Nazi Politician, he was one of the leading Nazi "blood and soil" (German: Blut und Boden) ideologists and served as Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942. He was an SS-Obergruppenführer and the seventh most senior officer of the SS. When WWII ended, Darré was the senior most SS-Obergruppenführer, outranked only by Heinrich Himmler and the four SS-Oberst-Gruppenführers. As a young man, he initially joined the Artaman League, a Völkisch youth-group committed to the back-to-the-land movement. He began to develop the idea of the linkage between the future of the Nordic race and the soil: the tendency which became known as "Blut und Boden". The essence of the theory involved the mutual and long-term relationship between a people and the land that it occupies and cultivates. In July 1930 he joined the Nazi Party and the SS. He became a Reichsleiter and set up an agrarian political apparatus to recruit farmers into the party. In 1932, Reichsführer-SS Himmler appointed him chief of the newly established SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), a department which implemented racial policies and was concerned with the racial integrity of the members of the SS. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he became Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, and was also named Reich Peasant Leader. He campaigned for big landowners to part with some of their land to create new farms. He also converted most of the country's small farms into hereditary estates that were to be passed from father to son under the ancient laws of entailment. While this protected small farmers from foreclosure and many other modern financial problems, it also tied them and their descendants to the soil to the end of time. He developed a plan for "race and space" which provided the ideological background for the Nazi expansive policy on behalf of the "Drive to the east" and the "Living space" theory expounded in Mein Kampf. He strongly influenced Himmler in his goal to create a German racial aristocracy based on selective breeding. Himmler would later break with Darré, whom he saw as too theoretical. Darré was also on bad terms with Economy Minister Hjalmar Schacht, particularly as Germany suffered poor harvests in the mid 1930s. By 1938, Himmler was demanding that Darré step down as leader of the RuSHA, and he finally had to resign as Reich Minister in 1942, ostensibly on health grounds. In 1945 the American authorities arrested Darré and tried him at the subsequent Nuremberg Trials as one of defendants in the Ministries Trial. He was sentenced to seven years at Landsberg Prison and was released in 1950.