Ernst Langthaler has created an impressive work—and not just in terms of the number of pages. Agriculture in the Third Reich is a difficult and therefore also a neglected subject, despite the centrality of “peasantry” in the National Socialist ideology. Moreover, agriculture in National Socialism is a very contradictory topic. The contradiction between the antimodernist rural ideology of the National Socialists and the modernization propaganda of the war and industrial production policy is difficult to reconcile. These difficulties are further complicated by temporal paradoxes: The period between 1938 and 1945, which includes National Socialism in Austria, is extremely short, and by contrast, the production cycles in agriculture are rather long and the decision making is sluggish. The cultivation of the crops goes on for a year, and in livestock farming, it takes much longer until a yield is to be expected.

A key feature of Langthaler's work is its symbiosis between a regional, source-oriented case study and a sophisticated method-oriented system perspective. Theoretical models, which are increasingly prominent in economics and economic history, can be processed and tested with microsources much better and more reliably than with the aggregated and more error-prone data of the macroeconomy. Langthaler's empirical field is Lower Austria, known as the Gau Niederdonau at that time. The name Austria was extinguished. Lower Austria was not only the most important industrial region in Austria then but also the largest agricultural region. Here lie the agrarian “battlefields,” a phrase that he uses so evocatively in the title.

Langthaler took the trouble to incorporate large-scale sources of Nazi agriculture in Lower Austria: documents from more than 3,000 farms form the corpus of his data. His sources include debt relief files and court maps with farm-related data on land use, livestock, machinery and equipment, labor, and market performance as well as legal and police records, letters and other personal evidence, and interviews. This abundance matches the diversity of the space and makes it possible to show different development lines and scenarios: mountain and flatland farming, viticulture, crops and livestock, urban and rural areas, large and small scale, and in different climates. Langthaler constructs categories for which he provides unique labels: “agricultural workers” and “worker farmers,” “mixed farmers” and “commercial farmers,” “wine makers” and “sugar beet farmers,” and “machine men” and “ox farmers.” Overall, this makes the book more effective and engaging. But sometimes it takes a great deal of effort to understand this terminology and the geographical smallness of the Lower Austrian community structure: Markersdorf and Mannersdorf, Kleinmeiseldorf and Kleinpertholz, and Weigelsdorf and Weikendorf can easily be confused.

The book is divided into six main sections: The first part is dedicated to business and management; the second focuses on the peasants (hereditary farmers, Jewish owners, land and transport personnel); the third part describes the workers (servants, prisoners of war, and forced laborers); the fourth part analyzes the question of mechanization and the increase of productivity; the fifth deals with experts and consultants who played an important role in the agrarian field; and the sixth part examines the market, a particularly contradictory topic in National Socialist economic and war policy.

Langthaler's ability to deal with statistical methods and in the graphical analysis and visualization of the results is remarkable. What he can extract from the data is particularly noteworthy. Even more remarkable is how he can illustrate these results in graphs. Of course, his desire for illustration also generates one of the problems of the book: It becomes much too long and even more confusing to a certain extent. It is not always easy to understand the complexity of the many diagrams (a total of 150) and even more tables.

Despite its achievements, desiderata remain. Regarding Aryanized farms and large estates, here one would have expected the information on the restitution after 1945, especially in the agricultural sector and in view of the situation in the Soviet-occupied zone, where opposition to restitution was particularly marked. The decisive question would be: What has become of the “redistribution of Jewish land ownership in favor of the new formation of German peasantry” after 1945? How far and in which form were the Aryanized lands set back? Nothing is written about this. This would also be important for Langthaler's main question: How did the Nazi period affect postwar agriculture and agricultural policy? The fact that it was a deep cut in the history of mentality, and that it has shaped behavior and thought, applies not only to the peasants but to the entire population. That 1945 was not a zero hour, one need not prove with the continuation of the court card. Food management had to be carried on, and this also applied to most structures, businesses, and organizations.

Langthaler views the Nazi era in Austria as “the main act of Austrian agrarian development between the world economic crisis and the postwar boom” (751), and that from 1938 to 1945, a threshold of the productivist transition was exceeded, from which there was no return to a more nonproductivist direction. This claim is by far exaggerated. It is much more likely that postwar agricultural development would have been largely similar without National Socialism, and that even without the few years of National Socialism, Austrian agriculture would at least have advanced strongly enough to become “productivist” and the contribution to GDP in agriculture as well as in industry would probably have been higher in 1950, had there not been the National Socialist interlude. Langthaler's comparisons with the British agriculture show a very similar development as in Austria. And a comparison with Switzerland would also bring the same results. Is the “threshold-character” of the Nazi era (752) claimed by Langthaler perhaps only a myth? Overall, the National Socialist agricultural policy was far too contradictory and ultimately took place in too short a period and in the face of economic constraints that such a threshold character cannot be attributed to it. That the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were to be classified as the thresholds of agricultural development over the cuts in 1938 and 1945 is not unique to Austria. This radical upheaval was universal and would have also occurred without the terrible interlude of National Socialism.