httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGHXDZ5GIxo
Story highlightsThe chant of “Blood and soil” invokes a Nazi philosophy.
Video shows some of the protesters shouting “Blood and soil,” a phrase invoking the Nazi philosophy of “Blut und Boden.” The ideology stressed that ethnic identity is based on only blood descent and the territory in which an individual lives – and it celebrated rural farmers and peasants as virtuous Germans.
The “Blood and soil” chants began Friday night when torch-bearing protesters marched at the University of Virginia and clashed with counterprotesters.
The phrase dates to the earliest days of Nazi propaganda.
Richard Walther Darré, who served as the Nazis’ minister of agriculture between 1933 and 1942, championed the “Blood and soil” ideology.
Many rural farmers identified with the Nazis’ blood and soil rhetoric, and it instilled a deep sense of national pride in poorer and agricultural populations.
Some Nazi propaganda also insisted that most Jewish people were merchants – stereotyping the population as distinctly opposite from the “Blood and soil” German farmers.