Haymaking near Berlin, 1937

A flat, mown meadow stretches to a low line of trees under a wide sky, two women small in the distance among the rows of drying hay. Close by, a farm woman in a long, finely patterned dress and knotted headscarf draws her long wooden rake through the swathes and swings it over the rows; a younger woman in an embroidered apron grips her rake high and works beside her. Along a straight country road a team of four black-and-white cows, yoked in pairs, draws a wagon piled high with hay, the farmer walking beside it.

On the small farms of the Berlin hinterland much of the work was still done by hand and by the women of the family. The regime's rhetoric of blood and soil glorified the peasant; the Reich Food Estate under Richard Walther Darré meanwhile tied farmers to fixed prices and quotas.