Jill Stephenson's most recent book, Hitler's Home Front: Württemberg under the Nazis, is a richly detailed and thoroughly researched study of a single Gau during the Third Reich, but its conclusions about Württembergers' ultimate lack of responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi period will leave some readers feeling uneasy. Stephenson makes two key arguments throughout the work. First, National Socialist ideology and support for the regime failed to make the kinds of inroads into Württemberg society and culture that they did elsewhere in Germany. Both generally had to be imposed from above, rather than initiated or even adopted enthusiastically from below. Second, Württembergers endured great hardship and suffering under Hitler, especially during the final months of the war, when even those villages that had retained some semblance of normal everyday life were “thrust into the cauldron of war” (p. 317).

One agrees readily enough with the latter assertion. But Stephenson's attempt to minimize the collaboration and complicity of ordinary Württembergers is more troubling. Challenging recent historiography which, she argues, tends to blame “‘the Germans’ as an undifferentiated whole” (p. xi), Stephenson's book asserts that most Swabian farmers were “profoundly disaffected with the regime,” not only “withholding cooperation” from it, but also “positively obstructing [its] efforts” (p. 3). In Stephenson's account, non-conformist behavior is transformed into conscious acts of “dissent” and “dissidence,” which were often, she maintains, of no “lesser value” than determined resistance to the regime itself (pp. 359, 323). Such an interpretation echoes the stories many Germans told in the postwar period as they sought to excuse what they had done, and had failed to do, under Hitler.

Stephenson is certainly not wrong to highlight the weak roots of the NSDAP in Württemberg: eighty percent of Nazi Party members in the Gau joined only after Hitler's 1933 seizure of power, and in more than 800 local communes, the NSDAP presence was virtually non-existent. As a result, the process of Gleichschaltung (coordination) took place relatively slowly, although, as Stephenson is forced to admit, “there was no concerted resistance to attempts at Nazification” (p. 89). Moreover, she is correct in highlighting how profoundly unpopular many Nazi initiatives were, ranging from the creation of the Reich Food Estate to the National Socialist People's Welfare scheme. But how unique was Württembergers' distaste for such organizations? In short: not very. Historians have long argued that a deep aversion to the Nazi Party could go hand in hand with admiration for Hitler and general support for the state. The dislike of specific programs and policies should therefore not be equated with “resistant” responses to Nazism as a whole (p. 89).

After what Stephenson herself calls “a great deal of preamble about the prewar years” (p. ix), including chapters on racial persecution and the role of the churches, the book turns to the impacts of war. These naturally include the Allied bombings of cities such as Stuttgart and Friedrichshafen, but Stephenson's real concern is with rural Württemberg and its experiences of unwanted price controls, increasing labor shortages, and influxes of “foreigners,” be they prisoners of war, forced laborers from the East, or evacuees from Germany's war-torn cities.

For farmers, the greatest source of resentment was the regime's imposition of market controls on their goods. Mass demonstrations against, and open violations of, price restrictions and rationing regulations soon followed. These provide, for Stephenson, further evidence of Swabians' lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi regime more generally. Their disaffection grew as the Gau became “awash with outsiders” (p. 310). Despite Nazi rhetoric about their racial inferiority, many forced laborers were welcomed onto Württemberg farms. In fact, locals often found they had more in common with rural Poles or Ukrainians than they did with the German town-dwellers who had been evacuated from urban centers and now found themselves facing the “distinctly mucky” realities of peasants' lives (p. 14). Tensions and outright hostility erupted, belying the myth of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) to which Nazi propagandists still clung. Yet these further displays of oppositional attitudes—being civil to forced laborers, reacting angrily to townees' demands for better amenities—were neither unique to Württemberg (mutual antipathy between locals and evacuees was also rife in Baden and Bavaria, for example), nor do they necessarily mean that the Gau's inhabitants had avoided “being colonized by Nazi norms and values,” as Stephenson concludes (p. 359).

Stephenson's tendency to exonerate the good Swabians of Württemberg is all the more problematic in relation to the Jews. Why should they not be held responsible for some of the worst of the Nazis' crimes? Because there weren't any Jews in most of the Gau's communes, the author posits, and, she continues, it is difficult to imagine what could have been done (this despite the fact that her book details how effective public protests against the euthanasia campaign had been in the Gau). Obviously Stephenson is right to claim that most Württembergers did not actively participate in atrocities, but they certainly profited from them in various ways, particularly after deportations to the East had begun in 1941.

What is most troublesome about Hitler's Home Front is Stephenson's translation of certain actions that opposed specific national policies into more widespread disapproval of the entire Nazi system. Simultaneously, she glosses over how a traditional, conservative, Swabian worldview could at other times easily co-exist with and support Nazi ideology and policy. It is quite right that we blame “the Nazis”—whoever they might be—where blame is due; however, underestimating the degree to which the Third Reich operated through the compliance and collusion of ordinary Germans is historically inaccurate. Moreover, it absolves those who also bear responsibility for the crimes done in the name of the German Volk.