Progress before the disaster
The 1930s started with Mahatma Gandhi's salt march with the aim of breaking the British salt monopoly and leading India to independence. Until the mid-1930s, there was a world economic crisis characterized by mass unemployment. In 1933, the NSDAP came to power in Germany.On September 1, 1939, World War II began with the invasion of Poland.
Before the beginning of the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War raged in the period 1936-1939. In 1937 was the invasion of China by the Japanese. On December 17, 1938, Otto Hahn discovered the nuclear fission of the uranium atom, which is still the scientific and technological basis for the use of nuclear energy.
Farm workers of the 30s
Agriculture in Germany was not very efficient by international standards. Agricultural policy was intended to achieve the highest possible degree of self-sufficiency and was of great ideological importance to the political leadership.
The blood-and-soil ideology was not specifically founded by the National Socialists, but was intensively used and taken up in propaganda.
Already around 1850, set pieces of agrarian romanticism, anti-urban reflexes and profound anti-Semitism had been propagated in the course of increasing urbanization and industrialization. The widespread Lebensreform movement also drew in part on such fears.
In the German Empire, the agrarian milieu was still firmly integrated into society. The gradual loss of importance in the Weimar Republic led to an alienation from democracy.
