ABSTRACT
The ErbhOfe never covered more than about one-third of all farms, and they contributed little to the improvement of agricultural efficiency. The farming community itself was not enamoured with entailment. Many viewed the legislation as restrictive on freedom and on the new guarantees against sequestration in cases of farm indebtedness, even with the compensations of guaranteed prices which were introduced almost simultaneously under the newly formed Reich Food Estate. Outside the entailment legislation were the mass of small-holdings, as obvious an arena for land reform as any, and then at the further extreme the vast Junker estates east of the Elbe. In 1938, 2.5 million of the smallest farmholdings had less land area than the top 1 per cent of holdings (Fig. 3.18). Had entailment been part of a comprehensive land reform programme, some improvement in efficiency might have been obtained. Such a reform had certainly long been in the party programme. But as became so typical of National Socialism in practice, party commitments were implemented haphazardly, the more immediate needs of the regime readily holding precedence. Radical land reform would have compromised the regime's drive for agricultural self-sufficiency in preparation for war. Entailment, therefore, was hardly a political measure and even less an economic one. Most of all it was part of the great myth propagated by the Nazis about the rebirth of German nationhood - the anticipated volkisch empire. The regime organised its own annual harvest festival, supposedly
