ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the view that the German obsession with the "flight from the land" was solely an expression of "ideological blindness" as a romantic reaction to industry-biased modernization. Among the dimensions of rural governance outlined by Kiran Klaus Patel, at least three were relevant for dealing with rural exodus in Nazi Germany: new forms of economic intervention, social and technological forms of engineering the rural, and colonization. The "deployment of labor", introduced gradually in the German Reich between 1933 and 1939 and expanded abruptly in the Ostmark in 1938-9, gave the authorities a kind of testing ground for the wartime regulation of the labor market. The mountainous regions in the north and southwest, as well as the lowlands in the eastern parts of Niederdonau—and specifically, small- and medium-sized farming operations—recorded above average losses in terms of agricultural workers.
