Overview

What was life like for ordinary Germans under Hitler? Hitler's Home Front paints a picture of life in Wnrttemberg, a region in south-west Germany, during the rise to power and rule of the Nazis. It concentrates in particular on life in the countryside. Many Wnrttembergers, while not actively opposing Hitler, carried on their normal lives before 1939, with their traditional loyalties, to region, village, church and family, balancing the claims of Nazism. The Nazis did not kill its own citizens (other than the Jews) in the way that Stalinist Russia did, and there were limits to the numbers and power of the Gestapo and to the reach of the Nazi state. Yet the region could not escape the catastrophic effect of the war, as conscription, labour shortages, migrant labour, bombing, hunger and defeat overwhelmed the lives of everyone.

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9781852854423

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Reviews

Stephenson has produced a deeply analytical, thoroughly researched, perceptive study of all aspects of live in Germany during the Second World War. - European History Quarterly

Her finely textured analysis of the politics of the everyday life in the hinterlands of southwestern Germany underscores the widely acknowledged difficulty of reducing grassroots behavior in the Third Reich to simple categories of support and opposition...all readers will likely appreciate the wealth of local detail she has unearthed to support her conclusions. - The Historian--,

Stephenson's consideration of Nazism in terms of the conflict between rural precinct and urban neighborhood is extremely useful, and her discussion of the local men who left during the war and of the conscripted foreign workers, prisoners of war, and refugees from bombed-out north German cities who took their places is compelling and dramatic. Her narrative account of the hardships of 1943-1945 is unparalleled. -Peter Fritzsche, The Historian, 2009 Listed in The A-List on Today's Books mention- Book News Inc./ August 2007 Stephenson has produced a deeply analytical, thoroughly researched, perceptive study of all aspects of live in Germany during the Second World War. - European History Quarterly In her top-down analysis of the relationship between the National Socialist state and society, Stephenson describes with remarkable local detail the many attempts, and what she sees as the many conspicuous failures, of the Nazi regime to win local support. She also describes the many ways in which the Third Reich caused hardship and suffering for ordinary Wurttembergers, especially toward the end of the war...Stephenson has written what will no doubt be considered the standard survey of Wurttemberg during the Third Reich... -Andrew Stuart Bergerson, H-Net Reviews, April 2007--Sanford Lakoff H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online Her finely textured analysis of the politics of the everyday life in the hinterlands of southwestern Germany underscores the widely acknowledged difficulty of reducing grassroots behavior in the Third Reich to simple categories of support and opposition...all readers will likely appreciate the wealth of local detail she has unearthed to support her conclusions. - The Historian--Sanford Lakoff

Author Information

Jill Stephenson is Professor Emeritus of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published widely on modern German history, including Hitler's Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis (2006), Women in Nazi Germany (2001), The Nazi Organisation of Women (1981) and Women in Nazi Society (1975).

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