page_title: Blood and soil
section_title: Lebensraum
hierarchical_section_title: Blood and soil / Nazi implementation / Lebensraum
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Nach dem Feldzug der 18 Tage begann die bisher großzügigste Umsiedlungsaktion der Weltgeschichte. Alle Volksgruppen, die Draußen ihre Aufgaben erfüllt haben, rief der Führer zurück in die Heimat ihrer Väter. Sie helfen jetzt mit beim Ausbau und der Festigung des großdeutschen Reiches. In besonderem Maße werden beim Aufbau des Warthegaues ihre kolonisatorischen Fähigkeiten wirksam werden.
context_page_description: Blood and soil is a nationalist slogan expressing Nazi Germany's ideal of a "racially" defined national body united with a settlement area. By it, rural and farm life forms are idealized as a counterweight to urban ones. It is tied to the contemporaneous German concept of Lebensraum, the belief that the German people were to expand into Eastern Europe, conquering and displacing the native Slavic and Baltic population via Generalplan Ost.
  "Blood and soil" was a key slogan of National Socialist ideology. The nationalist ideology of the Artaman League and the writings of Richard Walther Darré guided agricultural policies which were later adopted by Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Baldur von Schirach.
context_section_description: Blood and soil was one of the foundations of the concept of Lebensraum, "living space". By expanding eastward and transforming those lands into breadbaskets, another blockade, such as that of World War I, would not cause massive food shortages, as that one had, a factor that aided the resonance of "Blood and soil" for the German population. Even Alfred Rosenberg, not hostile to the Slavs as such, regarded their removal from this land, where Germans had once lived, as necessary because of the unity of blood and soil. Mein Kampf prescribed as the unvarying aim of foreign policy the necessity of obtaining land and soil for the German people (again, "German people" defined by the Nazi Party as racially pure).
  While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian "breadbasket" and expressed particular hostility to its "Russian" cities as hotbeds of Russianness and Communism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war. Even during the war itself, Hitler gave orders that Leningrad was to be razed with no consideration given for the survival and feeding of its population. This also called for industry to die off in these regions. The Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns. This would also encourage large families.
  Furthermore, this land, held by "tough peasant races", would serve as a bulwark against attack from Asia.
caption: Origin of German colonisers in annexed Polish territories. Was set in action "Heim ins Reich"
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