The 980th Grenadier Regiment was recruited
from the part of Germany now called Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), an
area in Northwest Deutschland. The area is largely flat except for the Harz Mountains in the South.
Agriculture and Forestry were important in the region, but the state
also had significant war industries: steel, chemicals, and
shipbuilding. Salzberen on the coast refined petroleum and oils, while
Hanomag in Hanover
produced locomotives and diesel motors, both destroyed by Allied
bombing. In contrast Volkswagen, founded in 1938 as part of the
National Socialist planned economy, stood isolated in agricultural land.
The entire region suffered from the experience of the 1929 economic
downturn, which consolidated right radicalism, partly due to the lack
of any resisting middle-of-the-road political strongholds by the Social
Democratic or Center Party aside from Hanover. The
farmers had already suffered market declines and welcomed any group
that would help family units survive. The National Socialist made
promises to that effect. Inside and outside economic pressures, the
region, in particular the peasant population, became attracted to
National Socialism.
The area suffered severely from allied bombing because it was readily
reachable by air from Britain.
Food and housing shortages, partly due to refugees, convinced many that
they were the victims and not the victimizers, forgetting about the
disappearance of their neighbors and foreign slave laborers at
industries such as the Dora-Mittelbau rocket
installation carved in the Harz
Mountains. |
The sub-regions of East Frisia, Harz,
Lüneberger Heath, Erns Lowlands and specific cities such as Oldenburg,
Hanover, and Brunswick find little in common in there attachment to
land and place, not blessed with the historical identification that
Bavarians can readily employ. The stereotype of the slow by shrewd
peasant Catholic in the west contrasts sharply with the quick-acting
Protestant of the east, similarly the High Germans of the city contrast
with the east Frisians as the German hillbilly.
Most of the region speaks a dialect called Plattdeutsch,
Niederdeutsch, or Low German. |
