Blut & Boden

Blut & Boden  - 500mm x 415mm steel sign

Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden) is a slogan expressing the nineteenth-century German idealization of a racially defined national body "blood" united with a settlement area "soil". By it, rural and farm life forms are not only idealized as a counterweight to urban ones, but are also combined with racist and anti-Semitic ideas of a sedentary Germanic-Nordic peasantry as opposed to (specifically Jewish) nomadism. The contemporary German concept Lebensraum, the belief that the German people needed to reclaim historically German areas of Eastern Europe into which they could expand, is tied to it.

"Blood and soil" was a key slogan of Nazi ideology. The nationalist ideology of Artamanen and the writings of Walther Darré guided Nazi agricultural policies which were later adopted by Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Baldur von Schirach.