The Home Front

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys life on the German Home Front during the Second World War through three main themes. The first is popular morale, and the tension between the need to mobilize society for war, and the regime’s fear that asking too much of Germans would undermine their support. Adolf Hitler and other key figures such as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels paid a great deal of attention to popular morale, including women’s morale, and this shaped and to some degree limited their wartime choices. A second major theme is the Third Reich’s exploitation of German occupied territories as a source of food, raw materials, and labour. While surveying the forms and extent of German exactions, the chapter examines civilian responses to wartime shortages, and considers how much civilians knew about the increasingly brutal treatment of forced labourers, POWs, and Jews. Finally, the chapter underlines the interconnectedness of home and war fronts throughout the conflict. As initial successes gave away to stalemate and a reversal of Germany’s fortunes, notably at Stalingrad, wartime losses touched the Home Front deeply. This, alongside the total mobilization of society and widespread aerial bombing and evacuations, underlined that home and war fronts, never fully separate, were blending together as the Reich slid towards defeat.