Summary Of Breeding By Franz Pfeffer Von Salomon

Primary Source Analysis of “Breeding: A demand in relation to the Party Program” by Franz Pfeffer von Salomon (1925)

The Author
Born in 1888 in Düsseldorf to a Prussian Bureaucrat, Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, also known as von Pfeffer, chose as a young man to become a specialized officer in the Prussian army, where he served as both an administrative and combat officer during the First World War .
By the end of the war von Pfeffer held the rank of Captain and in January 1919 went on to form a free corps, a power base that was becoming dangerously large within a bourgeoning Nazi state . His corps fought in regions such as the Ruhr and the Baltic, and in 1926, after a successful career as an independent and persuasive leader, von Pfeffer was

Campbell highlights that while von Pfeffer had an energetic and able personality and was a genuine and determined leader, he was equally conceited and obstinate . “Clearly he was a man who believed he was right and therefore did not like a compromise.” By 1941 however, the SA had developed into an organization that was distinctly in conflict from the Political Organization ideology. Campbell goes on to suggest that it became quiet clear during this time that von Pfeffer’s vision of the SA and Hitler’s were actually more “divergent than they had appeared to be in

Staudenmaier offers the definition of the Volkisch movement as a “powerful cultural disposition and social tendency” which combined ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism . Within Nazi Germany the Volkisch ideals were embellished for the cause of the party and offered a ‘natural’ root to the problems that existed within Germany at the time, namely the Jews and wrongly distributed wealth and power within a nation of unequals.
After the failed Beer hall putsch, Hitler spent a minimum sentence in prison which, drawing on the Volkisch ideas, gave him time to write Mein Kampf, expressing, in his opinion, the reasoned view of the superiority of the ethnic German race and the clear natural order that Darwinism and natural selection supposedly upholds .
In 1920, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) released the ‘Twenty-Five Points’ plan, a program that lays out (in rather vague terms) the goals of the Nazi party in regards to the formation of a new, revolutionised German state. It is within this period that the document takes