"National community" was one of the most frequently used key political terms of the Weimar period. While this slogan had already been used very successfully in Nazi propaganda before 1933, after 1933 it became the central element of Nazi ideology and symbolised the successful strategic orientation of the National Socialists, who were able to use this slogan to exploit the potential for consensus within German society to a large extent. Within the framework of exemplary and comparative regional case studies, the aim is to examine the instruments used locally to produce a "national community", which concrete references to content played a particular role (depending on different social, denominational, economic and local conditions), which indications can be found for the success or failure of the policy to construct and maintain a "national community" and to what extent it continued to have an effect or was consciously passed on after 1945. to a conscious continuation or a critical remembrance or even a deliberate deconstruction of the National Socialist idea of the Volksgemeinschaft in the Federal Republic.

The selected fields of investigation are cities and regions in Lower Saxony, in which specific and particularly relevant influencing factors clearly emerge and which are therefore examined as case studies: the three Gau capitals of Hanover, Oldenburg and Lüneburg, which are representative precisely because of their mediocrity, as important links between the national and local levels of action and as regional arenas of Nazi politics. as regional arenas of Nazi policy; Wilhelmshaven as a young city with strong military traditions from the outset, which was to be developed into a unique metropolitan armaments centre during the Nazi era; the "New City" of Salzgitter and the crisis area of the Upper Harz, where the economic accentuation of the National Socialist mobilisation policy was particularly prominent; Hameln, Goslar and other staging locations in the "national heartland" of Lower Saxony, where the cult of blood and soil was staged with particular intensity; the Oldenburg Münsterland with the "Kreuzkampf" and Stade with the scandal surrounding the Protestant pastor Behrens, who was persecuted as a "Judenknecht", which became particular focal points of faith-based conflicts and unrest, and finally Aschendorf-Hümmling with the Emsland camps and Celle with the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as regions in which large camps could represent possible "disruptive factors" for Nazi policies aimed at generating a "national community".

Joint project of the Universities of Oldenburg, Hanover, Osnabrück and Göttingen, funded by the "Niedersächsisches Vorab" programme of the VW Foundation.

Sub-projects based at the University of Oldenburg:

• Education for the "national community". Elementary school teachers as actors in National Socialist communitarian practice, project collaborator: Kathrin Stern, information on the project: >>Download<<
• Military imprint and nationalist sentiment as a mobilisation factor for the Nazi regime: The "City of 500,000" as a vision of the military-oriented Nazi "people's community" and the effectiveness of nationalist communalisation in Wilhelmshaven 1914-1960, project collaborator: Gunnar Zamzow,
• The construction of the "Volksgemeinschaft" in the immediate field of experience of marginalisation and persecution: The significance of the Emsland camps and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for the process of National Socialist "communisation" and for the confrontation with National Socialism after 1945, project collaborator: Bianca Roitsch,

All information on the research project can be found on the project homepage.

Dissertations completed in Oldenburg, which are gradually being published in the series "National Socialist 'Volksgemeinschaft'.Studien zu Konstruktion, gesellschaftlicher Wirkungsmacht und Erinnerung" by Ferdinand Schöning Verlag:

• Christine Schoenmakers: "Die Belange der Volksgemeinschaft erfordern gebieterisch ..." Lawyers from Bremen as actors of local rule under National Socialism (2014), published in 2015 in the above-mentioned series as vol. 6
• Bianca Roitsch: More than just onlookers. Social practices and sayability of actors in the environment of
  National Socialist exclusion camps using the example of Bergen-Belsen, Esterwegen and Moringen 1933-1960 (2015), published in 2018 in the above-mentioned series as vol. 9
• Kathrin Stern: Education for the national community. The role and behaviour of primary school teachers in the Third Reich (2019), to be published in 2020/21