Hitler, Germany's Embattled Farmers, and the Powerful Farm Lobby

In so far as economic interests were responsible for the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the installation on 30 January 1933 of Hitler's government, the group chiefly responsible was not big business or even heavy industry, but Germany's embattled farmers. Ever since the 1870s, agriculture had been a lost cause to liberalism. Bismarck had won over the agrarians in 1879 with the imposition of the first substantial grain tariff. This had not halted the decline of agriculture, but it had significantly slowed what might otherwise have been a very dramatic process of social displacement and internal migration. In the mid-nineteenth century the share of workers in agriculture had stood at a half. By 1925 that had fallen to 25 per cent, but this still meant that 13 million people depended directly on farming for a living. The farm lobby was thus a vital constituency for all political parties other than the Social Democrats and Communists, neither of whom managed to devise a credible agrarian programme.

--Adam Tooze, introduction to The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 29.