Rural People's Movement (Schleswig-Holstein)

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The Schleswig-Holstein rural people movement was a protest movement at the end of the 1920s that soon spread to other parts of the German Empire . It manifested itself through demonstrations, organized a tax boycott and individual members carried out several bomb attacks. The leaders of the movement were Claus Heim and Wilhelm Hamkens . Her symbol was a black flag with a silver plow and a red sword .

Socio-economic prerequisites

The First World War and the forced economy that had persisted from the hunger winter of 1917 to 1922 had caused a major investment backlog in agriculture . The great German inflation from 1914 to 1923 cleared up numerous farms, but also wiped out the farmers' savings . As the price gap between agricultural and industrial products widened with lagging machine equipment (up to the 1960s, by the way) , farmers were forced to take out new loans because the investments needed to modernize the infrastructure or to purchase were necessary by modern machines, could not be generated by the sale of the agricultural products. Most of the loans were US reconstruction loans, which, unlike pre-war loans, had short terms and relatively high interest rates . Many underestimated this risk.

From 1925 the German Reich was able to conclude international trade agreements again. This opened up the German market primarily to agricultural imports - to the detriment of local farmers. Rising taxes and levies created additional burdens.

The steadily increasing number of foreclosures throughout the empire proves that more and more agricultural businesses were in dire straits . The onset of the agricultural crisis and the global economic crisis from 1929 onwards led to a general decline in the price of agricultural products due to falling domestic demand . Many businesses collapsed under the burden of debt. Neither the government nor the agricultural trade union, which was split up into three associations, were in a position to provide effective remedial action.

The aggravated situation - especially in Schleswig-Holstein, which was additionally shaken by bad harvests and floods - led to a radicalization of the rural population.

This radicalization was favored by the change from an agricultural to an industrial society , which had slowly taken place since the end of the 19th century. In the German Empire , the agrarian milieu was still firmly integrated into society, as it was considered a pillar of the monarchical system. This gradual loss of importance led to an alienation from the democratic system of the Weimar Republic, with which many farmers could not identify.

The region

The Dithmarsch peasants were mainly marshland farmers, the wealthiest in Northern Germany and without resident wealthy nobility who fattened the cattle for slaughter . Their farms were old and were not divided in the event of inheritance ( inheritance law ), there were large farmers and farm workers who worked for wages. The clearly poorer Geest farmers , like the march farmers, were always free, never serfs . However, they had no agricultural self-government like the Eiderstedter or Dithmarscher, but were directly subject to the sovereign and had to provide services and taxes until the peasants were liberated. The eastern hill country had a long feudal tradition with dukes, serf peasants and large estates. There were subordinate villages here until 1918.

In 1918 the Schleswig-Holstein farmers 'and agricultural workers' democracy was founded, which initially achieved high electoral successes (Geest 38.4%) due to the forced economy by the war food office and the continued existence of the old large estates , but collapsed again in 1921 when the revolutionary movement had ebbed.

The marshland areas on the Elbe and west coast were particularly affected by foreclosures . In the districts of Pinneberg and Steinburg as well as in Süderdithmarschen , many farmers specialized in the capital-intensive and market-dependent pig fattening . The region was considered the center of German pig production. When pork prices collapsed in 1927 due to cheap frozen meat imports from Poland , many companies were on the verge of collapse.

Actions and protest

Flag of the rural people movement

For the first protest rallies on January 28, 1928, a total of 140,000 people met on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. In Heide (Holstein) alone , 20,000 farmers came to a rally. The rallies were mainly organized by Otto Johannsen from Westerdeichstrich ( Norderdithmarschen ). Talks with the government failed relatively quickly, the movement began to radicalize and Johannsen was increasingly sidelined. Claus Heim from St. Annen (Norderdithmarschen) and Wilhelm Hamkens from Tetenbüll (Eiderstedt) took over the leadership . There were also numerous demonstrations in the Oldenburger Münsterland and the Emsland / Bentheim region , including a. In mid-January 1928 for a large demonstration in Lingen an der Ems . Politically, the Christian National Peasant and Rural People's Party and the German-Hanoverian Party benefited from the displeasure of the rural population, who turned away from the center in Oldenburger Münsterland and Emsland, and from the German National People's Party in the county of Bentheim .

The first measures of passive disobedience were a tax boycott and resistance to seizures and foreclosures. The chiefs , country hunters and community servants who were involved in these actions and who also lived in the villages were exposed to social pressure and even brawls. Often a large group of farmers would gather on such occasions and try to hinder what was happening. A particularly well-known case was the Beidenflether ox fire on November 19, 1928. When two oxen attempted to seize two oxen, around 200 farmers armed with sticks gathered who also lit fire and thus made the oxen wild. The executing community servants were driven to flight and first had to come back with the police to confiscate the animals. 55 of the farmers were later arrested for the action. At the auction, the oxen could be bought back through donations to Beidenfleth, which turned out to be a great public success for the rural people movement.

On March 4, 1929, the Steinburger emergency aid movement was founded . 1,200 farmers in Itzehoe had gathered, burned their tax bills, declared by Article 1 of the Weimar Constitution to the people and explained the measures taken against her consent tax bills for unlawful . In August 1929 a large demonstration took place in Neumünster . The peasants brought their new flag, black with a silver plow and red sword, as a flagpole a straight forged scythe . There were several clashes with the police, who were armed with sabers. Most importantly, the flag was confiscated, which led to farmers boycotting the agriculture-dependent city for ten months, which brought it to the brink of ruin. This was only ended with a ceremonial handover of the flag to members of the movement.

Individuals like Claus Heim, who was the first to publicly raise the idea of ​​the tax boycott as early as 1928, went further. They went from more or less passive resistance to active deeds - an idea that was also widely echoed in the movement. This is a popular song of the time:

Mr. District Administrator , don't worry,
you won't live long ...

Tonight at two,
we'll visit you
with the alarm clock, the explosives
and the pocket battery!

Already in the winter of 1928/29 there had been differences within the rural people's movement about how to proceed. While the wing around Wilhelm Hamkens relied on nonviolent actions, others around Heim took a more radical path. Under his leadership, a group from the völkisch milieu , which u. a. Connections to former volunteer corps members had several bomb attacks. It started with an attack on April 6, 1929 in the small town of Wesselburen in Dithmarsch , where two hand grenades were thrown at farmhouses whose owners were opponents of the rural people's movement. Both hand grenades did not fire, however. Then he organized numerous attacks on district and tax offices until September 6, including in Schleswig , Niebüll and Lüneburg . Bombs were also deposited in the private homes of individual government officials. Nobody was injured. In order to finance the rural people's movement and the attacks, Heim had sold a considerable part of his farm in St. Annen-Österfeld and went into great debt.

media

The most important medium of the movement was Das Landvolk with the subheading Lewwer duad üs Slaaw! (an allusion to Detlev von Liliencron's ballad Pidder Lüng ), which appeared in 1929/1931 with a circulation of up to 12,000 copies. After his release from prison, Claus Heim published Dusendüwelswarf until it was banned in 1933 . Both newspapers argued nationally and völkisch and built on the blood-and-soil ideology . At the time, there were “politically colorful people” such as Ernst and Bruno von Salomon and Bodo Uhse , but no farmers or agricultural experts, active in the newspaper editorial offices. The language and ideology of the newspapers can therefore only be regarded as valid to a limited extent for the rural people.

Rural People's Movement and National Socialism

The rural people's movement combined with nationalist organizations and the NSDAP (especially with their "proletarian wing" around Otto Strasser ), anti-parliamentarism, anti-Semitism, class notions of order, cultural pessimism and nationalism.

When, in addition to passive resistance, there were also bombings against tax and district offices of the group around Claus Heim, some farmers withdrew. The NSDAP also considered it tactically advisable to move away from the rural people movement. After one of the first serious clashes in Neumünster in the late summer of 1929, Hitler forbade members of the NSDAP from any activity in the rural people's movement in an official party order. The Schleswig-Holstein NSDAP Gauleiter had already pointed out in a circular in March that the party, which was trying to convince the public of its legal intentions, had been very damaged to be associated with the rural people movement.

For the NSDAP, the rural people movement was a competitor, although ideologically there was a close relationship between the two. When the movement collapsed, most of its supporters went to the NSDAP. With its agitation based on anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist motives, however, it had essentially laid the foundation for the breakthrough of the National Socialists , who achieved above-average election results in the strongholds of the rural people's movement. In the Reichstag election in 1928 , they reached around 17% in each of the two Dithmarsch districts and around 10% in Steinburg, while they were still 2.6% across the whole of the Reich. The transitions between the rural people's movement and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) were fluid, and many rural people were already members of the NSDAP. The rural people leader Wilhelm Hamkens from Tetenbüll, not to be confused with the NSDAP member of the same name, Wilhelm Hamkens , withdrew from public life during the Nazi era.

Literary reception

The rural people movement is the subject of Hans Fallada's book Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (1931). It is about how Ehrhardt people and Stahlhelm activists try to reinterpret the actions of the rural people movement into their model of a conservative revolution .

Ernst von Salomon describes the history of the rural people's movement in his semi-documentary novel Die Stadt (1932). In his later work The Questionnaire (1951) the author reports within several chapters about his own work for Das Landvolk , the movement's newspaper.

Herbert Volck describes the events in his book Rebels for Honor. My struggle for the national uprising (1932) from a völkisch-nationalist point of view.

Bodo Uhse reports in his autobiographical novel Söldner und Soldat (1935) from the perspective of the enemy, who is getting closer and closer. Uhse was editor-in-chief of the National Socialist Schleswig-Holstein daily newspaper in Itzehoe , which was in ideological and journalistic competition with the daily newspaper Das Landvolk (also Itzehoe). After his release he became active for the rural people movement.

See also

literature

Contemporary literature

  • Lebenswogen (unpublished manuscript) Claus Heim (estate)
  • Among the explosives bombers ... (unpublished typescript, Claus Heim estate, family property) Claus Heim
  • Under the black peasant flag. The rural people movement in the struggle for Germany's liberation by Jürgen Schimmelreiter (pseud. Peter Petersen ), Munich 1929 (first independent publication on the subject at all)
  • New Prussian Peasants' War: Origin and Struggle of the Rural People's Movement by Walter Luetgebrune , Hamburg a. a. 1931
  • Rebels for Honor: My Struggle for the National Revolt 1918-33 by Herbert Volck , Berlin 1932
  • Farmers, bigwigs, bombs by Hans Fallada , Berlin 1931 (novel)
  • The city of Ernst von Salomon , Berlin 1932
  • The questionnaire of Ernst von Salomon, Hamburg 1951 (autobiographical novel)
  • Mercenary and soldier by Bodo Uhse , Éditions du Carrefour, Paris 1935 (autobiographical novel reprinted several times, most recently: Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 978-3-7466-0140-3 ).

Representations

  • Author collective: Farmers and bombs: Claus Heim in the Schleswig-Holstein rural people movement. In: autonomy. No. 12, Sept. 1978, ISSN  0341-3640 , pp. 46-73.
  • Hans Beyer : The rural people movement of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony 1928-1932. In: Yearbook of the home association of the Eckernförde district. 15, 1957, ISSN  0179-8804 , pp. 173-202.
  • Hans Beyer : The agrarian crisis and the rural people's movement in the years 1928–1932. A contribution to the history of “revolutionary” peasant movements between the two world wars . In: Archive for Agricultural History of the Holstein Elbmarschen , Archive of the Elbmarschen 5/6, 1983, pp. 156–187, (PDF). (Reprint of the publication in the publishing house of the Heimatverband for the Steinburg district from 1962).
  • Lutz Fahlbusch: Rural People Movement 1928–1932. In: Dieter Fricke u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon on the history of parties. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties and associations in Germany (1789–1945) . Volume 3: General Association of German Employees' Unions - Reich and Free Conservative Parties. License issue. VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1983. Western edition as: Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1985, ISBN 3-7609-0878-0 , pp. 347-353.
  • Susanne Heim : The rural people movement in Schleswig-Holstein 1928/29. An analysis of their socio-economic conditions and forms of political action. Hamburg 1980 (University of Hamburg, Department of Political Sciences, diploma thesis 1980).
  • Rudolf Heberle : Rural Population and National Socialism. A sociological study of the formation of political will in Schleswig-Holstein 1918–1932 (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history 6, ISSN  0506-9408 ). German publishing house, Stuttgart 1963.
  • Michelle Le Bars: Le mouvement paysan dans le Schleswig-Holstein 1928–1932 (= Contacts. Sér. 3, Volume 2). Lang, Bern a. a. 1986, ISBN 3-261-04071-8 .
  • Helmut Lensing: The rural people in need movement of 1928 in Emsland. In: Yearbook of the Emsland Heimatbund. 40, 1994, ISSN  0448-1410 , pp. 44-63.
  • Alexander Otto-Morris: Rebellion in the Province. The Landvolkbewegung and the Rise of National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-631-58194-0 .
  • Onno Poppinga : Rural People's Movement . In: Farmers and Politics (part of studies on social theory ). European Publishing House , Frankfurt am Main / Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-434-20077-0 , pp. 160–168.
  • Dirk Stegmann: Political radicalization in the provinces. Status reports and strength reports from the political police and the regional presidents for East Hanover 1922–1933 (= publications by the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen. Sources and studies on the general history of Lower Saxony in modern times 16). Hahn, Hannover 1999, ISBN 3-7752-5909-0 .
  • Gerhard Stoltenberg : Political currents in the Schleswig-Holstein rural population 1918–1933. A contribution to the formation of political opinion in the Weimar Republic (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties 24, ISSN  0522-6643 ). Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1962 (also: Kiel, Univ., Habil.-Schr.).
  • Nils Werner: The trials against the rural people movement in Schleswig-Holstein 1929/32. A contribution to judicial criticism in the late Weimar Republic (= legal history series 249). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2001, ISBN 3-631-38429-7 (also: Kiel, Univ., Diss., 2001).
  • Rural people movement: the fathers fighting nature . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1963 ( online ).

documentary

  • Documentary about the rural people movement: Blunt scythe - sharp steel, farmers, industry and National Socialism ; Director: Quinka F. Stoehr, Kay Ilfrich and Jens Schmidt, 95 min., D 1990.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Onno Poppinga : Landvolkbewegung . In: Farmers and Politics (part of studies on social theory ). European Publishing House , Frankfurt am Main / Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-434-20077-0 , pp. 160–168.
  2. ^ Onno Poppinga : Peasants and Politics . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main / Cologne 1975, ISBN 978-3-434-20077-2 , p. 166.
  3. ^ Onno Poppinga: Peasants and Politics . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main / Cologne 1975, p. 157 f.
  4. ^ Onno Poppinga: Peasants and Politics . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main / Cologne 1975, p. 159.
  5. ^ Reichstag election in 1928 in the Schleswig region.
  6. ↑ Christian M. Sörensen: Political Development and Rise of the NSDAP in the Husum and Eiderstedt districts 1918–1933 . Neumünster 1995, p. 234.