ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of the political representatives of the large landowners in the Republic and examines that peculiar view of the German economy which served as a legitimisation of conservative politics at the height of the economic crisis. The territorial losses suffered by the German Reich after its defeat in the First World War resulted, in economic terms, in a relative strengthening of its industrial base. The fall in prices and the opening of a ‘price scissors’ to the disadvantage of agricultural producers showed that German agriculture had purchased its modernisation at too high a cost and in general had failed to rationalise its marketing and production. The political behaviour of the mass of agrarian producers in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic and the growing importance of rural voters as supporters of the Nazi Party has preoccupied both contemporary and subsequent observers.
