Book excerpt: A political biography of Darre, appointed National Peasant Leader and Minister of Food and Agriculture in 1933. Argues that his ecological ideas are still worthy of attention despite his racism. Although he believed in eugenics and Nordic racism, he did not emphasize their antisemitic aspect until after joining the Nazi Party in 1930, when he began to speak of the Jews as leaders of the capitalist urban threat to rural Germany and of an international Jewish conspiracy. He opposed anti-Jewish boycotts and delayed the Aryanization of Jewish land until 1940, not wanting his land reform program to be controlled by Nazi antisemitism. Although he was excluded from policy decisions after 1939, and dismissed in 1942, Darre was tried as a war criminal in 1949 and found guilty of participation in the Aryanization program and of expropriation of Polish and Jewish farmlands during the resettlement of ethnic Germans.