Hitler's Home Front

As its subtitle more directly indicates, this is a history of the German Land (federal state) of Württemberg during the Nazi era. Using this relatively narrow geographical base, Jill Stephenson conducts a detailed investigation of the longer-term impacts of war and Nazism on a predominantly agricultural southern German region. Stephenson conceives of her work as a corrective to the standard, mainly urban, Prussian-dominated picture of Germany in the Third Reich. Given that in 1939 nearly a third of the German population still lived in towns of less than 2,000 people (p. 23), and that the survival of a substantial agricultural sector in a rapidly industrialised and urbanised state was one of Germany's central paradoxes, Stephenson argues that examining Nazism from a rural angle is essential. Such a viewpoint challenges prevailing interpretations in three main ways. First, according to Stephenson, sources from rural communities suggest that Nazism's permeation of German society was not as complete as has recently been asserted. Second, Stephenson links her work to debates about the Third Reich's modernising impact, noting that Nazism was not as strong a modernising force in farming communities as it may have been elsewhere. Farm life continued in many ways unaltered throughout the Third Reich, giving way to widespread mechanisation only once the war was over. Stephenson concludes, finally, that it was not Nazism but war, with compulsory military service, controlled food production and distribution, foreign workers and invasive urban evacuees, that brought major changes to rural life

Agrarian society · Agriculture · Archaeology · Economic history · Forced labour under German rule during World War II · Front (military · Geography · German · Nazi concentration camps · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Population · Sociology · State (computer science · World War II · Demography · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law