Steam threshing in Saxony, 1937

On a flat stubble field, with a factory chimney on the horizon, a boxy wooden threshing machine stands beside heaps of straw. Men in caps work on its top platform pitching sheaves into the drum, an older man tends the steam engine with its tall black chimney, a worker rakes the chaff from under the machine while grain pours from its outlet, a boot treads through the husks, and a woman in a headscarf gathers armfuls of straw onto a board.

The archive record calls the machine antiquated and places the scene in Saxony, where farms lay in the shadow of factories. Under the Four-Year Plan the regime demanded more grain from every field, yet much of the harvest still depended on travelling threshing sets like this one.