Hitler's Home Front: Wurttemberg Under the Nazis

New
Illustrated
2006
$107.91

What was life like for ordinary Germans under Hitler? Hitler's Home Front paints a picture of life in Wurttemberg, 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 Wurttembergers, 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.

Synopsis

What was life like for ordinary Germans under Hitler? Hitler's Home Front paints a picture of life in Wurttemberg, 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 Wurttembergers, 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.

$107.91

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 420
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Hambledon Continuum
Published: 26 Oct 2006
ISBN 10: 1852854421
ISBN 13: 9781852854423

Media Reviews

Listed in The A-List on Today's Books
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
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 Bio

Jill Stephenson is Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh and is one of the leading British authorities on Nazi Germany, and especially on women under the Nazis.