Germany and the Second World War

The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany - soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave labourers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities. Taking a 'history from below' approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust. From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast