A Reich league of one million — how the Nazis organised the allotment

Yesterday's day three walked the estate gardens Migge and his colleagues designed, from the side of the physical ground. The side of ideas belongs to the earlier column Hitler and Migge: subsistence gardens in the age of 'Blood and Soil' — how the emancipatory garden of Leberecht Migge, who declared 'everyone self-sufficient', could be appropriated by Nazi agrarianism. That article handled the history of the ideas. This one is not its sequel. It rewrites the same period using an entirely different body of material — the dates of decrees, the statutes of associations, membership counts, hectares under cultivation, harvest tonnages, and personnel records.

The reason is simple. A story about ideology carries the reader easily toward the safe conclusion that the period was an aberration. Organisation and numbers do not permit that. The Reich league of 1938 had around one million members. Set against the German adult population, that means ordinary people joined in enormous numbers. They were not martyrs to a doctrine; they rented a plot, paid their dues and dug potatoes. The sum of those daily routines was wired into the state as a production apparatus covering 45,000 hectares, and it is the wiring that has to be described.

One caveat up front. Every year, organisation name and figure below is one that could be verified in a source; what could not be verified is left out, and where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated explicitly. On anything touching the Holocaust and forced labour, the verified facts are set down plainly, neither inflated nor played down. Writing vaguely about this period is as harmful as exaggerating about it. And handling numbers means handling the question of whose hands made them and who they failed to count.

As day two of this series — 31 July 1919, the allotment ordinance that hunger wrote — showed, the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung was passed on the same day the National Assembly adopted the Weimar constitution. It did three things. First, it capped rents: land could not be leased above prices set by the lower administrative authority. Second, it restricted termination: under § 3, a lessor could not, as a rule, end such a lease. Third, it created arbitration: under § 4 each district set up a Kleingartenamt, an allotment office, to settle disputes. For the first time, an allotment was land a landowner could not simply erase.

Two years later, on 21 August 1921, the Reichsverband der Kleingartenvereine Deutschlands — the Reich Federation of German Allotment Garden Associations — was founded. Its statute declared its purpose to be the union of all allotment holders while keeping party-political and confessional aims at a distance. No politics inside: in the fractured party landscape of the Weimar Republic, that was a sensible way to protect an association. A body that gathered the country's allotments under one umbrella and professed neutrality. That was the vessel standing ready in 1933.

What follows is the paid section. In order: what happened in Nuremberg in July 1933, who led the resulting league, what the two figures standing side by side in 1938 mean, how the Nazi regime carried over the emergency decree of 1931, and how the garden shed turned into a dwelling after the defeat. Keep hold of the two years already given, 1919 and 1921. The Nazis did not build the allotment system from nothing; they took the law and the organisation that existed and rewrote them through the leader principle.