ABSTRACT
The statesmen, generals, admirals, civilian officials and political leaders discussed in the previous chapter all had their particular views of the war which have been passed down to us in various secret memoranda and in published speeches, memoirs, diaries, newspaper articles and pamphlets. But how was the war seen from below, by the millions of soldiers called up to fight at the front, and by the millions of women, children and older men battling for existence on the home front? As Volker Ullrich, the author of an earlier and very influential study of Hamburg during the war has written:
The war took place at a distance, but it was also very much present in the letters and stories told by soldiers, in the ever-lengthening casualty lists, in the suffering of women who had to support themselves and their children in the absence of their men, and in the inhumane tempo of work in the armaments factories. Hunger claimed its victims on the ‘home front’. While battles raged in the war zones, the German interior was placed under a state of siege, and every shade of opposition was subject to the threat of repression. 1
