Rural People's Movement

Last updated

The Rural People's Movement (German : Landvolkbewegung) was a farmers' protest movement in northern Germany from 1928 to 1933. Due to an agricultural crisis, demonstrations took place in numerous towns and cities in early 1928, and deputations were sent to Berlin to voice grievances against trade and tax policies. Farmers' continuing financial difficulties and dissatisfaction with their own lobby organizations led to more radical protests, especially in the province of Schleswig-Holstein, from late 1928. Passive resistance included tax strikes and the obstruction of foreclosures, but some farmers, with the assistance of nationalist radicals, resorted to terrorist methods. Throughout 1929 bombs were placed in public buildings, including the Reichstag. The Rural People's Movement ran its own newspaper "Das Landvolk" which was edited by Bruno von Salomon, the brother of Ernst von Salomon. With the arrest of the bombers and many of its leaders, as well as the rise of the Nazi Party, the Landvolk declined from 1930.

Hans Fallada's first successful novel, A Small Circus (Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben), was based on the farmers' protests, especially a demonstration and boycott of the town of Neumünster.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prussia</span> European state, existing from 1525 to 1947

Prussia was a German state located on most of the North European Plain, also occupying southern and eastern regions. It formed the German Empire when it united the German states in 1871. It was de facto dissolved by an emergency decree transferring powers of the Prussian government to German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1932 and de jure by an Allied decree in 1947. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, expanding its size with the Prussian Army. Prussia, with its capital at Königsberg and then, when it became the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, Berlin, decisively shaped the history of Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German National People's Party</span> Political party in Germany

The German National People's Party was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalist, monarchist, völkisch, and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League. Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism, German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum, it belonged on the right-wing, and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glückstadt</span> Town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Glückstadt is a town in the Steinburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is located on the right bank of the Lower Elbe at the confluence of the small Rhin river, about 45 km (28 mi) northwest of Altona. Glückstadt is part of the Hamburg Metropolitan Region.

Ernst von Salomon was a German novelist and screenwriter. He was a Weimar-era national-revolutionary activist and right-wing Freikorps member.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altona, Hamburg</span> Borough of Hamburg in Germany

Altona, also called Hamburg-Altona, is the westernmost urban borough (Bezirk) of the German city state of Hamburg. Located on the right bank of the Elbe river, Altona had a population of 270,263 in 2016.

In the fourteen years the Weimar Republic was in existence, some forty parties were represented in the Reichstag. This fragmentation of political power was in part due to the use of a peculiar proportional representation electoral system that encouraged regional or small special interest parties and in part due to the many challenges facing the nascent German democracy in this period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neumünster</span> Town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Neumünster is a city in the middle of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. With more than 79,000 registered inhabitants, it is the fourth-largest municipality in Schleswig-Holstein. The Holstenhallen and the Stadthalle make the city an important trade fair location.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geesthacht</span> Town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

Geesthacht is the largest city in the District of the Duchy of Lauenburg in Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany, 34 kilometres (21 mi) south-east of Hamburg on the right bank of the River Elbe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hinrich Lohse</span> Nazi German politician (1896–1964)

Hinrich Lohse was a German Nazi Party politician and a convicted war criminal, best known for his rule of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, during World War II. Reichskommissariat Ostland comprised the states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and parts of modern day Belarus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free State of Prussia</span> Successor state of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1918 to 1947

The Free State of Prussia was one of the constituent states of Germany from 1918 to 1947. The successor to the Kingdom of Prussia after the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, it continued to be the dominant state in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as it had been during the empire, even though most of Germany's post-war territorial losses in Europe had come from its lands. It was home to the federal capital Berlin and had 62% of Germany's territory and 61% of its population. Prussia changed from the authoritarian state it had been in the past and became a parliamentary democracy under its 1920 constitution. During the Weimar period it was governed almost entirely by pro-democratic parties and proved more politically stable than the Republic itself. With only brief interruptions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) provided the Minister President. Its Ministers of the Interior, also from the SPD, pushed republican reform of the administration and police, with the result that Prussia was considered a bulwark of democracy within the Weimar Republic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party</span> Political party in Germany

The Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party was an agrarian political party of Weimar Germany. It developed from the German National People's Party (DNVP) in 1928.

The Agricultural League or National Rural League was a German agrarian association during the Weimar Republic which was led by landowners with property east of the Elbe. It was allied with the German National People's Party and later the National Socialist German Workers' Party

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernst Graf zu Reventlow</span> German naval officer, journalist and Nazi politician

Ernst Christian Einar Ludvig Detlev, Graf zu Reventlow was a German naval officer, journalist and Nazi politician.

The Tannenbergbund was a nationalist German political society formed in September 1925 at the instigation of Konstantin Hierl under the patronage of the former German Army general Erich Ludendorff. Part of the Völkisch movement, it was meant to counteract the Der Stahlhelm veterans association as well as the reorganized Sturmabteilung (SA) of the Nazi Party. The TB failed to meet the goal of a far-right collective movement and sank into insignificance long before it was officially banned by the Nazi authorities in September 1933.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bodo Uhse</span> German writer, journalist and political activist (1904–1963)

Bodo Uhse was a German writer, journalist and political activist. He was recognised as one of the most prominent authors in East Germany.

Altona Bloody Sunday is the name given to the events of 17 July 1932 when a recruitment march by the Nazi SA led to violent clashes between the police, the SA and supporters of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Altona, which at the time belonged to the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein but is now part of Hamburg. Eighteen people were killed. The national government under Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg used the incident as a rationale to depose the acting government of the Free State of Prussia by means of an emergency decree in what came to be known as the Prussian coup d'état of 20 July 1932.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gau Schleswig-Holstein</span>

The Gau Schleswig-Holstein was formed on 26 February 1925. It was an administrative division of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 in the Prussian Province of Schleswig-Holstein, parts of the Free State of Oldenburg and, from 1 April 1937, the Free City of Lübeck. Before that, from 1925 to 1933, it was the regional subdivision of the Nazi Party in that area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Refugees in Schleswig-Holstein after the Second World War</span>

The influx of refugees in Schleswig-Holstein after the Second World War was one of the biggest difficulties faced in Germany in the early post-war period. Per capita, the Province of Schleswig-Holstein of Prussia, later the state of Schleswig-Holstein, took in the second-most refugees and displaced persons from the former eastern territories of Germany between 1944 and 1947, second only to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This led to an economic and humanitarian crisis in the state throughout the late 1940s. The situation was only resolved in the 1950s as the Wirtschaftswunder enabled physical reconstruction, raised living standards, and aided in integrating the hundreds of thousands of new residents.

Like other areas under Nazi Germany, Jews were persecuted in the northernmost German state Schleswig-Holstein. Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, an estimated 1,900 Jews lived in Schleswig-Holstein, mostly in Lübeck and Kiel. By the time of Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, many of Schleswig-Holstein's Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Claus Heim was a German farmer and political activist. Alongside Wilhelm Hamkens, Heim was the most important leader of the Schleswig-Holstein Rural People's Movement (Landvolkbewegung).

References