In the name of freedom, nineteenth-century liberals had broken the fundamental bond that connected the German people to the soil. They had uprooted millions of peasants and turned land itself into a commodity, to be freely bought and sold. It was this capitalistic expropriation that had set in motion the disastrous process of migration and degeneration that had depleted the German countryside. Since unification in 1871, each national census had recorded a lower share of the population employed in farming. For Darré, the dire consequences of this development were most starkly evident in the
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