[5] They lived prosperously and educated their children privately, until they were forced to return to Germany as a result of worsening international relations in the years preceding World War I. Darré gained fluency in four languages: Spanish, German, English, and French.

Richard (as he was known in the family) then spent two years at the Oberrealschule in Gummersbach, followed in early 1914 by the Kolonialschule for resettlement in the German colonies at Witzenhausen, south of Göttingen, which awakened his interest in farming.

[6] When the war ended, he contemplated returning to Argentina for a life of farming, but the family's weakening financial position during the years of inflation made that impossible.

As a young man in Germany, Darré initially joined the Artaman League, a Völkisch youth-group committed to the back-to-the-land movement.

Darré's first political article (1926) discussed Internal Colonisation and argued against Germany attempting to regain its lost colonies in Africa.

He wrote his first book, Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse ('Peasantry as the life-source of the Nordic Race'), in 1928.

[9] It asserted that German farms had previously been bestowed on one son, the strongest, ensuring the best were farmers, but partible inheritance had destroyed that.

He advocated more natural methods of land management, placing emphasis on the conservation of forests, and demanded more open space and air in the raising of farm animals.

[10] Another acknowledges Bramwell's biography as "undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English", while at the same time saying that she "consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical.

However, on 29 June 1933, shortly after the approval by the Reichstag of the Enabling Act of 23 March, he became Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, succeeding DNVP leader Alfred Hugenberg, who had resigned.

[19] Darré went on to set up an agrarian political apparatus to recruit farmers into the party operating along three main directives: to exploit unrest in the countryside as a weapon against urban governments; to win over the farmers as staunch Nazi supporters; to gain a constituency of people to be used as settlers displacing the Slavs in future land grabs in the East.

The German historian Klaus Hildebrand described Darré together with Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg as one of the leaders of the "agrarian" fraction within the NSDAP who championed anti-industrial and anti-urban "blood and soil" ideology, expansion into Eastern Europe to gain Lebensraum, an alliance with Great Britain to defeat the Soviet Union, and staunch opposition to restoring the pre-1914 German colonial empire.

While the law protected small farmers from foreclosure and the ordeal of repossession, it also tied them and their descendants to their hereditary farm forever, not allowing it to be alienated nor mortgaged.

[24] Darré strongly influenced Himmler in his goal to create a German racial aristocracy based on selective breeding.

[citation needed] Darré's influence began to wane as Hitler and Himmler both came to feel that he was too much of a theoretician and an incompetent administrator.

[15] By September 1938, Himmler demanded that Darré step down as leader of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office in favour of Günther Pancke.

[26] Darré was later placed on an extended leave of absence as Reich Minister on 23 May 1942, ostensibly on health grounds, and his duties were assumed by his State Secretary, Herbert Backe.

[28] However, Darré was effectively sidelined from May 1942 and retired to his hunting lodge in the Schorfheide forest outside Berlin until the end of the Nazi regime.

we actually have in mind a modern form of medieval slavery which we must and will introduce because we urgently need it in order to fulfil our great tasks.

These slaves will by no means be denied the blessings of illiteracy; higher education will, in future, be reserved only for the German population of Europe .

In his two main writings, Darré accused Christianity, with its "teaching of the equality of men before God," of having "deprived the Teutonic nobility of its moral foundations", the "innate sense of superiority over the nomadic tribes".