Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.

Much has been written about the events of 9 November 1918 at Spa, but little about the aftermath in Holland. Some studies present sketches, often inaccurate, of “the squire of Doorn”; others remark that answers to many questions must await the opening of Dutch archives. Since the Dutch documents have now been published in profusion, answers are for the most part available.

Nearly four decades have passed since the collapse of the Greater German Reich, but the subject of Nazi rule in Hitler's homeland of Austria still remains something of a mystery. While the appearance of pioneering works by Karl Stadler, Radomir Luža, Gerhard Botz, and John Bernbaum, among others, has illuminated the landscape of what until recently was terra incognita, a great many dark valleys and ravines still remain. The purpose of this essay is to examine Nazi control in the Upper Austrian city of Linz as a means of addressing certain unresolved issues of Central European history such as the degree of Austrian participation, support, or acceptance of the Hitler regime, the role of the Roman Catholic Church, the extent of German penetration of Austrian institutions after 1938, and the impact of fascist industrialization in transforming and modernizing Austrian society. Linz should make a particularly interesting test case since it has long mirrored the currents and ambiguities of Central European history. The boyhood home of Hitler, Eichmann, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, it was a center of German Nationalist agitation before World War I, a model of democratic propriety during the 1920s, and a major battlefield of the Austrian Civil War of 1934. Rapidly evolving from a bastion of Social Democracy into a stronghold of National Socialism, it was a focus of the Anschluss in 1938 and the recipient of lavish aid from its Führer-son thereafter. What occurred in the Danubian city between 1938 and 1945 foreshadowed something of Hitler's intentions, not simply for Austria but also for much of the Greater German Reich.