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The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. They owned great estates that were maintained and worked by peasants with few rights. These estates often lay in the countryside outside of major cities or towns. They were an important factor in Prussia and, after , in German military, political and diplomatic leadership. The most famous Junker was Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck held power in Germany from to as Chancellor of the German Empire. He was removed from power by Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Not only does it persist, but it has recently been given a new lease on life by hypocritical Nazi legislation purporting to abolish it.
The practice of entailing estates, that is, settling them inalienably on a man and his heirs, stems straight from the middle ages. Frederick the Great made extensive use of it to create new Junker ministers for his government and generals for his army.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though voices were repeatedly raised and laws proposed against it, the practice continued and the entailed estates Fideikommisse of Eastern Germany actually increased, both in number and in total acreage. In there were 2, in the Reich, most of them east of the Elbe, comprising a total area of over eight million acres.
The next year a law went into effect which prohibited the creation of new entailed estates and in the Nazis promulgated their own hereditary freehold law Reichserbhofgesetz which was supposed finally to supersede them. That it did not is proved by the facts that in there were still Fideikommisse with a total area of 3,, acres in existence and that the Nazis found it expedient in that year to pass a new edict expressly providing for their dissolution.
Even this contained Junker loopholes. In the second place, the law dissolving the Fideikommisse discreetly provided that in exceptional cases estates larger than acres could also qualify as Erbhofet With the Junkers legally entitled to qualify their estates, somewhat larger than acres though they may be, as Erbhofe, it is scarcely necessary to look elsewhere for evidence of the survival of their influence. The point stands out more glaringly in the light of what the sponsors of the new hereditary freehold law had to say of the Fideikommisse.
If the Reichserbhofgesetz is not a new lease on life for the Junkers, it is at very least no barrier to the continuation of their existence. More than that, it spreads their social influence more widely than ever by creating a legion of little Junkers in their own image. About , of these had made the grade by , and it seems reasonable to assume that they will be no more progressive in politics and social outlook than the original models, whose manners they copy.
The history of the German tariff on agricultural imports need not detain us long. It is comparable, in many respects, to our own. When, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Russian, Argentine, Australian, Canadian, and especially American grain began to invade Europe, the Junker grain producers allied themselves with the big industrialists of the Ruhr and turned to protectionism to save their domestic market. A German farm bloc Bund der Landtvirte was formed under Junker leadership, and in the combined pressure of the two forces, Eisen und Roggen iron and rye forced Bismarck, himself a Junker, to institute an agricultural tariff.
All of the stock protectionist arguments were brought out, including military necessity, defense of the German wage scale and standard of living, maintenance of the rural population, et cetera, but as the tariffs rose, the prosperity of Eastern Germany declined. At the same time the full impact of the industrial revolution made itself felt in a prolonged flight from the land.
From to , while the total population of the Reich increased from 45,, to 65,,, the agricultural population declined from 15,, to 13,,, or from In this nation-wide decline of the agricultural population the share of East Elbian Germany was disproportionately high.
Hundreds of thousands of small peasant farmers migrated into the industrial centers of the west and thence, in a not much smaller stream, overseas, until the population density of the region, as we have already observed, sank well below that of the rest of the Reich. In comparison with these figures the 74, new families that had been settled on the land 56, east of the Elbe up to were a handful of pebbles thrown in a mill race.
The agricultural tariff, itself a symptom, was no remedy for these other effects of the industrial revolution. None of them left the land. Every vacated peasant holding meant an annex to one of their estates. An inexhaustible supply of cheap Polish labor stood ready to hand, and their Pan-German scruples did not deter them from using it.
They simply sat tight and let the winds blow, winds which brought no general good and much harm to East Elbian Germany but no immediate harm to them. For the time being the tariff sheltered them. But not for long. Instead of taking advantage of the breathing spell to reorganize and modernize the economy of their region, they merely consolidated and tended their estates. The tariff did not stop the flight from the land. It did not make Germany self-sufficient in foodstuffs.
It did not promote the general prosperity of Eastern Germany. But it did help the Junkers to survive a few years longer. That it brought them no lasting security is proved beyond a doubt by the blanket of indebtedness with which they began to cover themselves soon after the turn of the century.
From to annual mortgage loans in Prussia increased from to million marks, and on the eve of the First World War the total agricultural indebtedness of the Reich stood at 17,,, marks. The post-war inflation wiped the slate clean, and in after a revaluation of mortgages at 25 per cent of their gold mark value, the total indebtedness was four billion marks.
From this it rose steadily while prices and income fell to a peak of 12,,, marks in , and the interest burden from about 5 per cent to The Nazis have been able to reduce it somewhat by debt moratoria and lowered interest rates, but the mortgage debt has continued to climb and stands today somewhere in the neighborhood of nine billion marks.
Most significantly of all, they have been broken down to show that acute distress has prevailed in certain areas, worst of all east of the Elbe, and Dr. Max Sering, the dean of German agricultural economists, is authority for the statement that the heaviest indebtedness in that region rested on the large peasant and Junker estates. He bases this statement on figures published in by the Rentenbank-Kreditanstalt which show that 69 per cent of the farms of over acres in East Elbian Germany were indebted up to from 61 per cent to per cent of their unit value as compared with 31 per cent of the same size farms in western Germany; and no less than 40 per cent of the large East Elbian farms were indebted over per cent of unit value as compared with 11 per cent in the west.
Studies carried out in by the Reichsverband fur Land-wirtschaftliche Buchfuhrung und Betreuung bear out these conclusions with further evidence showing that an average income of 13, marks for the large farms during the years dwindled to minus 3, marks after payment of interest on debt.
From this predicament the Junkers tried desperately to extricate themselves by means of emergency credit legislation known as the Osthilfe, or eastern relief. In conditions were so bad in East Prussia that the Prussian Government was forced to enact the first of this legislation for that province alone, the Ostpreussenhilfe.
This it did in the form of the elaborate debt conversion and refinancing legislation known as the Osthilfe, enacted in , subsequently amplified in and again, by the Nazis, in It afforded them the same opportunities to convert, refinance, and scale down their debts that it offered to small farmers.
At the same time, it gave them a means of cancelling part of their obligations at public expense by permitting them to sell portions of their enormous estates to government-financed farm settlements. This and other practices, which enabled them to weather yet another storm in which hundreds of thousands of their less-favored countrymen were foundering, led to the suspicion that the Osthilfe funds were being mismanaged in their interests.
An investigation was demanded and carried out during the feverish months of the von Papen and von Schleicher ministries. When the Budget Commission of the Reichstag turned up evidence of collusion between the administrators of the Osthilfe and the Junkers, and Schleicher threatened to make this public, the Junkers turned against him and urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler.
The President required little urging. In he had been presented with his ancestral Junker estate at Neudeck in East Prussia, tax-free and entailed in the name of his son, as a gift from the Reich.
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