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A New Nobility of Blood and Soil
Fearsome and provocative, the slogan "Blood and Soil" speaks to the interplay between the land and the people on it - the power of a land to shape a people and the power of a people to shape a land. Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading "Blood and Soil" ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.
This worldview held that Germany's natural elite, its nobility of blood and soil, was the nation's last hope against both the rapacious elite of capitalist wealth and the degenerate elite of ancient privilege. The hardworking and industrious peasant, who has no other country to call home, no riches with which to escape his duties, no international connections with which to deracinate himself, is the truly national man. His country is everything to him, and he is everything to his country, for it is on his back and by his sweat that his country is built. Thus, only from such a class of people can a new nobility arise that can combat the depravations of the modern world, with its polluted rivers, childless marriages, and the asphalt culture of city life.
With no English language edition available, this essential text has been unknown to modern dissidents for far too long. Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present, for the first time in English, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. Laboriously translated by Augusto Salan and Julius Sylvester, this book is important to the preservation and contextualization of history.
This worldview held that Germany's natural elite, its nobility of blood and soil, was the nation's last hope against both the rapacious elite of capitalist wealth and the degenerate elite of ancient privilege. The hardworking and industrious peasant, who has no other country to call home, no riches with which to escape his duties, no international connections with which to deracinate himself, is the truly national man. His country is everything to him, and he is everything to his country, for it is on his back and by his sweat that his country is built. Thus, only from such a class of people can a new nobility arise that can combat the depravations of the modern world, with its polluted rivers, childless marriages, and the asphalt culture of city life.
With no English language edition available, this essential text has been unknown to modern dissidents for far too long. Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present, for the first time in English, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil. Laboriously translated by Augusto Salan and Julius Sylvester, this book is important to the preservation and contextualization of history.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 20, 2021
This is by far one of the most important books I have ever read as a NatRev. While I am not a huge fan of some of the critiques of Christianity's influence on the Germanic people mention from time to time, from a purely historic standpoint alone even those points are extremely interesting. This book walks you through not only the historic German nation and its traditional laws of nobility but then walks the reader up to and through the modern understanding of hereditary, blood and soil at that time and the beautifully and elaborately sculpts a point by point manifesto about how one would go about creating a new nobility in Germany at that time.
Personally as an activist for my nations cause found tons of useful information in this book that shined a very important light into what may be required to build a new system here in America as well. The foreword by Warren Balogh also added to that by helping to clarify just how important this work is to the dissident community still today. Once again and as always I am extremely Antelope Hill went out of there way to translate this amazing work into English for the first time. Pick yourself up a copy and you won't be let down in the least.
P.S. I would even go so far as to say this book also is an excellent resource for arguing all those who claim that race and by extension the importance of good blood and breeding habits is a relatively modern phenomenon. Walther Darré goes out of his way to show how incorrect that belief truly is.
Personally as an activist for my nations cause found tons of useful information in this book that shined a very important light into what may be required to build a new system here in America as well. The foreword by Warren Balogh also added to that by helping to clarify just how important this work is to the dissident community still today. Once again and as always I am extremely Antelope Hill went out of there way to translate this amazing work into English for the first time. Pick yourself up a copy and you won't be let down in the least.
P.S. I would even go so far as to say this book also is an excellent resource for arguing all those who claim that race and by extension the importance of good blood and breeding habits is a relatively modern phenomenon. Walther Darré goes out of his way to show how incorrect that belief truly is.
January 1, 2024
Excellent book, very useful to understand the Weltanschauung of National Socialism.
It discusses how National Socialism is rooted in the ancient Germanic culture, before Christianity. The ancient Germanic societies had a Nobility which was rooted in the soil, was hereditary, and was seen as a class of leadership rather than just representing inherited privileges. In line with all the rest of the National Socialist ideology, there should not be power without responsibility (which is in fact Hitler's main critique of parliamentary democracy: politicians don't have responsibilities for their ineptitude or malevolence). In our modern liberal democracy, the term "nobility" and "aristocracy" have become synonymous with individuals owning material possessions for their own personal benefit. I can assure you that Darré does not mean this at all, he means the Nobility of ancient Germanic societies: a class of leadership which represents the best elements of a people for the good of society.
"With all their sense of freedom, the people were proud of their lordly dynasties. Not with jealousy and envy, but with joy and love, with veneration and gratitude—the people looked up to them".
But why should this be hereditary? This is the difficult question that Darré tries to answer. In a democracy an upper class can be formed, as some talented individuals can succeed in a meritocratic system. However, an hereditary system is also necessary to be able to cultivate and maintain this upper class in the long run:
"If the leading class of a people is composed exclusively of its best elements, without any provision being made for the inheritance of its talents in any form, the people will, underall circumstances, deplete its abilities and talents. There is no doubt that such a form of exploiting talents may cause a temporary flourishing of the people, but this state of affairs is not permanent. Almost all historical democracies of the modern era offer examples of this, because the establishment of a democracy in a state that was previously noble-led creates a general power vacuum in which gifted individuals can, with some luck, work their way up to the upper echelons of the people. But it is precisely this peculiar democratic tendency of denying any hereditary bond and even refusing to recognize the hereditary inequality of individuals which makes it difficult or even impossible for recognized valuable talents to be hereditarily anchored in the nation. This is the key to the riddle of why democracies, after a short historical period of flourishing, always very quickly show a decline in their ancestral talents and therefore die culturally."
Therefore, while Darré discusses at length the necessity of a nobility to renew itself (even by accepting people of not-noble birth) and be kept to a high standard of conduct, the main idea of this book is that this upper class needs to be hereditary. And it was in fact hereditary in ancient Germanic culture, where everyone recognized the importance of blood.
"nobility among the Germanic peoples was an institution that concerned property for the preservation and multiplication of proven blood value".
According to Darré, this ancient value has been subverted by Christianity, that "through its doctrine that all men were equal as the children of the same God, had shaken the aristocratic fabric of ancient civilization to its foundations."
"the value of the noble birth was actually destroyed in thought, for everyone was now equal to every nobleman in the competition for the salvation of the soul in the hereafter—which was now the actual moral task of life".
With the consequence that "the idea of the hereditary inequality of human beings was thus transferred from blood to the ownership of property".
One of the important characteristic of the nobility is that it must be rooted in the soil. The nobility must have roots, maintaining and improving and defending the land. In National Socialism the land is not seen as a commodity that should be freely traded, but rather as the essence of society and inseparable from the blood of its people. Darré attacks Marxism as the product of a nomadic instinct, a parasitic instinct that only cares about the distribution of goods and without thinking of how these goods can be created. Bolshevism is actually, albeit through different means, exactly the same as the nomadic attacks on Germanic Europe by the Huns, [etc.]".
The book highlights the importance of biological heritage. A successful society will have institutions to ensure that the best elements pass on their genes, and the undesirable elements do not. National Socialism wants to improve the quality of the people and while this can be reached to a certain extend with education, it is also important to cultivate the biological quality of the population - as the potential of each individual is determined by his or her genetics. Needless to say, I'm not just talking about IQ here. The morality and culture of a society comes primarily from the blood of its people. Therefore Darré's Nobility is not a selfish and privileged class, nor should it focus on the ownership of property, but it should revolve around "the idea that the blood of the ancestor must be passed on to the offspring in the purest possible form".
For National Socialism the spiritual salvation is achieved through our children. This was even discussed in the book Hitler's Religion. Therefore it's only natural that a great attention should be placed on the quality of our offspring. Darré proposes to divide society in 4 classes: 1) The top 10% of our racial elements, for which marriage and children should be heavily encouraged and supported. 2) The majority of the population, that should be free to marry and have children. 3) A class of people which due to hereditary conditions should be prevented from having offspring (with forced sterilization, if necessary), but still allowed to marry. 4) A class of undesirables, such as mentally ill persons, habitual prostitutes, and recidivist criminals who should not only be prevented from having offspring, but should not be allowed to marry at all to not degrade the institution of marriage.
Personally I feel that cultivating the nobility of our blood is a more important and worthwhile effort than desperately trying to raise the GDP at all costs, even importing foreign elements for cheap labor. The contrast between National Socialism and our current capitalist liberal democracy is very obvious reading Darré's book.
"At its core, Liberalism is not so far removed from Marxism; although it has grasped and affirmed the economic laws of the creation of value and the production of goods, it nevertheless tends to persist in purely material thinking and wants to know nothing of the people’s way of life, or, in the truest sense, of the decisive forces which condition and constrain the human being who produces value—a reality that Liberalism believes it is entitled to disregard."
I'm still not convinced of the need for an actual Nobility as a formally distinct social class, and I do not believe that it's necessary in a National Socialist society. This book is only Darré's proposals and not an official NSDAP policy. Some parts of the book in which Darré goes in details on how he'd organize the Nobility and all institutions surrounding it feel less interesting, and not relevant to the modern reader. Nevertheless, the other parts of this book are very valuable for their discussion on the importance of biological heritage and the history and evolution of German Nobility. This book improved my understanding of National Socialism and was very thought-provoking.
It discusses how National Socialism is rooted in the ancient Germanic culture, before Christianity. The ancient Germanic societies had a Nobility which was rooted in the soil, was hereditary, and was seen as a class of leadership rather than just representing inherited privileges. In line with all the rest of the National Socialist ideology, there should not be power without responsibility (which is in fact Hitler's main critique of parliamentary democracy: politicians don't have responsibilities for their ineptitude or malevolence). In our modern liberal democracy, the term "nobility" and "aristocracy" have become synonymous with individuals owning material possessions for their own personal benefit. I can assure you that Darré does not mean this at all, he means the Nobility of ancient Germanic societies: a class of leadership which represents the best elements of a people for the good of society.
"With all their sense of freedom, the people were proud of their lordly dynasties. Not with jealousy and envy, but with joy and love, with veneration and gratitude—the people looked up to them".
But why should this be hereditary? This is the difficult question that Darré tries to answer. In a democracy an upper class can be formed, as some talented individuals can succeed in a meritocratic system. However, an hereditary system is also necessary to be able to cultivate and maintain this upper class in the long run:
"If the leading class of a people is composed exclusively of its best elements, without any provision being made for the inheritance of its talents in any form, the people will, underall circumstances, deplete its abilities and talents. There is no doubt that such a form of exploiting talents may cause a temporary flourishing of the people, but this state of affairs is not permanent. Almost all historical democracies of the modern era offer examples of this, because the establishment of a democracy in a state that was previously noble-led creates a general power vacuum in which gifted individuals can, with some luck, work their way up to the upper echelons of the people. But it is precisely this peculiar democratic tendency of denying any hereditary bond and even refusing to recognize the hereditary inequality of individuals which makes it difficult or even impossible for recognized valuable talents to be hereditarily anchored in the nation. This is the key to the riddle of why democracies, after a short historical period of flourishing, always very quickly show a decline in their ancestral talents and therefore die culturally."
Therefore, while Darré discusses at length the necessity of a nobility to renew itself (even by accepting people of not-noble birth) and be kept to a high standard of conduct, the main idea of this book is that this upper class needs to be hereditary. And it was in fact hereditary in ancient Germanic culture, where everyone recognized the importance of blood.
"nobility among the Germanic peoples was an institution that concerned property for the preservation and multiplication of proven blood value".
According to Darré, this ancient value has been subverted by Christianity, that "through its doctrine that all men were equal as the children of the same God, had shaken the aristocratic fabric of ancient civilization to its foundations."
"the value of the noble birth was actually destroyed in thought, for everyone was now equal to every nobleman in the competition for the salvation of the soul in the hereafter—which was now the actual moral task of life".
With the consequence that "the idea of the hereditary inequality of human beings was thus transferred from blood to the ownership of property".
One of the important characteristic of the nobility is that it must be rooted in the soil. The nobility must have roots, maintaining and improving and defending the land. In National Socialism the land is not seen as a commodity that should be freely traded, but rather as the essence of society and inseparable from the blood of its people. Darré attacks Marxism as the product of a nomadic instinct, a parasitic instinct that only cares about the distribution of goods and without thinking of how these goods can be created. Bolshevism is actually, albeit through different means, exactly the same as the nomadic attacks on Germanic Europe by the Huns, [etc.]".
The book highlights the importance of biological heritage. A successful society will have institutions to ensure that the best elements pass on their genes, and the undesirable elements do not. National Socialism wants to improve the quality of the people and while this can be reached to a certain extend with education, it is also important to cultivate the biological quality of the population - as the potential of each individual is determined by his or her genetics. Needless to say, I'm not just talking about IQ here. The morality and culture of a society comes primarily from the blood of its people. Therefore Darré's Nobility is not a selfish and privileged class, nor should it focus on the ownership of property, but it should revolve around "the idea that the blood of the ancestor must be passed on to the offspring in the purest possible form".
For National Socialism the spiritual salvation is achieved through our children. This was even discussed in the book Hitler's Religion. Therefore it's only natural that a great attention should be placed on the quality of our offspring. Darré proposes to divide society in 4 classes: 1) The top 10% of our racial elements, for which marriage and children should be heavily encouraged and supported. 2) The majority of the population, that should be free to marry and have children. 3) A class of people which due to hereditary conditions should be prevented from having offspring (with forced sterilization, if necessary), but still allowed to marry. 4) A class of undesirables, such as mentally ill persons, habitual prostitutes, and recidivist criminals who should not only be prevented from having offspring, but should not be allowed to marry at all to not degrade the institution of marriage.
Personally I feel that cultivating the nobility of our blood is a more important and worthwhile effort than desperately trying to raise the GDP at all costs, even importing foreign elements for cheap labor. The contrast between National Socialism and our current capitalist liberal democracy is very obvious reading Darré's book.
"At its core, Liberalism is not so far removed from Marxism; although it has grasped and affirmed the economic laws of the creation of value and the production of goods, it nevertheless tends to persist in purely material thinking and wants to know nothing of the people’s way of life, or, in the truest sense, of the decisive forces which condition and constrain the human being who produces value—a reality that Liberalism believes it is entitled to disregard."
I'm still not convinced of the need for an actual Nobility as a formally distinct social class, and I do not believe that it's necessary in a National Socialist society. This book is only Darré's proposals and not an official NSDAP policy. Some parts of the book in which Darré goes in details on how he'd organize the Nobility and all institutions surrounding it feel less interesting, and not relevant to the modern reader. Nevertheless, the other parts of this book are very valuable for their discussion on the importance of biological heritage and the history and evolution of German Nobility. This book improved my understanding of National Socialism and was very thought-provoking.
July 13, 2022
Darre was 3rd Reich Minister of Agriculture but his career declined from 1938.
This is a long book and it was a slog. Large parts of it I skimmed.
Hard to ‘score’:
Readability – 2*
Historical Importance – 4* Clear insight into NSDAP policies especially Nordic racial purity. Early proponent of green conservationist thinking?- debatable?
Subject Interest – 4*. Fascinating comparisons between German and British nobility. Considerable similarities. Shared heritage – Anglo Saxon.
Dated and obviously hugely controversial/unacceptable to today’s Western liberal and global thinking. But out of tune with Nature??
This is a long book and it was a slog. Large parts of it I skimmed.
Hard to ‘score’:
Readability – 2*
Historical Importance – 4* Clear insight into NSDAP policies especially Nordic racial purity. Early proponent of green conservationist thinking?- debatable?
Subject Interest – 4*. Fascinating comparisons between German and British nobility. Considerable similarities. Shared heritage – Anglo Saxon.
Dated and obviously hugely controversial/unacceptable to today’s Western liberal and global thinking. But out of tune with Nature??
December 6, 2024
An interesting read. The author proposed a national socialist revision of feudalism for the German people. This was the most interesting part of the book. But the author is very much against Christianity and promotes Christ-less ideas of government and parts of society, which destroys his overall proposition; since he assumes and imports the fruits of Christendom, while rejecting Christianity.
April 28, 2022
I was interested in reading this latest translation by Antelope Hill and noticed that Warren Balogh of the National Justice Party also wrote a foreword to the book. This book has never been translated before and I can see why. Walther Darrè is a Nordicist and sadly this book is not evergreen. There have been advancements in human biodiversity since the time this was written and the information is very dated. It is a good way to get into the insight of the mastermind behind the NSDAP's eugenic program but is not applicable to the world today.
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February 12, 2023An utterly despicable book, yet also one which is all but critical to understand the architecting of the fascist society Darre helped to undertake. Made my skin crawl throughout.
March 22, 2025
Scritto nel 1930, il libro di Darré sarebbe divenuto un capisaldo dell'ideologia nazista, sopratutto nei primi anni di governo e Darré stesso divenne ministro dell'alimentazione e dell'agricoltura del Terzo Reich. La "nobiltà" di cui parla Darré è un fattore che unisce tanto la nobiltà quanto i contadini in una terminologia comune, che non sembra dato tanto (e solo) dalla razza e dalla nazione che si abita quanto a una non meglio precisata unione spirituale. Per raggiungere questo è necessario 1) contrastare il cristianesimo in qualunque modo e riscoprire le antiche radici germaniche e pagane e 2) ricostituire la società in una forma strettamente feudale. Si potrebbe accusare il libro di voler annullare le differenze di classe con un finto superamento così come di parlare effettivamente molto poco di ecologia, agricoltura e natura in generale (esclusa una fugace parte sulle "necessità" eugenetiche sui corpi delle donne in questa nuova ipotetica società feudale) considerando che Darré è ricordato come uno dei padri dell'ecologia nazista - fu proprio lui a istituire alcune delle prime leggi per la preservazione della Natura nonché a popolarizzare lo slogan nazista di "Sangue e Suolo" - ma esso si perde abbastanza rapidamente in disquisizioni pseudo-storiche poco correlate che annoiano e fanno perdere il filo sulle tematiche centrali del libro. Per il resto è il classico testo dalle teorie assurde (anche per l'epoca) e incoerenti che influenzò l'ideologia nazista che rimane però perfettamente rappresentativo come oggetto di studio per la mentalità del regime.
Ottimo da leggere complementarmente all'illuminante "Ecologia e società nella Germania nazista: Walther Darré e il partito dei verdi di Hitler" di Anna Bramwell, indubbiamente uno dei libri più interessanti mai letto sul nazismo in generale.
Ottimo da leggere complementarmente all'illuminante "Ecologia e società nella Germania nazista: Walther Darré e il partito dei verdi di Hitler" di Anna Bramwell, indubbiamente uno dei libri più interessanti mai letto sul nazismo in generale.
June 28, 2025
While a more readable treatise than other books of this nature, the fundamental flaws persist. The book does provide an insight into the social construction of the National Socialists (and presents an unexpected attitude towards “green” policies) from a historical and traditionally German perspective. It is conceivable that the German populace would succumb to this ultra-traditionalism (that even criticizes and Christianity and Christendom) due to the social policies of the Weimar Republic and the economic conditions following the Treaty of Versailles. Insert a popular, charismatic political leader and the German people were ripe for National Socialism. This book, however, asks a fundamental question that should not be left up to radicals to answer. Who should be the new nobility? Where is the nobility in our society? Is it the wealthy? The Hollywood elite? The politicians? The common man? Because of America’s bold embrace of capitalism, it seems the nobility is to be whoever has the most money (best ideas?). Until this question is answered succinctly and morally, you will have the far-left and the far-right providing easy solutions that will lead to utter chaos and destruction.
April 30, 2023
This is recommended for any serious student of National Socialism and WWII history, otherwise it is rather hard to get through, despite some gems within the entire text.
Most of the book is incredibly dry, academic, and written in a context that is mainly relevant to the government policies of that time.
What I really wanted from the author was more practical application regarding agriculture, permaculture, ecology, resource conservation, nutrition, biology, human development, homesteading, etc. The passages about theoretical "breeding systems," or how to incentivize healthy families and high-quality individuals, were interesting, but ultimately bogged down by extremely dense, bureaucratic language.
In other words, I think the writing and ideas would be much more effective if it drew on science and practice rather than advocating for governmental policy.
Most of the book is incredibly dry, academic, and written in a context that is mainly relevant to the government policies of that time.
What I really wanted from the author was more practical application regarding agriculture, permaculture, ecology, resource conservation, nutrition, biology, human development, homesteading, etc. The passages about theoretical "breeding systems," or how to incentivize healthy families and high-quality individuals, were interesting, but ultimately bogged down by extremely dense, bureaucratic language.
In other words, I think the writing and ideas would be much more effective if it drew on science and practice rather than advocating for governmental policy.
September 18, 2025
The Peasantry as the Lifeblood of the Nordic Race set the racial, agrarian, and philosophical foundations, and this book seeks to implement them into actual policy. Admittedly, this one was not as fun to read.
I enjoy Darré's particular attention to language and titles and the impact they have on shaping a nation's culture. However, an English reader will quickly resort to skimming the occasional long paragraph doting on which German terms should be proposed in these new systems.
Likewise, Chapter 6 on the government's proposed structure and names of agencies was incredibly dry, and much of this book can be considered mere reference material.
There are still some powerful sentiments in this, and it is incredibly important to understanding Blood and Soil put into practice, but it is narrower in scope towards an overall worldview than the former mentioned book.
I enjoy Darré's particular attention to language and titles and the impact they have on shaping a nation's culture. However, an English reader will quickly resort to skimming the occasional long paragraph doting on which German terms should be proposed in these new systems.
Likewise, Chapter 6 on the government's proposed structure and names of agencies was incredibly dry, and much of this book can be considered mere reference material.
There are still some powerful sentiments in this, and it is incredibly important to understanding Blood and Soil put into practice, but it is narrower in scope towards an overall worldview than the former mentioned book.
May 5, 2023
Being a huge WW2 Buff I had to read this one. Honestly it was very different than I thought it was gonna be. He is quite logical in how he points out his arguments. I don't agree with many of his conclusions. But for a piece from the time, it would probably find a lot of fertile ground today amongst many.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews