Grain harvest: reaping and stooking, 1937
Seen through ripe wheat, a reaper cuts the field; men mend a horse-drawn binder, and women set up the sheaves in stooks under a grey sky.
Through a screen of ripe wheat ears a man sits high on a harvesting machine as it cuts its way through the field; a wide view shows a valley of cut fields dotted with stooks below dark wooded hills. Against a heavy sky an old woman in a headscarf props another sheaf against a stook; two men bend over a reaper-binder that has stopped beside its horses and untangle the twine in its knotter; on a wide flat field a peasant woman looks up from behind a stook and smiles.
The regime's 'battle for production' called on farmers to bring in every grain so that Germany could feed itself without imports. On most farms the women worked in the harvest alongside the men, and the reaper-binder, spread across German farms since the turn of the century, was still drawn by horses.
