Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945: Citizens and Soldiers (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("The German War presents a [] problem: how to uncover the fears and hopes of the society from which the victors and perpetrators came in order to understand how Germans justified this war to themselves. To focus in this question I have tried to develop both a sense of breadth and of depth: breadth by using 'micro' snapshots of opinions, drawing on what eavesdropping reporters for the regime picked up from public conversations or military censors from sampling the mail bags; depth by following a select cast of individuals, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, over a considerable period of time, exploring how their personal hopes and plans were entwined with their changing experiences of the war. Doing this has made the voices of the victims less prominent than in Witnesses of War but they are never absent: without their contrasting perspective, we would not know how differently--and often solipsistically--Germans framed their understanding of the war." Id. at xxiii-xiv.).
Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("Hunger was the most common pain children experienced during and after the war, and they soon learned that their parents could not take it away. Like adults, children turned food fantasies into elaborate games, creating make-believe recipes or enacting the queues in front of soup kitchens. They saw how hunger drove adults to fight, steal and prostitute themselves; and they became participants in the bitter accusations and counter-accusations of theft which tore families apart. . . . Hunger drove children to beg and to risk their lives smuggling goods. It also taught them to distrust strangers: however unhappy their own families were, in most cases these remained the only social institution to which children could turn. The children's homes in Theresienstadt were the exception to this rule. In most other homes and orphanages children starved. In the extremities of the Warsaw ghetto, passers-by might throw a sheet of newspaper over the children who had died in the street, but hunger also drove other children to ignore the corpses altogether and to retreat into the make-believe world of games. Hunger invaded all social relationships, teaching children wariness and self-reliance, and it left its mark on their bodies and their minds." Id. at 364. "During the war, adults and children in the German cities failed to notice the forced laborers who cleared their streets of rubble after the bombing, just as German refugees fleeing westwards in 1945 had ignored the death marches of the concentration camp prisoners in their midst. In this complete nationalisation of empathy lay the fatal work of Nazism, which had legitimized any act of barbarity towards Untermenschen as long as it helped the German cause. Despite all the evidence before them, many Germans did not reflect on what they were seeing." Id. at 370-371.).
