At the end of World War Two, the German people hastily rid themselves of the propaganda from the Third Reich, much was burned and buried, weapons and munitions thrown into the village pond. Decades later artifacts that were once quickly thrown into the garbage of history slowly come back to light. On a pile of rubble behind the bust of Adolf Hitler lies the Deutschen Bauern odal rune cast iron relief of the Erbhof, part of a group of artifacts of German rural history unearthed in the museum village Hösseringen 1997/98. (Image right; Copyright Lanwirtschaftsmuseum Lüneburger Heide, Heft Nr 28) [1]
The National Socialists saw the farmer as the first and deepest representative of the people since he nourishes the people from the fertility of the earth, and since he maintains the nation through the fertility of his own family. Here National Socialism had to accomplish two legal ends: the re-establishment and the protection of the farmer class and the securing of its land for the farmer family.
Legislation concerning property rights from 1933-1945 shows a great number of statutes and decrees on various other questions but in respect of the “peasant’s estate” (Erbhof) only three important problems were actually dealt with[2]:
- Separation of agricultural property from the capitalistic economy
- Liberation of real property from capitalistic enslavement
- Protection of the tenants.
The “separation of agricultural property from the capitalistic economy” was attempted only for that part of the agricultural, domain regarded as the most important, namely, the “peasant’s estate”; comprising land, house, barn, and implements. This estate was established as a single, separate, indivisible unit,, not transferable by contract, deed, or will, descending from father to son as an integral whole. The law of the “peasant’s estate” has been regulated by a series of statutes and decrees and has been developed so as to constitute a more or less independent legal system. All the rules, concerning peasants’ estates refer only to this special class of agricultural property. For other agricultural property which did not form a peasant’s estate the connection with the normal economic system was not dissolved.[2]