Hay harvest at Oberau, Upper Bavaria, 1937

Cows lie before a lone onion-domed church; then in the Loisach valley at Oberau a woman sits high on a hay wagon while a passenger train runs along the mountainside behind her. An old farmer with a bushy beard and a hat full of feathers pitches hay up to her, lights his pipe and grins; women rake the swaths, a mother cycles past with a child on her handlebars, men fork hay onto drying poles and racks, and families dig potatoes into baskets below the village church.

The archive record places these scenes at Oberau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the Winter Olympics had been held the year before. Richard Walther Darré's Reich Food Estate hailed such peasants as the blood-source of the nation, but their work had hardly changed in a century.