The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.

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.

This chapter uses space as an analytical category to examine the living situation of inmates of ghettoes in occupied Poland, exploring the efforts by Jewish ghetto residents to secure and uphold vestiges of privacy under the conditions of dangerous overcrowding imposed by the Nazi authorities. Drawing on personal letters and diaries kept by ghetto inmates, it distinguishes between the initial phase of ghettoisation, involving radical upheaval and shock for those involved, and a subsequent phase of temporary relative stability, in which ghetto inmates developed a variety of social practices for coping with privation, including the deprivation of privacy.