While the National Socialists made a concerted effort to harness the emigrant nation wherever its members might be, they had no more success outside their areas of conquest than had previous regimes. In some ways, they had less. Moreover, their efforts to replace an inclusive notion of German cultural community with a racially exclusive one ultimately undermined Germans’ positions in other countries even more than the events of World War I. Those efforts within Europe also exposed the degree to which Germanness continued to be defined by its aggregate character even under their auspices.Their notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was defined more by its exclusions than its inclusions. The striking ways in which that fell short outside of Europe underscore the varieties of ways in which Germanness continued to be defined and performed abroad during the period of the war and the degree to which Germans’ fates outside of Europe were contingent on the states in which they lived. Geopolitics played important roles in recasting notions of belonging during this period of crisis, much as it had during earlier ones.Nevertheless, older notions of belonging persisted during and after the war.

This chapter examines birth customs and bodily experiences and practices as an important but rarely considered dimension of private life under Nazism, setting them in the context of the complex racial and ethnic hierarchies created by Nazi occupation policy in Poland. It outlines the power relations and practices associated with women giving birth in the Nazi-annexed Polish territory of the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, and focuses in particular on the relationship between ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) women giving birth and the German and Polish midwives they sought out to assist them. Efforts by Reich German midwives to control events in the birth room sometimes faced fierce opposition on the part of the women giving birth, who asserted their right to privacy and to choose persons they trusted to be present at the birth. While the Nazi regime sought to exclude Polish midwives from attending German women giving birth, the supply of German midwives was inadequate. Polish midwives therefore continued to practise, though their precarious status made them vulnerable to harassment by the occupation authorities and accusations by Volksdeutsche of malpractice.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.