The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

by Adam Tooze

Allowing for the natural increase which Darré believed should have been expected, he arrived at the shock figure of 700,000 for the number of workers lost to agriculture since 1933.72 Of course, agricultural labour had long been at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy. But the racist ideologues of Nazi agrarianism now feared that farm labour was becoming a sink for the least valuable elements in German society.73 RNS experts scared themselves with surveys such as one conducted in the vicinity of Goettingen that counted four cases of ‘subnormality’ and two forced sterilizations in a sample of only twenty-six unmarried maids. In Marienburg the situation was no better with six cases of ‘subnormality’ and one forced sterilization in a sample of thirty-eight. This, needless to say, was not how Darré and his cohorts had imagined the future of the new countryside.