ABSTRACT
Landowners and farmers no more rushed to embrace the new political order in Germany after 1918 than did the Reich’s businessmen. The inexorable course of German industrialization in the late nineteenth century had long stimulated the great estate holders in the east and north of the Reich to hone their lobbying skills to perfection. German agriculture as a whole was disadvantaged in the first place by the pace of industrialization and the concomitant growth of the service sector, which inevitably attracted labour. In the end a farmer’s life in the ‘Third Reich Limited’ demanded – in exchange for security of tenure and praise – more work for less return. It has been rightly said that conditions were desperate for the small farmer, hard for the middlesized farmer and only a little less so for estate owners. A final German victory provided the Third Reich ‘with new land when its citizens were busy depopulating part of their existing countryside’.
