Anna Bramwell, "Blood and Soil: Walther Darre & Hitler's 'Green Party'" (1985)

This book is certainly challenging, in that it presents both a significant 'rewriting' of the history of Nazi Germany, an intensive analysis of ideological clashes within German National Socialism, and a troubling apparent sympathy for some aspects of that movement.

Bramwell offers two core theses:
1) Walther Darre was found guilty of war crimes that he should not have been.
2) Echoes of Darre’s philosophies can be found in contemporary Europe, if not globally, thus suggesting that they cannot be regarded as intrinsic to fascistic/national socialist ideology.

Bramwell explores the evolution of Darre’s thought through his pre-Nazi era writings, the policies and pronouncements of the Nazi era, as well as his post-Nazi writing. She notes that Darre’s anti-semitism, given the absence of this position in his pre-Nazi writing, may have been adopted merely as a pragmatic attempt to curry favour with powerful anti-semitic Nazis such as Hitler. She spends a significant amount of effort exploring Darre’s interests in the peasantry, and how his aims for preserving and strengthening Germany’s peasant class did not include the claiming of substantial new lebensraum in the East, nor the use of a vast number of non-German forced labourers for the purposes of maintaining or increasing agricultural output.


You can read it for yourself, if you go to:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/155137318/Bramwell-Anna-Blood-and-Soil-Richard-Walther-Darre-and-Hitler’s-‘Green-Party’