities. They should be razed. During the siege of Leningrad, Hitler ordered that no consideration be given to the survival of the city's population. Let them starve.
The soldiers who would colonize these eastern lands were to be Wehrbauern—"soldier-peasants." They could only marry peasant women who had never lived in towns. Their farms would be both agricultural and military outposts, a racial bulwark against Asia. This was the endgame of Blood and Soil: a continental empire of racially pure farmers stretching from the Rhine to the Urals, built on the graves of those who had lived there before.
The Culture Machine
The Nazis understood that ideology requires constant cultural reinforcement. Blood and Soil saturated German art, literature, and film throughout the 1930s and early 1940s.
Two popular literary genres—the Heimat-Roman (regional novel) and the Schollen-Roman (novel of the soil)—were amplified and distorted into propaganda. Writers produced endless variations on the theme of peasant life, often set in a timeless past where seasons turned and the land endured. The term "Blood and Soil" was so common it got abbreviated to "Blu-Bo." These novels merged war literature with rural romance, featuring soldier-peasants uncorrupted by urban life.
Visual art followed the same pattern. Landscape paintings dominated the Greater German Art Exhibitions—but they had to depict real German landscapes, the Lebensraum of the people, without religious overtones. Peasants working fields by hand, without machinery, were popular subjects. Art that failed to reflect Blood and Soil ideology was labeled "degenerate" and banned.
Films reinforced the message with particular effectiveness. Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City) told the story of a young woman who runs away to the city, becomes pregnant, is abandoned, and drowns herself. Her dying words beg her father to forgive her for not loving the countryside as he did. Ewiger Wald (The Eternal Forest) presented German history as an organic extension of the primeval forest—both had endured war, occupation, and humiliation, but both would triumph through rootedness in the soil.
Even children's books served the cause. The notorious antisemitic picture book Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) included a story about a Jewish financier forcing a German farmer to sell his land while a neighboring boy watched in horror, resolving never to let a Jew into his house. His father praised him: peasants must remember that Jews will always take their land.
The Strange Afterlives of an Idea
Blood and Soil didn't die in 1945. Ideas rarely do.
The concept migrated in unexpected directions. A 1943 Japanese government report titled An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus made extensive use of the term, usually in quotation marks, adapting Nazi racial ideology for Japanese imperial purposes.
More controversially, some scholars have identified echoes of Blood and Soil thinking in early Zionist ideology. The philosopher Martin Buber, for instance, has been described by historian Walter Laquer as "an early protagonist of Blut und Boden." Laquer argues that this should be understood in historical context—that Buber's use of the concept was "innocent," part of the broader nineteenth-century romantic nationalism that influenced many movements before it was weaponized by the Nazis.
Other scholars disagree sharply. David Biale notes that before the Nazis took power, "the language of 'blood and soil' ... held wide appeal for Jews searching for new ways of defining themselves." The Israeli national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik said at a 1934 press conference: "I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of blood." Whether such statements represent a troubling ideological kinship or merely a shared nineteenth-century vocabulary remains fiercely debated.
In 1944, the political theorist Hannah Arendt criticized Zionism for what she called its "politics of 'blood and soil'" and its "uncritical acceptance of German-inspired nationalism." She warned against any ideology that explains peoples "in terms of biological superhuman personalities."
The Torches Return
Which brings us back to Charlottesville.
North American white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the so-called alt-right have enthusiastically adopted the Blood and Soil slogan. They understand its history. They embrace it precisely because of that history—as a deliberate invocation of Nazi ideology, a declaration of intent.
The phrase endures because it captures something seductive and terrible: the promise that identity can be simple, that belonging can be absolute, that some people are rooted in a place by nature while others are rootless, parasitic, eternally foreign. It offers the comfort of certainty in exchange for the humanity of everyone defined as outside the circle.
The men with torches weren't confused about what they were chanting. They were announcing what they wanted: a world divided by blood, ruled by soil, purified by violence. The same world Richard Walther Darré dreamed of in 1930, the same world Adolf Hitler tried to build with bullets and gas and fire.
Understanding Blood and Soil means understanding how romantic ideas about farming and nature can mutate into justifications for genocide. It means seeing how "love of the land" can become "hatred of the other." And it means recognizing that this mutation isn't some aberration of history but a recurring pattern, one that requires constant vigilance to resist.
The soil is just dirt. The blood is just blood. What makes them dangerous is what we choose to believe about them.